Clay Shirky talks about all the wasted time watching tv and doing “nothing” … youtube shows it as a multipart video, so I link to the site where I saw it on, blip.tv, I hate their embedded player, it seems to mess up my wordpress theme (cannot seem to keep the closing embed and object html tags)..
Google just launched a preview release of App Engine, I was lucky to be able to try it.
As Google describe it, “Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications, Google App Engine makes it easy to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of users without infrastructure headaches..”
I’ve been learning Python the last few months, so I followed the tutorial and created an application. It’s currently limited to 3 applications, and I used-up one (you currently cannot delete applications).
I just added my books to librarything, I already had a CSV file created with a barcode scanner, so I Just imported it…
Larry Cannell says “I Hate Files“, and I agree with almost every point.
Files are a major nuisance, and until another practical solution is universally accepted, we will have to live with them.
Online-only solutions cannot work until connectivity is not an issue, until it becomes an extremely cheap commodity.
Until then, maybe a hybrid solution that uses client-side software with network-based distributed storage that does not rely on folder structures and filenames could be acceptable.
Google’s newly added translation bots are amazing, I’ve been using them for a few days now, and they’re much faster, simpler, and easier to use than opening language tools in your browser.
Supported language pairs are: ar2en, bg2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, es2en, fi2en, fr2de, fr2en, hi2en, hr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, uk2en, ur2en, zh2en. Always append @bot.talk.google.com to get the bot’s address.
Google’s statistical machine translation is getting better … it currently gives better translations than when I first tried it, still not perfect but usable.
When a user interface is so intuitive, that even a one-year-old can use it.
PhillRyu.com - The Power of Good UI Design
(yes, this is about the iphone)
Amateurs do incredible things, I think that people who don’t know what they’re doing are better innovators, they don’t have the baggage of knowing the official way to do it.
When Linus Torvalds started working on Linux, he was a student who knew nothing about operating systems.
When Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google, they created a computer cluster like no other, based on cheap PC motherboards, and built expecting and embracing hardware failure.
Have a look at this new technology, it allows to model faces in 3d from a single (2d) image.
Have a look at these security experts:
I have noticed that some companies do not put the telephone numbers that the customers need to call.
Regency
For example, when I wanted to reserve a ticket (before the electronic ticket problems) I wanted to call Regency Travel, Q-Tel’s information directory at 180 usually takes a long time to respond so I visited their website, clicked on Contact Us, where it lists many numbers:
The problem here is that I was at the office, and my mobile’s battery was dead (my office phone does not call mobiles).
I called the General Manager’s office, got an answering machine and hung up, I remember they used to have an easy to remember number, so I called directory assistance. The number they gave me 4344444 is not listed on the website!
Qatar Airways
I wanted to reconfirm my return flight to Doha, I had a ticket on Qatar Airways and visited their website,
I scrolled to the bottom of the page, clicked on the tiny Contact us link at the page footer, then clicked I want to contact a local Qatar Airways office: click here, then chose Egypt from the list. then clicked the almost invisible link Cairo, then I get 7 different phone/fax numbers sales? cargo? airport? and some cryptic information about check in closing time (yes I know what it means but the average traveler would not).
That’s 4 clicks from the homepage.
Qatar Airways has a 5 digit short number in Cairo 19950, this number is not on their website, and there are no numbers labeled confirmations or reservations, you can only see it on billboards in Cairo.
I just called their main number in Doha.