The other day, Kent brought Lorraine 4 shoes and said Go, go. He knows what it means now, and he knows he doesn’t want to just sit around at home all day (despite the fact that he has a million toys in each room to keep him occupied at home for the rest of his life).
September 28, 2007
September 13, 2007
Fun Fact: Programmer’s Day
It does not look like there is a strong concensus, but some consider today (9/13/2007) as programmer’s day.
From what I understand, today is the 256th day. 256 is a number many computer geeks see a lot because computers work with binary numbers.
Wikipedia apparently had an article at one point in time about the day, but it was removed for some reason.
Resources
Happy Progammer’s Day also here
Programmer’s Day Deleted from Wikipedia
September 12, 2007
Computers: Automatic Program Installer
If you have ever used Linux, you are definitely spoiled by the automated install programs. Fedora has yum and up2date, and Debian-based distributions have apt-get. You just give the command to install a particular program and the installer not only completely installs that program but also determines and installs all the required libraries.
Now, you can do the same thing in Windows. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds very promising. The program is called Win-get.
The automated install may be much easier in Linux, but you have to give Windows credit. Manual installs are generally easier in Windows. In Linux, you usually have to compile the source code when you install manually.
Resources
Blogging: Adding Images
There are 3 different resources for photos:
- iStockPhoto
- stock.xchng (This one has been most useful so far)
- yotophoto (A search, but so far, I have had to wade through many images you have to pay for)
This site has been helpful for clipart:
The problem I have had with the clipart library is with searching. I haven’t found an easy way to search and browse to find the image that I want.
Linking to Images:
http://www.flickr.com/
I have been downloading the images from the various websites and uploading them to my account on Flickr.com. I figured that was better than using the bandwidth of the photo distributor to display the images on my personal blog. To add the image to my blog, I have been copying the image from Flickr and pasting it in the editor on WordPress. Then, I changed the link from Flickr to the page on the photo distributor’s website so that people know where the image came from.
For images from the Open Clip Art Library, I have to convert them because Flickr does not accept svg images. So, I save them as an svg to my desktop. Then, I open them in Inkscape and export them to a jpeg. Then, I can upload the image.
Resources
September 11, 2007
Computers: Google Phone Timeline
Business Standard published an interesting article called “Gphone: Phantom marketing at its best“. I like the phantom marking label.
Anyway, the most interesting thing in the article is the mention of a time line of developments. I found the time line in the article, “Gphone? The Google Phone Timeline“.
Computers: International Digital Children’s Library
Here is an interesting link if you have kids:
International Digital Children’s Library
I came across this resource when I saw Allison Druin give a Tech Talk at Google: If Google Becomes Giigle. In the talk, she was mentioning the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, which partnered with kids to determine things that worked best for them. The amazing thing to me about working with kids is the ability to listen to them and understand their needs as far as computers go. Think about the number of people/companies that cannot listen to adult users and adapt software to them!
Another interesting thing about her presentation was the fact that she used a different presentation tool. The tool is called KidPad, which was developed by the lab. I noticed that it is available for download for noncommercial use, but it only works on Windows.
September 7, 2007
Computers: Column-Oriented Databases
I just came across this article:
Relational database pioneer says technology is obsolete
Are we really ready to call relational database’s “legacy technology”? My first reaction is that column-oriented will only ever be niche software. The article points out that data can be read faster because the columns are together, but what about writing the data? I would think that while data may be accessed by the column, data would be written by the row. So, I would guess that column databases fit well in the data-warehouse niche, but for day-to-day transactional data, we are still going to use relational databases.
Hopefully, I will get the opportunity to work with such a database so that I can have more than just a first reaction.
BigTable
The most interesting thing to me about the article is the mentioning of BigTable. BigTable is the database that Google uses. Here are some more links on BigTable:
Google Research Publication: BigTable
Jeff Dean in lecture at University of Washington
Apache Hadoop
My next question was, I wonder if Google releases the code for BigTable. The best answer that I could find came from Wikipedia: project Hadoop/project HBase.
Hadoop is part of Apache Lucene.
Computers: One Week to Google Phone?
Last Friday, Electronista claimed that the Google phone would be announced in two weeks. Does that mean that now it will be announced in one week?
Google phone just two weeks away
At the time, my Google news feed had listed three or four articles with a similar title. But, I haven’t seen any articles this week that say Google phone one week away. Is the announcement canceled, or did no one like the title?
Grand Central
Several articles have mentioned the company Andriod that Google acquired such as the article 10 Questions and Answers about Google Phone. What about Grand Central? Is it possible that Google purchased Grand Central to integrate into the Google Phone?
Potential
The most exciting thing about the Google Phone idea is the potential to revolutionize the cell phone industry. When Google came out with Gmail, it changed web mail in general. Before Gmail came out, the web mail accounts were very limited in storage space, but now, the other competitors have change their products to meet and even exceed. See Gmail, the Top Web Mail Service with the Least Amount of Free Storage and Microsoft trumps Google on free e-mail storage limit.
Now, consider the other cell phone players. They traditionally lock their customers into contracts and force them to pay extra for features that probably should be included. See Grip Line’s Verizon Locks Out a Spectrum of Features. Hopefully, Google does create a phone and forces the others to make standard some of the openness we take for granted in the Internet world.
September 6, 2007
Computers: Handling Email
Google Tech Talk about handling email called Inbox Zero:
Computers: Search Added to Google Reader
The search has been a dearly missed feature in Google Reader. A number of times, something has come up in conversation that I said, “oh, I read something about that just the other day, but I could never find it again.” Now, I can search back through the feeds to find that item!
Google also added many other nice new features to the reader, such as counts above 100, the animated loading indicator, and the ability to collapse the folders.
Feature Request: Now, that you can search. I think it might be nice to have a distinction between read posts and ignored posts. On many of the feeds, I just look through the headlines and only read a few interesting head lines. Then, I click “mark all as read” so that I don’t go back through those headlines again. If I were to search, I would like the option to search only the posts I actually read and not the ones I marked as read without reading.
Resources
How to Search Your Reader Feeds (the old way to search)
Digital Eagle 