Month: July 2008

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

RIP.

Pretty amazing 75 minute talk:

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch ( Oct. 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008 ) gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving presentation, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. For more, visit www.cmu.edu/randyslecture.

Cuil Search Engine Thoughts

Like everyone else I watched the frenzy over the launch of Cuil, a new search engine founded by several ex-Googlers.

After using it a bit, there is definitely something nice and elegant about Cuil, and I noticed that Matt was going to use it for a few days to get a better sense of it as well.

As I’m sure 99% of people do, I typed in my own name to see what results would come back, and was shocked by the results 🙂

On the one hand, it correctly identifies me as a multi-dimensional athlete – baseball, basketball, and boxing ( thai kick boxing in my case ).

On the other hand, it appears that Matt has taken over my “look & feel” UI aspects, as it clearly shows his head-shot on my blog.

So why is Cuil showing these results ? How does Cuil have the confidence and “chutzpah” to make these associations ?  Ouriel may have stumbled on the answer based on his recent post to twitter:

“CUIL in French is like “Balls” (the dirty meaning)”

Ahh !  Now it all makes sense 🙂

But seriously — it’s good to see another search engine play – and hope we see some great innovation and search improvements overall.

NYTIMES: Can’t Find a Parking Spot? Check Smartphone

This sounds really interesting:

This fall, San Francisco will test 6,000 of its 24,000 metered parking spaces in the nation’s most ambitious trial of a wireless sensor network that will announce which of the spaces are free at any moment.

Drivers will be alerted to empty parking places either by displays on street signs, or by looking at maps on screens of their smartphones. They may even be able to pay for parking by cellphone, and add to the parking meter from their phones without returning to the car.

I do question the premise though that this will ease the fighting over spots:

Solving the parking mess takes on special significance in San Francisco because two years ago a 19-year-old, Boris Albinder, was stabbed to death during a fight over a parking space.

“If the San Francisco experiment works, no one will have to murder anyone over a parking space,” said Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose work on the pricing of parking spaces and whether more spaces are good for cities has led to a revolution in ideas about relieving congestion.

Depends on how they implement it, I actually think you may have the reverse situation where everyone drives like mad trying to descend on that last parking spot causing more fights and chaos.

[ nytimes.com ]

WordPress.com Gears

It’s been live for a few days, but now we have officially announced Gears support for WordPress.com.

WordPress version 2.6 ( currently in beta ) also has Gears support.

So what is Gears ?

Gears? It is a browser extension like Flash or QuickTime/Media Player. However Gears works with the browser to enhance web based applications. It can create local database and file storage, and run JavaScript in the background to update them without slowing down the browser.

Gears has been in the making for over a year and is well known among the web developers. Currently it supports Firefox versions 2 & 3 and Internet Explorer versions 6 & 7. Safari 3 support is coming soon.

On WordPress.com it is used to store all images and other web page components from the admin area to the user’s PC, speeding up access and reducing unnecessary web traffic.

The speed increase is most noticeable when Internet is slow or on high latency and makes everybody’s blogging experience more enjoyable.

How do you turn it on for your blog ?

To enable this new feature, click on the “Turbo” link and follow it to Gears’ site to install it in your browser (if not already installed). Then the browser will have to be restarted and after logging back in WordPress, click the “Turbo” link again to give permission to Gears to work on WordPress.com.

After that Gears will download around 200 files and store them on your PC. It will also update them when needed automatically in the background, no other actions are required.

Update: you can follow the coverage over on techmeme: http://www.techmeme.com/080702/p72#a080702p72