You might already have heard about the Freeze at Grand Central Station in NYC, the Freeze in San Francisco, and many others. Here’s my video of the Zürich Freeze:

The beginning of the video is not that great due to the backlighting.

The popularity of social networks can’t be denied, but it was still a surprise to find that the BBC had started adding social-bookmark links at the bottom of their news items. Specifically, they’ve added links to del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Facebook and Stumbleupon. Although the BBC does experiment a lot with new media, this was still quite unexpected. Looks like they aren’t the dinosaur they used to be! And it seems it’s not just the BBC readers/viewers who are exposed to Facebook - it seems that BBC staff and employees are jumping on the Facebook bandwagon, with the network having gone viral inside the beeb. Was that the reason these links were added?

I’m wondering what the reaction of people who haven’t yet been part of these networks will think once they see these icons. Will they be tantalising enough for them to go subscribe and start using a social network? Or will they simply be ignored? Would be nice to have access to some kind of stats on it.

Here’s a test to see what happens when you search for රොෂාන් (Roshan) and සෙම්බකුට්ටිආරච්චි (Sembacuttiaratchy) via Google Sri Lanka. Actually, that last search should eventually be a GoogleWhack. If you use Firefox, the pages might not render correctly. Make sure you have a font like Kaputa Unicode installed. If you use any flavour of Linux, you’ll have to follow the instructions from here to enable proper support and rendering.

I’ve just installed the Wordpress Twitter integration plugin, which means my blog post entries will update my Twitter page, and any Tweets posted would update my blog. Here’s a test to see whether it really works!

I’ve finally resurrected my blog, migrated it over to WordPress, and have a consistent theme across the main site, blog, gallery and code sections. Having done that, there’s several developments I have to share:

I’ve moved (again!). To those who know me well, this comes as no surprise as I’ve always had some form of “Gypsy” gene in me, giving me itchy feet if I’m in one place for too long which then causes me to move to a new place. And so it is that I left London after having spent four years there, and am now living and working in Zurich. After having spent several months dealing with interviews and work permit issues, I’m now working for Google in Switzerland.

“Good, fast or cheap. Choose any two.”

And

“Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster”.

After two years with Vodafone, I switched to Hutchison’s 3 mobile service. It was only after that I was to realise that this was a BIG step backwards. Read on for more details.
(more…)

I returned recently from a workshop in Vienna, and one of the attendees was telling me about having been placed on one of the exit/emergency rows right at the front of the plane, but in the middle seat. The actual seat next to the emergency exit had been given to a Chinese gent. Halfway into the flight, when they started bringing the meals around, this person I was talking to had unfolded his stowaway table, which, due to them being in the first row, was in the armrest. The Chinese guy then, looking around for something to unfold or hit to get at his table, reaches for the lever of the emergency exit! Both the flight attendant and this guy who told me this had then lunged at him, to stop him.

Very surprising that they’d just put someone beside the emergency exit without checking to make sure that he/she is in fact capable of attending properly to the exit. On the flight back, I was also placed on the window seat next to the emergency exit without being told so at check-in, but at least the flight-attendent then came by and checked to make sure I was aware of what is required.

Having finally finished Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack! Adventure, I found an interesting reference about the 1911 version of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which found me googling today to find the entire encyclopædia online. It is available in the public domain due to its copyright having expired. One reason why the 1911 edition is so different and considered to be the greatest edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is because experts in particular areas wrote the articles corresponding to their areas. For example: Henry Ford wrote the article on mass production.

And so I found an OCR’d, non-proofread version of the 1911 Britannica, as well as a Wikipedia entry about the 1911 edition.

I was sharing the links which were the consequence of the following story with people, when Max suggested that I put it up here, so here it is.

You probably know the song:

99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer,
Take one down and pass it around.
98 bottles of beer on the wall.

Well, I was searching for a program to generate the entire song, when I
happened to stumble upon a page which contains (at last count)
programs in 621 different languages to generate the beer song!

Exploring the site found entries written in standard languages like BASIC (of course), Pascal, C, C++, etc., and also entries using PostScript, bash, sed, etc! I knew PostScript was a full-featured programming language, but had never really read up much on this capability. Having got the initial prod from the Beer entry, did some more exploring and found a page called the
First Guide to PostScript. And from there, onwards to
PS-HTTPD - a webserver written in PostScript!

So, armed with this knowledge, I think it’s finally possible to achieve a task we were investigating a few years before at the company I used to work for: install a version of SETI@Home to run on the HP Colour Laserprinter! It’d be a PostScript program. Send it to the printer, and a few hours later, the printer would finally print out a sheet of paper - a printout of the analysis of the data packet that it examined.