2002

Opera 7 Beta is out. It sports a new look, which one tires of quite soon. But it’s as fast as ever, and has better standards compliance. via Anand

Altavista’s new features are pretty good. What I liked best, though, is their new interface. Especially the bar used to open the search result in a new window. Good to know that I rank 3rd on their search.

Why am I the second hit on Google for queries like “arabic food’s pictures”, “wedding pictures in chennai in geocities”, and “iim grads future”?

Drinking bug juice. via RobotWisdom

Bill donated $100mn to fight AIDS in India. Interestingly, just contrast this photo of him wearing a ’tilak’ with his 1977 snap with Paul Allen. In the latter, he almost looks like a girl! via The Register

Another interesting piece related to complexity: a speech on the paradox of randomness by Gregory Chaitin. via missing matter

An interesting thread on Andersja’s about how McKinsey is blocking competitors from its site. I’m at the receiving end of it. And so far, it hasn’t affected my life in any way.

On figuring Google’s pagerank. It’s interesting to note that Google, and only Google, ranks 11 out of 10 in its pagerank.

Quantum information science: a convergence of complexity theory and quantum mechanics. via missing matter

Photoblogs and the Visual Thesaurus via Kribs

Distributed Proofreaders. As the name suggests, it’s a distributed web-based tool for proof-reading books for Project Gutenberg. References from Slashdot and kuro5hin have spiked the number of pages proofread. But even that apart, they’re targetting over 1,000 pages a day. That’s over a book a day! via kuro5hin

An update on the IIT-K prime factorisation algorithm. via Matthai Markose

I’m going to try and not update until Monday (11th Nov, not 4th). Don’t even bother visiting. Happy Diwali!

After Googlebombing, now we have Google glossary bombing. via Metafilter

Oh, so Sam Palmisano made CEO of IBM. Guess that was expected. He wants to focus on on-demand computing (his word for corporatising distributed computing projects). Shortly, there will be companies creating this [distributed computing] market – focusing on aggregating the retail computing power, and using them across several projects. (Google is already trying to do that through its toolbar, and so is Intel.) – S Anand, 29 Sep 2002 And now, IBM. I was prophetic :-)

You can hear people over the Internet. You can see people over the Internet. Now you can touch people over the Internet. When can we smell and taste them? Or are these senses too mundane to worry about? I, for one, would be very happy to be able to taste recipes online. via Ravikiran

The Newspaper Today is dead. Yet another blow to the pay-model. via Netahoy

Pride and Prejudice, from the director of Bend It Like Beckham. This doesn’t sound like a light entertainer the way Bend It Like Beckham was… via RobotWisdom

Sorry. You have to buy Windows 2000 or XP to use Office 11. Microsoft’s next strategy to sell their operating systems. via Google News

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