April 2008

I’ve added some interactivity to the Statistically improbable phrases application. You can now: Filter out stopwords Dynamically filter infrequent words and commonly used words Dynamically play with the contrast and font size Comments Srikanth 12 Apr 2008 12:00 pm: Dear sir, I was searching for Ilayaraja songs and came across your wonderful compilation of 15 wonderful articles. Good one. Please do write more on music. Collin 12 Apr 2008 12:00 pm: I love this application. Because now, I can create a url to NY Times, and see what is the main subject of the day. :) S Anand 12 Apr 2008 12:00 pm: Thanks, Colin! Spencer 12 Apr 2008 12:00 pm: I was curious as to whether or not I could use this pointed into a specific personal corpus to separate documents from one another.

I read about Google AppEngine early this morning, and applied for an invite. Google’s issuing beta invites to the first 10,000 users. I was pretty convinced I wasn’t among those, but turns out I was lucky. AppEngine lets you write web apps that Google hosts. People have been highlighting that it give you access to the Google File System and BigTable for the first time. But to me, that isn’t a big deal. (I’m not too worried about reliability, and MySQL / flat files work perfectly well for me as a data store.) ...

I just upgraded from Firefox 3 Beta 4 to Beta 5. It’s amazing how unstable Beta 5 is compared to the earlier version. Gmail crashes. Google maps crashes. Almost every other site I visit crashes. And looks like I’m not alone: doing a Google search for “Firefox 3 beta x crash” shows a consistently increasing number of results. ![Number of Google search results for Firefox 3 Beta crashes, by Beta version](http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chs=300x200&chd=t:12300,17200,24400,48700,151000&chds=0,150000&chtt="Firefox 3 Beta x crashes": Google results&chco=dbdbff&chg=20,33,1,5&chbh=40,10,10&chxt=x,y&chxl=0:|Beta 1|Beta 2|Beta 3|Beta 4|Beta 5|1:|0|50,000|100,000|150,000) ...