needle in a haystack

i tried out wolframalpha today. went there from a slashdot article. the article talked about how, for the first time, some software is claiming copyright on its output. anyway, the search engine or 'the computational knowledge engine' as its creators call it, produces some truly amazing results. while there are already lots of semantic search engines on the net, the little that i dribbled with wolframalpha, made me like the way its results are displayed and also the depth of information provided. i don't know whether there is a law dictating that depth and breadth of information are inversely proportional but it's true that this engine will not turn out results for many queries. so, for example, red hot chilli peppers will give you nutritional information of chillies and peppers. but try searching for an english word or 'who killed kennedy' or 'india' or some stock and the differences will stand out.

however, i'm not sure how all this 'making sense' of queries will make things better. true, it brings you relevant data quicker and in a more compact form - data for which you might have had to visit 2-3 pages. but the presence of information repositories like wikipedia means that, in most cases, if your query makes some sense, you'll get all the required info from wikipedia and links to more information sources. but most of the searches that people do are for queries that don't exactly 'make sense' in the first attempt - these are the queries that matter because information on others is amply available. try searching for 'rural income trends in india' and i'm sure it will be a google or yahoo that will give you your desired result.

however, semantic search is touted to be the next big thing in search. and i suppose i'm not aware of all the uses it can be put to. let's see..

windows ki jai ho :)

faced this problem today and i thought it might be just with XP. But apparently, it has stayed on in vista and windows 7 too!!

time travel

noticed this happening today. looked like a mail from the future [:P]

so i searched some (on google itself, of course) and found that one of the reference times is your computer's. so this basically indicates that my comp's clock is out of sync with the real world. now why would gmail do that? rahul said that they are using javascript to refresh that thing so that they won't have to reload a page every time. but then the script could have noted the comp time when it first loaded, and taken this into account when calculating future times [ would have worked fine unless you changed your comp time while reading a mail]. this page provides an alternate explanation.

anyways, i now have an alternate way of knowing when my comp's clock is running behind.[:P]

more gmail

i like the way pdf attachments now open in google viewer. that way i don't have to download them and not be satisfied with the bland html view.

IE 8

IE 8 beta 2 has been available for download for some time now. i tried it today. seemed to me more of a child born out of a marriage between firefox and flock.

accelerators let you utilise the power of the web without copy-pasting across tabs. so you have encarta, maps, live search etc built into the context menu. there are addons in firefox that give the same functionality. only here you have everything pre-built.

instant search is basically a built-in suggest feature. i think it will be annoying. i've turned off suggest in firefox. i hate those drop-down lists that appear for every thing i search. and visual search is more like yahoo glue.

web slices seems to be a nice thing. but it's success depends on how exactly the browser selects which pages are capable of web slices. and which sites it supports. it seems the support for web slice will have to be built by the site designer. and it is said that it's inspired by the web clip feature of safari (i've never used safari)

tab grouping seems to be an interesting thing to do. with an option to close the group at once or refresh the tabs.

inPrivate browsing has been termed as porn browsing. but i think it's a good feature, particularly for people using public computers.

the smart screen is a direct copy from firefox 3. even the wording is almost the same. but i liked the domain highlighting feature.

smart address bar is again a copy from firefox 3. only, in IE it takes just a fraction of a second more to load.

searching on page has become a bit better with highlighting and no annoying floating boxes. but i still don't know why they can't have find-as-you-type.

the tabs are now individual processes or something like that. so that if a tab crashes, it doesn't affect the other. i don't know what it will do to the memory consumption, the only advantage IE has over firefox.

by default, all web slices and many other things will keep on updating themselves even though IE might not be running. dunno how many people really want this to happen. on my part, i hate processes that run by themselves in the background (not the system ones, of course :P)

but this is still beta. though i don't think there will be any major changes.

gmail new feature :D

dunno if you've noticed it or not, but there's a small new feature. the compose area now expands as you go on typing. this is especially good for long mails where earlier you had to scroll within that small writing area. now you can view a larger area of your draft.

but why the :D ? i suggested this feature some time ago [:D]!! of course, there must have been many others who did so, but i was also one of them [:D]!!

of quoted searches

sometimes google can be extra helpful and you have to ask it specifically to stop helping you. like i realised today.

a search for hypothesis testing confidence interval eviews gave results most of which had the word reviews. there are fewer results with eviews in it and the helpful soul that google search is, it assumed that i must have spelled it wrongly.

finally, had to include eviews in quotes to get the required results.

i love google [:)]!

g-talk

when did contacts in gmail turn so cool? i completely missed the rollout of this feature!

tried out the superstars today! nice li'l feature. and quick links is good too. if only i got mails more frequently.

google talk labs edition, even though a bit buggy, has smileys and tabbed chat. but i think i like separate windows. maybe they'll include an option in the final release.

and yes, don't miss the evolution of gmail chat here.

mac os X leopard

the new apple os is out. i've never used an imac. don't know why i saw the guided tour. there are some 'new' features they talked about.

stacks: - this is a shortcut to a folder you create on your desktop. when you click on it, the contents fan out or appear as a grid, depending on the number of files in that folder.

cover flow:- this shows you a preview of the files as you browse through them. something like windows photo gallery with better visuals.

finder:- the search. not much to talk about here. except saving custom searches.

quick look:- lets you preview files (presentations, pdf files, movies etc) without actually opening them. works in conjunction with cover flow. just a fancy tool.

time machine:- backs up your computer every hour to an external hard disk. a good thing - except the fact that you'll have to buy an extra disk and i don't know how resource-intensive the communication with the hard disk is. btw, the visual effects for the time machine interface is fundoo.

spaces:- multiple desktops. navigation between them is easy.

mail:- has good templates. a quick note function. a data aggregator that identifies address fields to add them to the address book.

ichat:- good special effects for the background of the video chat. easy sharing of files. remote desktop thru the chat. they call it screen sharing.

except for the ichat thing, i didn't find anything expectional. but then, i haven't used any video chat software yet. as expected from a mac os, the visual effects are really good. the specs say a minimum of 512 MB RAM is needed. i don't know how they'll manage so much with so little. to do it at the speed the person in the tour was doing, i think you'd need at least 2 gb.

and no, the thought of switching from vista didn't cross my mind even once [:D]!!

having your bacn and (not) eating it

Bacn, according to wikipedia, is the term given to electronic messages which have been subscribed to and are therefore not unsolicited but are often unread by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all. Bacn has been described as email you want but not right now.

see gmail's method of dealing with it here .

i do it all the time [:D]!! ** swells with pride **

my bacn consists of dictionary.com, blog comment and orkut notifications.

YO!!

i LOVE blogger. i really do. i swear. what's this recent declaration of love all about? well, blogger decided to include an autosave feature just like our already-lovely gmail. no more unsaved blogs. no more recovering blogs after crashes, praying fervently that the cookie thing worked.

i'd have liked to yell YAHOO!! but it seems inappropriate in this context [:P]!!

i LOVE google.

गूगल की जय!!

google transliteration क्या fundoo चीज़ है !! अब मुझे हिंदी में लिखने के लिए एक अलग editor use नहीं करना पड़ेगा!! अँधा क्या चाहे दो आंखें !! अब तो ख़ूब हिंदी लिखो!! मज़े में लिखो !! वाह वाह!! इसी बात पर बोलो गूगल की जय !!