A buggy is like a car, but drawn by a horse.

Radio is like TV, but with no picture, only sound.

A letter is like email, but written on paper and delivered in days or weeks.

The Encyclopedia Britannica is like Wikipedia, but printed in 26 volumes, and occupies half a room.

A telegram is like SMS, but you need to send it from the telegraph office.

A newspaper is like Google News, but is only updated once a day.

TV is like YouTube, but you can only watch what’s playing right now.

A Victrola is like an iPod, but with fewer songs and lower fidelity.

Google recruiters use Google to search for recruits for Google. And how do I know? I found out because of another Google product. The irony is that I’ve been at Google, and I will be at Google, so I’m not exactly who they’re looking for. So, all this, and the search was a failure, then?

Here’s what happened: I’m in the habit of checking my web server logs every once in a while to see which pages are popular, where my users are coming from, what keywords they type into search engines to find me, and sometimes just to stalk my stalkers. For this, I use two great tools, StatCounter and Google Analytics. (StatCounter is the better of the two, by the way, but they have a last-500-visitor limit, so I need to check my stats at least daily.)

Today, the following entries appeared in my logs:
(inurl:resume or intitle:resume or inurl:cv or intitle:cv) (c or c++ or java) “computer science” “software engineer” (415 or 650 or 925 or 510 or 408 or 369 or 669 or 707 or 831 or 916 or 530) -jobs -job

The IP addresses show that the request came from Google’s Mountain View headquarters. The query shows exactly who they’re looking for. Interestingly, they seem to be hiring locally (the numbers in parentheses are all telephone area prefixes in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

There’s so much Google involved in this story, it’s scary.

It’s no secret that Google hosts an employee-only event every Friday where we get to talk to Larry, Sergey and Eric directly (though the contents of each TGIF session are confidential.) In June, I walked up to the mic and asked them why Google wasn’t the default search engine in Opera Mini, the #1 mobile browser. It used to be #1 at that time; today, perhaps Mobile Safari has taken over that spot.

Today, I heard that this has happened. Seems like a good thing that they actually take feedback from interns seriously, and/or maybe I’m taking too much credit. In any case, I’m happy, because the older Opera Mini didn’t even let you customize the home screen to pick a search engine. I hope that has changed too (user choice is good.)

(Note: Both snippets mentioned here are public news; nothing confidential was released in the making of this post.)

I received the following email a few minutes ago, with fake headers and the works, and is formatted exactly the same way as the regular email we get from these folks. It’s probably viral marketing for the upcoming game, Portal, releasing November 23, 2007. Lots of references to it in the text.

1. UNDERGROUND HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE
2. BOBBY FISCHER – ENDED THE SOVIET CHESS HEGEMONY
3. SELECTING YOUR CABLE COMPANY IN BLACKSBURG
4. PI EATING CONTEST
5. POSSIBLE BAG BAN
6. DONALDSON-BROWN LOCKS TO BE CHANGED
7. ODD – OPEN DOOR DAY
8. MICROSOFT VISTA SERVICE PACK DEMO
9. WEEKLY SPEAKER SERIES
10. REGISTRATION FOR DEAN’S FORUM ON HEALTH, FOOD AND NUTRITION
11. STUDY PARTICIPANTS NEEDED

1. UNDERGROUND HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE
A Halloween tour of the steam tunnels beneath campus will be offered for the first time this year to four groups of eight people on Oct. 29th and 30th. Sign-up for each of the four tours will begin on Monday, October 22nd, and continue until all places are taken. Interested parties should contact Richard McCoy at 231-3200 for more information.

2. BOBBY FISCHER – ENDED THE SOVIET CHESS HEGEMONY
Monday, Oct 22, 5:30-7:00 in Williamsburg Rm, 7:00-8:00 in Haymarket Theater in Squires Center The man who ended the Soviet chess hegemony by defeating Boris Spassky will speak at Virginia Tech. A reception will precede his presentation at 7:00pm. Robert James “Bobby” Fischer is a United States-born chess Grandmaster who in 1972 became the only US-born chess player to become the official World Chess Champion. Fischer’s victory during the Cold War caused a great interest in chess and is responsible for the swelling of members of the World Chess Federation.

3. SELECTING YOUR CABLE COMPANY IN BLACKSBURG
Sometime between Tuesday, Oct 23 08:00am and next Friday, Nov 2 7:00pm in Room C in the GLC Are you interested in purchasing a subscription package from your local cable company? Presenters from NTC Communications Comcast Digital Cable and Cox Communications will talk about the different internet, phone and cable packages available and answer questions about rates and programming.

4. PI EATING CONTEST
Tuesday, Oct 23, 7:00pm in Room F in the GLC the VT Math club is sponsoring a Pi festival. Approximately 3,141 pies will be available for sampling. They will include but are not limited to Apple, Banoffee, Banana cream, Blackberry, Blueberry, Cheesecake, Cherry, Chestnut, Cream, Custard, Grape, Lemon meringue, Peach, Pecan, Pumpkin, and Rhubarb. In addition, at 7:30 there will also be a pie eating contest. The first contestant to eat an irrational number of pies will receive a hand-carved Penrose triangle.

5. POSSIBLE BAG BAN
Due to the heightened security of many university campuses, a possible ban of all bags on campus may be implemented in the next two weeks. Backpacks, duffels, shoulder-bags, and purses may soon join the list of items prohibited on campus. This measure has been proposed since it has been pointed out that bags may be able to conceal already illegal items. An unlikely supporter of the ban is the campus Health and Safety Department as it would also alleviate the troubling phenomenon of overweight book bags that commonly lead to health problems later in life. Acceptance of the proposal will be decided by the campus Board of Directors later this week.

6. DONALDSON-BROWN LOCKS TO BE CHANGED
It has come to the attention of university security personnel that many graduate students have access to the GLC 24 hours a day. In order to remedy this threat to campus security, all doors to the GLC will have their locks changed between Monday evening and Tuesday morning. In addition, Donaldson Brown dorm rooms will also have their locks changed on a short rotation. You may need to request a new room key from your Residential Fellow.

7. ODD – OPEN DOOR DAY
To help promote social interaction amongst the graduate students, Thurs, Oct 25, will be open door day. Graduate students on campus are encouraged to keep their door open and meet their neighbors as well as their Residential Fellow if they have not done so already. We are aware that the doors in the GLC rooms close on their own, this is why you have been provided with doorstops. Use them! Hopefully open door day will become more routine and no longer considered odd.

8. MICROSOFT VISTA SERVICE PACK DEMO
Wednesday, Oct 24, 6:00-7:00pm in McBryde 666, Microsoft will be giving an exclusive preview of service pack one for Vista. In response to the massive number of problems, compatibility, and stability issues in Vista, Microsoft has spent the past year fervently addressing these issues in the much anticipated service pack 1 (SP1). Representives from Microsoft will demonstrate the features and stability changes of SP1, such as the newly bolstered DRM software. This update and others in SP1 that will be demonstrated should help provide Vista users with new enhanced reduced functionality.

9. WEEKLY SPEAKER SERIES
Friday, Oct 26, 4:00-5:00pm in Room F in the GLC Faculty speaker: Dr. Henry Warren – Physics, on Structure of the Proton. Graduate students and faculty from across the university present weekly their teaching and research passions in a casual, coffee house atmosphere. Free coffee and pastries served from 3:45pm.

10. REGISTRATION FOR DEAN’S FORUM ON HEALTH, FOOD AND NUTRITION
Registration for the Nov 5 forum is now open. This forum will showcase health, food, and nutrition efforts in research, extension/outreach, and teaching currently underway at McDonalds, Kraft Foods, Monsanto, and LuthorCorp. Register by Sunday, Oct 28 if you plan on attending the event. Sponsors will showcase the health benefits of the latest developments in GMOs, growth hormones, preservatives, artificial sweeteners, hydrogenated oils, flavoring and texturizing food additives. For more information, including registration links, and to view the Forum agenda, please visit http://www.mcvideogame.com/index-eng.html

11. STUDY PARTICIPANTS NEEDED
A graduate student researcher working on behalf of Aperture Science is seeking highly-motivated individuals in good physical condition between the ages of 18-25 for her study. Participants will be asked to perform complex tasks. The entire study should last a minimum of 3 hours and moist, delicious cake will be served upon successful completion of the test. For further information or to sign up to participate, please contact Glados, glados@aperturescience.com

It’s been exactly a month since my feature launched on Google Books. I went on an ego-surfing trip to see who had covered it. Here’s what I found.

• TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/06/google-books-embed-book-clips-into-websites/
• CNet Australia: http://www.cnet.com.au/software/internet/0,239029524,339281859,00.htm
• Ajaxian: http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-book-search-now-with-clipping
  

  Very simple and clean.

  The words every designer loves to hear!

• TeleRead: http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=7066

  Fascinating, isn’t it, how summer interns’ work at Google can imperil whole businesses?

• Blogoscoped: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-06-n55.html

• WebMetrics Guru: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/2007/09/google_books_and_the_search_fo.html

  Funny, but this one new feature of Google Books, I find, is one of the most impressive things that Google has done lately…but that’s just my opinion.

• VentureBeat: http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/06/google-offers-nice-refinements-on-book-search/

• Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/070906-101120.php

• WebWare: http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9772831-2.html
• MobileRead.com: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13565
• Googlified: http://googlified.com/2007google-books-my-library-and-more/
• DownloadSquad: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/09/06/more-google-books-news/
• Switched.com http://www.switched.com/2007/09/07/how-to-embed-book-snippets-in-your-site/

An MIT student was arrested today for carrying and displaying (what looks to me) a breadboard with some wires and a 9-volt battery. For those who are not technologists, a breadboard is a simple piece of plastic with wires underneath, neatly arranged in a grid. You can insert various electronic components into the grid of perforations on it and they will be connected by the hidden wires. It’s used for prototyping circuits before sending them for large-scale manufacturing (on printed circuit boards.)

Here’s a photo of the device she carried. Compare that to the photo of a breadboard on the Wikipedia page.

To me, what is scary isn’t that the enterprising and creative girl was arrested, but that law enforcement officials are so less technologically inclined. I wouldn’t expect everyone to know about these things, but I think a little basic technology familiarization would keep the country safer than surveillance or arrests like this.

News agencies all over have been reporting this as a ‘fake bomb’. Guys, come on. By that deduction, every cell phone contains the equivalent of a hundred fake bombs. That’s how little circuitry can physically fit onto a breadboard. Just because the contraption looks laboratory-like and it’s at an airport doesn’t mean it’s a bomb.

Two students in Nova Scotia got back at school bullies silently, yet strongly.

Two Nova Scotia students are being praised across North America for the way they turned the tide against the bullies who picked on a fellow student for wearing pink.
[...]
They went to a nearby discount store and bought 50 pink shirts, including tank tops, to wear to school the next day.
[...]
Not only were dozens of students outfitted with the discount tees, but hundreds of students showed up wearing their own pink clothes, some head-to-toe. And there’s been nary a peep from the bullies since, which Shepherd says just goes to show what a little activism will do.

And you thought Monty Python were just fooling around when they crafted this scene of the Killer Rabbit in the Holy Grail movie!

Apparently, there is (technically, was) a squirrel on a similar rampage in Berlin this week.

BERLIN (Reuters) – An aggressive squirrel attacked and injured three people in a German town before a 72-year-old pensioner dispatched the rampaging animal with his crutch.

The squirrel first ran into a house in the southern town of Passau, leapt from behind on a 70-year-old woman, and sank its teeth into her hand, a local police spokesman said Thursday. With the squirrel still hanging from her hand, the woman ran onto the street in panic, where she managed to shake it off. The animal then entered a building site and jumped on a construction worker, injuring him on the hand and arm, before he managed to fight it off with a measuring pole.

“After that, the squirrel went into the 72-year-old man’s garden and massively attacked him on the arms, hand and thigh,” the spokesman said. “Then he killed it with his crutch.”

Everyone agrees meetings aren’t fun, but what if you’re discussing matters with your teammates while pedaling a 7-person bike furiously on the streets of Mountain View? Forget the discussing matters part, but the rest of it sure is a lot of fun.

Just don’t call it the party bike; it’s the “conference” bike. Google’s newest acquired toy is a 7-person bike, much like New York City’s Party Bike [link broken at the time of posting]. It can be scheduled as a conference room for holding meetings and as a team-building exercise (no pun intended).

Our team rode the bike to the nearby Shoreline Lake on a hot Friday afternoon. Just for kicks, we rode it up a hillock and let it go full speed downhill. Here’re some action shots!

I have posted photos from today’s candlelight vigil at Virginia Tech. Reporters, journalists and media-persons, please note: the license explicitly prohibits any commercial use of these photos. Others, please feel free to share/email/print these photos for friends, family, and everyone else who might have been impacted by this tragedy.

A terrible piece of news was announced to us this morning while writing a test. An unidentified gunman opened fire on two separate occasions today, killing one person at Ambler Johnston and several more at Norris Hall. The current fatality count stands at 22 — now updated to 32 — this is absolutely, positively horrifying, especially for a rural campus like Virginia Tech.

Two bomb threats, last one two days ago

The campus has been plagued by law-and-order trouble most of last year; we had two bomb threats for buildings on campus, on April 2 and April 13 (just two days before today’s shootout!). On both occasions, the respective buildings were immediately evacuated and all events suspended until police could conduct a more thorough inspection of each building. Following the last threat on Friday, the three buildings were closed until Sunday night. The university sent a campus-wide email Sunday evening that those buildings would open at 7:00am Monday and all events scheduled for today would resume.

Second shooting led to more fatalities

So we went off at 9:00am, right after the first shooting. At that time, if we had known about the first incident that occurred at 7:15am, we sure as hell wouldn’t have ventured out. We only heard about it later, some time around 9:26am, via email from the University. While we were on the bus to campus, it was probably exactly that time that the killer moved from Ambler Johnston Hall to Norris Hall, where the second shoutout occurred. Most of the fatalities occurred at the second shooting. If that could have been prevented — oh well, hindsight is always 20/20.

First, curfew; then, evacuation

The first email from the University asked us to stay indoors, lock the doors, and away from windows. The second one told us that the campus was being evacuated, and we should leave the building as soon as possible. We left at around 11:30am from Whittemore hall, and a classmate offered to drop us back home. The status of the Blacksburg Transit bus service was not known.

Shock at home

The real shock came when we reached home, because accurate information about the happenings of the morning was not available until after President Steger’s statement released at noon. The sheer number of fatalities and injuries — 22 dead, 21 injuries — was mind-boggling. It is expected that the death toll may rise as more information is available.

Is anyone going to do something about this?

Or should we just expect the National Rifle Association to convene at Blacksburg later this month? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please see Michael Moore’s documentary, Bowling for Columbine. I’ve written about this topic before: it’s high time someone does something about this.

22 32 innocent lives lost, not to mention all the victims over the years, is reason enough to do something about the root of the problems, the easy availability of guns.

Update:

This blog entry was posted before we learned that Minal Panchal was missing. After we heard, most of us have been on campus or at Montgomery Regional Hospital trying to locate her.

Which, on the whole, is a Good Thing™. But the way they convey the message is disgusting.

A friend pointed me to Microsoft India’s Vista Promotion (for its humor value, of course), which I tried to access using Safari on my Mac. This is the page I got back:

<HTML><HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0.1">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1">
</HEAD></HTML>

It is not as innocuous as it may look; there’s an infinite redirect loop on line 1. Safari didn’t crash, of course, but MS still tried.

I figured I’d see what happened if I changed the user-agent string (which, by the way, is how websites can identify what browser you are using.) I asked Safari to masquerade as Internet Explorer using a fake user-agent string, just for kicks. And lo!, the entire page showed up! Quelle surprise!

Microsoft have pulled this trick before during the launch of Windows XP (and again, and again). Will they never learn? Will they ever stop being such immature kids and not try to prevent competing browsers from viewing their websites?

I would’ve said they just lost a customer, but I wasn’t one to begin with, so that doesn’t make much sense.

Never mind the big hole in it.

Dilbert author Scott Adams has an interesting blog entry, about his Donut Theory of the Universe. I call it interesting, because it is a fairly good explanation of something that has piqued the curiosity of mankind for millenia.

(As an aside, it also provides ample fodder for puns: one comment goes, “Sweet theory. I think you are on a roll with this idea. Perhaps some Danish research institute could fund research into your theory. Although, I have to admit I sort of glazed over reading it.”)

Give it a read; it’s the closest I’ve ever come to understanding these things.

Time Magazine captured the essence of 2006 (and maybe 2005 and 2004 too) when they nominated You as Person of the Year. Yes, you, who contributed to a global knowledge-base that’s larger than anything the experts could ever do. You, who brought attention to shameful acts that otherwise would have remained hidden from the public eye. You, who created an operating system that has the major for-profit vendor all worried. You, who brought us Web 2.0.

Here’s to You!

Google just announced a new feature in Google Maps: Click to Call. When you find a business on Google Maps, you can ask to be connected directly. Google then calls you on the number you provide, and places a call to the business at the other end.

This is yet another example of seamless task migration. The user’s ultimate goal in locating a business is to get in touch with them. The most common way to do this today is to call using a phone (at least as long as Voice-over-IP is not as ubiquitous as cellphones and land-lines). Lo, Google bridged the gap. End-to-end support for a user’s tasks using multiple devices is a challenge that’s getting its due attention only recently.

Hopefully, we will soon be able to do the same with phone numbers all over the Web. Imagine a button on my website that says, “click to call me”. Or, a button on my photo albums page that says, “view as a slideshow on the living room TV”. Or being able to press a button on your car radio to “read more about the currently-advertised product once I’m back home”.

Users who bought music from Microsoft’s MSN Music Store (no one I know, but still) will not be able to play it on the newly-announced Zune portable player. (Oh, did I mention Zune is made by Microsoft too?)

Let’s see how many different classes of people they’ve alienated this time:

1. There are the users who bought players from their hardware partners. If they want to “upgrade” to a Zune, they’ll have to re-buy their music.
2. Their hardware partners, because this is going to affect their sales, no doubt.
3. Their music suppliers, because they’re discontinuing the MSN Store.
4. And this is in addition to all of us Mac OS X and Linux users for whom Microsoft doesn’t even have a media player (not that we care, but still.)

From playsforsure.com:

Look for the PlaysForSure logo if you’re shopping for a music or video device and you want to make sure the digital music and video you purchase will play back on it every time.

Heh. I’d just buy an iPod, then.

And the irony to top it all is that this initiative was called ‘Plays for Sure’. Yeah, right.

Yeah, right. And kids do.

When one says, “guns don’t kill people”, it’s worth examining whether the same killing would have taken place in the absense of a gun. In gang wars, the answer would be yes, of course. But in many of the recent killings by school children, or — the horror — toddlers, it’s hard to argue that the answer could even remotely be ‘yes’.

Today’s killing of a 5-year old girl by her 3-year old brother might never have happened if the gun used for the killing were not available to the brother. Morgan King was even younger than Kayla Rolland at the time of her very untimely death (Kayla was thus far the youngest victim of firearm-related deaths.)

With elections around the corner, and everyone debating apparently more important issues, I hope you aren’t forgotten, Morgan.

R.I.P.

Now proven scientifically. Take, for instance, sleep. Nobody ever doubted that sleep was a necessity, but now I have scientific evidence to back me up when I’m caught napping in the middle of the day. I’m sleeping to stay fit, of course! They say, and I quote:

Even two or three nights of shortened sleep can have quite significant effects, he says, disrupting the normal hormonal balance and making more likely a series of long-term consequences, including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. [...]

For adolescents, he suggests allowing them to sleep in at weekends, but not for more than two to three hours, as that can disrupt the normal rhythms.

And I drink to increase my income, if this little bit of research is to be believed. According to the authors,

“Drinkers may be able to socialize more with clients and co-workers, giving drinkers an advantage in important relationships,” the researchers said. “Drinking may also provide individuals with opportunities to learn people, business, and social skills.”

Update:
And chocolate! How can I forget chocolate! Though I do think that the term flavonoids seems more marketing-speak than genuine scientific terminology. But I’m no expert — I’m biting into this delectable delicacies purely on medical advice.

The fourth and final thing that’s good for everyone needs no scientific evidence, really.

If you’ve recovered from that tongue-twister of a title (there I go again!), here’s the news! A high-schooler’s parent in Houston is asking the school to ban ‘Fahrenheit 451‘, Ray Bradbury’s book (and later, a movie) about the horrors of a government that burns books and controls all knowledge. The grounds for the objection are the language used in the book. C’mon, the language used by high schoolers these days is nothing compared to what’s in the book. And oh, by the way, the guy, Alton Verm, says he hasn’t even read the book about whose content he’s objecting. Someone please tell me this is the 1^st of April.

The irony (apart from the obvious irony in someone trying to ban a book about banning books) is that this happened just after Banned Books Week.

Update: A friend pointed me to a similar case where an art teacher got fired for taking her students to an art museum where a student was offended by a naked statue.

If this is reason enough to fire a 28-year-veteran school teacher, I think these easily-offended students should just spend their childhood in the confines of their home, snug in their overprotective nests with their parents. After all, there’s so much else to be offended about in this world. At least that way, the rest of them would be able to explore, appreciate, and understand life, without getting their teachers fired for doing their job.

Update 2: There seem to be far too many of these occurrences these days. A Christian parent from Georgia wants to ban the Harry Potter series from her kids’ school’s media center. The reason? “I think the anti-Christian bias — it’s just got to stop.” I kid you not.

And one element that’s common in almost all these frivolous complaints is this:

“She admitted that she has not read the book series partially because “they’re really very long and I have four kids.”

I’ll end this short post here, so you may quickly go to either have a hearty laugh, or weep quietly at the anti-intellectualism in society today.

I’ve been reading Presentation Zen lately, and various related resources. I’ll credit Stanford Law School Professor, Larry Lessig, with exposing me to “alternate” styles of presentation when he gave a talk at Google last Summer.

Some interesting quotes and links I picked up along the way, with credits.

“If someone that did not attend to [sic] my presentation can understand anything if I mail them my slides, I have made a really bad set of slides. Really bad.” — eirikso.com.

“What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” — Steve Jobs.

An excellent presentation from Seth Godin at the Gel Conference, on all things broken!

Jonathan Shewchuk’s tips for academic talks.

“Start-up a PowerPoint presentation and the average IQ of the room drops by 10 points.” – Anon

A suicide PowerPoint presentation featured on The Onion.