Category Archives: Uncategorized

The New York Times (free registration required) has a good article today summarizing the rumored buyout of Sun. Since the rumors first surfaced on May 9 Sun shares have been trading at about four times historical volume. Seems like something is up and maybe it’s just a matter of JavaOne before we know what it is. As a member of the Java Community Process I am especially concerned….

The May 26 issue of Newsweek reports that U.S. military units are using Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” to break the resistence of Iraqi soldiers….

Researchers in England have come up with a new soft-ground soccer shoe using springs to reduce shock….

Naked Cowboy makes between $150,000 and $200,000 a year for performing in Times Square in his underwear….

A team from Stanford has come up with new enhancements to what the world commonly knows as PageRank. They discovered that 80% of the pages on any given site point to other pages on the same site. Topic specific PageRank can become a reality, which definitely has huge possibilities for business intelligence applications….

I Grub daily.  Over half a million crawls so far this month.  Good work on pushing through the new client Kord and crew!  Local crawl is working well….

What’s for lunch at Google today?  Google is open about allowing employees to work on outside projects, or even heavily swayed R&D within the organization.  How many companies do you know would except a failure rate at the expense of a production line?  It is nice to see management thinking in terms of leaps and bounds and not inches….

I attended a presentation by Sun Microsystems tonight and saw an implementation of Grokker by Groxis, Inc.  Very interesting client rendering design.  At 20 MB on top of a Java Runtime Environment I am curious to look at the APIs when they become available….

Dan Maynes-Aminzade and Hayes Solos Raffle from MIT’s Media Lab have outfitted a urinal to serve as a gaming platform.  The game itself reminds me of Duck Hunt.  Given the static advertising above public urinals today, video monitors are probably not too far off either.  “John Anderton, you look like you could use a Guinness!”…

I have over 15 gigabyes of music ripped onto my hard drive right now in either MP3 or WMA format.  All retail CDs, purchased legally, but now much more efficiently indexed. Now the problem is having my music with me both at home and at work.  My current player holds only 64 megabytes : not even a full album at 192 Kbps.  I feel proud that my music collection can fit on only the high-end iPod 30 gigabyte model.  MP3.com’s old model of proving you owned the music and then enabling access to it anywhere makes sense to me. …