waider

ronebofh points out an amusing Google search result. All things being equal, by the time you read this it may no longer be true, but for now I have my brief moment at the top of the suckweasel charts.

Expect this to be edited:

The UK Google Finance site, geared to investors in the UK, [8-character non-sequitor "word" (four chars, four digits)]is now live. You can access stock prices, mutual funds, financial news, blogs, and charts, all through our easy-to-use and familiar interface. Here are some highlights:... (link)

(my editing/emphasis, obviously)
update: yep, it was edited.

I skimmed through yet another attempt to explain Google's PageRank system (summary: "we trawled everyone else's documents and glommed them into ours, producing zero new information in the process") and found, right near the start, the statement that "not all links weight the same". Personally if I'd been asked to proof the article I'd have flagged this as a typo for "weigh", but I guess in the context in which it's used it's actually a valid if annoying use of "weight".

I still think the article as a whole is pointless, though.

wtf.google.com, a site where you can post a link to something on google maps and find out what the f^Whell it is. I don't care if this facility is provided on the keyhole site, I prefer my suggested domain name.

Apparently the multi-million-euro motorway that almost encircles Dublin is the "Around The Wicklow Mountains" road...

One of the books I got for Christmas is "The Google Story" by David A. Vise; it touts itself as "the definitive account of one of the most remarkable organizations of our time". The best part of it is the historical stuff about Google's founding; it's not quite so good in its coverage of the GMail privacy arguments; the entirety of chapter 14 could be replaced with the phrase, "People use Google to look for porn" without any loss of information; and the most curious part of the whole thing is whether or not the author actually ever talked to Sergey, or Larry - or even Eric Schmidt. Certainly reading the book I had a strong impression that he'd conducted several interviews with them, and the phrasing of a lot of quoted material suggests that he was, indeed, conversing with them. However, the flyleaf contains the note that the book isn't "created, authorised, or endorsed by Google, Inc.", and the section on sources explains that they talked to a lot of people who knew Larry and Sergey - lecturers at Stanford and what not - and perhaps most tellingly, having thanked Larry and Sergey "for trusting us[1] to tell their story", it goes on to say, "we discussed the manuscript with Google Executives" (my emphasis) which strongly suggests that the only trust Larry and Sergey expressed was in not actively blocking the publication of the book.

[1] Mark Malseed gets a with credit on the inside of the book, but not on the cover.

So I'm pottering around the kitchen and suddenly it occurs to me that it'd be funny to tie two google or yahoo searches together, one with filtering on and the other off, then extract the filtered stuff from comparing the result sets. Of course, someone already did it.

Italian guy discovers buried Roman villa through Google Maps - wasn't this part of the setup for some book or another? The vague details I recall involve the site being revealed as shadows in an overhead shot, but utterly invisible from on-site unless you stood at just the right place at the right time. And there was something about sealed jars in catacombs containing some sort of virus, too. I initially thought I might be thinking of Crichton's Congo, but it's not that.

This is a pretty ghetto GPS tracker I threw together yesterday, having come up with the idea while I was out on my morning run. It requires: Firefox, set to open URLs from remote applications in the current window/tab, Perl, and a means of piping NMEA data from your GPS to the script’s standard input. The sleep commands are a blunt way of allowing the remote-control calls to take effect and may need to be tuned for your system/bandwidth.
( shielding you from the gory details )