September 14, 2005
Google Blog Search
Okay, so this is way cool. Search results come only from self-publishers / bloggers. God love Google!
Posted by SparklesMpls at 09:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 12, 2005
Skype / VOIP / Internet telephone
Back in the day when I tried some of the original internet telephone services with my 56k (if you were lucky) dialup, internet telephones (software phones) were pretty much unusable. I never tried again until recently.
I admit it - I'm a total techno geek. But when it comes to internet telephones, I've been a relative latecomer. I signed up for Vonage about six months ago and have loved it ever since. I don't use my home telephone all that much, so the 500 minute, $14.99 plan is more than sufficient for me. But lordy - for $14.99 I'm getting much better service than I was getting with QWest or Sprint local service for $50 a month - and that didn't include long distance, voicemail or any of that other jazz!
Just recently I signed up with Google Talk - it's basically another instant messaging service, with a nice and clean Google interface, but also includes VOIP (voice over internet protocol) service so you can actually use your computer as a telephone. Plug a microphone and speakers in (or if you've got a laptop, you likely already have both of these things built in), and wam-bam-thank-you-mam, you've got a speakerphone! I love it. Now I just need to get more of my friends signed up so that I can use it more regularly.
I've also just signed up for a Skype account. Skype has been on top of the internet telephone game for a couple of years ago and it's just been announced that eBay is purchasing them. It was just a couple of years ago that eBay bought PayPal - a competitor to its own proprietary money-echange service. That purchase made sense, but the telephone buyout is a little bit of a mystery to me. Sure, it'll likely be a moneymaker, but eBay is into selling merchandise???
I hope this stuff continues to be free. I don't mind seeing advertising here and there if it's not intrusive, just don't start charging!
Do any of you use these services? What have your experiences been? Any recommendations?
Posted by SparklesMpls at 01:51 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Census information
Okay, so this is probably one of the coolest things I've seen done with the Google Maps API! Check out your neighborhood and find out how much money your neighbors are making ;-)
Posted by SparklesMpls at 01:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 02, 2005
Email no-nos
How NOT to email. I must admit - I use some of these in my emails.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 09:05 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 12, 2005
PayPal discontinues Billpay service
Bummer - I use this service quite often. Paypal is one of the great things that's come out of the internet. I received this email from them today:
We are writing to let you know that PayPal's BillPay service will be discontinued in early August, 2005. If you currently use BillPay, you will need to make other arrangements for your online bill payments prior to August to avoid any interruption in service. We regret any inconvenience this may cause, and we will send you periodic reminders as the cancellation date approaches.
None of your pending payments will be affected by this announcement; however, payments should not be scheduled after August 1, 2005 in order to ensure that they are completed.
Please be advised that this will not affect your PayPal account. You will still be able to use PayPal to pay for purchases on eBay and thousands of other merchants on the Web, as well as to send or receive money online.
If you have any questions, please contact PayPal customer service at paypal@paypal.com or (402) 938-3631.
Sincerely,
PayPal
Posted by SparklesMpls at 10:40 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 11, 2005
Google and its "Public Betas"
There's been speculation that Google uses the term "Public Beta" a little loosly. If you think about it - it's gmail service was unveiled in a beta fashion. No hype, just word of mouth and folks touting the service. About a year later it's one of the most popular free email providers on the 'net and it's changed the way that industry opperates. In short, it's been a huge success.
Then came it's Web Accelerator that I . They've now taken it down, just a couple of days after releasing it to the public. I jumped at it and thought it was a great technology. After using it for a couple of days, however, found it too buggy and had to question what they might be doing with my data.
CNET speculates that perhaps they've released software that is doing something wrong and / or unethical. Google's smart, and everything up until now has been a total success, but the web accelerator has people questioning.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 11:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 08, 2005
Spyware removal
Do yourself a favor and go install Adaware and Free AVG, before a virus or 500 spyware tools install themselves on your computer. Adaware has been a savoir more times than I can count. I've set it up on my parent's computer and run it at least once every two weeks, as unbeknown to them, everytime they visit one of those 'auction' sites or 'message boards' they're usually getting pop-up installing crapware on their machine. On top of being annoying, spyware slows down your computer, sometimes to an almost unusable pace, as they each fight each other for memory and processor resources.
Enough of my ranting. Go download them now. (Mac & Unix users need not bother)
Adaware - spyware removal
Free AVG - virus protection
Posted by SparklesMpls at 01:21 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 04, 2005
Google Web Accelerator
This is really freaking cool:
Google caches the web already, and they've got amazingly good net connections with amazingly fast web servers. Now you too can harness the POWER OF GOOGLE! By installing this browser plug-in you can access pages through Google's cache instead of from the server the site your browsing is served from.
"But what about pages that update frequently?" you ask. Ahhah - Google's got a solution! It caches the specific parts of the page that don't change, but if part of the page has changed, you'll get the updated version of that piece from the original server.
Even more amazing - it creates it's own index of frequently viewed pages on popular websites. When you visit a popular website, it will start caching the most popular pages on that website onto your computer in the background. That way, in the likely event that you visit some of the most popular pages of the website, you're viewing it from your own hard drive - it doesn't get any faster than that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so why in the HECK is Google doing this for FREE? Well, it's so they can monitor browsing habits and continue to enhance their ever-perfect search indexes and sell advertising.
Who cares? Live a little. Let Google see your browsing habits and browse the net at Warp-google.
Works with MSIE 5.5+ and Firefox 1.0+. Mac users, you're SOL.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 07:40 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
April 18, 2005
Another biggie is on the fritz
What's up with the 'net these days? The other day the MS Office website was on the fritz, and now Blogger! Granted, Blogger tends to have a bit of a reputation for this stuff, but it's owned by Google - presumably, one of the most reliable websites in the nether ... so what's up with this?
Posted by SparklesMpls at 02:48 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 17, 2005
Nice, Microsoft, nice
I guess it happens to the largest of websites. I snapped this screen grab last week - it was a weekday in the middle of the afternoon:
Posted by SparklesMpls at 01:21 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 11, 2005
Manic Mondays
Had a rather manic day - meaning I haven't had breakfast yet. Instead of bitching about it, I'm just going to recap some interesting things I've been exposed to today:
This little bugger is a wireless webcam. It'll stream video, snap pictures on a timer and email them to you, or just act as your regular webcam - except it's wireless so you can put the thing damned-near anywhere, within reach of an electrical outlet, anyhow. "No, I'm sorry, I don't know anything about the camera in the ceiling tiles above your shower. My Word, that's just awful - who could have done something so invasive?!" $200 retail. Read about it on Gizmodo.
Victoria Gotti is my new favorite pastime. Seriously, if you haven't seen it yet, tune into Growing Up Gotti on AETV. The rich and famous daughter of a mobster serial killer turned single-mom / gossip columnist. She's got the house on Long Island and my fantasy job. She's a total nutjob and she's fabulous - I love her.
And speaking of AETV - have you seen Dog The Bounty Hunter? It's a hillarious show about a white-trash family of convicts turning do-gooders. They've cleaned up their act and now make their livings as bounty hunters - and let me tell you, I wouldn't mind one of "The Dog's" nephew/helpers pinning me to the ground and slapp'n on the cuffs.
And this is way too cool - this guy somehow merged the real estate and rental listings from craigslist and Google Maps to make one tool that you can browse real estate and rentals from a map view - VERY FUCKING COOL. And can I just say again how much I love Google Maps? Thanks.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 10:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 04, 2005
Blog buttons
I came across a neat online tool that allows you to build blog buttons - you know those little 80x15 pixel images that link to other sites like I have listed in my sidebar? It's called the "Button Maker" and I just LOVE it! Here's a button I made for my site:
Now go make your own!
Posted by SparklesMpls at 12:15 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 15, 2005
How fast can you type?
I tried it once and got 113 wpm.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 07:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 26, 2005
Spam filters being used in the fight against AIDS
This is an interesting article from the Seattle Post; I've reprinted it below.
Spam filters may lead scientists to AIDS vaccine
Scientists hope method will find patterns in variations of HIV
By TOM PAULSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Software scientists at Microsoft Research have teamed up with biomedical researchers in Seattle, Boston and Perth, Australia, to see if computer techniques used to defeat e-mail spam can also be used to help design a vaccine that can defeat AIDS.
Today, members of this unique collaboration will announce a plan to use "machine learning" or "data mining" computational techniques to decipher HIV's wildly creative genetic ability to constantly change and disguise itself from immune system detection and deletion.
"HIV mutates like crazy, but it does show a pattern," said Dr. David Heckerman, a physician and computer scientist at Microsoft Research.
"It isn't completely random," added Heckerman's colleague Nebojsa Jojic. Just as a spammer can add only so much nonsense or other disguising characters without obscuring the message, Jojic said, so can the AIDS virus vary only so much without disabling itself.
The two plan to announce the innovative approach to seeking an AIDS vaccine today in Boston at the 12th annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, perhaps the most prestigious AIDS research meeting in the world.
"The genetic variability of this virus is a major problem in finding a vaccine," said Dr. James Mullins, a University of Washington microbiologist and AIDS researcher working with the Microsoft scientists.
There are millions of different variations of HIV, Mullins said, and the standard approach to vaccine development typically requires extensive testing of experimental vaccines against specific strains or select groupings of similar strains.
"It's just not that manageable," he said.
The basic idea behind "machine learning" -- a form of artificial intelligence -- is to make this search more manageable by letting a computer sort through and analyze all the information and variations to look for revealing, repeat genetic patterns in HIV.
Just as a computer's spam filter "learns" to recognize new variations from the same spammer, it is hoped a computer can learn to decipher some fundamental repeat patterns about HIV's genetic variability and narrow the search for vaccine targets.
"HIV mutates by making errors in its (genetic) copying," Jojic said. But it can make only so many errors, he said, if it hopes to retain the genetic equivalent of the spammer's intended e-mail.
If these techniques can identify genetic sequences retained by HIV despite its many disguises, the researchers believe this could identify critical parts of the viral DNA to target in developing a vaccine.
Heckerman, who was trained as a physicist before veering off into medicine to study the brain before being diverted again into the artificial intelligence field, sees this partnership as a logical extension of his interests. He pioneered e-mail spam filtering in the late 1990s and contends Microsoft is holding its own against spam.
Unlike spammers, he noted, the AIDS virus likely won't try to further alter itself in some more perverse way in response to being scrutinized.
Mullins said he learned of Heckerman and Jojic's work from a post-doctoral student a few years ago and sought them out.
He said he had earlier used another kind of computational analysis studying HIV's earliest genetics to identify common patterns that might be good vaccine targets. He made and tested in rabbits an experimental vaccine developed by that method, but said, "The results were not that great."
This new effort is unique and orders of magnitude more powerful, the team said. Using a series of computerized problem-solving techniques they call "epitomes," they plan to comb through millions of genetic sequences looking for patterns that "epitomize" the fundamental nature of HIV.
Microsoft Research has been using this technique to reduce or compress video and audio information down to its essential information.
For an AIDS vaccine, the team hopes to find the smallest essential quantity of genetic information needed to fight off different strains of the deadly virus. They said they have already started testing experimental vaccines in the laboratory, exposing them to blood samples taken from HIV-infected people.
If the approach is successful, the scientists said they may expand into other areas such as the development of treatment for hepatitis C infection and other highly mutating viruses.
AIDS kills more then 8,000 people every day and has claimed more than 30 million lives since it was first identified. Nearly 40 million people are infected worldwide, and nearly 5 million more are infected each year.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 07:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 10, 2005
I -heart- Google
Google just released Google Maps! It's soooo cool! You can type in an address, map a location, search for a store, restaurant, residence. Get phone numbers for addresses, and on and on and on.
And the niftiest thing is that once you've got a map onscreen, you can drag and drop it to your heart's content!
I LOVE GOOGLE!
Posted by SparklesMpls at 07:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 25, 2005
I love Google
Google's latest venture is looking really cool.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 01:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 19, 2005
Pyramid scheme
I know. I know. This is totally a pyramid-scheme-type deal, but I couldn't resist trying.
This company claims to offer you a free G4 iBook if you sign up for one of their promotions. Many of the promotions are free or trial subscriptions that will charge you if you continue a membership. All you have to do, though, is cancel before the trial expires.
I don't know if it works or not, but what can it hurt to try? It's a free frick'n iBook!
Anyway, take a look. Sign up if you want, and then get your friends to do the same and you too can be the proud owner of a new iBook :-)
Posted by SparklesMpls at 07:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
