Pomme::TAB

The software industry is a battle field and somebody drew a map of it.

(Source:Wired)

Now that Apple unveiled the real “thing“, This website shows a photo gallery of some fake designs that appeared on the web when the “thing” was still a crazy recurring rumour.

It’s fascinating to read the Google Zeitgeist (the list of the most frequent queries to Google search).

the list for November 2006 in UK is very illustrative of the period (pre-Christmas shopping season).

It was interesting to see “cricket” appearing in top 15 in India but not in UK.

It also show that greek people are searching for a hedonistic life, may be to try to have a similar life to all of these celebrities that are searching on Google
And of course there are the eternally popular queries in almost every countries: Jessica Alba, Paris Hilton, Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears.

Finally, I admire the concision of danish queries

In the same vein, Digg.com links to an article about what chinese are searching for the most in Baidu (the most popular search engine in China)

Buzztracker - World News - 2007-01-12

Almost a year ago, I discover a web site that track global news and represents them on a world map as circles. The larger the circle the more frequent are the news about the place. Buzz tracker also represents inter-references between places in the news articles by a link between two circles.

Using the image available on Buzztracker.org site, I’ve made a small film showing the evolution of the map over 14 days (7 of them consecutive, for the others I have been a bit lazy).

It’s interesting to see that the biggest circles are almost always the same (Iraq, big western cities) but the smaller ones are more mobile.

[QUICKTIME rtsp://streaming.pommetab.com/streaming.pommetab.com/buzztracker.mov 320 257]
images in the film are from buzztracker.org web site and the film is licenced under the same Creative Commons licence.

According to Ars Technica, Ford and Microsoft are going to work together on the dashboard OS of some of Ford 2008 vehicles.

I guess we will soon have plenty of illustrations for the old joke (If Microsoft made cars…)

… and I lost the Sidebar Widgets plug-in. It’s under investigation.

Update, 08 Jan:  I moved the old sidebar.php and functions.php in the default theme directory and it’s now fixed.

I found this blog article about the bandwidth consumption and thus storage growth for Flickr.
There are graphs of frequency of photo uploads to Flickr and the size of the photos.
The author doesn’t say how did he get his information though.
But the API calls are named in the comments

I use vi daily. I switched from Emacs 4 years ago. Sometimes I reflect with a smile on the fact that I’m still happy and productive with a software written before I was born.

The Birth of vi: “lanc writes ‘Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, tells the story of how he wrote the vi editor. The article at The Register delves into his motives, who instigated the project, and some of the quirks of leaving a ‘gift to mankind’. From the piece: ‘9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore. The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens. So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I’m sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.”

Fancy becoming the input data for an algorithm? In other word, do you want to apply for a job at Google?

Google’s Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm: “An anonymous reader tipped us to a New York Times article about Google’s newest HR tool: an algorithm. Starting soon, the company (which gets roughly 100,000 applications a month) will require all interested applicants to fill out an in-depth survey. They’ll be using a sophisticated algorithm to work through the submitted surveys, matching applicants with positions. The company has apparently doubled in size in each of the last three years. Even though it’s already 10,000 employees strong Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for people operations, sees no reason the company won’t reach 20,000 by the end of the year. This will mean hiring something like 200 people a week, every week, all year …”

(Via Slashdot.)

Routemasters - Lower Regent St SW1

Originally uploaded by JJ Willow.

I like very much this superb shot of 3 (not 1) Route Master buses.
Symbol of London they have now been decommissioned. You can still see some of them on some tourist routes though (and also use as private hire). The photo has been posted on my flickr group West London