So, I couldn't make my program on time and got eliminated from
the contest to let Daniel Egnor win the conest with his 'Geographic Search'
idea which adds the ability to search for web pages within a
particular geographic locale to traditional keyword searching.
That's very similar to things we were planning to do, converting
street addresses to latitude-longitude based cooredinates through
publicly available
TIGER
and
FIPS
data sources.
Jen McGrath, a software engineer at Google, said Egnor's entry was chosen not just because he had developed a useful application but also because he had "clean" code and, importantly, because his code showed the possibility of "scaling" to work across the entire Web.
He got $10'000 in cash and a VIP visit to
Google's
office in Mountain View, CA.
But, who is the real winner of the contest? I would say: Google. They now have tons
and tons of fresh ideas and a bunch of pre-written, ready and clean code which they
legally can glue to their system (although they have said they're not planning
to use it for now) by spending approximately one month salary of one of their Phds.
List of Winners
Google's Search for Winner Ends,
Farhad Manjoo's article in
Wired
Another world cup started yesterday (or apparently earlier this morning), and
Senegal surprised everybody with a 1-0 win against France (FIFA world cup
holder) through a first-half goal from Papa Bouba Diop.
Holders France's bid to become the
first nation for 40 years to win a second straight World Cup were
undermined when they lost 1-0 to newcomers Senegal in the World
Cup opening match on Friday.
Papa Bouba Diop scored the sole goal in the 30th minute to seal
the first ever World Cup victory for Senegal.
Captain Marcel Desailly attributed the defeat to Senegal's
conservative tactics.
"We have been trying to play, but not enough quicker." the 34-
year-old veteran said after the match.
Complete Coverage
I put
Some photos
of Amir's graduation party in the photo album. Check them
out, that was fun. :-)
Let me quickly add, I just realized that
Google's
database has started it's monthly update. It now contains a lot more pages
of
www.anvari.org including this
log page which is the only page refreshed on a
bi-daily basis on their database.
Sequia and Kings Canyon are two of
the most beautiful national parks in California. I was planning to go to
my cousin's graduation party on Saturday, but got today off, stopped by at
Kings Canyon, visited some friends at
Cedar Grove
and went hiking with them. The whole area is really
gorgeous.
I have taken some pictures of
Mist Falls and other
beautiful places, will be posted on the site as soon as I get them developed.
Picture: The whole path (including planned return path
by
MapQuest)
We went to craigslist party last night, that was cool, those
people who are all in the computers and stuff all gathered
in San Francisco for a fun night. I guess they're gonna put
some photos on
Craigslist.
I posted a message to sell the party's tickets when I was
there. :-)
I gotta get back to work now, meetings, back to back...
Say your search keywords... Okay, searching... your results are ready... ***
Say your search keywords... Okay, searching... your results are ready...
This is what you hear after dialing (650)318-0165 to perform a Google
search via voice! Yes, the dream has come true:
Voice Search.
Google labs is the place
google learns from you. They have
combined their sophisticated search capabilities with basic technologies
to become one of the leaders in the market in the very near future. They
don't do magic, they just plug and play.
I had written about the great combination of image processing technology
and Google's advanced search engine which led to the birth of
Google Catalogs (which is
unfortunately still in Beta). The system basically receives your search
keywords, looks them up into the scanned catalogs and returns the pages
with your phrase highlighted in them.
Now, google works on the advanced voice search which enables any computer
illiterate performs a quick search on google and gets the desired
results. This system basically receives your keywords through the
telephone system, converts them to text through a sophisticated speech
recognition technology and sends the result to a web page. A perfect
and smart combination of sound processing and their search engine. They
say: we do the text processing, give us image/voice processing, we'll
glue them together and do the magic.
Their next step towards making the search much easier for the businessmen
would be the integration with
mobile platforms
and sending the search results to the cell phones. Here is the trick
which makes them perfect: get your search results when you're camping,
gone to a picnic or driving your car.
Google sets is also one of the
experimental projects held in Google. It may reveal some of the secrets
of google's future projects, it works fine enough to find any related
items to your few items and make a set. The system should obviously work
for the English phrases, but it also amazingly worked when I entered persian numbers
(
yek, do, seh)
into the system... Google rocks again!
Please refer to http://www.anvari.org/log if you want to point to this article.
Remember
Dilbert? Scott Adams
will add some color to Google's first page logo all the way this week. So, visit
google.com everyday this week (which I'm sure you
computer nerds do anyways!) to see sketches of cartoon hero Dilbert featured on the
first page of the Mountain View search engine.
Complete story from SiliconValley.com
OOpps. it just went live! :-)
Good morning! Driving down to work a few minutes ago,
saw
this guy with a
cool license plate (WEBDUDE) on Martin Luther King avenue.
His website address was also printed on his trunk. Where's
the world going to go? Cars with cool license plates and
the owner's web site address? Or maybe the license plate
format will change to a dot com one?!
Just received an IM containing this link, turn on your speakers and
enjoy the flash presentation:
No more war.
A teacher asked one of her pupils, "Can you name our nation's capital?"
The reply was, "Washington DC"
When asked what the "DC" stood for, the pupil added, "Dot com "
Here's a very cool test from
BBC, just
follow the instructions and
Test your IQ.
The results will be sent to your e-mail adress, just make sure you use your
real address. You can go back to the above link to analyze how well you did on
the test and where you stand. You can also use this
conversion table to
see if you are considered a genius or not. Good luck!
What is IQ? IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient, the IQ score is a statistically
derived number which indicates relative and comparative abilities that can
be used to obtain academic skills and knowledge.
IQ was used as a means to control immigration in the US in the 1920s.
[I didn't know that allegedly Marilyn Monroe had a higher IQ than Einstein..!]
It's Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, and a man makes his way to his seat right at center ice. He sits down, noticing that the seat next to him is empty. He leans over and asks his neighbor if someone will be sitting there.
"No," says the neighbor. "The seat is empty."
"This is incredible", said the man. "Who in their right mind would have a seat like this for final game of the Stanley Cup playoffs and not use it?"
The neighbor says "Well, actually, the seat belongs to me. I was supposed to come with my wife, but she passed away. This is the first Stanley Cup we haven't been to together since we got married in 1967."
"Oh .. I'm sorry to hear that. That's terrible. But couldn't you find someone else, a friend or relative, or even a neighbor to take the seat?"
The man shakes his head "No. They're all at the funeral."
From:
#!/sub/neural/
[I'm going home to watch Lakers-Spurs game 5 now!!! For the love of the game...]
I was watching TV when a substantial earthquake shook the
Bay Area less than an hour ago. The center of the earthquake
was 3 miles southwest of Gilory, soutside San Jose (preliminary
magnitude of 5.2), however, I could totally feel it
here in Berkeley more than 50 miles away from its center.
No major injuries has been reported so far.
It was the 2nd strongest earthquake I experienced, the first
one was seven point something strong, almost 10 years ago back
there when I was in Iran.
Complete story from Associated Press: Earthquake Shakes San Francisco Area
I'm back from my four day trip to LA. Saw and learned new stuff,
came back more experienced, with fresh ideas and the enthusiasm to
read about some new topics.
So, the first thing I checked after the quick Monday morning meeting
was tons of deferred e-mails, this one from Yahoo! indicating they
have added this page to their directory was a cool one, check
Yahoo's directory of Online Journals, they used a weird nickname
to describe me which is kinda kewl: compuworm!
BTW, does anyone have any idea what this URL could be? One of Yahoo!'s
internal machines?
http://surf.yahoo.com/whatsnew/yahoo/1020510/lisae/complete.html
You have probably heard the news, the Police arrested this 21-year-old
college student by tracking his cell phone, after a high-speed car chasing
outside Reno. He was planting pipe bombs across the states as you may
remember the story.
Guess what he said today?! He was aiming to make a very huge 'smiley
face' across the country!! The first 16 bombs were arranged in two circles, one
in Illinois and Iowa and the other in Nebraska. On a map, the circles could
resemble the eyes of the 1970s happiness symbol. The final two bombs, found
in Colorado and Texas, form an arc that could be the beginning of a smile.
Story from Reuters
Did anyone see the performance of stock market today? It was very good,
in other words, it was one of the best days I had ever seen. Dow up
more than 300 and Nasdaq up more than 120 which is a huge move upwards.
Cisco, I believe, was
the market's leader up from 13 to 16 something dollars (around 24%)
which is quite impressive after they reported higher than expected
3rd quarter profits late yesterday. Microsoft also jumped 5%.
It's very unlikely that the market keeps going up since the investors
would probably show less enthusiasm to put their money on the table
after this huge rally.
Before going to meeting, let me write quickly, have you notieced Yahoo! Mail
is not powered by COMPAQ anymore? They changed the little icon at the top
to 'Powered by HP'. I just noticed!
Ooops! Call for meeting, gotta run! :-)
Today, I finally found a free time to play some Tennis with Alidad, my
friend from Sharif University. It was fun after a long time, and we
joined a bunch of UC Berkeley people and played some basketball with
those guys and kicked their a$$es. :-)
The bad news, LA Lakers just lost to San Antonio Spurs some minutes ago,
the series is tied 1-1 now..
benel.com has a section for
picture of the day
in their
powershot digital camera
section. They sent an e-mail to me a week ago:
Ahmad Anvari,
Just to let you know one of your images has been selected for
Picture of the Day on PowerShot User. Your picture will be
featured on 6th May 2002, and you can vote for your picture
on this day to help it's chances in the monthly star photo
competition.
Have you visited our new forums yet at http://www.benel.com/psforum
Best regards,
PowerShot User
http://www.benel.com/powershot/pic-of-the-day.php
So, my photo (a view of San Francisco and Berkeley) is featured today at
here. Check that
out and vote for it! ;)
Permanent link to the photo
A funny flash Cartoon
sent to me by someone. They're now hiring! [Turn on your speakers for maximum enjoyment]
Yao Ming, the 7-5 star center of the Shanghai Sharks of the China Basketball Association whose height, agility and shooting touch make him the most intriguing player in the world outside of the NBA, has come to America. He grabbed everybody's attention in Chicago, where they showcased his mistique in an hourlong workout yesterday. According the NBA.com TV, 26 of the representatives of NBA teams were there to check this fabulous player out!
There are still concerns about his ability to play big, he's just a BIIIG basketball player! (Photo from Reuters)