Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category
mind-reading game...
I don't usually recommend websites, but this one's quite interesting.
My friend forwarded me this site today. It's an interesting mind-reading type of game, the computer asks questions on what character you have in mind and then tries to guess it. It's amazingly accurate, I tried like twenty times, and the character I had in mind ranged from auntie Helen Clarke to Lin Daiyu (an character in Dream of the Red Chamber) - the computer never missed a shot and can usually done the guessing within 20 questions.
It's not a mindreading game, seriously, it works more like a decision tree in statistics. It's fun to play though.
Googling Google
Google today released the fastest rising and highest volume search terms recorded in New Zealand in 2008. I don't want to repeat the whole list, you can see it here.
However, I have found the list somewhat strange, first it's in the news, but you cannot find anything in Google Zeitgeist, where Google usually publish these stuffs.
The other one is, Google itself is placed sixth of the list. after "Trademe", but before "TV".
Here's my interpretation. There's a trend that, especially among the young people, when you want to visit facebook, very few people actually type facebook.com: what they do is type google.com, then search facebook. They also tend to ignore the "I'm feeling lucky" button, which may save them 5 seconds.
I also understand some people don't even bother to type google.com, instead, they just ask "google" in the address bar. Most of modern browser will take all apparently non-URL form queries to a designated search engine.
Well, it just shows that search engines are becoming more like a doorway to the Internet, a kind of replacement of your browser's address bar.
back in time
As part of Google’s celebration of its 10th birthday, Google has made its earliest search engine index from January 2001 available to the public. With the help of the Internet Archive, people can revisit those pages even if they are not there anymore.
Sure I believe most of my visitors like you know the Internet Archive bit already – it has archive pages right back to 1996. But I still enjoyed this 2001 search. You need to know the exact URL of the page you wanted before you can access it in Internet Archive, but this Google search does not, just type in the key words you wanted.
This enables you to do a lot of stuffs ... like check what kind of promises auntie Helen has made back then, or things happening in Afghanistan before the 911. Quite interesting to see how the world was like - blog was pretty much a new concept, SNS has yet been created, and people's hope was still high on Duke Nukem Forever.
Apart from those, it's just fun to revive your good memories.
Life without Internet
Wonder how many people from North Island can get online now.
A problem within Vector's fibre network seems to be causing many people in North Island lost internet connectivity for about 7 hours+, started around 12:30pm today. As far as I understand, Country's second and third ISP Vodafone and Orcon are both affected, not so sure about Telecom.
The details are still quite sketchy, however, I suspect the outage is possibly due to our aging infrastructures failed to stand in the bad weather this week?
Seems to be OK now, at least for me.
This is a huge outage and I do expect some sort of explanation, report or compensations for this.
Auckland University switching to Google Apps
Auckland University's email services will be switching to Google Apps next month.
Google Apps is a service most of ordinary users never heard of, but yet it is so popular that some of small site owners just cannot live without it. It provides an integrated solution for small site owners, provide the Google services like Google Chat, Gmail and Google Canlendar to users of those sites, free of charge.
I'm not a very tech savvy person so the Google Apps saved me from all the hassles like manage emails. If somebody is more unsavvy than me, they can even build a whole simple site by using Google Sites.
Compare with old university 100mb storage (1mb maximum attachment) email system, the Gmail service is just too generous, and it was free in the form of Gmail for quite a long time now. And even better, it is free.
There's only one down side:there will be usual google ads in it. Oh maybe two, another one being the administrators have little control on storages(I think all your emails are now stored on Gmail server）.
I thought people paid enough tuition fee to fund an email service that has no ads on it. I didn't expect to see this kind of time and money save move on New Zelaand's largest universiy.
It's bit worrying that corporations are becoming more involved in the process of educating our future generation. I wonder what kind of effect would have on the people who get their business degree in "Fisher and Paykel Appliances Auditorium".
Another worrying bit for more self is that my other bit of life online is now just fell into the hands of Google, yet again. I'm already dependent on lots of google services like Gmail, Google Reader, Calender, Apps, Docs ... they are all good but you just feel you cannot put all your stuff in the hands of one giant corporation.
It may not doing the evil today, but who knows what will happen tomorrow?
Tomorrow is the day!
The long expected Firefox 3, will be officially released on 17 June 2008, which is ... tomorrow night or early Wednesday in NZ.
There were several beta and RC versions available. I did not try it since I'm not that kind of guinea pig type software enthusiast. However, from other people's comments, I expect the Firefox 3 to be something worth you to download, and have a try (if you never used firefox before...)
I'm a long time Netscape - Firefox user. I enjoyed Firefox with its high flexibility - you can almost add any function you can imagine to your browser by simply install a plug-in.
Another reason is just do my small bit to prevent a monopoly. Netscape has been put down by AOl, which is a sad story. However, it's legacy, and the <blink> tag, continued in Firefox.
Of all the visitors to my Chinese and this blog, roughly 25% of them are using Firefox. It's a high percentage considering that Internet Explorer had a several year monopoly over the market.
The Firefox 3 release also got something quite special ... It will attempt to become "the most downloaded software in 24 hours" in Guinness World Record. 1.3 million people worldwide have pleaded that they will become part of this "download day".
Great idea to increase Firefox's publicity.
