This is what happens when someone asks you to google “piano ass” while you’re hanging out.
I was having a discussion of China and Censorship of the Interwebs, and since I’ve never actually tried to see what sort of search results one would get from, say, Google’s search in China versus the US search, I thought I’d give it a try. It’s actually pretty different for anything related to criticism of China or Chinese politics and events. This is probably the biggest example:
The US version:
http://www.google.com/search?q=tiananmen+square
The Chinese version:
http://www.google.cn/search?q=tiananmen+square
Sure, there’s a language bias, since the pages on the Chinese site are assuming you want some form of Chinese as your default language, but I don’t think that explains away the huge difference in results. If you set the preferred results language on the US site to Chinese (Traditional) and Chinese (Simplified) the content of the results is still in line with the English results.
Even when this place was open, it had a certain irony to it.
Dan, I just have to say thanks for the special thanks.
And here’s to you, Dan! Thanks for all your hard work!
I usually don’t care for Canada, much less Quebec. I heard a track from Telefauna on a podcast, like a 20 second clip, and I decided I really had to hear the song. That was in early 2006.
So today I’m cleaning up the iTunes, and lo and behold I come across their early EP, and yes, I like it still and I’m subconsciously making things like this when I screw around with my Korg DS-10 and my guitar. So I guess I really like it.
They have a new single. Here’s a link to the Telefauna Official Website.
4/5 stars
The movie Ponyo had some scary parts. Ponyo and the boy Sōsuke basically get married at the end of the movie. Sometimes it has some harsh parts and fantasy violence. It had lots of fantasy stuff about the ocean and that part was sort of violent. And that explains the waves turning into giant fish that Ponyo was running on.
It was weird when Ponyo started out as a tiny goldfish, went to a bigger fish, turned into a human, and then Ponyo started changing back into a human/fish and then at the end she was a tiny gold fish again, and then turned back into a human. Some of it was sort of crazy, like when the giant waves were going up like a water volcano.
Overall, I think it was a good movie. I will watch it again when it comes out on DVD. The scary parts maybe won’t be as scary on the TV compared to the theater screen. It was sort of cute and at the same time really weird.
-Lars
With Google Chrome 2.0 comes extensions.
My very favorite firefox extension is firebug. It’s the one I really couldn’t live without. It’d be like trying to mountain climb with only only twenty feet of rope. Painful and unnecessary.
Chrome is the up and comer with excellent performance and seamless google integration. What would it take for me to dump my tried and true mozilla browser for the new kid on the block? At the very minimum a ported or trumped firebug equivalent.
If firebug were a commercial product I imagine there would be much more of a chance for a straight port. I’m sure the revenue generating (directly or indirectly) toolbars will get ported with ease. But firebug? Maybe what’s more likely is a firebug inspired chrome specific extension. If that happens it’ll either fall short or kick firebugs ass.
I’m sure I’m not the only web developer that feels this way. While we may not make up a significant market share in terms of raw numbers it’s because we bit twiddlers are constantly remaking the internet that I think this is an important hurdle for chrome to overcome in it’s quest for world domination relevancy. Like the human body the internet completely regenerates itself every seven years or so, and it’s we web monkeys, not the voodoo super magic of biology that is responsible for this evolution one Console/DOM/Debugger/Cookie/Net panel use at a time.
From a platform development perspective it’s a fairly cut and dry real world test. Will Chrome pass the firebug challenge? Maybe by the time you read this they have already. Maybe not.
At the same time that the government is starting to look into anti-consumer activity at mobile service providers, Apple comes out with this little gem:
By tinkering with this code, “a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data,” Apple wrote the government. “Taking control of the BBP software would be much the equivalent of getting inside the firewall of a corporate computer — to potentially catastrophic result.
Here’s the original Wired article with that text. That was written to the Copyright Office to attempt to counter an Electronic Freedom Foundation request to legalize jailbreaking, or removing application and carrier locks on the phone.
Whenever you want your political way, I guess it’s best to play the fear card. But by that token, Android phones must be a menace, along with all the unlocked WinMo devices. Oh, and ALL of Europe, how’s that work? Do they just have infinitely better security on their cell towers?
You’re being annoying, Apple. Super annoying.
‘See when you on top, mother fuckers just want to bring you down. Mother fuckers don’t even know you they don’t like you.’
-My Downfall, Notorious BIG
Google’s awesome and everything I’m not for a second going to deny that—though I’m far too attached to Firefox to make the switch to Chrome it seems by all accounts to be a nice piece of software. Why am I too attached to Firefox? Add-ons.
What makes Windows great is the endless applications available for it. A rich tapestry of millions, millions of applications. People love to bash Microsoft at every opportunity, but truth is, they are just as awesome as Google. Sure they can’t make a decent browser to save their life, they’ve released countless applications that were lame, bug ridden and fell by the wayside. That guy who got that Zune tattoo had it removed. They’ve been known to strong arm partners and put the squeeze on their competitors. Regardless, make no mistake, they are awesome. What makes them awesome is as Ballmer famously exclaimed: Developers, developers, developers.
This is also what makes the iPhone awesome. It’s what makes Firefox awesome. It’s what makes Windows awesome. These systems would be fairly sweet without a plethora of third party functionality but it’s this plethora that makes them truly, undeniably, definitively: awesome. Pry them from my dead hands awesome.
Google doesn’t seem to be totally hip to this way of doing things. I’m not saying they won’t be later, but so far, it doesn’t seem like they really ‘get’ it completely yet. Take Google Analytics for example, the insanely popular traffic monitoring tool. They are just now releasing a public beta API for exporting your analytics data. For years that data was trapped and there was no way to interface with the service. Want to write applications for Google Apps using your favorite programming language? No problem, as long as your favorite programming language is Python.
I’m a web developer and have been for sometime now. I think in web. Nonetheless, I don’t see a large market for a browser OS anytime soon. Niche sure, M$ killer. I don’t think so. Add that to the fact that Google isn’t a super developer friendly company really, and Microsoft is much wiser and easier going then they used to be and you’ve got a bunch of hoopla for fluff.
You want irony? Google Chrome isn’t even available for Linux yet which is to be the base of the new Google Chrome operating system.
And Windows 7? Everyone says it looks, well, awesome.
yet