Duck Goes Moo!

Ask.com had a neat idea where you could see a small preview of the sites that show up in your search results, but pagebull.com has an even neater idea: Why bother with text at all and just show the previews of the sites? Here’s what came back when I did a search for “duck goes moo”:

Pretty neat, huh? It will also highlight any words that match your search terms and you can roll over some icons in the corner of each image to see a quick text blurb and a larger image of the preview.

I am not sure if the search results are filtered for content or not, so I can’t vouch you might get a filthy image or two… unless that is what you’re looking for anyway.

Here’s a clip of an old employer and friend of mine giving a lecture on MSNBC about search engines. It’s none other than the illustrious Stephanie Leffler, co-founder of Monster Commerce and now Senior VP at Network Solutions.

I really do miss the Stephy; she really is a special person. I joined Monster Commerce in 2002 and was their second employee. Back then the company was contained to just corner of a building and had around 500 clients, now they have over 5000 and make millions daily.

I eventually left MC in late 2004 to start my own company, but one of the things I miss the most about working at MC was working with Steph and her never ending energy and optimism.

She still owes me a lunch date though, about two years overdue. With interest that comes to two lunches and coffee-break.

There is a new device out there called the Mosquito that supposedly can generate sounds only teenagers can hear, the idea being that the device will keep them away. When you get older you begin to lose your ability to hear high-pitched noises, the Mosquito takes advantage of this by choosing a pitch that most people over 20 can’t hear.

I have just found out recently that I am one of the rare few who still can hear it, and I am 30. This is especially interesting because I look young for my age, some people even mistake me for a teenager now and then.

I do hope this device does not come into wide distribution. I really cannot stand the sound and I would hate to think that I may end up having to avoid most adult venues.

Scientists in Australia have made major innovations in the field of rocking out. The have invented the WIS, or Wearable Instrument Shirt. You just put on the shirt, play air-guitar, and the advanced sensors in the shirt radio your jamming movements into a waiting computer where the sound of a guitar is generated.

Could this be the next big Christmas toy come 2007?

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/air-guitar-down-to-a-t-shirt/2006/11/13/1163266457568.html

http://www3.uark.edu/bkst/macmod/page1.htm

I’ve been to swing parties in real life, but this is my first online swing party I’ve been too. A Second Life denizen named Guy Goodman recently threw a swing party at Club Tropicana. It was definetely a nice change from the usual bump’n'grind particle fests that most SL bashes are. Very classy and a great show of how far SL has advanced since it first came online, not to mention they played some sweet swing tunes there as well.

Here are some pictures I took while dancing the night away. I’m the one with the lightbulb for a head. (SL name: Ness Coffee)

There once was a time when 1MB of memory was something to be excited about. Now 1GB of memory is becoming standard and perhaps even not enough for today’s memory intensive apps and OSes.

One solution for a lack of memory in the past was virtual memory, where sections of the hard drive was assigned to act like RAM. Of course, we still use virtual memory today and with even more gargantuan portions of space, but back in the day it was truly needed to run games like Myst or to run intensive office applications.

We are now approaching a point in which having multiple processors or multiple cores on a single processor are becoming common. How long will it be before 10 or 20 core processors come out? And until then, perhaps we might even begin by having “virtual cores”, where a few cores can act like many.

Why would we want to do this? Well, why did we first start using virtual memory? Because applications started demanding more memory than most people had available. The same may apply to the operating systems of the future.

I can see applications and games in the future requesting a certaing number of cores for different aspects of functioning. A combat game might require 2 cores dedicated to graphics, 3 cores dedicated to physics, 5 cores dedicated to AI, and 2 more cores for the game process itself.

Some lucky fellows might have a machine with 20 processing cores and be fine playing the game, but others might have only 5 cores and need to simulate the presence of the others.

So is this idea sound or is it just mistaking how computers really work? Or… did I just let another patentable idea slip out into the public sphere? D’oh!

The new Nintendo Wii console is coming out soon and of course there is going to be a new installment in the venerable Mario Bros. series of games. The new Mario release is titled Super Mario Galaxy and it makes use of the Wii’s unconventional controller to allow the not only control Mario with a gamepad but also use the built in lazer gun/motion detector to interact with Mario’s environment.

Looks pretty neat actually. Could the Wii revolutionize gaming as we know it? If it doesn’t then this may be Nintendo’s final gaming console.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wbm0F0WWVU&mode=related&search=super%20mario%20galaxy

MIT freshman roommates Zack Anderson and RJ Ryan have turned their dorm room from drab to fab with a complete line of custom automations. Music, lighting, and even window blinds are hooked up to a central node that takes commands from a wide variety of sources, including RSS feeds and an appropriately named “Party Button”, which will turn their room into a dance club with the slap of a large red button.

My roommates and I have talked about doing something of the like, but we lack the electrical engineering to do it… yet. Thanks to the local library I may soon have a wired house or suffer severe electrical burns; or maybe I’ll just ask my local electrical wizard friend “Sparky” to help me out with it instead.

http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/midas.html

A new Apple store is opening in New York and people are camped out outside, awaiting its opening today at 6PM EST.

What is so special about this new Apple store? Well for one it is open 24 hours a day, it hosts a full staff which includes people who provide tips and tricks to prospective and experienced users alike… plus, the store looks so cool! From the surface the building just looks like an empty glass cube, but steps lead down into the real store: an underground complex filled with Mac goodies like iPods and iMacs, all available for trial use before buying.

If I lived in NY I might consider dropping on by myself, but I wonder to what degree the homeless will start hanging out inside to stay warm or cool or to use the facilities, or if a late-night drunk might stumble in and wonder why he can’t get servered alcohol at this funky looking bar.

Nintendo’s next generation game console, codenamed “Revolution”, has been officially named. It is now called the Nintendo “Wii”, which is pronounced as “We” or “WEEEEEEEEE!”

http://revolution.nintendo.com/

Al Gore may have invented the internet, but appearantly George Bush invented the iPod:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/20/bush-government-research-developed-ipod/

Google has caught much flak in the US and the rest of the Western world due to its willingness to censor its search results in the Communist Republic of China. Their defense is that something is better than nothing and that they were not “being evil”, as their company slogan would protest.

Google’s relationship with China has grown even closer as they gave created a Chinese brand name for themselves: Gu Ge, which approximately means “Valley Song”.

I myself have a Chinese name, Gu Jia, which means something like “First-Ranked Elder” or “Old-School”. My Chinese teacher gave me that name most likely because I was much older than all the other students and did very well in the class.

I’ve never watched the show… and I’ll probably never play the game, but Buena Vista Games is creating a game based off of the Desperate Housewives TV series. The player is an amnesiac who tries to remember her adulterous past by talking to the chief cheaters themselves.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/housewivessetsupshopincomputergame

One of the main reasons why the days of the “one man game development studio” are long gone is the wide berth of content that comes with any modern game. A single person can’t crank out the sheer volume of 3D models, spoken dialog, and movie quality soundtracks that is expected of a modern game. This would seem to stop any little guys from getting into the game business, leaving the game consumer with recycled chum as the big boys run out of ideas.

Will Wright has proposed a way around this, plus he shows off his upcoming game, “Spore”:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-775656482294094003

PacMan now has an evil alter ego: PacDevil!