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The other day I noticed on The American Apparel Daily Update an image of mine! They had highlighted it because it came via a color search on Multicolr. I found it interesting that an image of mine should come up. It’s from my old set of Amiga Images.
Here’s a screenshot of the entry:
And here’s the image that was found:
Multicolr is a pretty fun tool.
The other day I was listening to the Stack Overflow Podcast, which features two interesting bloggers who I’ve read for some time: Joel Spolsky of JoelOnSoftware, and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror. They tend to ramble a bit, and they’re not as funny as they think they are, but I enjoy it. On Episode 28 they speculated as to how Google does its suggestions about typos. Their speculations were incorrect, because I remembered another piece of Audio I had listened to, Adam Bosworth speaking at the MySQL Developer’s Conference in 2005. That whole speech is wonderful. It’s got food for thought about developing at web-scale, it’s funny, and entertaining. The money quote that addresses what Messrs Spolsky and Atwood were saying is this, which I lovingly transcribed for comment on their blog:
“How many people here have built a system that takes a billion requests a day? Well you could. And actually that’s the point of this conversation—what I want to talk about. It’s the same thing that’s made Google possible I mean think about what Google does, we take hundreds of millions of fairly hard queries a day; the queries tend to say things like ‘searching for camels in Tanzania’ and we sort of shake our head and try and figure out what that means and we go over petabytes of content, not terabytes but petabytes of content. And we have a couple hundred milliseconds in which we’re allowed to search the entire petabytes and return back to you what we found in rank order. So not only are we trying to search really, really large amounts of data we’re trying to search it extraordinarily quickly and we’re trying to do this hundreds of millions of times a day. And we do it. And we do it without a helluva lot of sweat. The way I think about Google is that’s it’s lots of PHDs driving tanks. It’s all about brute force. Everyone’s sort of General Patton—they don’t drive around the wall they drive through the wall. It’s really dumb techniques, used in large scale: I mean for example, the spellchecking. Every so often when you type a Google query and it will say ‘did you mean,’ and it’s usually because you put in a typo. This is not because we have some incredible dictionary or some brilliant thesaurus that tells us what you meant. It’s because we’re tracking what people type after they type the query that didn’t return anything — and it turned out that that was a very efficient way to figure out what you probably meant to type, in fact it works much better than any spellchecker. But notice the stupidity of the approach: ‘people who typed this usually wanted to do this’—works great.”
Last night I saw this tweet:
suebob: @QueenofSpain Is it “Here, here” or “Hear hear”? I really don’t know and have always wondered.
I knew right off. One of my favorite things about having visited the Supreme Court was hearing that every session of the Court starts with this preamble:
Oyez, Oyez, Oyez! All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court!
I’m not sure how I make the link between oyez and hear—but I do. As to the language above, I really love it. I have a love of archaic language and formal presentation. I’m famous to Leah and my stepkids for having announced to Leah that I wanted to date her by saying “I find you charming and would like to see you socially.” To the question of “who talks like this? The answer is me.
Hear hear! is like “oyez oyez”—and I love the word oyez:
WORD HISTORY: The courtroom cry “Oyez, oyez, oyez,” has probably puzzled more than one auditor, especially if pronounced “O yes.” (Many people have thought that the words were in fact O yes.) This cry serves to remind us that up until the 18th century, speaking English in a British court of law was not required and one could instead use Law French, a form of French that evolved after the Norman Conquest, when Anglo-Norman became the language of the official class in England. Oyez descends from the Anglo-Norman oyez, the plural imperative form of oyer, “to hear”; thus oyez means “hear ye” and was used as a call for silence and attention. Although it would have been much heard in Medieval England, it is first recorded as an English word fairly late in the Middle English period, in a work composed around 1425.
I hate it when people just post videos. I never have time to watch them all, since I’m looking at my own videos that compel me. So here are the videos that have compelled me lately. Just one on the main page, more after the jump.
Ben Folds – Kate in Nashville (and more from this user)
There’s something archetypal about this image I really like.
It may be that it triggers me to think of the term “flimsy skirt”—which makes me think of this post: Shoe PhotoShop—which used to get a fair number of referrers for that phrase. Of course, that was six years ago.
I might need some sort of ranking and sorting system for my blog posts. Perhaps by included images, videos, lyrics, length, time of day, etc. I have a huge corpus of posts. Something to think about.
The past, we have written down and we can reference it:
Barack Obama. I like him. He seems to be a straight shooter with upper management written all over him. I like that I my spidey sense doesn’t tingle with “Plastic Robot!” when I watch him speak. I would like him to be President.
About McCain’s Concession Speech:
He’s at odds with the Republican Party’s habits. He’s not hateful, and he’s rather moderate. The speech made me cry—and reignited my admiration of the man. It was gracious. His presidential aspirations are tragic and Faustian. He gave up his moderation to campaign in an aggressive, accusatory style. That suit didn’t fit, and he lost. Then again, with the country in as much turmoil as it is, hard to see what he could do to get traction.
About Obama’s speech:
He looked forward to the 22nd Century. How many times do leaders look forward 20 years, let alone 92 years? I think we have a President who will be mindful of the future. This is a change. Countries are not companies, they cannot be led quarter to quarter—and come to think of it, companies may not be so well off given their focus on quarter-to-quarter profits. What succeeds in the long-term are goals in the long-term. But he emphasized the difficulty that faces this country, and the hard work it will take us to get to that future. Platitudes and speeches do not get us the world we want, toil, difficulty, and hard work get us there.
Two Data Points:
In 1988 I voted for Jesse Jackson in the California Primary. His campaign made a go of it.
In 2000 I voted for John McCain in the California Primary. I was tilting libertarian at the time and McCain seemed like a good option. I still like the man, and his speech last night reminded me why.
The 18-year old kid who voted for Jesse Jackson would be shocked by two things in this future:
1. The President-Elect is a man categorized by race as a “black man”
2. No nuclear bombs have been detonated in anger
The future is unwritten. Let’s write some future.
But I can remind you to vote if you haven’t. I’ll be voting in the morning. Looking forward to it.
Vote. Every vote counts, or at least it should, and it probably will.
Update: I voted this morning. Got there 10 minutes early and there was already a line about 60 people long. Once the polls opened at 7:00am I got in and voted and was out by 7:20am.
Previous All Hallow’s Eve posts from me:
And here’s an old poster I made.
Happy Halloween!
via UBM
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