Snowboarding, rally driving and Primus. Too good!

One day, a Tibetan Lama was speaking to a group of monks and, to make a point, pulled out a large jar, set it on the table in front of him, produced a few fist-sized rocks, and placed them into the jar.

When no more rocks would fit inside, he asked, ‘Is this jar full?’. Everyone said, ‘Yes’. He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel, poured some in and shook the jar, the gravel worked between the rocks.

Again he asked: ‘Is this jar full?’ The monks were catching on. ‘Probably not,’ one answered. ‘Good!’ he replied and reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He dumped the sand into the jar until it filled all the crevices.

Once more he asked: ‘Is this jar full?’ ‘No!’ the monks shouted. ‘Good!’ He said and grabbed a pitcher of water and poured until the jar was filled to the brim. Then asked, ‘What is the point of this illustration?’

One young monk responded, ‘The point is, no matter how full your day you can always fit some more things in.’ ‘No,’ the speaker replied, ‘the point is that if you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them all in at all. What are the priorities in your life?’

– from the art of looking sideways, p141.

Bonus quote …

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

— Pablo Picasso

Instant message bots are all the rage at the moment. Twitter has an IM bot, Google has recently provided language translation via instant messaging.

For example, invite en2zh@bot.talk.google.com to be your friend on Google Talk and it will translate English text to Chinese.

There are 24 bots currently available: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. As some have guessed, this is a 20% project, and while machine translation isn’t perfect, we hope these bots can be helpful in bridging language barriers.

Seen via blogscoped.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

One of the great minds of the 20th Century passed away today. His visions of the future inspired me growing up and fuelled my interest in the sciences.

News reports are here and here.

Update: Economist article

I’m convinced that sync is a big thing. There are lots more players in this space, attempting to solve a simple problem: We use many devices.

My calendar has lived in Outlook/Exchange for many years, and our corporate IT policies has made it hard to re-use this data. Google and Apple, combined, made my day.

1. Google Calendar Sync - sync between Google Calendar and Outlook
2. iCal - subscribe to remote calendars
3. iSync - sync my calendar to my phone and .Mac

The final result is that I can manage my calendar on my PC, and view it on the web, share it with others, see it on my various Apple computers and have it updated into my phone.

The astute reader will notice that I can’t update my Outlook calendar with this setup. And that’s the way I set it, so I don’t risk corruption of Outlook.

When multiple services are sync’d together, like my calendar example, you start to have sync messages flying all over the place. Add in some other common data points, like contacts, email, bookmarks, etc, and it starts to get messy.

At an enterprise level, this was “solved” using an ESB. The solution in consumer space is for one sync broker to be the master. And this has led to a race to be the master sync point. Google, Apple, and Plaxo are all contenders.

Sync gives you the best of both worlds, access to your information in the cloud, while keeping it up-to-date on your desktop and in your pocket.

Competition in this space is a win for all of us.

On January 21^st, aged 89, Marie Smith died and with her the Eyak language passed into oblivion.

From the Economist:

This universe of words and observations was already fading when Marie was young. In 1933 there were 38 Eyak-speakers left, and white people with their grim faces and intrusive microphones, as they always appeared to her, were already coming to sweep up the remnants of the language.

As the spoken language died, so did the stories of tricky Creator-Raven and the magical loon, of giant animals and tiny homunculi with fish-spears no bigger than a matchstick. People forgot why “hat” was the same word as “hammer”, or why the word for a leaf, kultahl, was also the word for a feather, as though deciduous trees and birds shared one organic life.

Most outsiders were told to buzz off. But one scholar, Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, showed such love for Eyak, painstakingly recording its every suffix and prefix and glottal stop and nasalisation, that she worked happily with him to compile a grammar and a dictionary; and Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker was allowed to talk when she brought fresh halibut as a tribute. Without those two visitors, almost nothing would have been known of her.

… in an age where perhaps half the planet’s languages will disappear over the next century, killed by urban migration or the internet or the triumphal march of English, Eyak has no chance. For Mrs Smith, however, the death of Eyak meant the not-to-be-imagined disappearance of the world.

Of late I’ve noticed that deleting mail on my GMail account doesn’t always work. Delete a message, check mail, and there it is back again. Very frustrating.

Google took some time to actually add the ability to delete mail. Their theory was that if you had enough storage, you shouldn’t need to delete mail. And to find anything, you can just search.

In theory, that works just fine. In practice, users like being able to delete some mails. The ones I like to delete, aside from junk, are the notification mails from on-line services. I want to receive them, I don’t want to keep them.

In actual fact, most of the email I receive in my Google account are specifically these mails. I don’t pollute my normal email address with them. Thus, the deleting issue causes me some problems.

It does make sense why Google struggles with deleting mail. Their servers are massively redundant, housed in farms. To my understanding their mail store is built on the same platform as their search tool. This would mean that multiple copies are kept of all your mail.

When you ask to retrieve mail, a parallel query would be issued to the farm. The results would then be collated and returned to you in the GMail user interface. Simple enough.

Except, when you delete a mail, it now needs to be deleted in multiple locations. So if you hit delete, it sends out the delete command to the parallel server farm. Being a delete, it may take a bit longer to process than a query, as the farm is optimized for queries. They are a search company after all.

So while the delete command is being run, my refresh command is run to find any new mail. Unfortunately, it would find some of the mail I had asked to be deleted, but had yet to actually delete.

At least this is my theory on why deleted mail keeps popping back into my Inbox. Even if my theory is right, it doesn’t make it less annoying.

Note: This is a recipe for chocolate cake that my mother made us often when I was younger. It is posted here so I can easily find it.

Put everything into the one bowl and beat for about 3-4 minutes on MEDIUM. May take a bit longer with a wooden spoon. Mixture goes into a greased (sprayed) ring pan for about 30 mins.

• 1 cup S.R. flour (sifted)
• 1 cup sugar (can use a bit less)
• 1 tablespoon butter/margarine (melted)
• ½ cup milk
• 2 tablespoons Bourneville cocoa
•   vanilla essence

Variations

Add an extra 2 tablespoons flour and add

Orange

orange rind
juice of ½ an orange

Lemon

lemon rind
juice of ½ a lemon

Over years of living in China, I have spoken to dozens of Chinese professors and experts, intellectuals and urbanites who give the impression of having their fingers on the pulse of the nation and an ability to interpret it for foreigners. Sometimes they do it very well, but if you really want to know about China, real China, there are few better ways to find out than a long conversation with an ordinary long-distance truck driver, barreling across the Gobi Desert.

Rob Gifford’s book, China Road, tells a lively story giving rich insight into the Chinese nation as he travels along Route 312 from Shanghai to the western boarder. Along the way, he educates the reader on the state of China today, gives snippets of its grand history and adds his own perspective.

Rumour is that search as we know it only solves 5% of the problem.

Pondering that means when I fail to find something, it has my attention. The specific query, that sparked this post, is practically impossible using Google.

Find all places in Melbourne
	that have tennis courts, with lights
	are available for hire on Tuesday nights
	and include hire cost per hour.
Order the results by descending distance from home

Can’t be that hard, surely.