dsandler.org

Over the weekend I decided to fire up Google Reader again. (I’m still a fan of NewsFire, but now that I’m using the other GApps I’m sort of hooked on instant, painless, in-sync access from multiple machines.)

The UI is better than I remember it, but what is the deal with the message latency? At 4PM central time I took the following screenshot:

Five hours? I’m all for fetching feeds less frequently, but this delay is absurd. Is Google trying to cure my ADD?

As I am no doubt the last person to point out, Google Maps has added a street level view to (a few) urban areas. It’s the first Google app (besides Picasa) that I’m aware of that requires Flash, but it’s also (as fellow Be alumnus pixelknave points out) the first Google app to feature the Be Man:

Fig. 1. The BeOS Man. Fig. 2. The Google Maps Man.

I guess it was only a matter of time, given that there are so many Be alums at Google now. I figured I’d send him home after all this time away (screenshot).

Update: The Google Maps Man now has his own instructional video.

Prof. Luis von Ahn’s Google TechTalk, 7/26/06, on harnessing the computational power of humans.

Sigh.

I can’t easily tell apart the two color blocks under “Other Calendars”. On-screen, I typically have the most trouble with small dots or lines, but these are HUGE regions of color. [They seem to have picked two colors of identical luminosity in the region where my deuteranomalous red and green receptors are both triggered, no matter how much contextual stimulus (read: larger areas of color) I’m given.]

So Jason gets a new job, and I have to hear about it from his blog. Bah.

Since I’m already elbows-deep in gnuplot, here’s a graph to explain what’s going on here:

Fig. 1. Cumulative distribution function of friends, co-workers, and acquaintances working at Google, as a function of time.

Update: Chris points out that my data collection has been sloppy, and that the graph above actually represents the function of friends who have gone (or will go) to work at either Google or Apple.

So it appears (though it is still a rumor) that Yahoo! is all set to acquire Digg.

Why is Yahoo! buying up all these niche websites?