I was unaware that the USA could not afford enough maps. I suggest the rest of the world teams up: if you send just one map to the USA, then you will have made a difference.

I have decided to do my part:

View Larger Map

This trick is very clever: many sites limiting access to documents, let Googlebot (Google’s spidering agent) through. I think this is the case with some IEEE archives. So, you can simply tell your browser to identify yourself as user agent “Googlebot/2.1″. Voilà! You can go where Google can go. What a beautiful hack!

With Firefox, you can get this result with the User Agent Switcher.

More details are available on Pinguy’s website.

Also see my post Google was eating all my bandwidth!

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While everyone is getting excited about multicore systems, something else is happening:

I just ordered two new 500 GB drives to replace the failing and failed 250 GB drives. Both 500 GB drives cost almost exactly the same as one 250 GB drive did three years ago. That’s progress. (Source: Harold)

Not only are our computers able to do more things at once, they can also do it over much more data.

I own a couple of 500 GB drives with nothing on them. I could easily buy much more. I own a couple of multicore processors that are idle. If it were important, I could buy more machines too. I am sure most people are like me.

In some respect, we no longer have scarcity of storage and CPU cycles.

My wife loved this: Super Flash Mario Bros. Flash games can really be impressive. This one looks and feels very much like the Nintendo original.

Me? I could never figure out the appeal of a game like Mario. Somehow, I always end up falling into nothingness well before the first level is over. Where do all these Marios end up after falling for a long time? Wouldn’t the hole eventually fill up with corpses? What about the smell? Or are we supposed to assume that the hole has infinite depth? But can gravity and holes of infinite depth mix? Wouldn’t this be very unstable? Wouldn’t the dirt keep on falling in these holes? What does he eat? Turtles maybe? Uncooked turtles?

Universities should not be afraid of teaching radical novelties; on the contrary, it is their calling to welcome the opportunity to do so. Their willingness to do so is our main safeguard against dictatorships, be they of the proletariat, of the scientific establishment, or of the corporate elite.

Source: E.W. Dijkstra, 2 December 1988

I actually had to type 0xFFFFUL in a piece of code I just wrote.

This is exactly why ladies stay away from Computer Science, and young geeks can’t get a date.

Bryan implemented the collaborative filtering algorithm Weighted Slope One in Haskell using only 29 lines of code. I must say, I am impressed.

This post on 43 folders gave me the idea of offering free job ads on my blog. Why not?

In any case, if you have cool jobs in the Montreal area having some relation to my blog, just add a comment on this blog post and you’ll get a free ad. I promise to do a nice job at it too!

(Ok, the monetary value is tiny. It is likely there will be no takers. But who knows?)

Stephen nails the USA. He pulls out a nice graph that says it all.

Turns out that ditching my PDA is harder than I thought. After spending over an hour at the local Staples, it turns out that there is no market for pocket notebooks. I want something I can keep in my pocket without looking like an idiot. It needs to be elegant, because I am not eager to look like a nerd. All I could find were cheap notebooks from China. I own one that looks good, but the pages are falling off and the paper is too cheap.

Someone had suggested Moleskine notebooks, and they do look cool, but I could not find a way to order them cheaply in Canada. Ciak pocket journals are another alternative, but again, no luck in figuring out how to order them. I was also a bit upset to learn that the true Moleskine notebooks, out of Tour in France, are no longer made and all you buy are copies from a company that has had nothing to do with the original notebooks. So maybe people are falling prey to marketing? It may sound cool to think that famous writers used the same notebooks you are buying, except that they are not.

Happily, there is a company in Vancouver called paperblanks producing beautiful notebooks and journals. To top it off, you can order their product cheaply on Chapters/Indigo. I will let you know how they are once they arrive. Here is what it should look like: