Archive for October, 2006

Google Co-Op

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

Google recently started their new Co-Op service (see here) which allows users to create their own personalized search-engines to whichever topic they desire. More importantly, it allows for inclusion of the search into the website of the whoever created the search-engine. Especially the later is nice as before it was only possible to either drive the user away to the Googles’ homepage, open it in an iframe or a new window – all stuff that webmasters wouldn’t want for one reason or the other. I just created a search-engine for machine-learning related materials. I’m still adding sites, but I’m getting better results for my personal searches already. I also wrote a module for the PHPNuke content management system to include whichever personal CoOp search-engine you created into the system. You can download the Search-The-Web-module for PHP-Nuke on my website. It even comes with English, German and French language-files (although the French translation might be a bit funny).

Fire….

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

We had a small incident last night. Around 10 or so the firealarm in #208 went
of, at first only one, then two of these annoying beepers. A minute later
somebody knocks on the door and keeps knocking. So I go downstairs, open the
door and this huge cloud of smoke is outside. The neighbor girl is like: “Hi,
um, do you have a fireextinguisher we could borrow?”. I can see flames in
their kitchen-window and it smells awful like burning grease. Nobody got hurt, but their kitchen is now a mess. That reminds me to check the batteries in my smoke-detectors… you never know.

Random Number Books

Sunday, October 15th, 2006

A friend of mine just pointed me to the book of A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. It’s a book full of random numbers from back in the days when random number generation was hard. However, check out the reviews at Amazon of the book. They are hilarious.