Chat right from GMail

Google is about to introduce a new feature to GMail. You would be able to chat with somebody right from your GMail account if you see her online. This report says this is more of an attempt to attract more users towards GTalk (the IM service offered by Google). But I don't think it's necessarily this. I think it's primarily a GMail feature which will add value to the email service. I actaully sugested this chat capability a couple of months ago in the feedback form they have on the help page. We have the technology to connect to am IM network from a browser window: AJAX, not the old Java applet way. Check this cool site that lets you chat in many IM networks from your browser; it's very handy when you are on a machine which doesn't have your preferred IM client installed. So Google just added a natural feature to their service. Enjoy!

Walking on the frozen waves in Mangalia 

Touristic harbour was entirely frozen 

Next to the Casino 

Same place, more detailed 

Frozen (Black) Sea

It was very cold last week in Romania (-20 Celsius, and even colder), and the Black Sea froze near the shore. A spectacular view, that happens rarely here (I heard last time happened in 1985). I'll post some pictures from Constanta and Mangalia here.

Google Video

Google has for some time now a service where you can upload videos and search and see videos uploaded by others (you can see it here). Recently they launched a video store as well, where they sell some TV series, NBA games, as well as videos which anybody can upload and request some money for others to see them. I think this will become a huge business in the future, but I don't intend to buy videos any time soon. As for the free ones, I found some funny ones, like commercials or some videoclips of Romanian bands that were off the copyright radar (they ban the videos for which the uploader does not have the copyright as soon as they find them).

What needs badly to be improved in order for this service to be usefull is the search. Currently it seems the search is done based only on the title of the video, which gives a rather poor results. I think an easy to implement idea would be to let users add keywords about a specific video. This can be abused by adding wrong keywords, but if most of the users are well behaved the resulting semantic should increase search quality.

Talking about weather

That's what English people do, I, not being able to do just that, started reading a book "The Weather in the Imagination" by Lucian Boia. This guy is a Romanian historian, specializing in the history of ideas and the imaginary of people, i.e. he takes an idea or a concept and traces back how this concept was viewed or percieved (including in the form of myths and ideologies) in different eras and cultures. This time he takes it on weather/climate and investigates ideas like that of climate which determines the character of a nation, and the global warming and the end of the world through a climate catastrophe.

I read many of his books and I find his history much more enlightening than the one generally taught in school where you have to memorize loads of dates and events. He also manages to be funny many times, so the reading is also entertaining.

The best of his books is in my opinion "History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness" which discusses many of the myths of the Romanian history. I'm not sure how interesting would be this book for someone who is not Romanian (i.e. to understand the gap between this version of history and the "official" one), but for the ones that passed through our school system, were "brain-washed" in history classes and are still open-minded persons it definitely worth a read.

Be cool, but try to stay warm

Russia is having an argument with Ukraine over the gas price, and the rest of Europe is trembling. They depend in a large measure on the gas from Russia that passes through Ukraine. European Union will hold a summit today discussing their energy policy. The trend in the latest years was to increase the imports from Russia, as ecologists obtained the closure of many nuclear reactors accross Europe. Not that I'm totally opposed to ecologists, but to close your reactors, having no real alternative plans but to depend in a large measure by Russia doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

On the other hand, as we consume more and more energy to run our computers, it's good to see more efficency on cooling them. Here is a story about a company that is doing this: optimizing the air conditioning systems in data centers.

Happy New Year!

We started a new year, so we have a reason to be happy :)
And to go back to work :)

16 years ago

I forgot to mention that today we celebrate/commemorate the Romanian revolution from 1989. Celebrate because we gained our freedom, commemorate because of the (post)communists that confiscated the revolution and of the hundreds of people that died in the masquerade that followed the flight and catch of Ceausescu. Nobody payed for that...

Note: in Romanian "comemora" means to remember a sad or tragic event, as opposed to celebrate which means to remember a joyful event; in English I think this distinction between celebrate and commemorate it's not very clear.

New book

I'm reading "Loving Sabotage" by Amelie Nothomb (the Romanian translation). The book describes a strange, cruel world as seen through the eyes of a little girl. Not entirely plausible, but interesting in how she descovers the meaning of love.

Driving in Bucharest

If you ever want to drive in Bucharest you have to answer the question in this test firts! For those who don't speak Romanian the question is: Which vehicle will leave first the crossroad in the picture above?
The answers are:
A. The tram.
B. The truck.
C. The trolley bus.

Firefox 1.5

It's official! Firefox 1.5 was released yesterday. I used the beta versions for a while now, and I think it's faster and more stable then the previous version. So get it while it's hot :)

New book

Now reading A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, the Romanian translation. It's a funny novel, about a guy that doesn't adapt at all to the society, but it's forced to do so by some circumstances.

David vs. Google

An interesting article in a German newspaper covering the evolution of Ask Jeeves search engine and the man behind it, Apostolos Gerasoulis. They say Ask Jeeves uses a better search algorithm than Google. I tried a search on "failure", a currently well known Google bombing, and Ask Jeeves returned some meaningfull results. It also has a feature called "zooming" where they offer some alternative search terms that could find better answers for you.

Universe in a nutshell

I finished reading "The Universe in a Nutshell" by Stephen Hawking. He describes the current search in physics for a universal theory that would describe the universe, and reconcile the relativity theory with quantum mechanics. I knew some of the theories explained there from other books of science popularization, but this one is very well written and entertaining. There is also one chapter not related to physics theories, but to the potential evolution of the human society.
I think this is the weaker part of the book, as I don't think we will be in competition with any artificial intelligence any time soon, if ever. Nice to see the reference he mades to Popper and his epistemology. I think everyone doing science should be aware of Popper's theory and the limits of our knowledge.

Google and Sun

Google and Sun announced a partenership which will see Google toolbar bundled together with Java. That's a strange (at least for me) bundle to download, but many are speculating that what they really want to do is to integrate somehow OpenOffice.org into the services offered by Google. This will be, suposely, a big competition chanlange to Microsoft, and many (see for example here) want to see the "good guy" (Google) fighting the "bad guy". I guess they will "fight" eventually, but not as good versus evil (although Google tries to picture itself as being on the good side of the force, see their slogan "don't do evil"), but just as two companies looking for revenues and profits.
I have to admit that even myself look sometimes at Google as being "on the good side of the force" :)

Partial solar eclipse

Live partial solar eclipse in Bucharest right now! We're lucky the clouds are gone after the heavy rain of yesterday; one of my co-workers brought the special eclipse watching glasses he has from the eclipse in 1999, so we all watched it.

Measuring teacher's quality

The Romanian minister of education proposed recently that teacher's salaries should be linked to their performance in teaching. But how would you measure teaching quality? Clearly not by the grades pupils receive, cause in this case everybody would start giving 10 grades (in Romania grades are from 1 to 10). Instead you should measure the (improvement in the) scores pupils receive at national standardized tests, but this is also not trivial. Here's an article about a study made in US on this topic, measuring teacher's quality. Note that in US a teacher is hired by a school, and after a few years his performance is evaluated and he can get a tenure, i.e. a permanent appointment. In Romania, to obtain a permanent position (i.e. titular) you have to pass a contest, without any proof of your real teaching capabilities.