Monthly Archives: February 2007

Mortgage news

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Today’s Guardian brings us up to date on the Blairs’ property portfolio…

Tony and Cherie Blair have bought another house in London near the property they will move into when they leave Downing Street, it was reported last night.

Number 10 refused to comment on the claims that the Blairs have exchanged contracts on an £800,000 house behind the Bayswater property they bought in 2004. The Daily Mail said they planned to knock through the walls to join the buildings together and create extra space.

The Guardian reckons that this will bring the First Couple’s mortgage payments to nigh on £20,000 a month. But do not panic — the piece goes on to predict that Tony will earn £20 million a year when he leaves office.

Gosh! I had no idea that lecturing to right-wing Republicans could be so lucrative. If it isn’t, there are always directorships of Halliburton, Bechtel and aerospace companies to be considered. Wonder who his agent is.

Google does Viacom’s bidding?

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Hmmm… The NYT is reporting that:

In a sign of the growing tension between old-line media and the new Internet behemoths, Viacom, the parent company of MTV and Comedy Central, demanded yesterday that YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google, remove more than 100,000 clips of its programming.

Viacom, along with other major media companies, including the News Corporation and NBC Universal, has become increasingly frustrated with YouTube as it has amassed a vast library of copyrighted clips, placed on the site by its users.

While such companies regularly ask YouTube to remove their material, Viacom’s demand, which it disclosed in a statement circulated by e-mail, was the most militant and public move of its kind so far.

As it has with the similar request from other companies, Google removed the Viacom clips from the YouTube site yesterday…

So no more clips from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show then? Er, apparently not. For example, a few days ago I blogged Bill Gates’s appearance on the show. I’ve just checked (on Saturday 3 February, 09:55) — and it’s still on YouTube! Maybe Google isn’t quite as efficient as we think.

The search for Jim Gray

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From the New York Times…

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 2 — When James Gray failed to return home from a sailing trip on Sunday night, Silicon Valley’s best and brightest went out to help find him.

After all, Dr. Gray, 63, a Microsoft researcher, is one of their own.

The United States Coast Guard, which started a search Sunday night, suspended it on Thursday, after sending aircraft and boats to scour 132,000 square miles of ocean, stretching from the Channel Islands in Southern California to the Oregon border. Teams turned up nothing, not so much as a shard of aluminum hull or a swatch of sail from Dr. Gray’s 40-foot sailboat, Tenacious.

In the meantime, as word swept through the high-technology community, dozens of Dr. Gray’s colleagues, friends and former students began banding together on Monday to supplement the Coast Guard’s efforts with the tool they know best: computer technology.

The flurry of activity, which began in earnest on Tuesday, escalated as the days and nights passed. A veritable Who’s Who of computer scientists from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NASA and universities across the country spent sleepless nights writing ad hoc software, creating a blog and reconfiguring satellite images so that dozens of volunteers could pore over them, searching for a speck of red hull and white deck among a sea of gray pixels.

Coast Guard officials said they had never before seen such a concerted, technically creative effort carried out by friends and family of a missing sailor. “This is the largest strictly civilian, privately sponsored search effort I have ever seen,” said Capt. David Swatland, deputy commander of the Coast Guard sector in San Francisco, who has spent most of his 23-year career in search and rescue…

Jim’s home page is here.

If you want to help, Werner Vogels, Amazon’ CTO, explains how. Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link.

HTML icing

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Later… Quentin points out that:

The [ !supportEmptyParas] stuff is not standard HTML – it’s a proprietary Microsoft extension which used to have a nasty habit of turning up where it wasn’t wanted. Outlook would hide it, but some other non-MS programs wouldn’t. All of which makes me suspect that this wasn’t how the cake was meant to turn out.

I did a quick Google search and found another document by way of an example.

You just can’t please some people

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Turns out Google’s investors are as maddeningly difficult to impress as the company’s founders themselves. After market close Wednesday, the search giant announced fourth-quarter profits that nearly tripled, handily beating analysts’ expectations, but astonishingly not those of investors. Though it was nearly impossible to find anything worrisome in Google’s numbers, disappointed investors sold the stock off anyway. (Oh, I suppose company’s growth is clearly slowing; it was ONLY 70 percent year over year. Talk about letdowns …). Google is trading at $494.44 as I write this — off nearly 2 percent. This, despite a $1.03 billion profit on a 67 percent jump in revenues, to $3.2 billion. Said Scott Devitt, an analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus, “Expectations got ahead of themselves.”

Yes, just a little, I think. “Their performance is extraordinary even in absolute terms,” Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Derek Brown told the New York Times, “but particularly in comparison with the companies they are competing with.”

HDR images

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I use PhotoShop CS and been wondering if the High Dynamic Range tools in CS2 would make it worth thinking about an upgrade. This astonishing picture of Tokyo by night has made me think it might be time to think about it. Basically HDR enables one to create a composite image from a number of photographs made with different exposures, thereby increasing the dynamic range of the image. Useful introduction here. There’s also a HDR pool on Flickr.

Thanks to James Cridland for the link.

The end of Googlebombing?

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Interesting Guardian piece ny Nick Carr…

Last week, after years of taking a fairly laissez-faire attitude toward Googlebombing, Google decided to put an end to the popular sport. It incorporated into its search engine a Googlebomb-sniffing algorithm that somehow manages to identify and neutralise any concerted effort to skew search results for a word or phrase.

Googlebombing was amusing at first, but it got old fast. So I’m perfectly happy that Google is giving it the heave-ho. It’s like scrubbing graffiti off the side of a subway car.

But there’s a deeper story here, and it lies in Google’s explanation for why it finally decided to defuse Googlebombs. You might assume the company was acting out of a desire to present better results, or to counter internet vandalism, or simply to serve the public interest. But you’d be wrong.

What drove Google to act was its fear that Googlebombing was tarnishing its painstakingly controlled image.

One of the company’s top engineers, Matt Cutts, explained the move on a Google blog: “Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.”

Good piece. Comes to the right conclusion too.

Google’s software has become much more complicated over the years.

Its search engine operates according to an array of sophisticated and secret algorithms crafted by the company’s brilliant coders.

It’s a machine that’s been tweaked to do precisely what Google instructs it to do, even if that might mean filtering results to protect the company’s reputation.

Google may have good in its heart. It may, for the time being anyway, be fighting on our behalf to bring order to a chaotic internet. But let’s not forget that Google’s machine is not our machine. It’s Google’s, for better or worse.

Follow this…

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How’s this for a first blog post?

A woman laughs at a baby that has just died in her arms. Behind her a soldier is slumped on the floor, his brain splattered across the bottom of the wall. Close by, the woman’s abusive lover is shuffling on his knees, his arms stretched out in front of him reaching desperately for the touch of her body. He is blind. His eyes were sucked out by the soldier, who swallowed them and then raped this rapist using first a gun and then a part of his own body, and then stuck the gun in his gob and pulled the trigger. Later the woman buries the baby in a hole in the floor, and then leaves the room to hunt for food. While she is out her blind lover eats the dead child and shortly after that he, too, dies. The woman returns. She is humming and singing. She sits down, swinging her legs, gazing out at the emptiness.

This is how Blasted, written by the late Sarah Kane, ends. The play is a hopeless reflection on war; its achievement is to show the truly miserable detail of conflict and how acts of great violence are within us all. The individual quest for survival will in the end always defeat our dreamy desire to be humane…

Lara Pawson, whose blog opens with this post, is a talented journalist and an alumnus of the Wolfson Press Fellowship Programme which I run. She’s a specialist on Africa (especially Angola) and has seen some horrible things in her time. And she’s good at telling it as it is. I’ve been encouraging her to start blogging because I thought she’d be good at it. Looks like I was right.