¤ jetless heights

makin’ tea in your underwear

+ Tue, December 14

Your Library, Google

In case you were still unsure, the revolution won’t be televised.  It’ll be Googlized.  As if 8 billion webpages aren’t enough, they announced today that they’ll be digitizing and indexing the full contents of some of the world’s largest libraries.

The news broke for me by the Michigan Daily headline from the newspaper stack atop the drop-off box in Michigan’s Graduate Library lobby.  Fitting, I guess.  Walking through the stacks on my way to class after that, you go through countless rows, stretching away on your sides farther than you can see.  Floor to ceiling, leather-bound books with fading text.  To think that these 7 million books with who knows how many billions of pages are all going to be available in the public domain, for free forever – there’s a certain beauty in that.

I read it when it came out and you can still read an older opinion on Google’s role as the digitized deity of this day at CNN. It’s an interesting point, made all the more strong with Google SMS, this effort to digitize such a weighty chunk of our academic knowledge, the white pages, the maps, the calculator, the whole weight of their 8,000,000,000 page index.

If there was one company I’d want orchestrating this massive collection of our history and knowledge, it’d be the good guys of Google.

1:28 PM  ×  1 Comment  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Thu, October  7

Google SMS

Certainly by now everyone knows that Google makes the most useful tools of anyone out there.  Free, massive email, the best aggregated news of anyone, free usenet archives dating all the way back, an incredibly adaptive and knowledgeable calculator, local searching, maps, stocks – there’s not a lot they don’t do.

Today, they totally one-upped themselves in my eyes: Google SMS.  Loading Google on your phone has always been an easy thing (with a spartan page like that, certainly) for those lucky enough to have the web via their phone, but now you can access their knowledge via SMS text messaging.  Looking at this page, you can see how to look up businesses, people, addresses, prices, definitions, the calculator and – the best – quick facts all via your phone, nearly instantly.

The set of people with text messaging but without data transfer abilities on their phone is huge.  This is a huge step for the complete pervasiveness of Google into our lives.

I must say, it’s a wonderful thing to have such great guys providing such an insanely powerful and free service for as many people as they can.  Completely fantastic.

4:50 PM  ×  0 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Tue, August 24

SpamSieve

Last January, I installed Michael Tsai’s excellent SpamSieve.  It’s a handy little app that runs next to my email app and it has quite literally ended spam for me.  Here are statistics:

Filtered Mail
7470 Good Messages
1765 Spam Messages (19%)
8 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy
5 False Positives
39 False Negatives (89%)
99.5% Correct

Showing Statistics Since
1/27/04 10:39 AM

Out of 1,765 spams, it made only 44 mistakes with 5 of those being hard to notice.  At its best, I had 99.7% accuracy and that’s fantastic.  Out of 1,000 emails, that’s 3 mistakes.

I bring this up today because SpamSieve saw a major upgrade today and I want to reset my database to try and get even better results.  If you’ve got a Mac and you’ve got a problem with spam, this app is the best $25 you can spend.

4:19 PM  ×  5 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks