Things on my radar screen

This week seems to be an exciting week, so here's a list of things I am looking at:

Google Chrome

As a browser, Chrome is rock solid, and it runs impressively on older computers running Win XP. If you have not tried it out, I suggest you give it a spin. If you are stilling IE, please ditch it in place of Chrome. (CNET's somewhat bias JavaScript speed test shows Chrome being 65x faster than IE and 10x faster than Firefox.) 

Related news:

- Did Google reverse engineer Windows?

- SquirrelFish Extreme (Webkit's new JS engine)

Adobe CS 4

Adobe has released its CS 4 suit of applications. Lightroom 2 is out too! Photoshop CS 4 comes with cool new features like the content-aware scaling/resizing, and smoother panning/zooming. GIMP already has the content-aware resizing feature, called Liquid Rescale.

The new California Academy of Sciences bulding opens

I remember visiting the temporary one at San Franciso's Howard Street in Dec 2004. This news bring back memories.

Some random stuff: Technical Article on Moore's Law, Math Clock for Math Geeks

Stanford Eng Launches Online CS Classes

For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection is all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience.

This fall, SEE launches its programming by offering one of Stanford’s most popular sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford’s undergraduates and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.

Check it out at Stanford Engineering Everywhere

The first course, Introduction to Computer Science (Programming Methodology), has Mehran Sahami as the instructor.

Quote of the Day

"In life you make the small decisions with your head and the big decisions with your heart."
-- Omid Kordestani (Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Business Development at Google)

Bill Gates, Seinfeld, Microsoft and Nothing

Official Explanation:

After seeing the new ad from Microsoft, which debuted today, some may wonder what Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates pick out a new pair of shoes has to do with software. The answer, in the classic Seinfeld sense of the word, is nothing. Nevertheless, the spot is the first and most visible sign of an ambitious effort by Microsoft’s Windows business to reconnect with consumers around the globe.

See also: LA Times' Analysis

This is non-sequitur.