The week in recap

President-Elect Barack Obama
The recent democratic election of an Afican-American to the world's most powerful office has resulted in optimists around the world asking if a country's top office can be headed by a person from a minority racial group.

"I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible." -- Barack Obama, NDC 2004

Firefox
2 days ago, Mozilla Firefox turned 4. The next milestone will be the release of Mozilla Minefield, which comes with a new JS JIT engine called tracemonkey.


Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton, one of my favorite authors, passed away last week. Fans may remember Crichton for Jurrasic Park and E.R. drama series. Crichton introduced me to the fast-paced genre of thrillers. His novels had the courage to deal with controversies that often leave the reader pondering over the realism that one associates with life. I will always remember reading "The Andromeda Strain" through the silence of the night into the wee hours of the morning.

Obama Wins

Barack Hussein Obama II is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and President-elect of the United States of America.

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain to become the 44th President of the United States and the first Black President in U.S. history. He will take the oath of office and become the 44th President of the United States on January 20, 2009.

Source: Wikipedia

Change is coming

Obama '08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

Good Game on Wall Street

With main street, wall street and your street going haywire, Sequoia Capital gives its take. Get the presentation.

It has been almost a month since the collaspe of Lehman Brothers, and this is where we are today.

Photo of the Day: Print Gallery (Escher)

Escher's Print Gallery (lithograph) (1956)

A picture of a picture which contains itself. Or is it a picture of a gallery which contains itself? Or of a town which contains itself? Or a young man who contains himself?

At first glance, it is easy to dismiss this piece of art. But on closer inspection, it brings to mind several provoking questions - what is that white patch in the centre, what is so unique about this work? To ponder for some time brings even more conundrums than answers - a memory trapped within a memory, reality encased in a fake-reality?

If you are inspired, here is a gallery of Escher's works.

On a side note, I have been browsing through Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid", which I chanced across while reading ReadWriteWeb.

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.

Trends

Inspired by the use of Google Trends to gauge Linux distro trends...

Comparing debian, ubuntu, slackware, fedora, opensuse:

Comparing iatkos, kalyway, uphuck, leo4all:

Comparing twitter and friendfeed:


Comparing facebook and myspace: