Gibbon Is Right
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
"As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters."
Self-Replicating 3D Printer
RepRap is an amazing idea (with partial implementation) to make a 3D printer that can make its own parts. Version 1 can only make 50% of itself: the plastic parts, apperently. Version 2 will know how to make silicon chips to create its own circuit boards. Check out the video:
New Photos
I built a javascript photo display page and uploaded some of my recent Seattle and DC pictures there. I hope to add more visual coolness to this page later.
Chinese Dialects
Apparently, the Wu dialect is the second most popular around the world, yet I never heard anyone speak it. I always thought that Cantonese would be the second most popular, but it turned out to be third. Mandarin, of course, is the most popular dialect of all.
Incredible Deal on Office Ultimate for Students
If you have a .EDU e-mail address, you can get Office Ultimate for around $60. Check out the apps you get! That's a good deal, but not nearly enough advertised by Microsoft.
CodeRush Xpress
Trying out CodeRush Xpress in my development environment. The videos have wonderful promises of efficiency and magic. The tool runs on VS 2008.
Russian Translit Keyboard
For the lazy Russians among us: the Windows keyboard layout that maps the latin letters to the cyrillic alphabet phonetically. Download the keyboard layout for editing using the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Editor or for installing and using yourself.
That's right, the keyboard layout has no name. KGB style.
Luis Von Ahn
...comes to speak in our department this week.
Luis characterizes his research interest as "encouraging people to do work for free." How strong is this encouragement? Does he inspire? Do people get addicted? Do they feel guilty if work is not done? Are these incentives ethical?
Tom Mitchell (father of machine learning) was here last week. I can't complain.
