Category: internet

medical imaging

communication history internet technology

So glad I found this great introduction and overview of medical imaging.

I liked the article since it gives a great overview of different techniques together with their genesis. Stuff like a PET scanner does not rain down on humanity. Lots of people needed to work hard to realize it. Ideas, Patents and -as it turns out- the Beatles were needed and involved.

I personally found it fascinating how much ample computation power has enabled. Nothing that mattered in the last 40 years would have been conceivable without massive numerical processing. Even 99.999% of computing power is wasted on Facebook and games it is just awesome that we people deviced instruments to compute so cheaply.

It is probably impossible to estimate the impact that technologies like DfMRI will have on our knowledge and picture of ourselves. The microscope changed the world and each of our lives in the most radical ways. Which might only have dawned on people in the 17th century.

Of course the link was found in Wikipedia. After having set up a monthly donation to them and knowing how good it feels now and will do in the future I wonder why I did not do so earlier. Specially learning new things most Wikipedia pages allow a quick overview about the topic. What I personally really love is how detailed yet concise even very specialized topics are being documented. Quiet brilliant.

google reader shows wrong content for feed

google internet technology

When adding the feed

http://rss.sciencedirect.com/publication/science/07357044

to google reader the resulting page showed the wrong content, while the title is correct:

This seems to be a caching issues. The workaround was to simply alter the URL in a way that would not have any effect on the feed:

http://rss.sciencedirect.com/publication/science/07357044?x

shows the expected content.

ecoli map germany

daily life deutschland internet

I made a map of the current ecoli outbreak in Germany.

There is actually also a german version: Ehec Karte Deutschland

IP to Name lookups

internet

Ars Technica describes how an IP address gets turned into a name at Comcast and TWC.

mail me later

internet linux

I really like email. It works well for me. One thing that I grew accustomed to was the abillity to postpone email. To set up quick reminders easily. I used ‘replylater.com’ for this. Unfortunately last month they stopped working for me.

I decided to just implement the same features myself: Mail Me Later works pretty much like replyater.com.

The ‘problem’ is, that once a tool works for me I completely start to rely on it. Having a topic delegated to a service like ‘mail me later’ means that I will entirely forget about it. Good since it saves hassle, really bad if that service fails.

Having this part of me workflow now in an environment where I can quickly verify its operation makes me very happy.

bing is better

internet

I found the first case where Bing is the better search engine. Which is good, since that means that there will be competition in search. The case where I found bing results to be relevant is a specific one. It is about an ongoing / developing story. Google is really fast with getting new pages into the index. But their ranking does not show them on the first page. (Ever since they added preview the ability to see 100 results has gone away, sadly). The term in question is ‘SORBS’. If you search for this in twitter you get a good glimpse about what is going on right now. SORBS is a blacklist that is broken. Since November 29th. And they are unable to fix it . Basically since it is a hack written by one person in perl. GFI bought them last year for around 0.5 Million. But that didn’t result in any improvement. So as a searcher you are most likely looking for the current state of SORBS. Bing does a good job in that it links to this comprehensive writeup about the SORBS debacle. Google however does not show this yet on the first page. Only 6 links that are not from SORBS itself are on that page. Not many people click through to the next page.

I should rephrase the title in saying “bings first page is better than googles first page”. Right now.

google, bing, maps, military.

free of any reason internet

People trust those pixels a bit to much: Nicaragua / Costa Rica Border

what do you do after you invented gmail …

communication internet technology

… and a couple of other things? Whatever it is that Paul Buchheit is doing today, luckily blogging is among it. Specially since he seems to think about what he writes.

paging don norman

internet

Allot of work has probably gone into the creation of this comparison chart of Javascript UI libraries. Which is great and appreciated.

Tragically the author didn’t specify the meaning of the X axis. With benchmarks both can be the case. (Here it is apparently shorter is better). The comments on the post do point this out. Oddly the author did not fix the page. Would have taken 1 minute.

It might also be that not having a meaning on the axis’ caters to the biggest audience: People looking for this page might already have a favorite. So, let’s say you embrace YUI (shivers) then you come to this page, look at the long bars and click away just having confirmed that YUI is best. (Firmly ignoring what should have been a give away that protoype does even have longer bars).

People probably roam the Internet looking for ‘information’ that confirms what they were thinking all along. Since the Internet is pretty vast this works better than it ever did in history. There are 22,000 pages about unicorns and postage stamps.

hft

free of any reason internet misc

A new cable gets dropped into the atlantic to save 5ms on a 60ms delay. And High Frequency Trading will pay for that. You know that it really has taken off when they start considering a straight tunnel between London and New York. As impossible as it is, it WOULD save at least another 15-20 ms.