Semantic Search Engine

December 31, 2007 by

If your are not familiar with the concept of semantic search, or wonder what it means – watch this video. These guys are off to a pretty good start but I think their site could use a bit more usability tuning.

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Google searches the skies, tracks your flight

December 27, 2007 by

Google rolls out a new flight tracking feature: just type your airline
and flight number into the search box, and get the departure and
arrival location and estimated time. I really love these guys.

Better flight stats results [Official Google Blog]

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Use Gmail to find out who sold your email address

December 27, 2007 by

Google lets you put a + sign in you email address that it ignores but you can use to create filters. For example, when you create an account at buy.com, just I just tell them my email address is  BenShoemate+buy.com@gmail.com. If I start getting ads for “V I A GR A” I know who to boycott, report, complain, filter. Cool.

Also, gmail ignores the . in your name. So even if you signed up for FirstLast@gmail.com you can tell people at work its First.Last@gmail.com and set up a filter to auto tag those as work. Also cool.

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office 2007 :The windows installer service cannot update one or more protected windows

December 17, 2007 by

I am trying to install Office 2007 onto a clean install of Windows XP (on a friends eee PC – it is really a sweet little laptop.. anyway), I get the error above about protected files. Here is the solution. (This may have happened because in optimizing XP down, some files were deleted).

1. From Windows install disk goto E:\I386 folder and open open (Double click) on the FP40EXT.CAB file. It should open.

(or – if you do not have the disk, find a working XP computer and go to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\40\bin).

2. find fp4autl.dll in the list and copy it (ctrl-c)

3. go to c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\40\bin and paste it (ctrl-v)

4. Restart the 2007 office install

Viola! (thanks guys over at http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=627360)

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Download a backup of wikipedia to your laptop or local lan

December 9, 2007 by

Yesterday I downloaded Wikipedia – All of 2,120,684 English articles of it are now on my hard drive.
A few stats for the curious (for the English version only):

  • Date of last edit: April 2007 (A September backup is still in progress)
  • Compressed size: 7.19 GB
  • Number of files compressed: 9
  • Number of files decompressed: millions
  • Decompressed size: ~100 GB
  • Time to download: 8 hours
  • Time to decompress: 10 hours

Why on earth would you do this?

  • The more versions of Wikipedia exist in the world, the less the chance it will get lost if something really depressing happens
  • Having a local version means you can look things up offline
  • Local versions can be used in corporate firewalls to give users access without granting full access to the web
  • Local files can be parced by scripts to create reports and study the structure, trends, and patterns
  • umm..its cool…do I really need a reason to want all the world’s collective knowledge on my laptop

Most people interested in this won’t have any problem downloading the compressed files. But few people have 100 GB free on their laptop. If you decompress the files to an external usb hard drive, it can take 30 hours per file (multiply times 9 files). Still, that is not too bad. You can buy 2.5″ laptop drives now that have 300gb and 3.5″ drives that are 1000 GB. The only problem is that decompressing the time it takes (10+ hours!)

Wikipedia is growing…fast.
Last year (Dec 2006) total compressed size of the English version was version only 5.8 GB. By April 2007 (just 4 months later) it was 7.2 GB (this is the version I downloaded). I am waiting to see what the September version will be. How fast is Wikipedia growing? It is hard to say. The last stats I found are for July 2006 but it was definitely on an exponential curve.


http://download.wikimedia.org/
http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/December_2006/en/

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