In the “good old days,” Google was closer to a traditional information retrieval system: if you gave a query that was four unusual words, it would retrieve only documents that included all four words. Now, we are more aggressive at allowing synonyms and related terms; as you say, we assume the query is sensible and try to make sense of it, rather than doing a literal match to keywords. That is better formost users, but unfortunately not for poets like you.
— Peter Norvig (to Richard P. Gabriel)*
poor man’s profiler, automated polling of backtraces with gdb. Well, why not.
Lytro, first affordable light field camera!
NewsBlur, hosted feed reader. One of the better ones.
wwwoosh, a simple web server and Sinatra-like microframework written in shell script.
Keyboard Number-Symbol Swap, a good idea for programmers.
William Gibson on The Setup.
Is the alcohol message all wrong?
Buddhist Mummies of Japan, creepy.
William Shatner – Bohemian Rhapsody