Blog

Earn a Free Gmail Invite!

Have a few minutes to spare? Do you have a TTS, NLP or linguistics background? Then you may be interested in checking out the draft of my M.Sc. dissertation in this area. A free Gmail invite (with 2.5 GB of space) will be given to anyone providing useful and/or constructive feedback. Access the latest PDF version here.

Visit the World

How many of the world's countries have you already visited?

Create your own visited country map at World66.

Heavy Office Pranks

Think you're good at office pranks? Check this article and images at Pocket-lint to gauge if you're really such a hard core prankster.

Dividing By Zero No Longer a Problem

I vividly recall, quite a few years ago now, when my maths teacher was explaining why dividing any value by 0 is undefined. It is meaningless, both mathematically and philosophically. Well, not for Google it seems. Using their calculator, the solution to such an operation is simply ... 0! Check it out for 1 / 0. Even the most rudimentary of calculators generate an error for such an operation, but no, not Google's programmers. What's a bit confusing, though, is that, for y = 1 / x, the value of y tends to infinity as x tends to 0 (see for instance here), but at x is 0, y suddenly rethinks its path and retreats back to 0. Must be one of those annoying non-Euclidean spaces or something.

Software Patent Free Europe

Software patents are a dangerous idea, as they could stifle the development of freeware and open source software that are important for both education and business. If you want to contribute to a petition against ePatents in Europe, click here.

Enron Email Dataset

The Enron scandal seems to have at least served some useful purpose. Email data used in investigations has been made available to the general public during the investigations. This is provides a useful email dataset for research, such as for Natural Language Processing. More detail can be found at http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/.

A Miracle Cure for All Your Problems

Litterbox

Always welcome to find a band with fresh ideas ... Check out the new single Hiss of Death, by Litterbox.

A Record of Sorts

I recently received an invitation for a Gmail account, which I registered with my first name. Having now also a registered account for Hotmail and Yahoo, and probably a host of other account providers I've forgotten about, plus a whole domain, all registered with my first name (or part of it, actually), I guess I must be holding some sort of record in the limited domain space of the Internet. Having an unusual name has its benefits.

How to Piss Off your Colleague

Short of ideas for practical jokes to play on your colleagues? Try this one. A guy at work had his car, and its much bragged-about sexy accessories, advertised on a classifieds newspaper at a very attractive low price without his knowledge. It was an annoying Friday morning for him, when the mobile started ringing continuously with calls from interested people. Reportedly, his mother still can't get some decent sleep from the calls at home, too ...