Under The Fridge

I just went to an interesting presentation by Chris DiBona (from Google). He was mainly talking about various things he does at Google, and some interesting projects and challenges they have.
An entertaining and interesting talk, and it’s good to be able to put a face on at least one small part of the huge entity [...]

So how long until someone uses a flaw in Apple’s new IPhone to get Linux running on the thing?
- Colin

Based purely on an Amazon recommendation, I just bought and read “Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner.
Freakonomics is a look at various behaviours, how people respond to incentives and an examination of heaps of data about interesting things to find correlations and causations.
It’s not as geeky as it sounds, and I found it really [...]

This post should be coming via the Flock web browser. This is a new web browser that tries to integrate common functions in a nice way. An example is posting to this blog, or using deli.cio.us for bookmarks.
I’ve read a lot of complaints saying that Firefox can already do most of this stuff with [...]

As more people come up with ideas for Amazons Mechanical Turk, (Top Ten Web 2.0 Problems Amazon Mechanical Turk Can Solve For Me) it occurs to me that maybe a useful form of Micropayments will be that of Microfavours.
No need to figure out how to pay someone 3c when you can do them a [...]

I’ve just been looking at Amazon’s new “Mechanical Turk”. The concept is that you get paid a small amount for doing tiny jobs that are easy for a human but pretty much impossible for a computer. Supported by their relatively open API for plugging third party stuff into the service, I think this is early [...]