Amazing Lectures

After listening to Lawrence Lessing, a law professor at Stanford, I really wish that I could take a class with him. Enjoy this great video as he discusses fair use in regard to Google Book Search. Amazing use of slides. And I like the geeky slide.

Speaking of great speakers, I also had a chance to watch a lecture from Noam Chomsky. It's amazing that he can be an expert in so many fields.

So much other news and so little time.

Open IM Federation

I use my GMail account to email people who have their email hosted by someone else. I use my Verizon cell phone to call people who use Cingular. These technologies are based on standards that allow different providers to interoperate.

But the same is not true of IM. As a result users suffer and are forced to use multiple providers or not IM all their friends. Today, we took another step in fixing this by launching open federation. Now you can IM users on other networks. No official partnerships are needed with long meetings full of buzdev folks, lawyers, and paperwork. Just like email, set an SRV record in DNS pointing everyone to your XMPP server. Exchanging email between companies never required partnerships. Even most countries at war allow telephone calls to be made between them. Why should IM be different?

Using open standards has other advantages as demonstrated by the new Blackberry client for Google Talk.

In the meantime, for those of you who know me personally and know my google.com email address, feel free to add me as a Friend in Google Talk (just add my email address as a friend).

And if you don't know me but play backgammon and live in Seattle, I like to meet you!

Rain Rain Rain

Unlike last year, the weather in Seattle has been very wet this year. This Sunday finally ended 27 days of continuous rain. Luckily, I missed some of the days given all my recent trips to sunny California.

Incompatible Chargers

Whenever I travel, I have to pack several chargers with me. Here is more proof that this is a problem. I saw this device in Seattle's airport. For $3 you can charge your cell phone for 30 minutes. And there in a wire for nearly every type of phone. Yuck!

Answers to the puzzle

Here are the answers to the puzzle. I really like the 2nd one:

In this sentence the number of occurrences of 0 is 1, of 1 is 7, of 2 is 3, of 3 is 2, of 4 is 1, of 5 is 1, of 6 is 1, of 7 is 2, of 8 is 1, and of 9 is 1.

In this sentence the number of occurrences of 0 is 1, of 1 is 11, of 2 is 2, of 3 is 1, of 4 is 1, of 5 is 1, of 6 is 1, of 7 is 1, of 8 is 1, and of 9 is 1.


Happy 2006! I'm very busy at work these days. In fact, I had to cancel my trip to Las Vegas for the CES.