Referring to this excerpt from BBC News article on 13 May regarding the relief measures in Burma for the Cyclone Nargis:
Vice-Admiral Soe Thein said [the country] was grateful for the aid shipment from the United States that arrived on Monday but insisted that "skilful humanitarian workers are not necessary".
Oh...really? That makes me wonder if we have more than enough skilful aid workers. =)
According to Xinhua news, US Navy stationed at Thailand is now awaiting Burma's response to initiate the relief efforts in the cyclone-hit areas. I sincerely hope that the Burmese government will give their consent to the US Navy to get to the areas inside Burma. It's not time to care about their politics and it's more important that aids arrive before more people pass away from the shortage of food, clean water and medical supplies.
Just saw this piece of good news for the soccer fans going to Moscow for the UEFA Champion League final on 21 May. It says "all ticket holders", so I suppose anyone holding a valid ticket and a passport. But, I can't help myself wondering what would happen if someone gets there with a ticket and a Burmese passport.
This reminds me of another incident at Google Summer of Code 2008. My Operating System lecturer let us know that there were opportunities for us to apply for the program. Hopeful, I was eager to read the FAQ and in a moment all the hopes were shattered by the following paragraph. Oh...sh*t...
This is the First Lady's speech on recent cyclone Nargis that ripped off Yangon.
The Burmese former goalkeeper, Aung Kyaw Kyaw, who played for Customs Football Club and was a member of Myanmar National Team, was sentenced to jail in fourteen years. He was arrested in last January and charged with bribery while he served as a customs officer.
Below is an excerpt from BBC Burmese channel. The language is in Burmese.
This is a collection of a few pictures of the collapsed bridge in the United States. As of this writing, why the bridge collapsed is still unclear yet.
iPhone is finally out. But, there seem to be more complaints and disappointments than satisfactions about it. Below is just a list of such First Impression Disappointments.
- Bluetooth is ONLY good for connecting a headset. That's it.
- There is no file browser on the device at all. Data must be organized (if at all) in the appropriate application.
- The camera is a simple application that has ONE button: the shutter. Pictures come out okay on the device, but nothing too fancy on a monitor, especially if it was an attempt at a macro shot.
- SIM card is damn near impossible to open, if at all. I didn't look into it extensively.
- Web browser is slow, even over WLAN. Even the simple OneList web app that was created takes around 20 seconds to load over WLAN. You can not highlight, cut, copy, or paste and text from a website, and you can not save any images you find from a website either. The only nice thing about it is the tabbed browsing, which crashed on me when I went to Engadget and YouTube on two tabs. This is the only application that allows you to use the keyboard in landscape mode.
- The keyboard sucks. It gets slightly better after the iPhone "learns" you, as the employees said, but even then, it's not a device you can use with one hand comfortably, much less without looking.
- You can only send one picture at a time in an email.
- No custom ringtones (yet, as we were being told) and the alert tones can not be changed whatsoever.
- The default ringtones are incredibly lame.
- The only form of customization outside of a lame default ringtone is the wallpaper, which you'll only see when you need to unlock the device or when you get a phone call.
- "Picture pinching" or using two fingers to zoom on any content is certainly fun to play with, but not practical whatsoever. This operation depends solely on using the device with two hands.
- No document editor or native viewer. You can not store documents on the device to be viewed, they can only be viewed as attachments when they're sent to your in an email.
- Visual voicemail is laggy and reacts about the same way as pushing the fast forward and rewind buttons on traditional voicemail systems. The only advantage is for those that get that many voicemail messages a day that they need to sort them according to priority.
- NO games. None.
- No voice dialing.
- No speed dialing (which can be made up by the "quick list", but getting to that quick list isn't as fast as holding a single key on a real keypad).
- No video.
- No MMS.
- It's still <4GB for $500 and <8GB for $600
- It only takes around 2 hours to explore every menu without any options for expandability except to scrounge around for new web apps that will load slowly and nowhere near as smoothly as the native apps.
Google announced on the blog and on Groups that they are going to release a new version of Google Docs which will feature "includes new ways to keep your docs organized, and find your old docs too".
That's right, very soon we're going to launch a new Docs list -- a
wish fulfilled for those of us who've wanted an easier way to organize
and manage our documents and spreadsheets.
Google News now releases a new version, called Image View, where you can view current news in pictures. When you pause on a thumbnail, the related news message will be selected and you can read it on.
In the screenshot, I pause the mouse on Alan Smith and the news about its transfer Middlesbrough is selected.
The new Image View interface can be accessed here.
Until then...
Justin
The much requested Group Chat feature in Google Talk is now available in the Gadget version of Gtalk.
Just launch the Gtalk Gadget and open a group chat conversation by inviting your friends. But, to be in the group chat, your friends also need to be using the Gadget. So, if one of your friends is not using it, he/she will receive a link to open the Gtalk Gadget and join the conversation.
This year, the Gtalk Gadget gets updates like smiley and now group chat. I do expect the desktop client to get more powerful updates soon since nothing much has changed for the Gtalk desktop client.
Until then...
Justin
Google Translate, after releasing search-in-other-languages, now lets you translate short words and phrases from English to French, German, Spanish, Italian and Korean, and vice versa. 
This is a stripped-down version of Google Translate (Text and Web) but in this version, Google also shows related phrases at the end of the translation page, which is quite useful to those language learners.
Until then...
Justin
Recently, the movie named SiCKO by Michael Moore was uploaded to Google Video in full, 2 hours and 3 minutes. In fact, the movie is set to be released only on June 29, 2007.
But, I'm glad that Google has quickly removed the video by the time of this writing after a lot of people (including DIGG) hailed about it over the net.
At least Google by now should have known who has (or have) uploaded the yet-to-be-released movie in full. Is Google going to do something with their account now that they have clearly broken the Terms of Use of Google Video?
Until then...
Justin
Now that Google has testified (and justified the reason) to increase the limit of H1B visas from 65,000 every year to a number more reflexive of the growing industry in the United States of America, I hope the Congress take some measure to respond to the request.
In his testimony, Laszlo said that, due to limits on the number of H-1B visas, Google is regularly unable to pursue highly qualified candidates. This year, an estimated 133,000 visa applications were filed by H-1B candidates in the first two days of the filing period for only 65,000 available spots. Over the last year alone, the artificially low cap on H-1B visas has prevented more than 70 Google candidates from receiving H-1B visas. Therefore, Laszlo said, "We would encourage Congress to significantly increase the annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas, to a figure more reflective of the growth rate of our technology-driven economy." He also urged Congress to address the backlog of employment-based green cards for highly skilled workers.
An article by Constance Holden with ScienceNOW says that the ratio of ring finger to index finger in men corresponds to the math skill of the individuals concerned while in women it corresponds to the verbal skills.
Boys with the longest ring fingers relative to their index fingers tend to excel in math, according to a new study. In girls, shorter ring fingers predict better verbal skills. The link, according to the researchers, is that testosterone levels in the womb influence both finger length and brain development.
The New York Times has it that the whole genome of Dr. Watson, who discovered the structure of the DNA (the hereditary material of all organisms), has been sequenced and made available for scientific research.
Dr. Rothberg’s company [,454 Life Sciences] makes an innovative DNA sequencing machine, the latest version of which proved capable of decoding Dr. Watson’s genome in two months at a cost of less than $1 million, said Michael Egholm, 454’s vice president for research. The sequence was verified and analyzed by Dr. Gibbs’s center in Houston.
...
Some scientists believe that it will be medically useful to sequence patients’ genomes when the cost of sequencing falls to around $10,000 or less. Dr. Egholm said that with improvements already under way, the 454 sequencing machine will soon be able to sequence a human genome for $100,000. The cost of sequencing has been dropping so fast in the hands of groups like 454 Life Sciences and Solexa Inc. that some technologists predict the $10,000 genome will be attained in a few years.
After showing off their future desktop, Microsoft now finally has made their next-generation desktop into a reality, the Microsoft Surface. It is a 30-inch table top computer without a mouse and a keyboard and where you can interact with it by your fingers. 
It is a pretty smart programming and I do hope it will open new doors to how later software will interact with humans. But, a little concern is that people will mostly be using their index finger (both hands) and pointing it straight most of the time is not an easy experience for everyone (including me).
Until then...
Justin
Gmail has increased the attachment size from 10MB to 20MB now. The Gmail help says:
With Gmail, you can send and receive messages up to 20 megabytes (MB) in size. However, the precise amount allowable will depend on the attachment.
Google BlogScope wrote about what Eric said in an interview with Financial Times. Below is the excerpt from the original post:
We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.
The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as “What shall I do tomorrow?” and “What job shall I take?"
And:
We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.
Most file hosting services on the net do not offer uploading a file of size as big as 2GB. MiHD is just the right service that you can use if you ever need to send very large files to your friends or colleagues. The download speed is also quite good for a free service: 100 KB/s.
Although being able to upload a file as large as 2GB in one stroke seems trouble-free, it wouldn't be the best solution to send the file to your friends: imagine how long it is gonna take for them to download the file at 100 KBps speed which is quite fast for a free file hosting service. A better solution is to split up your file into smaller parts so that you can upload them at the same time and your friends can download individual parts at the same time, achieving a virtual threading for downloading.
Until then...
Justin
Technorati tag => MiHD
Google Trend now has come up with a pretty cool display of top 100 search keywords for each day. Since the page is updated with the data from just one hour ago, you can be pretty sure that what you see is the most current trend for the day. Currently, it only shows the top 100 keywords from searches in the US but sooner or later, I hope Google will start showing international data too.
Until then...
Justin
Technorati tag => Google Trends
