A nice and easy way of starting up blogging again is just showing some videos. At least it requires very little effort from my side. Here's an old friend of mine, Kasper Lund, explaining the V8 virtual machine:
KASPER LUND DESCRIBING THE V8-ENGINE from Alexandra Instituttet A/S on Vimeo.
It's in Danish, sorry, so don't bother if you don't understand Danish. Maybe the next google project should be translation that works on audio and not just text...
I used to just use the web interface to Google Calendar, since I never managed to integrate it well with Evolution when I was using Ubuntu at home and an iMac at work, but now that I only have Macs I wanted to try out iCal since that is integrated with everything else on the Mac.
I was then very happy to find this HOWTO that explains exactly how to set it up, so in less than a minute I had all my calenders in iCal and synchronisation with Google. Neat!
I used to have my TODO list on todoist, but I don't know if I can synchronise with that as well.
It is not a major issue, 'cause I can always synchronize TODO items over IMAP in Mail - I could probably do the same for calendars - but it is nice to have a web interface to both calendars and TODO lists at time, and todoist is a really neat webservice for TODO lists.
Now, if I could only do the same with the awful Oracle shared calendar we are using at AU...
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There's an interview with Lars Bak and Kasper Verdich (Lund), two of the seniour developers of V8 at Financial Times. Also picked up at Slashdot.
I used to work Kasper back in the days when I was working with Coloured Petri Nets. Lars was working at Sun at the time and had an office on the same floor as us at the Dept. of Computer Science, AU.
We've all moved on to more exciting things now, but in all honesty their work for Google might be just a tad sexier than my genetics work. In the eyes of a computer scientist, at least...
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When collaborating on writing a paper, I often use a version control system like subversion.
It lets you keep track of changes and also lets different people work on different sections in the paper concurrently, since the system can merge changes when they are committed.
This works great for plain text documents. So great for LaTeX documents. Not so well for Word documents. Not that I write that many papers in Word, but I'm collaborating more and more with people who do, and that means sending copies of Word documents around by email (with the obvious problems of merging changes manually and such).
On a current project we are using Google Docs instead.
It is much better. There is a master copy, so everyone works on the same document (no manual mergin), we can work on it concurrently, and it keeps track of changes.
Plus, as I just found out today, you can even work on documents when offline, if you have Google Gears installed.
It also works great for sharing small additional notes and thoughts on the project. Normally I would write my thoughts on my blog, but for some projects I cannot really share all our work until we publish. Having the ideas on Google Docs is a nice alternative then, especially since my collaborators can then add to them and make them even better.
There are only a few features I really miss.
Like a LaTeX plugin for writing math. With just plain text, math is very hard to get right. Yes, you can also share LaTeX documents, but you have to pull the code down in a text file to process it, and that kind of defeats the purpose.
I would also love to see proper handling of references. Like an integration with Zotero or something like that. That would be sweet.
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The latest post in Google's "Google at 10" series concerns epidemics.
Well, it mainly concerns eradicating infectious diseases with smallpox given as an example.
In case you've forgotten, smallpox was eradicated in the late 1970s (last case in 1977) through a vaccination program. My parents received the vaccine but with the last case in Denmark in 1970 I didn't (I was born in 1975).
It is a bit cool to think about it. A disease was important enough to cause a global vaccination program in my parents generation, but for me there was no point; the disease had been wiped out. I was vaccinated against TB (Calmette vaccination) but my younger sister weren't 'cause by that time there were so few cases in Denmark that it wasn't worth it.
We are getting pretty good at this.
Now, in the Google blog post, Dr. Larry Brilliant compares smallpox to the Black Death and bird flu. That is a bit dramatic, I think. Well, maybe not the bird flu -- we don't know how deadly that will be -- but the Black Death was a bit more deadly. Maybe not in the long run -- smallpox has killed its share of people -- but in the short run a pandemic like the Black Death (and more so the Spanish flu) is a lot more worrying.
To identify potentially emerging epidemics, Larry mentions Google's Predict and Prevent initiative.
The post is a bit short on visions, at least compared to the earlier Google at 10 posts.
Epidemics (and pandemics) is an important issue, and something like Predict and Prevent can be important. But what will it do in the future? What are the visions?