It's Alive! It's Alive!

Woot. Announcement of "Translated search" tool

Have 20 Google Wave Invites

Email me. Ping me. Call me.

If you want one.

Internets This Way

Can believe it took me this long to post this, but today I started noticing the pipes around the buildings in Google labeled - "Internets -->"

Google Voice Invites

Hot on the heels of the Google Wave invite - one Google voice invite (valid only for users in US). Again, the first person I know who contacts me gets it.

[Update Oct 20: Taken!]

Boring

I have three draft posts, all about investing. Yeah, I know - Boring.

Here's something a little more interesting - I have one more Google wave invite left. First person I know who contacts me about it gets the invite.

[Update Oct 20: Taken!]

Predict and Prevent

While the hot new thing from Google is knol, defined as a unit of knowledge, I believe there is something else pretty darn hot was just announced too which can, hopefully, identify hot spots (you knew that pun was coming) - Predict and Prevent at google.org.

Rapid ecological and social changes are increasing the risk of emerging threats, from infectious diseases to drought and other environmental disasters. This initiative will use information and technology to empower communities to predict and prevent emerging threats before they become local, regional, or global crises.

This is part of Larry Brillant's vision for the future - see my earlier blog post on this.

Just in case you missed it...

Google has open sourced protocol buffers.

Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats.

Protocol buffers are a great technology. It is one of those things that you typically don't stop to think about - what kind of technology goes into a car, a computer or a plane when you are using it?

And that's not the only cool technology that Google has released - check out our Google C++ Testing Framework and Google commandline flags module for C++.

Software Engineering

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

- Albert Einstein

Writing software is a messy business - You are tasked with coming up with a solution that works. This is probably best exemplified by the Netflix Prize competition (see wikipedia article for a quick overview if you have not heard of it before).

One consensus I got at KDD Cup 2007 was a slight disappointment at the "hackish" nature of the leading team, which later won the 2007 progress prize. Their winning solution is described here.

It is easy to have bloat creep into code as bugs are fixed and features are added.

One positive plus of working in Google is the inclination to frown on code bloat, and engineers are recognized for coming up with simpler implementations. This philosophy of constant iteration of software engineering ensures that systems are capable of keeping up with features while being maintainable. (Unit testing is HUGE here too)

MOM

Doing a Google search on "mom" shows how overloaded the term is. Poor mothers... Not getting the mindshare of searches all over the world.

And of course, again we see evidence of Singaporeans' love for acronyms as Ministry of Manpower [mom.gov.sg] is such a high-ranking result.

We're having too much fun here

The article based on the interview with Straits Times is now available - Our Guys in Google [straitstimes.com].

I am now wondering if I remembered wrongly - is it supposed to be the 100 feet or 150 feet rule?

Oh well, hopefully this nugget of information does not become a circular reference like the Sacha Baron Cohen past job history factoid as featured on slashdot. :P