
Twitter to Buzz (A)
Most people currently have the options to connect their Buzz feed to Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, Google Reader, Google Chat status or Youtube.
However, as there is no log in to any APIs needed for Twitter, I believe you can eventually Buzz anything with an RSS feed.
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Littoral Combat Ship, the next evolution in naval warfare.
I would like to say that this ship, LCS Independence, is a thing of beauty! It looks like it came out of some futuristic video game.
So war machines don’t do things that you consider beautiful, but they look so futuristic and powerful and perform with such grace. I’m captivated by them.
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It’s one of the biggest questions of science: what shape is the universe? From Ptolemy onwards, physicists thought of the cosmos as a sphere, but this may not be correct.
via Five snacks that are shaped like the universe – physics-math – 03 August 2009 – New Scientist.
I vote that the universe is pringle shape! It has been happening since the big pop bang. Once you pop, you can’t stop! The universe has been expanding since!

HighlightsTouch Screen – Easy-to-use and responsive touch screen function for smooth navigating.Fully Unlocked – Works on all four main GSM frequency bands for great reception world wide.FM Radio – Pick up your favorite FM radio stations wherever you are.Bluetooth – High speed wireless technology.
via EG200 Touch Quad Band Single Card Watch Mobile Phone With Keypad Black 2GB TF Card SZFCL007 – US$ 115.99.
Wow, I never knew these kinda watches existed outside of the realm of James Bond or some high tech spy movie! As I was cruising around looking for ways to purchase a legally unlocked iPhone, I came across this store that sold the “Hiphone”, an iPhone replacement, along with these cool watches!
Probably China made. Not sure how long they’d last. Cool nonetheless!
If you know where to look, you might just find an officially unlocked iPhone.
As I have been in the market for a good smartphone for a while now, I have been doing some research off and on about iPhones.
According to this blog post by Olly Farshi in Helsinki, Apple can actually unlock your iPhone. It’s as simple as giving Apple your IMEI, and upon synchronizing it with iTunes.
In the Hong Kong version of the Apple online store, there is a message on the web site that states
iPhone 3G & iPhone 3GS purchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier. Simply insert the SIM from your current phone into iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS and connect to iTunes 8.2 to complete activation.
Yet, there is no such indication that the Canadian iPhones are unlocked, at least not according to a source who works at an Apple store.
Now that Bell and Telus has worked their way into the iPhone market, I think we should have some kinda choice, especially if we buy the device out right and pay in full.
Why should we be locked to a carrier if we paid full price for the iPhone?
I was wondering how Firefox would fare against Safari so I googled some results which favoured Safari.
However, being skeptical, I wanted to see for myself the results for myself.
I was quite blown away that Safari was twice as fast as Firefox!
A major advantage that Safari has of course is that it is coded for the new Snow Leopard MAC OS while Firefox does not take advantage of the inner workings of this new operating system.
It would be interesting to see if Mozilla would make changes to the code to harness the power of Snow Leopard.
Right now, I have upgraded my OS from Leopard to Snow Leopard, using the upgrade feature rather than my usual upgrade method which would be to wipe my entire HDD before the update.
It’s still stable and I’m loving it!
Test it yourself!
www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html
On the aside, I find Safari to have moments of lag while rendering while Firefox does render a little smoother.
This is a starting point for planning and design information for the Firefox 3.5 release, including schedules, feature sets, and branch process information.
via Firefox3.5 – MozillaWiki.
Firefox 3.5 are underway, despite the fact 3.1 is not even out yet. I guess the main holdup for 3.1 is TraceMonkey and the feature set is fixed.
I’m glad they have swipe technology in 3.1 and I do not have to wait until 3.5.
The strength in Firefox is its modular design. I could see them programming their own add-ons, even if it were to be an internally packaged component, thus abstracting OS specific components from the core browser code.
“We’ve not really discussed a dividend payment. At the moment our view is to let the cash pile up.”
[...]
Despite its $8.6B USD cash surplus, Mr. Schmidt said that Google would only make “very very conservative investments”.
via DailyTech – Google CEO Says Company is Letting Cash “Pile Up”.
Google is still rich! Whoever thought Microsoft was going to rule the world … was wrong!
Control all information, then everyone will go to you for information. That drives traffic and thus ad hits!
I wonder what Google has in store for its huge surplus. Perhaps if the economy hits Microsoft hard enough, Google could potentially buy it up!
Subject to US anti-competition approval of course. However, they don’t exactly produce the same line of products …

Simple yet functional, these SunCat Solar Batteries “are basically a set of old NiMH rechargeable batteries wrapped in a flexible Photo Voltaic cell created by the Institute for Energy Technology.” The photo voltaic cells were glued on and wired using a conductive silver pen along with flat wires.
via TechEBlog » Solar Batteries.
This looks like a great piece of renewable technology, especially for places like third world countries because they seem to be closer to the equator with a lot of sun!
Even here in Canada, I’d be happy to use these battries in my equipment. I can’t wait for the day we discover ultra efficient photovoltaic panels!
If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.
[...]
We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately and here’s the human error, the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.
via Official Google Blog: “This site may harm your computer” on every search result??.
It is a pretty unfotunate incident, but I guess that’s the drawback with processing huge amounts of data. One wrong keystroke can cause a whole system to fail.
Presumably, all test cases cannot be accounted for, and, like this one, will have to be dealt with when it occurs.
I suppose no one would have thought to flag as potential invalid data if the value for a URL contained just one character.
Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.
I think it’s great that the Google team managed to find this error within 40 mintues. I wonder what the algorithm or process they went through to find this error. It is literally looking for a needle in a haystack. The “/” really does look like a needle. :P