Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Imagine my surprise when I looked at “Top Recommendations” area of my Google Reader today and found … my own blog over there.

Yes, I know that these recommendations are based on the feeds that I read.  But still!  Is it the time to celebrate the recommendations technology, which recommended me to me over a gadzillion of other blogs?  Or maybe this is a day of Ultimate Technological Silliness, when Google, a search company that forgets nothing, somehow arrived to the conclusion that I might not be reading my own blog?  These questions remind me of a “half-empty or half-full glass of water“.  I guess a lot depends on the personal perspective…

It looks like humans aren’t all that useless when it comes to technology.  There are still a few areas that we do better than machines.  Image recognition is one of them.  TechCrunch runs the story about one company that seems to be using humans in image recognition process.  Comments to that story also mention Google doing the same.

To me it feels like a problem with timing.  There is a need to tag and search a whole lot of images.  But there is no good automated solution available.  So we are falling back on humans.  It’s easy to come up with a few other areas, in which there is a need today for solutions which won’t even be here tomorrow.  Technology needs help, I guess.

I’ve been using Google Reader for quite some time now, but it was only today that I noticed that I can search within a single feed.  The drop down menu near the search box at the top contains choices like “All items”, “Starred items”, and “Shared items”, which are followed by the tags.  But if you scroll further down, after the tags, there is a list of all your subscriptions.  You can pick any feed that you are subscribed to and search within it.

I’m not sure if this is a recently added feature or if it was there for ever, but it’s priceless.  I was missing out on it, because I use way too many tags and, apparently,  never scrolled down deep enough.

Via Google Blogoscoped post I learned it is possible to search for messages in Gmail based on what language they are written in.  The operator is called “lang” and can be used like so:   “lang:ru“  or “lang:russian“.  The operator can be used both in regular searches and in filter conditions.   As noted in the comments, this might be useful for sorting out spam messages (label with “Spam“) written in languages that you don’t understand (Chinese, for example, - “lang:zh“).

For me personally, this comes very useful, since most of my friends and family (at least those with who I communicate via email) speak both Russian and English, and sometimes it takes too much time going through all the messages instead of picking just those in one language (for those cases when I remember the language).

I’ve never particularly liked notebooks. They are clumsy, uncomfortable, hot, slow, weird, and hard to fix or upgrade. And expensive, of course.

But circumstances are changing now in such a way that I’ll need to have a notebook pretty soon. We can’t manage on a single computer nomore, and there is no place to put a second one. Plus I am way too often moving around.

I am not in a hurry yet, but I can’t delay the purchase for another six month. Tha gives me enough to time to study the options and compare the prices.

So far I haven’t done any research what-so-ever. And with this knowledge I am looking for the following:

• IBM ThinkPad T41 notebook (I’ve heard lots of positive comments about this particular line of products, and it supports Linux pretty good too.)
• Fast CPU is not an issue. Even 1 GHz will be enough.
• RAM is good, so I’ll need more. 1 GByte is pretty close to perfect.
• I don’t want an elephant in the bag, but I want something bigger than my mobile, so the ideal size of the screen is 15″.
• Well-supported video card - NVidia MX-series or something similar.
• CD/DVD/DVD-RW is a must.
• USB is a must.
• WiFi card, supported by Fedora Linux 4 or later is a must.
• 10/100 (or maybe even 10/100/1000) Mbit Ethernet adapter is a must.
• Soundcard with line-in (read: Skype) is a must.
• Battery life is not essential - if it can live and work for 2-4 hours, then it’s good enough. Usually, I am pretty close to power lines.

That’s pretty much what I have thought of at this moment. Any suggestions, ideas, or pointers are very welcome.

P.S.: The system will be running Fedora Linux and Fedora Linux only. No dualboots to Windows or anything crazy like that.

P.P.S.: Notebook can even be second-hand, if in good condition.