Libraries live!

Libraries are not losing relevance, at least not in the U.S. According to a PEW study on information searches for problem solving, more than half of Americans visited a public library in 2007. The biggest users were the from the 18-30 Gen Y group. 68% of visitors used computers at the library, 65% used them to access the internet while they were there, and 62% used them to check library resources. Interestingly, usage of libraries is highly correlated with "high" access to internet (ie. broadband). And libraries are effective: 88% of users found a lot or some of what they were seeking. By contrast, 53% of those who did not use libraries found a lot or some of what they were seeking.

F#

F#, Microsoft's functional programming language, will be fully integrated into Visual Studio. Ars Technica has a nice description of what F# is and the advantages of functional programming.

Firefox 2.0.0.8 unstable on Windows

If you have not installed the Firefox 2.0.0.8 update on Windows, wait for a bit. It keeps crashing. Mozilla recognizes the problem and plans an update soon.

Digitizing content and the Open Content Alliance

The NY Times published an article today about how several large libraries have rebuffed offers from Google to scan their collections, aiming for broader distribution of their content by preferring to go with the Open Content Alliance. The OCA has recently reached an agreement with the Boston Public Library to scan content, and will be scanning 136,000 books from the Library of Congress. This content will be indexed and made available through the OCA website and Yahoo!

It is laudable that several institutions are trying to make their content available to the widest possible audience. They are standing on principle, disagreeing to cede complete control to a private entity.

Google, IBM and cloud computing research

Google and IBM recently announced setup of a data center for access to students to work on cloud computing. They expect to setup 1,600 processors by the end of the year. This should be a fantastic resource for students to build and run some large applications.

Google has published a bunch of research that has gone into building their applications. In particular, MapReduce - a programming model based on functional programming - allows programs to be automatically parrallelized. According to Google, "a typical MapReduce computation processes many terabytes of data on thousands of machines."

Anand wins!

Vishwanathan Anand is the world chess champion. He won the championship tournament played in Mexico City in September 2007. A hugely satisfying result to a never-perfect system for determining who gets to be called world champion.

Anand won the 14-player double round-robin tournament with a score of +4. He was +3 in the first half of the tournament, but only a half-point clear of Gelfand. Both Kramnik and Gelfand lost round 9 to give Anand a 1.5 point lead. He was two points clear ahead of the field after round 11, and coasted to the win from there on.

It remains to be seen if FIDE can sustain a fair and well-run world championship system. Hope springs eternal. And at least for the next year or so, Anand can savour the view from the top...

Office supplies

One of the things I keep seeing stocked in our office supplies cabinet is floppy disks. No one uses them anymore, of course. They are sooo 20th century! No one seems to know who orders them, either. Perhaps the Office Depot guys put in whatever they want. If so, it is nice to be able to go in and sell a bunch of random things.

The latest joke is the anti-bacterial pencil. The box says that the anti-bacterial protection is for the pencil, not the person. We all had a good laugh about it, as I suppose do OfficeDepot and PaperMate at $1.25/pencil.