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.

Kramnik is the new world chess champion!

The match in Elista is over. Kramnik and Topalov were tied after 12 games and played a 4-game rapid tie break. Three of the four games were decisive, Kramnik winning the fourth.

I had said earlier that Topalov was a deserving champion. After the toiletgate shenanigans, I was rooting for Kramnik. He managed to overcome the one point penalty (from foreiting the fifth game) and prevailed. Mig has a good quote on his blog: "I don't know if the better player won today. But looking back over the past few weeks I'd have to say that the better man certainly did. Hail the new and improved world champion! Or, dare I type it, hail the new World Champion!"

The games themselves were very exciting, though the quality was often affected by nerves. They usually are exciting when Topalov plays! Reports and game scores can be found on the Chessbase site.

The next thing to look forward to is a resumption of a regular and fair system of determining future world champions. FIDE has for too long been a highly unprofessional and highly political organization. That needs to change.

Topalov-Kramnik match

A match to "unify" the world chess championship is under way in Elista, Kalmikia (FIDE president Kirsan Ilymzhinov's backyard). Kramnik followed up his fantastic Olympiad performance by going up 2-0 after the first two games. After a couple of draws, the psychological games began and resulted in the toiletgate scandal.

Instead of continuing the hugely interesting games, we had the edifying sight of Topalov complaining about the number of times Kramnik needed to visit the restroom and getting a pliant FIDE appeals committee to change playing conditions. The full details are too silly to elaborate. Kramnik forfeited game 5, refusing to agree to a change in conditions not approved by him. The match seemed to be over then, before Kramnik agreed to play game 6 under protest. Kramnik has clearly been wronged, and there is a huge outpouring of support for him.

Kramnik's conduct with the "classical championship" had been a bit dodgy, with him refusing to grant Kasparov a rematch and avoiding playing against any other worthy opponent. I thought Topalov had a better claim to being called world champion. But Kramnik has got off to a great start in this match and it looks as if the Topalov camp decided to use every means at their disposal to turn things round.

netgear MR814v2 and centrino 3945ABG do not talk

Tried configuring a Toshiba notebook with builtin Centrino 3945ABG to work with an old Netgear 802.11b router (MR814v2). It would not work with 128-bit WEP enabled. It would work if I disabled encryption. Did not find any information about this on Netgear or other support sites. I did upgrade firmware on the router as well as for the wireless device (v10.5.1.57 date July 2, 2006) without any success. A bunch of other cards including a a couple of Dell builtin wireless chipsets worked just fine with this router. I guess it is time to buy a new router, and take advantage of 802.1x security features while I am at it...