Technology for Education and Entertainment

I hadn't had an eye exam in a couple of years, and my doctor has recommended once a year. I made an appointment at the UC Berkeley Optometry Center and showed up at the appointed hour.

To show the eye charts, they now use a flat screen connected to a Windows computer instead of a projector. In the middle of the exam the screen saver kicked in and the screen went black! I just started laughing. The intern was relieved that I found it funny instead of vexing. I actually looked at her computer to see if I could fix it. The screen saver interval was locked down, however, so I left it up to her and their IT department.

They decided to take pictures of the insides of my eyes. It added a little to the fee, but (after I asked) they said they could email the pictures to me. To take the pictures, they had a device made by Canon with a digital camera back (that was then connected to a computer). They tried a couple of times, but couldn't get the picture to show up on the computer. They then called the tech guy. He just unplugged the camera from the computer, plugged it back in, turned off the camera and the device and turned them both back on. And it all worked.

I could have done that!

Is someone gaming Google "Web Clips"?

In GMail today, I noticed that the "web clip" at the top of the list of emails just said:

Dictionary.com Word of the Day - Presented By: - 18 hours ago

Unclear as to what that meant, I clicked on it, and found myself on what looked like a cleverly-disguised ad for one of these "work-at-home" marketing scams, complete with misspellings:

"We knew we had to do something, so we put our heads together and started trying online job opporuntities."

Can we trust Web Clips any more?

AOL to Google "conversion" project

I know a couple of folks who are still using AOL as their email (and contact and favorites) service. Some of them are receptive to moving to Google, so I've started working on helping them. A few weeks ago I actually put together a "business plan" for a service that would provide this functionality:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dgjndsm4_0c68v7vcn

In the meantime, however, Google came out with their conversion service:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/import-your-mail-and-contacts-from.html

It's not complete, but it's free, and thus that business plan hits the dust. I am, however, going to continue my efforts to help folks that do want to move their data from AOL to Google:

http://www.chriskeith.me/ck/Home/overview

I probably won't be updating this blog with every change that goes here, but will occasionally mention significant milestones. Feel free to pass this on to anyone that uses AOL (if you actually know anyone who does...) but wants to move to Google.

Erratum (part 3) for D. S. Malik's "Data Structures Using C++"

On page 738 is an explication of Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. Everything makes sense to me except step 2:

Set smallestWeight[vertex] = 0

This is because step 1 is:

Initialize array with smallestWeight[u] = weights[vertex, u]

Unless I misread something (or the weight from a node to itself isn't zero), I assume that step 1 subsumes step 2. Or am I missing something?

See also other errata.

Time to stop trusting Google Spreadsheets?

Somehow Google Spreadsheets lost the most recent version of one of my documents. I had edited it (and actually printed it out). When I went back, however, my changes were gone.

I cleared my Firefox cache and restarted my machine, but still didn't get the version that matched my printed version.

I had shared it with someone, so maybe there's a bug somewhere in their sharing code.

Autosave is a nice feature, EXCEPT when it doesn't work. At least I lost less than an hour of work.

I don't think it's a virus or other malware, because I run reasonably heavy security on both my machine and my router.

How about giving us a "Save" button, Google folks?

... a few minutes later..

It looks like a display problem. I can see some of the old documents in the revision history, but they (Firefox? Google?) won't display my changes.

Google doesn't like my domain name?

Does Google automatically reject any domain names that contain the string "google"?

Visual Studio C++ Release vs. Debug

Timings for anagram program that was the final assignment in my data structures class:

Release:

Found 199741 words.
Built multimap in 532 milliseconds.
Created anagram file in 125 milliseconds.

Debug:

Found 199741 words.
Built multimap in 2796 milliseconds.
Created anagram file in 3891 milliseconds.