Over a year ago, I wrote about a feature on the New York Times website. The feature works as follows: the reader double-clicks on a word, and a new window opens with a dictionary lookup of that word. I called it a killer feature.
Today I find that the same feature, powered by the same company (Answers.com) is present on CBSNews.com. Not bad.
I’ve been getting a 502 error on my Gmail account for almost four hours now:
Temporary Error (502)
We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to use your account while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.
Please try accessing your account again in a few minutes.
I just got an email from them (sent to my Yahoo! account, as I specified in an error report/support request):
Hello,
Thank you for your report.
We are aware of this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
Anyone else having problems?
[Update 2008.08.07 11:16AM] When my alarm went off this morning I had access to my email. I went to bed last night around 1AM and it was still unavailable. So I was without Gmail for somewhere between 12 and 18.5 hours.
In other news, script.aculo.us becomes PoopyUrl.com. WTF? Here’s to discarding the first and/or best use of the most clever URL technique I know. I’m glad I stopped using del.icio.us four years ago.
So I’m pretty anal.
I didn’t sign up for Facebook until about a year ago. I had long since graduated from RIT. Facebook started out as a social network for Harvard students, then it expanded to other colleges. For a while registration required a .edu email address. Even now, in order to identify yourself to others as a student or former student of a particular educational institution, you need to verify ownership of an email address from that school’s domain.
I’m sure I’ve written posts in the past about my RIT email address. I couldn’t wait for it to be turned off. But now that I’m on Facebook, I want that address just so I can identify myself as an RIT alum. Enter: solution.
I think saw a link that pointed to this in Gmail, but I forget, and it’s unimportant. I feel like this is way under-advertised. If you go to https://www.alumniconnections.com/olc/pub/RIT/, you can get yourself an email address @alum.rit.edu. Get it hooked up, go into Facebook, identify yourself as an RIT student, bam.
The official date for the launch of Firefox 3 is June 17, 2008. Click the link, pledge to download, and you’ll receive an email when it’s available.
Yesterday a Dashboard Update was released for the Xbox 360. The console now supports more file formats (i.e. Divx and Xvid) via sharing from a Windows PC.
I have a history dating back to Vista’s release of problems getting my Xbox 360 to play nice with my Dell, running Vista. However, when I installed Vista on my MacBook under Boot Camp, everything worked.
To my chagrin — but not my surprise — the Dell couldn’t even see the 360 on my network. Insistent on trying out the new features, I threw away 19 days of uptime and rebooted my MacBook into Windows.
After typing in my Windows password, I got my first surprise of the night — Windows telling me that my copy of Vista is not genuine. It offered to let me type in the product key. It didn’t work, so I even tried the product key for the Dell’s copy of Vista. No dice. Ever so kind in a black desktop, no taskbar, no Start Menu sort of way, Windows allowed me to search the Microsoft Knowledge Base for help. It turned up nothing in the 90 or so seconds I was willing to give it. I called the 1-800 number. Closed; outside normal business hours.
I decided to boot back into Mac OS X.
I opened up Firefox and jumped into Gmail, and the Web Clip at the top linked to an Engadget article about the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player’s new price drop. I clicked on it and saw a related headline: Vista SP1 kills the WGA kill switch. I even clicked on the link to press release — just to get the story directly from the horse’s mouth. Turns out, when Microsoft updates Vista to Service Pack 1, “Users whose systems are identified as counterfeit … won’t lose access to functionality or features.”
Too bad I just deleted my Windows partition.
As some of you may know, Halo 3 was released on September 25, 2007. It was developed by Bungie for the Xbox 360. On October 5, 2007, Bungie announced that it would become an independent company, no longer wholly owned by Microsoft. The Internet lit up with conjecture over why such a split occurred. Some suggested that Bungie wanted to work on intellectual properties other than Halo.
Meanwhile, Bungie has produced a podcast almost weekly since July of 2007. I have followed Bungie.net pretty closely since before Halo 2 launched, mostly because of Halo 2′s integration with the Bungie website. I didn’t give the podcast a listen until shortly after I got my hands on Halo 3. I think I was working on my Halo 3 Emblem Chooser™ but didn’t want to stop soaking up Halo 3 goodness.
The podcast has three regular contributors: Frank O’Connor, Brian Jarrard, and Luke Smith. Luke is new to Bungie, having come over from 1UP.com only in April of 2007. In January 2007, Luke interviewed game developer/producer David Jaffe, who was still Creative Director of Sony Santa Monica at the time. This interview was recorded for the 1UP Show, and is still available on GameVideos.com at this link (embedding screwed up my css). I have graciously embedded the video after the break. Luke asked one question in particular caught my attention:
A lot of these guys — like look at the Bungie situation. They made Halo. Halo’s a hit. That’s all they make now. That’s all they’re making, and you have sort of — you’ve ducked out of that. Like God of War was a hit and well, you’re still — I mean — you’re still painting on top of it, but you’re not — it’s not your grind. It’s not the only thing that you get to work on, like some of those guys. How’d you swing that?
Luke starts his question at about 9:05 into the interview, if you care to skip ahead.
Every once in a while I (try to) submit an article to Digg. Every time, I:
And then I get the dupe message. Eight steps. EIGHT STEPS! This could easily — and obviously — be reduced to three steps. Do the damn duplicate check after step 3. It makes about a million times more sense!
So I’m reading an article I find via Digg. The article’s on the New York Times website. While reading, I run across a word I am not familiar with.
Automatically, I want to put this word into Google. Firefox (and I suppose IE) allows users to highlight text, right click, and choose “Search Google for” the selected text. If Wikipedia is the currently selected search engine in the toolbar search box, the right click allows the user to “Search Wikipedia for” and so on.
Of course, the easiest way to highlight a single word is by double-clicking on it. So that’s what I do. I double click on “abstemious.”
Suddenly a new window appears. While it’s loading, I think I must have done something wrong. Then the page loads. It’s a New York Times.com-powered dictionary lookup of “abstemious.” This is like the coolest thing ever. Well, maybe not ever.
Examining the URL of the newly opened window, we see a few things (with some line breaks to reduce ugliness).
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?
srchst=ref&
query=more%20valuable%20to%20abstemious%20Martins%20than%20to&
fw=3
The query string includes, from the article, three words before the highlighted term and three words after the highlighted term. The field fw (focus word?) at the end of the query string indicates which word to pass to the dictionary, using a zero-based array. (I tried double-clicking other words in the article and changing the value of fw to test this.) I can only imagine that including surrounding words might provide context to generate an even more accurate definition. Why the target word is variable, however, eludes me.
Oh, and srchhst=ref sounds like search history = reference. Whatever that means.
Please, test this feature out for yourself. Head over to the New York Times site, click on any story, then double click on any word. (The feature doesn’t appear to work from the front page.) Awesome!
I got a Honda Accord. I picked it up yesterday. It’s a 2007 Coupe V6. Black exterior, black interior. I took some pictures today and posted them on Flickr. The Jetta is gone, but I posted the ‘new Jetta’ pics on Flickr, too.