Random Brain Dump

It’s only my 4th day as a new employee @ Yahoo and our team already launched a major site today: Yahoo! Food! What’d they do w/out me… 😉

It’s a very cool site, everything food-related: recipes from the likes of Martha Stewart’s prison, I mean kitchen, local restaurant reviews, articles & how-to videos. Just in time for your demanding family, this coming holiday season.

Here’s a list of top 50 coolest websites for 2006 from Time magazine.

I ran across this little nifty tool called TaskSwitchXP. It enhances the old boring Windows task switcher by displaying small snapshot of each app. Simple enhancement but very cool & useful. Check it out.

The Oregon State Linux Users Group honors Firefox’s 200 million download milestone by creating this huge crop circle of the Firefox logo in the middle of an oat field. It’s 220 feet in diameter. How freakingly cool is that?

There is actually intelligent life out there on planet Earth! 😉

Here’s a blog advocating the idea of killing the caps lock key. The reasons seem justified to me. The little used key occupies precious keyboard real estate. I myself remaps it to the control key (old habits from the old days of mainframe keyboards). So, I’d say let’s kill it!

Some interesting (to me anyway) 30 day stats (6/28 – 7/28) on rexlam.com:

Hits
Total : 13066
Unique: 956 (unique)

Platforms
Indeterminable 57%
Windows XP 41%
Windows 2000 2%

Browser
Bots 40%
Firefox 1.5.0.4 20%
IE 6.0 12%
Firefox 1.5.0.5 2%
IE 5.5 1%

Search Referrers
blo.gs 77
google.com 69
search.yahoo.com 34
pslranugget.blogspot.com 17
my.yahoo.com 9

Search Strings
audrey woulard 39
rex lam 7
futurama 6
Audrey Woulard 4
herzbolla 4

Countries
UNITED STATES (US) 9282
Indeterminable 2456
JAPAN (JP) 390
FRANCE (FR) 194
TURKEY (TR) 142
MALTA (MT) 118
GERMANY (DE) 113
MALAYSIA (MY) 110
THAILAND (TH) 62
KOREA, REPUBLIC OF (KR) 39
HONG KONG (HK) 38
MOLDOVA, REPUBLIC OF (MD) 27
CHILE (CL) 18
AUSTRALIA (AU) 17
CHINA (CN) 14
CANADA (CA) 10
BRAZIL (BR) 10
UNITED KINGDOM (UK) 5
SPAIN (ES) 4
EUROPEAN UNION (EU) 3
NETHERLANDS (NL) 2
SINGAPORE (SG) 2
INDONESIA (ID) 2
INDIA (IN) 2

You’ll notice that the header above got a long-deserved redesign, finally. The banner image is updated with pictures of the kids from this year. It’s about time. If I don’t do this 4AM Saturday morning, I’ll probably will never get around to it…

It’s been months since I add any new functionality to my site. The last thing I did was adding a rich WYSIWYG editor (only to deactivate it later since it doesn’t work across all OS’es & browsers).

Anyhow, I configured my blog to display related posts when displaying an individual entry. It’s pretty cool. If you’re using WordPress and interested in getting this piece of functionality, check out Alexander Malov’s plugin.

Doesn’t the PC guy in the running Mac ads look like Bill Gates to you? 🙂

Here’s Paul Graham’s thought-provoking essay discussing software patents.