Ed's Tech Tips

Cuil, pronounced like "cool", is an old Irish word for knowledge and is also the name of a new search engine. Here is how they describe themselves on their About page:

...the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

When I first tried it a few days ago it was rather sluggish, but that was when it was recently announced. It is now pretty snappy. You do get different results and in some cases better results. I like the layout which includes 2-3 columns. The results always have an image, a title and a small paragraph of text followed by the link. In some results you get a very useful category box that reveals related categories for you to search. Mouse over a term in a category to get a pop-up definition.

Some other useful features are the search term suggestions that appear as you type and quickly guess the term or phrase you are looking for. For large categories, like "Linux" or "James Patterson" you get tabs. The Safe Search feature is on by default. You can easily add Cuil to your FireFox search box. 

I like it and encourage you to check it out and I think you'll be surprised by how much more relevant information is out on the Internet. I think Microsoft jumped the gun too quickly buying Powerset and should have held out for Cuil which I think may give Google some competition unless Google buys them or can replicates their algorithm. Of course, it is no surprise that many of the founders of Cuil are former Google employees with Phd's in computer science.

POST UPDATE: After using Cuil for more varied searches, the results can be a real hit or miss. When it is working, it can be right on the money, but when it's not, it can be way off the mark. If Cuil is going to compete with Google they need to be more consistent. For example, I performed a search on "rss feeds via email". Google returned numerous results pertaining to what I was looking for, while Cuil just returned unrelated results that only pertained to "email". As I experimented I discovered that Cuil works well for names and single keywords, but give it a phrase or multiple keywords and it chokes

On Friday June 25th, a young 47 year-old Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon Professor in computer science, passed away after a 22 month battle with cancer. It was a battle he waged with style, grace, humor and forever the teacher, he used it as a opportunity to teach us how to better live life. He leaves behind a wife, three young children and a legacy that they can be proud of. It's not many people that can say that they achieved many of their childhood dreams and then went on to enable others to achieve their own dreams.  

Randy gave his last lecture at the university on Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed crowd. In his moving presentation, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. For more, visit www.cmu.edu/randyslecture. Below is the video that millions have since viewed and has been turned into a book which provides more details and back story. Thanks to Google for hosting the entire 1 hour and 16 minute video - yes, take the time to watch the whole thing, you won't regret it. I highly recommend both. We would all be better off to follow his example.

Part of Randy's legacy is the Alice Project. Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. It happens to be appealing to female students, because it helps them focus on successful storytelling and learn about programming without realizing that they are doing so. Many colleges and high schools have adopted the program. It would be cool to see Mount Holyoke College adopt it as well. For more information and FREE download: http://www.alice.org

This past weekend my 17 month old granddaughter and I took our maiden voyage and a few additional trips on a bicycle together with the aid of the new iBert child bicycle seat. Unlike older types of seats that put the child on the rear of the bike behind the adult where the child has to either stare at the adult's back or look to the side, the iBert puts the child toward the front of the bicycle just behind the handle bars. This way the view of the child is greatly improved and thus the bicycling experience for the child, as well as, the adult pedaling the bike. The iBert offers a better center of gravity and removes the mystery of what the child is doing behind the parent.

I've used both styles of seats and I like the iBert. WeeRide offers a similar style of bike seat, but the child's legs are not lifted forward and the adult has to pedal with his knees sticking out. 

The iBert is fairly easy to attach to your bike and it fits many styles of bikes as is attested to in the iBert photo gallery. A single mounting bar bolts on to your handle bar stem so that when you turn the seat turns with you. It did not fit my bike because my shifters and brake handles were right over where the legs go, so I installed it on my on my daughter's bicycle. I had to slightly raise the stem to allow the braket to be bolted on. Also it is a tight squeeze between the seat and the iBert. When you stop you need to be able to touch the ground from the bicycle seat since there is not much room to stand over the top bar of the bicycle frame.

It does take some extra effort to bike when you have an extra 25 or so pounds on the bicycle in front of you. Plus, you cannot really stand up to power down on the pedals. Still, it's a fun time. Yesterday, my granddaughter grabbed my finger and pulled me over to our bicyce helmets and wanted to go for a ride. It's a great opportunity to introduce your child to a fun activity which may be a primary form of transportation for them when they grow up as oil supplies dwindle and cost increasingly more. At the same time it encourages the habit of wearing a bicycle helmet. As my granddaughter grows up she will not remember a time that she did not wear a helmet to ride a bicycle. As parents and role models for your children, wear your own bicycle helmet. How can you make a good argument for helmets if you do not wear one yourself? Plus, they can prevent serious head injuries.

Tags: bicycle, children. seat, helmets, recreation, family

Big Buck Bunny is a very well done short animation video created completely with the open source 3D design and rendering program called Blender. The Blender Foundation, the non-profit organization created to support the software, helped to produce the movie short with a professional production company as an effort to improve the software by pushing it beyond what the hobbyist community could do. In the end they created a great promotion for the software as well as helped to spur various improvements in it's development including the rendering of fur and grass. The video is free to download, but you can also purchase it on DVD or Blue-ray disk. In addition, because it is open source and released under the Creative Commons license, all of the models and music created for the animation are also freely available to developers and designers who would like to experiment with them or use them in their own projects. The next project that the Foundation is working on is a 3D game based on the characters in the movie called Apricot.

Open source projects like these are a real boon to budding digital artists or students since the tools and the materials or content are available for free. Well, almost free. You'll need the high speed bandwidth to download over 7 GB of data file. The finished movie is much smaller depending on what size you download. Plus, you'll need a computer capable of running the 3D software, which by the way, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms.

Here is demo video of the game:

I listen to a number of podcasts and most of them are geared toward technology as is PRI's The World Technology Podcast , but this one stands out. This is how they describe themselves:

The World's weekly Technology Podcast brings you all the latest and greatest news from the fields of global technology and science.  The World is a US-based international news and analysis program co-produced by the BBC World Service, Public Radio International, and WGBH Public Radio in Boston.

I put the emphasis on "global" and "international" because that is where the big difference is with this program. You get a global perspective. For example, many tech pod-casts reported and commented on Bill Gates stepping down from the day-to-day operation sf Microsoft. Many pundits focused on the history of Microsoft, the pros and cons of Gate's leadership and they speculated on the future of the company. However, PRI is the only one that went outside of the U.S. and asked people what they thought of Bill Gates. I was surprised to learn that he is greatly admired and respected in China, despite the fact that many computers there are running counterfeit copies of Windows. 

On the same show I learned about an obscure new language called NOL, which strives to become an Esperanto for the Internet and Cell Phone age. It features a compact grammar and vocabulary that is ideally suited for text messaging, while at the same time bridging the cultural barriers of language.

The show just celebrated it's 200th episode. It is very informative and entertaining. While it has not garnered the same popularity CNet's Buzz Out Loud or This Week In Technology, I encourage you to check it out. I think as Americans, we would benefit from a more global perspective.