Category Archives: Internet

John Battelle's Searchblog: Google To Launch Major Pilot Program with Harvard, Stanford, U Mich, Others:

Harvard University is embarking on a collaboration with Google that could harness Google's search technology to provide to both the Harvard community and the larger public a revolutionary new information location tool to find materials available in libraries. In the coming months, Google will collaborate with Harvard's libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University's extensive library system. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. As of 9 am on December 14, an FAQ detailing the Harvard pilot program with Google will be available at http://hul.harvard.edu…

This doesn't mean I get to enjoy Harvard's library while basking in Miami's climate: the public access will be limited to the public domain. But I'm one step closer.

Meanwhile, it does mean that we're going to feel the pinch of 100 year copyright even more than we already do.

I am trying to telnet (remote access) to a machine about a block and a half away. But my residential DSL provider is Bell South. The machine is on the campus at UM. And tonight my packets can't quite seem to get there….could it be because my packets have to take quite a long detour — through a bad neighborhood — to get across the street?

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Google Scholar lets you search for academic articles. The cute feature is that it finds things by citation, so it will tell you about articles that are not online but have been cited in articles that are online, which allows you to request them from your friendly local dead tree library.

You find the most incredible things online. Here's what claims to be The Internet's Most Accurate English-to-English Dictionary.

Of course in a few weeks Google will offer the same functionality, and in two years it will be built into IE SP 4.

(Now also available in other languages: Español · Deutsch · Français · Italiano · Ελληνικά · Português)

GMail has been down for the past two hours. Occasionally I can get an email list, once in a while an email from the inbox, but never any that I've filed in a folder.

UM still can't provide me with reliable mail service…the email server went down last week for a while and no one knows why. I fear I will have to roll my own on the server that runs the blog. Do I wait for Dreamhost to finish beta-testing spamassasin? Install and configure my own? I have better things to do, darn it.

I am entering this post from a terminal in the Kendall public library, where I have just spent the last 30 minutes killing spam while my kids play in the local chess club.

The nice gentleman at the terminal next to mine has a technical problem neither he nor I can solve. He doesn't have a computer at home. He reads his email online (via mail.yahoo.com) at the library. As you might expect, the computers here are seriously locked down: you can't save anything to a hard disk, although you can bring in your own floppy to write to. Someone sent him an email with a zipped attachment. The computers here don't have any unzipping software and there is no way to download one. The only browser is IE, which doesn't seem to open the .zip extension automatically.

So how can he read the attachment to his mail?