The first qualification round of the Google Code Jam just ended, and I managed to scrape through with two of the three problems solved in time. On the third, unfortunately, I failed to take into account the orders of magnitude of complexity, and my algorithm was not fast enough to solve the larger input case.

Tesseract 2.0 is out. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm looking forward to it very much, as I've had no end of trouble trying to get the 1.04 beta to work. Especially under Linux - it just wouldn't compile.

I'm hoping this new version will make things a lot easier.

I've waited for this particular news for quite some time: Google has released their desktop search for Linux.

The number of reasons that are keeping me from running Linux as my main OS is quickly shrinking.

I just read a Google blog post which finally clears up what I always wondered about: Why am I getting no spam in my Gmail account?

Seriously, just about the only thing that slips past the filter these days is stock spam that is encoded into a hard to read image.

My visitor log shows me the referring pages, of course, and since I neither have a big audience of periodic readers nor other popular bloggers who link to me, most of these are Google searches.

... and Drupal.

Well, I installed the gsitemap module, which is so far only released for 4.7.x, but whose CVS repository already has a 5.x-compatible version... with a bit of meddling required.

Finally, I've been able to submit a sitemap and verification page for Google (that "google495953..." thing), and also look at the request logs to see what exactly Google requests from my site:

These are:

According to PC Advisor and numerous other sources on news.google.com, the Quaero project initiated by France and Germany is falling apart.

Google now offers prints from Picasa Web Albums. On one hand, this is great and very convenient (I probably won't use it, but still). On the other hand, these don't even need to be your photos - you can have anything printed provided it's hosted on Picasa Web.

I was looking for the quote from George Orwell's novel 1984 that begins "War is Peace." So I plugged it into Google, and noticed something funny in the suggestions (I use search auto-completion).

After entering "war is" Google already came up with a ton of suggestions that start that way. Suggestions are ranked by the number of results they return, so these quotes are ranked by their popularity.

These are the top 10:

I've taken to using Google's calculator function quite frequently. Mostly because with the toolbar and the search box in the upper right corner of my browser window, it's the nearest calculator I can reach in terms of clicks and mouse movement; I like to economize (Translation: *cough*lazyass*cough*).