Square Galaxy

A friend of mine was recently eating some packaged cookies, and we noticed something odd about the nutritional facts. We noticed that the calories didn’t quite match up.

Notice how there are two cookies per package, and that each cookie has 170 calories. 2 cookies per package times 170 calories per cookie equals 340 calories per package. But the package shows that there are 350 calories per package. So where are these extra 10 calories coming from?

You will see a similar error when you look at calories from fat.

A couple of weeks ago, I had an interview on campus with a recruiter for HP. The interview went ok I guess, and I was encouraged to apply for positions on their website. Just a couple of days ago, I received an email from “HP Human Resources” which started off:

Thank you for participating in the interviews we recently conducted on campus. Our recruiter was very impressed with your knowledge and abilities and we are actively reviewing your skills and interests against openings within HP.

My question is, how form letter-ish is this? Is this a generic email that they send to everyone they interview? Or does the recruiter actually have to be impressed for this form letter email to be sent?

When Google calculates the importance of a page, they use an ranking algorithm known as Pagerank to produce a numerical value for the page. We don’t know very much about Google’s Pagerank algorithm, except that it is complicated and evaluates lots of criteria, such as number of links, quality of page, and freshness.

Every once in a while Google exports their Pagerank values into a database that can be accessed by the Google Toolbar (also available as a bundled download with the Firefox browser). When Google performs such an update, people can see the Pagerank value for a particular site or page.

The latest export is currently underway, and I’ve noticed that the new Pagerank values for some of my sites and pages have been kind of disappointing. For example, I was excited when my main blog was promoted from a 4 to a 5 during the last Pagerank update, but has now fallen to a 3. This technical blog has fallen from a 3 to a 2, and my other blogs have stayed at about a 3 or 2.

I blame the lack of freshness of my blogs. During the last Pagerank update, I was blogging a new post almost every day. During the last three months, this has slowed down considerably, as blogging isn’t as important as it used to be for me. As a result, my Pagerank is down. This is too bad, but I’m not devaluing my life because of it.

Brigham Young University’s Internet filters continue to block the popular video sharing website, YouTube. BYU blocks the site completely “because it allows inappropriate sexual media throughout its URLs,” according to an article in the student newspaper. I appreciate that BYU wants to block inappropriate content, but YouTube contains so many videos that it is unreasonable to block all of YouTube content because there might be a few bad videos. Likewise you could argue, that BYU should block the whole Internet because there are a few bad sites.

By blocking YouTube, BYU is prohibiting students from accessing great video content. For example, recently The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the sponsoring organization for BYU, has published public affairs videos on YouTube that show Church Leader Elder Ballard explaining church beliefs. Students trying to access this content from BYU campus Internet are blocked from the site.

Other educational materials are also on YouTube. Recently, UC Berkeley started posting full lecture videos online. So far, they’ve posted over 300 hours of video taped lectures online for free access to the public. These lectures could help BYU students supplement their own studies, except that BYU blocks the UC Berkeley’s YouTube site.

BYU’s efforts to block video content come in addition to Google’s own safe-search program anyway, which limits access to inappropriate “adult” material. Why does BYU feel they need to be extra restrictive about YouTube? When does blocking bad content at the consequence of blocking good content go too far?

With the latest release of OS X Leapord being released soon, I thought I would take another look at some of the features of Leapord server. One of the things I’ve been anticipating is the new calendaring server. Apple says that the new server “works well with others,” but maybe not as well as they were first saying. It seems that Apple who was once touting Microsoft Outlook compatibility is now being quite hush about it. Consider this sentence from their old iCal Server features page:

iCal Server uses open calendaring protocols for intergrating with leading calendar programs, including iCal 3 in Leopard, Mozilla’s Sunbird, OSAF’s Chandler, and Microsoft Outook.

The same sentence recently changed to omit any reference to outlook:

iCal Server uses open calendaring protocols for intergrating with leading calendar programs, including iCal 3 in Leopard, and popular CalDAV clients from Mozilla, Open Source Application Foundation and others.

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