google – Made by Mikal

Google book search

I just noticed that the ImageMagick book appears in Google book search. I’m pleased.

I’m giving a MythTV talk at Google in the next week (although I can’t find it on the events calendar at the moment, I’ll update this post when I do) so I’ve been playing with MythTV 0.21 a little more than I have in the past. Its pretty cool.

I’m still writing the talk, so I don’t know 100% what it will cover, but I’m thinking it would be good to include some of the stuff from 0.21 as a teaser. Storage groups, the flash player in MythWeb, and the tweaks to the theme system seem like good things to include. Does anyone have other things they think are really cool in 0.21?

Oh, and I’ll have to cover guide data for the US, so it might be time to catch up with my MythTV email backlog once again.

Hopefully in you live near Silicon Valley you can come along to the talk and we can chat afterwards.

Update: I found a Google blog post with the details. To quote the most important information:

Like all sessions of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, Michael’s presentation will be open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM at our Mountain View campus; guests should plan to sign in at Building 43 reception upon arrival. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome and encouraged to attend. Michael’s presentation will also be taped and published along with all of the public Google Tech Talks.

As pointed out by a friend at work

Trends for “return gift”:

Who would have thought that people only return gifts at Christmas?

This would be me pimping tcmalloc

Uber cool Google written malloc implementation saves day at Wikipedia.

Rusty objects to the 6mb memory overhead. I guess the overhead is a big deal if you run lots of binaries, which isn’t always the case.

Solar panel reflection effects in satellite imagery

Google Blogoscoped has an interesting pointer to a star effect on a Google Earth satellite image. Apparently the consensus is that its the sun reflecting off a solar panel, but it’s still nice.

MySQL Camp

Kynan and I came along to the MySQL camp, and thru a quirk of fate pretty much ended up running it (the person who was meant to be running it got injured on the first day and had to go off to hospital). In return we wrote the Google Code blog post about the event. Pretty cool, huh?

A MythTV Jabber bot

While I love my wife and kids to distraction, the distraction bit is real. Then again, I’m sure they have a counter argument that I tend to end up deep in thought, and which point you could probably push me off my chair and I wouldn’t notice. Anyway, that’s mostly beside the point. What is relevant is for the first time in nearly a year (since 18 November 2005 to be exact, but who is counting?) I’m alone. All alone.

So, apart from watching the West Wing (which I haven’t seen before, and is fantastic), sleeping in, and going to a party tonight, I am coding.

What I’m writing is a follow on from my night hacking the other day, which was getting PyXMPP working with Google Talk. What I want is a bot which will take IM messages, and execute them using the MythTV front end. Oh, and it will display text using the on screen display if you ask nicely.

So, does anyone have any thoughts on if that sort of thing is useful to them? I think it sounds useful to me, but perhaps I’m odd.

Back to hacking.

Slashdot, Google and Slack

Rodney Gedda’s writeup of my talk on Slack (which by the way is in no way a comment on Slackware, or derived from Slackware) got slashdotted today. I am assured by Alan that the download link stayed up just fine, despite benley’s best efforts. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting this level of attention, although the tool is very cool.

Other press coverage (that I am aware of) for my AUUG talks includes:

Obviously many of these articles recycle content, and the links above still include the Google News redirects, because it’s easier than editting them out by hand.

(I have been slashdotted before, for TwinkleTux, and another time with the review for the ImageMagick book. Then there was the time that one of my articles about ImageMagick got slashdotted (direct link), but for some reason the sequel didn’t.)

Creepy

mary had a little Lamb Its fleece was white as snow; And as red as blood, and as black as the night, with the Corps Program, is for students. who have a disability or medical- condition is required to be submitted to the Storting. in the spring of the year. in the Shadows of Motown

From Google Talk.

Collect the whole set

Andrew Morton has been hired by Google.