GMaps Satellite Images

Google maps has better satellite imagery of Gambia than it does of Hartford, CT. How frustrating! I still can't see my house in CT... I keep hoping that'll change.

I'm writing this post using Firefox 2 Alpha 3. I installed it because I wanted to play around with some of the more advanced canvas tag capabilities it has. It also has inline spellchecking of textareas, which is nice for applications like this. Strangely, "Firefox" doesn't seem to be in the spelling dictionary... you'd think they'd have noticed that by now! I got it to crash a couple of times when I was using the canvas tag incorrectly, but it's been pretty smooth sailing since then. I'm going to try to stick with it to help contribute to the testing effort.

To the user, there aren't massive changes immediately apparent: tabs are a bit different, the search box is improved, and it seems a bit snappier. I won't bother to walk through the features since this isn't even a beta and the information is already out there, but you might want to try it at some point.

My advisor was mentioned on Slashdot yesterday (and mentioned in the wall street journal, too).

Sudoku

Google's resident puzzle expert, Wei-Hwa, has posted some explanations of his Sledgehammer method of solving Sudoku puzzles, here and here. I just started trying these since a girl on the plane on the way here gave me some, so I'm not particularly good, but it's fun anyway.

I'm feeling lucky

Time for an update, now that I've started at Google. I'm working on Book Search with the OCR team. The people there are great, as is the food, but I won't write about either yet, as I'm not in the mood right now.

A couple of links worth reading:
Scan this Book! - New York Times article about Book Search and related projects. This article is much better than similar articles in the press that I've seen before. It found a good balance and is worth reading if you'd like ot better understand the promise and difficulties in the project. I've been a big believer in the project long before I was being considered for an internship... I think it has the capability to be one of the most critical projects for Google to accomplish its goals.

Xooglers is a blog written by former Googlers. I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce the blog's name, but the writing is excellent and has some very balanced, seemingly honest insights. Definitely worth the read, especially for other interns.

I'm in California now, starting tomorrow morning. I'm exhausted from the trip, but excited for tomorrow regardless.

Tim O'Reilly has an interesting analysis of Google Book Search's addressing of the long tail of search. We're just at the tip of the iceberg with this sort of thing, but it's interesting to see some preliminary numbers.

I've been working hard through a lot of this week on Runstoppable, the online running log and route mapping tool I've been working on with a couple of friends. I'm hoping to release version 1.2 of the site in the next week, which is pretty exciting. But anyway, the point of this post: I'm looking for some sort of "loading" graphic for use on the pages (since we use a lot of AJAX). Ideally, I'd like to use something like a 32x32 or larger version of the firefox rotating progress thing (in the upper right). I haven't been able to find anything that I could use (legally) without modification. Does anyone know where I might be able to find one? I'm trying to avoid having to do any image work on this.

Since I'll probably be mentioning it from time to time, a few words about Runstoppable: the site uses google maps to map routes and compute distance and merges that information with a fully-feature running log, including statistics and collaboration features. We also have some pretty awesome elevation graphs (pictured, and here's an real example). We currently have over 850 users from word-of-mouth alone. If you're interested in participating in the project in your free time, let me know.

OK, that was far more than "a few words", but whatever. I get excited about this.

Edit: added an image to liven things up a bit.