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.

MadPenguin has an interesting interview with googler Chris DiBona. It was good to hear that there will be a native Linux Google Earth, and "probably more than half" of Google's desktops run Linux.

Since my laptops run Windows, I'm stuck without linux until my car gets to Mountain View. Hopefully I'll last.

Trendspotting!

At Google Press Day (yesterday), Google Trends was announced (among other things). It's pretty fun to play with.. I had a few interesting queries last night, but the most interesting one I have up right now is John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Harriet Miers. Another good example is tracking queries for Abu Ghraib.

The app is sort of similar to Google Zeitgeist in that it derives trends from query logs, but it scales better to more obscure queries and integrates more news information.