Interesting observation:

"China has a large mobile opportunity, with so many mobile users who will become mobile Internet users in the next few years as 3G and other technologies become pervasive," Lee said in an interview.

"These mobile users have very different usage patterns from the American users. Most Chinese users who touch mobile Internet will have no PC at all.

And this

Kurt Vonnegut famously divided writers into two groups: swoopers and bashers. A swooping writer writes one long word-belch chunk of text all at once, and then revises it repeatedly. A bashing writer will spend a long time on a single sentence, rewriting it until it's perfect, and then move on to the next sentence. I'm a swooper.  I've already revised this post several times, and I'm not yet happy with it, so I may still revise some more.

Old BBC article

Websites face four-second cut-off

Shoppers are likely to abandon a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load, a survey suggests.

The research by Akamai revealed users' dwindling patience with websites that take time to show up.

It found 75% of the 1,058 people asked would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load.

The time it took a site to appear on screen came second to high prices and shipping costs in the list of shoppers' pet-hates, the research revealed.

Why is it that people always insist on adding www before a hostname, even where one didn't exist in the first place? Do they think that the web doesn't work without a www on the front? Do they think that a host name needs to have at least three parts (username.sitename.com doesn't seem to get the "add the www" treatment nearly as much as just sitename.com does)? Do they think that a hostname needs to have exactly three parts? Is it because it looks more aesthetic with the www to balance out the com?

Field lengths determined by looking at the file. If any of them are wrong, please point it out as a comment and I can correct them.

One way to print out the number of characters in each line of a file:

awk '{print length, $0}'

One way to find the longest line is awk '{print length, $0}'|sort -nr|head -1. For example, to find the line with the maximum length in the file abcd.txt, (and how long that line is) you could run:

cat abcd.txt|awk '{print length, $0}'|sort -nr|head -1

If you just want to know what the largest length is, you can remove the , $0 like so:

When is someone going to come out with a little site that spiders the web looking for google adsense javascript tags and groups together sites and pages by the owner of the adsense tag?

The GIMP doesn't seem to have a Maximum (or a Minimum) filter. Looking at a description of what the Maximum filter does, it seems like it shouldn't be hard to create a Maximum or Minimum filter for The GIMP using Script-Fu.. Two obvious implementations come to mind, one of them O(N*M²) where N is the number of pixels in the image and M is the radius given to the filter. The other obvious choice would be O(N log N), which might actually be a better way to do it.

Analog, added during exposure

While reading about soft focus, I came across a method for applying soft focus digitally. One of the steps involved was a motion blur. After some experimenting, I discovered that the GIMP motion blur moves the image from where it previously was, by one half the blur length. The examples in the article lead me to believe that photoshop leaves the image where it was, without shifting it over, which seems to me like the correct behavior.