Embarking on a journey to Africa

The time is very near, in fact in less than 24 hrs, me and my friend Ilyia will be on our way to Nairobi, Kenya. We are going on an organized tour for 3 weeks through Kenya and Tanzania ... should be awesome! Through most of the jorney we will be camping out and making our way on a large truck. Hopefully we'll get to see the culture, meet some locals and enjoy the beautiful natural scenery and the animals we are bound to see on the safari.

Our last minute preparations were hectic ... we had to obtain two visas in a span of less than two weeks and to do that we had to send our passports to the respective embassies in Ottawa; luckily we made it on time. We also obtained several vaccination shots and other medication. Lastly we went on a shopping spree to buy everything that could be useful on the trip ... we stopped just short of obtaining water purifying pills :)

I'll try to post more about the trip when I get back and hopefully I'll have a few interesting pictures to share.

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Africa preparations Personal

Memoirs from University of Waterloo

Its been nearly a month since my last exam and I recently received an invitation to the official convocation ceremoniy ... so I'm guessing I've officially graduated 8)

My official degree will be Bachelor of Math with Honors Computer Science Coop major.

It has been five great years at University of Waterloo and it is all over now :(. I guess, I was in a state of disbelief this past month and didn't know what to say on this topic. At the moment, however, I am both sad and happy; happy that I have accomplished what I set out to do, but sad that things will never be the same again. After all, when again will one be in a surrounding of peers pursuing knowledge (some pursuing a degree), with no hidden agenda, loads of interaction, and having fun along the way at such a massive scale?

I remember how in the first few years most people I know would do their coding assignments in the labs at university. There were tons of hard working hours spent there, several all-nighters as well, but it was still fun and exciting because you were there coding with your friends and acquaintances close by; therefore making it a great atmosphere with tons of interaction, discussion, meal breaks together, etc.
In fact, till the end of University the labs remained THE meeting place; if you were at University and wanted to take a break or socialize, if you wanted to go eat and wanted some company ... you would go to the lab! The reason is that chances were high that you would find someone you know in the lab ... and so it became a common occurrence for me and many of my friends to circle around the labs after/before class, to see who was there. Often enough it was an important social time in a day of studying. This social aspect of university, all the people and the atmosphere, is probably what I'll miss most.

When time would permit, we 'd get together with friends to hang out. The main destination of choice was the Bomber, a local pub on campus. Over the years the Bomber has become a larger than life establishment to us, that to an outsider would seem just like another pub, but to many of the students it was much more. It was full of UW students and a great place to socialize and hang out. Bomber night was discussed days ahead and many students usually looked forward to them. Another scene was an on campus club, Fed Hall, but interest in it for my friends and I has died down after first year for one reason or another .

In between the social events, and believe me the time in between was usually long, we worked hard on our assignments. My place of choice was initially DC library, but after a year and a half I've discovered the hidden secret of Dana Porter (DP) library and I never went back to DC :) ... DP was a quiet, one may say elegant, place compared to DC, which was noisier and at times seemed like a fashion show (:P since lots of people would walk and look around. Over the years, DP became the place of some intensive exam preparation for me. During my time there, it was often difficult to resist reading the graffiti on the wooden cubicles; it was a source of some soap operas, as well as some ridiculously stupid remarks, but often conveyed some general feelings and issues of the students.

I loved my time at University of Waterloo and much will be missed.

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Waterloo University Student Graduated Memories
Bachelor Degree Computer Science

Interview with Yahoo CEO, Terry Semel

There is a very interesting interview with Terry Semel over at Globes. It is quite detailed about Yahoo's current position, overall business model and future direction of the company.

One of the most important points in the article:
Yahoo! rests on four basic pages: personalization, large communities of people, content, and search

More on Personalization

This time in the media.

Here is an excerpt from an informative article Gates vs. Google (which was finally made publicly available w/o subscription)

Another advantage for Gates & Co. is that search engines are still technologically primitive. They can't understand context, for example; if you type "chip," they can't tell whether you are looking for a snack food or high-tech equipment. As a result all three big search engines are scrambling to find ways to make search more personalized. The thinking is that the more a search engine knows about who is searching, the more accurate the results will be.

I wonder how far Yahoo and Google are in terms of processing and extracting useful data from this personalized information at the moment and is Microsoft keeping the pace? Thus far I haven't seen anything to suggest that MS is able to do this at the moment.

Each company has the foundations of such a product in its desktop-search software, which can tell what you have on your hard drive. Perhaps Microsoft, because it understands Windows better than any other company, will be able to offer faster, more accurate searches.

The problem is that the issue is not about the speed of the Desktop search, the issue is which company will be able to extract, process and use peronsonalized information better. The speed problem pales in comparison with the later problem.

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Personalization Gates Technology Google

Google's Web Accelerator - Another Way to Get Personalization Info!

Today Google has released a new application called the Web Accelerator
It is designed to accelerate your browser's page loading.

A few weeks ago I wrote an entry about gathering personalization data in order to provide personalized services and the different ways that companies can achieve it. In the comments there is a discussion of one such way: mining the web pages the user visits. Although something like that would probably be unacceptable to the public if done by a Browser, it could be totally acceptable if done in the backend, on Google servers, through the Web Accelerator.

There is a lot of information you can gather about the user from the websites he/she visits. So in principle the Web Accelerator is a clever idea and possibly a neat way to obtaining such information! Whether Google is planning to do this or not, I do not know, but the option is there for them and I wouldn't be surprised if they use it. After all, just recently there have been signs of a push towards personalization from Google with Search History and from Yahoo with MyWeb.

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Personalization Web Accelerator Technology Google