Over the weekend I built Unicode Lookup, a tool that lets you search for any Unicode character by name, or by codepoint number. A table of the characters with their decimal, octal, hex, and HTML entity representations is shown as results.

The core purpose of the tool is to aid web-development by making it easy to find the HTML entity for any character. It’s also useful for finding a character by class (e.g. math symbols) for copy & paste into documents.

As ASCII is a subset of Unicode, the tool also serves as a full ASCII (and Latin-1 etc) character reference.

Unicode Lookup is based on John Walker’s command-line tool unum.

Starting on or about the third week of April, users still running IE6 or IE7 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Server 2008 will get will get a notification through Automatic Update about IE8. This rollout will start with a narrow audience and expand over time to the entire user base. On Windows XP and Server 2003, the update will be High-Priority.

Users can decline the update, and Corporate IT groups can block it, but this is a promising move to bring users up to date, and so to increase web-development efficiency.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research. Amazon Elastic MapReduce lets you focus on crunching or analyzing your data without having to worry about time-consuming set-up, management or tuning of Hadoop clusters or the compute capacity upon which they sit.

Languages supported: Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, and C++.

Preventing errors within extremely complicated technological systems is often elusive. The more complex the system, the more complex the pattern of error. But a curious thing happens in systems that are kept relatively error free: as major errors are prevented, it gets more difficult to forecast future major errors — because so few happen! In these kind of mission-critical systems the genesis profile of a major failure may be unknown because major failures are so rare.

Whooooaaaaaa.

“If one developer is owning several blocks, they can do what they like with the streets,” Mr Thalis said. “They can move them, put malls on them, close them, turn them into business parks. The public interest in Sydney is at risk of being stolen by private and commercial interests. I don’t have a problem with density but I do have a problem when it’s at the cost of the public domain. We are the citizens. We own the streets. This will be thrown out the window for a 10-year fashion for big, monolithic buildings.”

Sorting on only one attribute is still quite limiting, though, and queries still only return object IDs, which forces many further queries to retrieve the full data-set.

I’m talking about the increasing use of photography competitions for reasons other than the celebration of fine quality photographic image making.

One of the most common adulterations of the concept of the photographic competition is to use it as a cheap way of building a bank of images. To commission thousands of images from professional photographers would cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars but, trick people into giving you their photos in exchange for the chance of winning something (money, camera gear), and you can bring the cost right down.

We extracted the colours from 3 million “interesting” Flickr images. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour.