The Magic Of Google

Just take a moment to look at what makes the great Google tick!

• More thanfour billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all indexed and cached (copied).
• Up to 2,000 computers in a cluster. With over 30 clusters
• Over 60,000 computers! Yes 60,000 pc’s.
• 104 interface languages (how many can you name!).
• One petabyte of data in a cluster — so much that hard disk error rates of 10 to the power 15 begin to be a real problem if not planned for.
• Constant transfer rates of 60Gbps. (Gigabites per second)
• An expectation that sixty machines will fail every day.
• No complete system failure since February 2000.

Want to know what makes Google tick? Some pretty interesting stuff, a good read too! Check out the full article I found here tonight….

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Keyboard of the Future!

An interesting discussion was had in work on Friday morning about the developments and customisation of keyboards for computer application, gaming, general PC usage…

On a trawl of the web, this little beauty was turned up. Should be released some time in 2006…..

The keyboard of the future?

Mona Lisa Smile

The DaVinci code movie is just around the corner and the analysts are popping out again, this time focussing on the Mona Lisa itself - only now they’re not looking for cryptic clues. Taken from BBC news….

A computer has been used to decipher the enigmatic smile of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, concluding that she was mainly happy.

The painting was analysed by a University of Amsterdam computer using “emotion recognition” software. It concluded that the subject was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry, journal New Scientist was told. The computer rated features such as the curvature of the lips and crinkles around the eyes.

Interesting stuff? You decide…. here’s the full article.

See me, see me live…

If you’re free this Friday then you should find your way to Cleere’s Theatre, Parliament Street, Kilkenny where there’s a tribute night for The Frames kicking off around 9pm before the big gig in Carlow this weekend. If you’ve not got tickets for Carlow and want to catch some of The Frames music live, then Friday is your best chance!

Local Kilkenny band Silvertape are providing a tribute to the Frames, preceeded on the bill by the Happy Medium, featuring yours truely.

Music kicks off around 9pm as I’ve said with local singer/songwriter Ken O’Dwyer, followed by the Happy Medium before Silvertape lead a tribute to The Frames. Friday also marks KilkennyMusic.com’s Christmas party, so why not get into the spirit of things and come along to start off your festive music season!

Yahoo On The Move Again

Over the weekend I mentioned that Yahoo picked up del.icio.us.

Now it seems that they’ve partnered with Six Apart, the creators of Moveable Type / Typepad and are now going to offer users the ability to create blogs with MT for hosting on the Yahoo Small Business hosting service. Not a bad move for Six Apart seen as they’ve just announced their own partnership with VideoEgg (see my earlier post).

Full story….

Death of a Comedian

Anyone who has ever seen Eddie Murphy raw will know of his Richard Pryor impressions. The man that most black comedians aspire to, the man who racial satire often went pure off the charts when it came to his standup routines.

Pryor won Grammy Awards for his comedy albums and starred in such films as ‘Hear No Evil See No Evil’, ‘Stir Crazy’ and ‘Superman III’. He had been in declining health for years after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986 but died this weekend of a heart attack.

Check IMDB for Richard Pryor information

Time For Me

During the week, I’m in the office 8:30am, normally until 5, 6, 7, 8pm at night or beyond.

Afterhours, I get home and spend another hour or two going through KilkennyMusic.com and making sure everything is ok there.

Get to bed around 11/12 and the cycle continues.

So what a pleasure it was to find myself yesterday at a gig locally, getting in the door at 2:30pm, armed to the teeth with camera gear, finally getting to take some photographs! Anyone who watches my photography account on DeviantART will know its been since October 31st that I last uploaded some class of a deviation but no more!

While I adore my work and my weekly routine, it’s so good to get out of the house, out of the office, enjoy your hobby and take some photographs!

Of course it means more work now that I’ve 300+ highres images to sort through at some stage but at least I went and got them! And it felt good!

Yahoo nabs Del.Icio.Us?!

Reading this article on TechCrunch yesterday, it was revealed that del.icio.us (such a handy tool I might add!) is being bought out by Yahoo. Have they beaten Google to the punch or are they simply trying to follow in Google’s footsteps and buy up whatever is good on the internet?

Is there any need for Yahoo to acquire something like del.icio.us? Could this be the key to serious success for Flickr, since Google were tapping up Riya to be bought? (A previous post of mine).

From the del.icio.us blog...

We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

Multimedia Merger Completed

So the big merger is finally complete. Only dawned on me today (happened at the weekend)!Adobe has officially eaten up Microsoft…. err… Macromedia. Yes… thats it.

There’s the simplest of lessons in there - if you can’t beat the opposition, make sure and bloody well buy them out! At least they’re keeping Dreamweaver and Flash alive! Through WIT I had the chance to work on a daily basis (and nightly basis) for over 4 years solid on the whole family of Adobe and Macromedia products… but you always had your favourites. You could always say that one was better than the other at something… but now there’s no competition! If Adobe screw something up, who’s gonna argue, or try beat their product off the shelf?

A little hint of Microsoft off this one? I think so…

Anyone interested can read a full PDF of details on the acquisition here.

TypePad users to get video

Video blogging, vlogging, v-logs… whatever you want to call them - just got a step closer for some users as SixApart have announced a partnership with VideoEgg & Serious Magic

VideoEgg has been kind enough to make a preview version of VideoEgg Publisher available to TypePad users free of charge, at typepad.videoegg.com. From their site you can log in to your TypePad account and use VideoEgg to post a short video to your blog.

Doesn’t leave anything for us WordPress users… but nice to see VideoEgg raising its head again

Read the full story

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