Category: Technology

Eamonn points to the rather good Carling iPhone app:

I had a mess around with it today, a colleague in work got one. Hmm. It is rather nice, not much different to its predecessor. Would be handy for blogging, among other things.

Should I, or shouldn’t I?

The Colbert bump is real. Firefox proved it.

…we looked at downloads of Firefox 3 by users within the U.S. – and then we drilled down to a minute-by-minute view to see what, if anything, could be detected. At minute 23 of the broadcast, Colbert said, “Firefox 3 just got the Colbert Bump.” What happened next?

We saw a big spike in downloads exactly one and two minutes later…

Here is the video:

And if you’re not already using Firefox 3, I highly recommend it.

Annoying music… anyways…

So is this Google entering the virtual world Second Life market? Will it work? Will they do an Orkut/Google Video on it?

*Big Brother tone*

You Decide.

Er. What exactly is the newly relaunched Ireland.com supposed to tell me, exactly? It’s still in Beta apparently.

It’s a nice site and all that, but why will I be visiting it in the future? I can’t think of a reason. No RSS feeds that I can see either.

An amateur astronomer took this picture and asked: What’s the blue blob?

The Economist this week covers the story of Galaxy Zoo, the collaborative web project for astronomers that found the blob. Their blog is here.

Earlier projects in distributed computing, such as SETI@home, which searched for extraterrestrial life, have used the power of millions of home computers. But more recently, scientists have begun to realise that distributed human brain power itself can be a useful commodity, as in working out the shape of proteins. Dr Szalay says that the voorwerp episode has shown how immensely valuable the public can be.

When the data were put online Dr Szalay thought it was only a matter of time before someone made a big discovery. “It just happened much faster than we thought.” In the past year 40m classifications of galaxies have been submitted on 1m galactic objects in the Galaxy Zoo. Dr Lintott says that the project has proved that the public en masse is as good as professional astronomers at classifying galaxies.

The next step is to ask people to do more complicated things, such as keeping an eye out for weird objects, which is bound to appeal to armchair astronomers. Hanny’s object had been there for decades, unnoticed in the astronomical archives. The idea now is for the public to explore strange new galaxies; to seek out new voorwerps and to boldly go where no amateur has gone before.

I first installed the Seti software back in 2001, and managed to get it going on several PCs, getting a reasonable amount of workunits done. It lasted a few months and I eventually stopped. No particular reason either.

The Economist are right to point out that it is human power that may be even more rewarding than computing power, and astronomy seems like the perfect discipline to test the idea. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is another similar stab at crowd sourcing.

Jason Sobel the manager of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, gave a presentation at Stanford recently. He explains how Facebook efficiently stores ~6.5 billion images, in 4 or 5 sizes each, totalling 30 billion files, and a total of 540TB and serving 475,000 images per second at peak.

You can look at the presentation here.

If Facebook’s storage is 540TB. How big is Google’s? The mind boggles.

Via Slashdot.

The Atlantic’s cover story by Nicholas Carr this month is really very good.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Worth a look.

The iPhone App store opens next month… social applications like this will likely feature prominently.

And I for one welcome our new 3G iPhone overlords.