The 50,000+ Server Club

I work for a company which runs around 500+ servers from a single datacenter, here is a list of companies which are running 50,000+ servers !! 

Most of the free services we use on the Internet reside on one of these servers.  That's a lot of data being crunched at the same time.  Mind boggling to say the least..

Google SMS

Yet another nifty little service from google.

Google India has launched their SMS service in India which can be used for looking up flight status, PNR status, cricket scores, Calculator, stock quotes, news and many more.

Best of all you don't pay a premium charge like you would pay with numbers like 575555.

I looked up my brothers PNR status a few times and it works like a charm.  SMS PNR (followed by PNR no.) to 9-77-33-00000.

Click on the title to view more search options and try their interactive demo.

Very handy if you are on the move and do not have access to internet.

Is the Free Web About to Expire?

PC Mag has an interesting article by Lance Ulanoff about how the current recession is going to affect the FREE web as we know it.

"It's finally happening. The foundation upon which the Web is built—oodles and oodles of free content and services—is about to crumble. It hasn't happened yet, but the signs that it soon will are all there:

• A glut of free content from largely undifferentiated sources • Premier providers struggling to maintain a steady flow of new content without the benefit of revenue • A beyond-hard economy beating back every idea, initiative, and dollar that might help float said content on the free Web • An uncooperative public that remains unwilling to pay for virtually anything online."

Gross National Happiness

Nytimes has posted an interesting article talking about an unique initiative undertaken by the Bhutanese Government.

"If the rest of the world cannot get it right in these unhappy times, this tiny Buddhist kingdom high in the Himalayan mountains says it is working on an answer". - NY Times

Read on for more on this unique concept.

In this era of mindless "Development" we all need to stop for a while and think for a while if we really need it.  We have managed to pillage almost all the natural resources in the last 100 odd years using technology and we don't seem to be stopping.  Everything is getting bigger and bigger to accommodate the needs of the human race..when do we stop ? Lots of Animals are gone, glaciers are vanishing, temperatures are soaring, air, water and earth are polluted... all of it to sustain one single species of the Animal Kingdom - US.

Australia to shoot 6,000 kangaroos

Now you know why the kangaroo was kicking that man !! 

On a serious note, this is so sad... agreed there is an overpopulation problem, can't all the science & technology not come up with a more humane method of culling (i hate that word).

And again India and China are also over populated, should we cull some humans too ?

Bent Objects

I have been following this blog for a while now, the kind of innovative things this guy comes up with is simply awesome.. that too just using every day things and some bendy wire.. have a look.. 

I added his widget too today :-)

Kickback

Lol...ouch !! I told you watch your back..always !

Life at Googleplex

The video below shows some interesting facts about Googleplex, Google's headquarters from Mountain View. Googleplex is a vivid mix of technology, fun activities, healthy food, eco-friendly materials and college campus atmosphere.

Swine Flu

Another outbreak, more hype so what do we do ? lets cull all the pigs & kiss with our masks on !!

Good pictures though..

 

Pictures courtesy : The Big Picture is a photo blog for the Boston Globe/boston.com, entries are posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday by Alan Taylor. Inspired by publications like Life Magazine (of old), National Geographic, and online experiences like MSNBC.com's Picture Stories galleries and Brian Storm'sMediaStorm, The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery - with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.

Lesser known features in GMAIL

Almost all of us have been using GMAIL since its launch. It can do a lot more than you think..read on..

Well here some of things I have come across which are just too good not to be used.

Keyboard shortcuts

The fastest way to work with computers is using a Keybaord, Period.

you better learn the keyboard shortcuts, not just on gmail but otherwise too.

to enable them go to SETTINGS>GENERAL>Keyboard Shortcuts On

Gmail LABS

Turn on wild and whacky features in GMAIL

Go to SETTINGS>LABS> enable/disable features you like

I personally use - UNDO SEND, Offline, Old Snakey (you can actually play snakey from within game!!), Sender Time Zone, Forgotten Attachment Detector.

Offline Gmail

Did you know that you can now use your email account in an offline mode ? which means you can read all your emails even when you are not connected to the internet right from the browser.  You can even send mails and they would be sent out whenever you have a connection.

Just follow these steps to get started:

1. Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
2. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
3. Click Save Changes.
4. After your browser reloads, you'll see a new "Offline^0.1" link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don't already have it.

You have multiple email addresses !! :

When you choose a Gmail address, you actually get more than just "yourusername@gmail.com." Here are two different ways you can modify your Gmail address and still get your mail:

• Append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was santasingh@gmail.com, you could send mail to santasingh+friends@gmail.com or santasingh+mailinglists@gmail.com.
• Insert one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- they just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was santasingh@gmail.com, santa.singh@gmail.com or sa.nta.sin.gh@gmail.com.
• You could use santasingh+bank@gmail.com when you sign up for online banking and then set up a filter to automatically star, archive or label emails addressed to santasingh+bank.
• You can also use this when you register for a service and think they might share your information. 

Happy Gmailing :-)

How not to avoid jury duty

This cracked me up completely..

Too Cute

Found this on Digg. :-)

Some stuff that caught my fancy ..

ECO ART/ADVERTISING: 50 Cars or 1 Bus?

More green news, but this is as effective as it get.

Swedish advertising company, Acne, put together a rather eye-catching advertising campaign for Flygbussarna, an airport coach bus service, to inspire individual car drivers to take the coach bus instead. An installation made up of 50 wrecked cars resembling a Flygbussarna coach bus was placed next to the highway leading to the Swedish airport. Acne used 50 cars to emphasize that a coach bus can seat up to 50 people whereas, on average, an individual car has only 1.2 people. Consider that with the fact that a coach bus releases no more carbon than 4 cars. The campaign also included a website where visitors could watch cars whizz past the installation. The website tracked the number of cars that drove by and how much carbon could have been saved if those drivers had taken a bus instead.

I guess this wont be applicable in India though.  Most of our cities don't have a good reliable public transport system. One would have to leave a day earlier to reach the airport lol.

Russian Living Statues Contest

You must have seen many statues (especially if you are living in India), now check out some of these. Very creative to say the least.  Can somebody please forward this link to Mayawati :-)

Download YouTube Videos Without Any Software

If you watch many YouTube videos, then you know there are some software programs that will allow you to download these videos to your computer.

With Firefox/Google Chrome (does not work with IE), you don’t need to download any software. In fact, with a simple bookmarklet you can download all the flash videos you want:

Right click in your bookmarks bar and select Add Page. In the Name textbox, type YouTube FLV. In the URL text field, paste the the following :

javascript:window.location.href="http://youtube.com/get_video?video_id=" + swfArgs['video_id']+ "&l=" + swfArgs['l'] + "&sk=" + swfArgs['sk'] + '&fmt_map' + swfArgs['fmt_map'] + '&t=' + swfArgs['t'];

Now just open any youtube video (you don't need to wait till it is streamed) and click on the link which you just created, it should download the video (FLV Format) for you which then can be opened in VLC Player.

For High quality mp4 (if available) format use the following script and boomark it as YouTubeMP4

javascript:window.location.href="http://youtube.com/get_video?video_id=" + swfArgs['video_id']+ "&fmt=18" + "&l=" + swfArgs['l'] + "&sk=" + swfArgs['sk'] + '&fmt_map' + swfArgs['fmt_map'] + '&t=' + swfArgs['t'];

Study: Electric cars not as green as you think

Just like the U.S., Germany has an ambitious goal of introducing electric vehicles. Germany, which today has 41 million cars, aims to have 1 million electric cars or plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road by 2020. The conclusion of the study is that these electric cars only reduce greenhouse gases marginally.

Artist creates invisible car

Art student Sara Watson has found the ultimate way of avoiding traffic wardens – by making her car invisible.

Google Servers

Google and its datacenters have been a tip lipped secret for all these years, slowly google is now releasing information on how they do stuff.  Here is one such video of Ben Jai, Google Server Platform Architect talking about the servers they deploy in all of their global datacenters.  Very Interesting for all us who understand hardware/computing and have seen fancy monolithic datacenters which cost millions to run and build.

Some of the facts gathered from posters around the net. 

• Instead of having a centralized UPS, Google integrated a battery into every server with a charge controller and test circuit. The battery is sealed lead-acid. Basically, it is a car battery. The goal is to keep the server running for "about a minute" until the generator turns on or the A/C power source is switched.
• The power supply ONLY provides 12VDC (notice the yellow 12V wires coming out of the power supply), and the power only goes to the motherboard. The motherboard then directly supplies power to the disks (at 5VDC) and no other voltage conversions occur (with the exception of 1.2-1.8V for the processor). As such, the AC feed of either 208VAC or 230VAC flow directly to the server with no UPS in the middle. The battery backup directly supplies 12VDC during power outages, so no more inverters.
• The power supply is about 92% efficient according to Google.
• The "distributed UPS" solution is estimated by Google to be "99.9%" efficient since there's no power distribution losses by operating directly at the DC voltage of the server.

I am Back

I started off with so much enthsiasm back in Sept but somewhere lost track of this blogging business.  Going to have another shot at this, hopefully I will do better this time.