Anyone who knows me knows I'm a bit of a hoarder... three storage units and counting, I really need to find time to go through some of that stuff.

Well this little clearout won't make much of a dent in that but the very fact I've managed to drag myself to throw anything away is a step in the right direction.

Have decided I really do no longer have any need for a 33.3 modem card for a PC, a 1990's Mac SCSI adaptor and a broken PC video card. Oh yeah, I haven't lived permanently in North America for 7 years so some of my US power cables get the chop too.

Tech cathartism!

Posted by Alx Klive at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the questions I frequently find myself pondering is why Google doesn't offer high grade web hosting, either traditional web hosting or in-the-cloud hosting like Amazon S3.

They certainly have the know-how, they would seemingly have the resources, you would think they could offer the lowest bandwidth prices with their size and scale. They also offer several web hosting-like services such as Google Web Applications and Blogger. For a video startup such as ours, we'd certainly like to have Google as an option for our hosting needs.

The answer is simple... they are having a very challenging time keeping up with their own internal demands for hosting, hardware and bandwidth, and the massive demands coming from the likes of YouTube and GMail. I postulate this from two separate conversations I've had with Google employees.

It makes sense - we are all used to the instant access availability and reliability that is manifested by all Google services. How many times have you not been able to reach Google's homepage or YouTube?

Only Google knows the true extent of this challenge and we can only ponder on the idea that... behind closed doors... Google is in a never ending fight to keep up with all the demand. One employee told me that there is often conflict internally over where to assign resources, and which services to promote (on the Google homepage). For some reason you just don't think this could be an issue.

So the next time you think... why doesn't Google do this? or that? The answer may just be... they need to build another data centre!

Posted by Alx Klive at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wikipedia has a detailed and long post on the subject of profanity. Reading through it I came across this classic section...

"A profane word in one language often sounds like an ordinary word in another; such words are called false friends. Fuck sounds like the French words for "seal" (phoque) and jib (foc), the Spanish words for "seal" (foca) and lightbulb (foco) or the Irish word for "words" (focail), as well as the Latin and Romanian words for "do" ("I do" can be facio in Latin or fac eu in Romanian, which sounds a lot like the English "fuck you"). Arabic for "think" sounds just like "you fucker". Also, the Croatian word fakat sounds similar to the English "fuck at" when it actually means "factually". "Fuck" also sounds like the Latin imperative singular form of "do" or "make" (fac) and the Swedish word for "union" (fack); shit sounds somewhat like the Russian for "shield" (щит).

The Cantonese words for "flower" and "bridge", when said together ("fa kyu"), sound vaguely similar to "fuck you". Also, the Latin singular imperative of "say" (dic) and the Dutch word for "fat" (dik) are pronounced like the English "dick". The German word for "fat" is both spelled and pronounced as the word dick in English. And the Dutch word for "cook" or "chef" (kok) sounds exactly like cock. Several European translations of the English word "bassoon" sound very similar to the American English slur faggot; an example is the Albanian "fagot". Even names in one language may appear as vulgar words in another linguistic community, which causes many immigrants to change their names (common Vietnamese personal names include Phuc and Bich; a fairly common Thai name is Porn. In Bengali, Fukeer is a personal name. In Latin, cum means "with", but it can be a profane word for "ejaculation" in English. Both cum and precum are prepositions in Romanian but can have profane, explicitly sexual meanings in English."

Posted by Alx Klive at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Using SunSpider, a webpage that puts the latest browsers through their paces, I came out with the following results on a current MacBook Pro.

The time represents how long it takes each browser to complete a complex set of tasks.

• Firefox 2.0 (current release version)- 16.26 secs
• Safari 3.0 (current release version) - 14.47 secs

Safari slightly edges out Firefox, but not by much. Moving to the very latest, bleeding edge versions of these browsers, you can see just how much we have to look forward to in terms of speed increases in the weeks/months ahead. The differences are startling.

• Firefox 3.04 (latest nightly build Feb 29th 2008) - 4.14 secs
• Safari 3.0 (latest nightly build Feb 29th 2008) - 3.50 secs

These improvements come from dramatic increases in the speed for executing javascript code, which forms the basis for many Web 2.0 sites.

These releases are pretty stable, and if you want to try them out, you can find downloads for the latest nightly builds of Firefox here, and Safari here. You can install both without overwriting or affecting your existing version.

(Thanks to @fredericl on Twitter for providing the inspiration for this article)

Posted by Alx Klive at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)