Tim Child

Excellent interview by Network World with Radia Perlman who the also named one of the 20 most influential networking personalities of the last 20 years.

She talks about Networks, her spanning tree protocol and what she is doing now including working at Sun on many projects including looking at networking and security. A most interesting Lady (though she doesn’t seem to want any treatment regarding her gender either).

Also related is this entry on 20 people who changed the industry, of which she is one and 20 network-changing products in 20 years.

So I was looking for a way of creating site maps and I came across a google tool that I didn’t know that had been created, namely Google Sitemaps.

This got me thinking, actually how many tools are there by google, and what do they all do. Google sitesmaps could do any number of things (check out the blog at http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/), and how does it compare to google analytics? So I came up with a list:

Google Earth. A download that provides mapping streamed from Google to your computer. It supports both Mac and PCs, but requires a fast internet connection and uses satellite images with maps to display the Earth in pseudo 3D form.

Gmail. The google mail service, with huge storage, google style searching all in a web interface which has become extremely popular thanks to its referral signup process.

Google Groups. Search and find information on Usenet with google powered search.

http://www.google.com – Allows users to search the web, usenet and the web for images.

Google Maps. AJAX powered maps of the US, and some of the rest of the world in differing detail. Satellite images can also be used and it provides an API so that third parties can integrate.

http://news.google.com/. An aggregated news viewer with google search integrated. The news can be personalized to your taste with news from all over the world.

Google Scholar. Keep abreast of new research, literature and papers with this Beta service.

Google Sitemaps – Experiment in web crawling where you define your site, upload a map and let google crawl it.

Google Talk A google online chat client which integrates nicely with gmail.

Google Video Upload and share your video, and offer it for sale straight from the webpage. Videos are automatically thumbnailed and can be keyworded.

http://toolbar.google.com/ A toolbar offering extra features to your web browser such as auto form filling, spell check, search and notification of unsafe sites.

http://books.google.com/
Search inside books

http://desktop.google.com/ An application that runs on your desktop and indexs content such as files, emails so that you can quickly search and find information on your computer. It also integrates with google search so that you can search the internet and your computer at the same time.

http://directory.google.com/ A categorized directory of weblinks alot like the original yahoo site.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/google blog site, where you can build your own blog and host it. Comes with many features and a well defined API for extension.

http://labs.google.com/ Googles own technology playground. All sorts of new and interesting bits are posted here.

http://www.google.com/notebook Google notebook, add notes and clipbook information while you are browsing the internet without leaving your browser with this browser extension.

http://www.google.com/coop Help others with finding information and create specialised search topics and subscribed links on specialised subjects.

http://www.google.com/trends Compare searches. i.e. Dogs vs Cats (looks like dogs are winning!).

And of courses there is:

http://moon.google.com/

answers.google.com
http://blogsearch.google.com/
http://pages.google.com/
https://adwords.google.com/select/
http://calendar.google.com/
http://pack.google.com/
http://finance.google.com/finance
http://froogle.google.com/
http://picasa.google.com/
http://code.google.com/
http://catalogs.google.com/
http://webaccelerator.google.com/
http://www.google.org/
http://www.googlealert.com/
http://sketchup.google.com/

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

http://www.googlestore.com/

Of course after putting together this list I find out that Wikipedia has an entry, in its own unique style, but I am going to update this in a while with information on each of those, I have used all of them. Then perhaps I will be looking at what Yahoo and Windows Live is doing…

Read the rest of this entry »

The whole darknet thing has been interesting me recently, not as a way of doing anything undercover, just more of the potential of running networks on top of networks and closed community creating new content.

One post that really got me into it was that at:

http://blogumentary.typepad.com/chuck/2006/03/mpaa_smackdown.html

When Kori Bernards of the MPAA got many questions thrown at her about copyright, when the discussion should have been about Darknets. It goes a little way to show the passion that users have for buying content and using it in the ways they want not in the predefined ways that the middlemen think we should.

The reason it arose in the darknets talk was obviously connected. I have mirrored the videos that are of the event here:

JD Lasica’s Darknet Mashup
SXSW audience and MPAA
Ian Clarke – Encoding broke my DVD
DCMA and Flickr

One of the most interesting papers on darknet is a must read if you are interested in the subject, The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution by Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado and Bryan Willman.

I’ve been looking for a way for ages on getting content down fast on to my Linux server, and the combination of a Giganews as my usenet server and my newly installed nzbperl scripts running mean I am getting there.

I have setup two folders on the linux box, one that is a watch folder, looking all the time for new NZB files, and another with the results of the files. Simply uploading an NZB file will result in nzbperl downloading all the binaries and decoding them. Placing the files in a directory ready to be manipulated.

Soon I will script up some automatic PAR2 and unrar’ing of the files, but at the moment this is just excellent.

Got some more links that I want to blog to keep from reading on netnewswire.

First off an amazing portfolio site done in flash, this one is really good with nicely done flash video: Dave Werner which I got from here: John Nack on Adobe: Mind-blowing design portfolio. It makes other portfolios, including my own look really stale in comparison.

ASP.NET on a roll apparently. So says Tim O’Reilly.

And finally something not so important: A Lego aircraft carrier. Want one.

Friend, and one time radio collaborator Minusbaby has just got into Odeo. You need to check it out!!

Odeo Mío: “My latest semi-obsession is ODEO . I made a channel.

Vocal Intros and Breaks in Popular Music
‘I’m recording sections of songs and transcribing them. Voice(s) in a song which are without musical accompaniment and don’t reference the song they’re a part of harmonically, rhythmically or melodically.

They’re just talking.’

That’s what the channel is about. Maybe you’ll dig it.
There are 21 clips up there as of this writing.

“

(Via ?.)

There has been many interesting articles, products and discussions on the web in the past week and I have been cutting and pasting them into this blog entry. Seeing as they don’t seem to be stopping perhaps time to post them up.

Amazon launches S3 – Simple Storage Service. At the moment its part of their AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform but it looks great. Its currently using SOAP and could take the crown from Google Drive, but more importantly opens up all sorts for nice web app mashups.

The Cost of Bootstrapping Your App: The Figures Behind DropSend (part one) – Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals). Ryan Carson offering interesting information as usual.

What techcrunch,the source, on web2.0 news wants to see in the future.

ORA talking Entrepreneurial proverbs.

Why Ruby, I am trying to learn python at the moment I am inclined to agree with this article – Ctrl-C from the web formating problems and the lack of decent reference is not making it as easy as it should be.

Pixoh – Edit pictures online before putting them in flickr or the new competitors that are coming out.

“Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace – A fantastic look at why MySpace is proving so popular particularly with the under 20s. Of course there are up and coming spaces that seemed to be doing very well as well. Perhaps a new app will come out soon that will stitch them together.

Treehouse magazine. New webbie mag, looks nice but I can’t actually remember why I blogged this!.

Vast A new search service that uses its data in a different way. At the moment they are showing a beta with cars for sales, job ads and peoples profiles but the real interesting thing is this just touches on what it can do. It has some very clever search functions, can go behind logon screens and has an excellent open API. Read more at techcrunch.

Rick Segal says watch this. I am not from Microsoft but perhaps I should too.

Anti-marketing design, or why ugly apps win some of the time. Not sure whether I believe everything here.

DIY Kite camera This would look great on top of the mountains around Bergen.

9 tips for productive meetings.

And thats about it for now. Sorry for the lack of pictures recently, but I haven’t had time in between my network overhaul and work.

Just going to post up todays interesting links from my blogroll so I can check them out later!

OSX 10.4.4 Security broken
Whats wrong with blogs
How to scale video to HDTV
New Windows Spyware software
How long have you got test

Yes, its finally here, WordPress 2. I am currently using WordPress 1.5 on this blog and 2 other sites I have developed so I am not going to upgrade for a while on those 2 sites because they are working very well, but I might test with this blog – well perhaps after just doing some upgrades that I have been planning for a while.

Here are some of the new features:

• Completely Redesigned Backend
• Faster Administration – AJAX based
• WYSIWYG Editing
• Included Spam and Backup Plugins
• Resizable Editing
• Inline Uploading
• Faster Posting
• Post Preview
• Streamlined Importing
• User Roles

There are also some upgrades for the developers which should prove interesting, but for me the most interesting feature is the Inline uploading of images, music and video – fantastic news, particularly as I want to upload more video to this blog. I am wondering about how I can split up this blog more though, because by posting about so many diverse topics I am breaking one of the goldern rules of blogging – have seperate blogs for different topics.

The new Firefox browser is almost with us, and I have signed up as a last minute Beta tester. As soon as the browser is out, and it should be followed by a new video marketing compaign, which I can’t wait to see – I am sure there will be main opensourced versions of it to come.

As soon as it is up I will post again.