Jul 09 2010
I read some interesting facts regarding the globally increasing demand for storage:
These facts are from a speech given by Jim Held, who is the Director of Terra-Scale computing in Intel.
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Apr 02 2009
There was some good technology related humour yesterday as part of the normal April Fools’ Day celebrations! Here are some of my favourites!
For a more comprehensive overview of the technology related humour see April Fools: YouTube Flails, Amazon Cloud Computing In A Blimp, 3D Chrome Browsing, Google Masters A.I..
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Jan 28 2009
UCD students will soon be able to enjoy an improved YouTube experience, thanks to the fact that its Internet connection is being upgraded from 1Gbps to 10Gbps :)
OK, I am joking when I write that the purpose of this increased bandwidth is to improve the YouTube experience :P
I wonder how much of this increased bandwidth is needed to keep pace with users’ requirements. I also wonder what sort of new and exciting projects can be undertaken to utilise this increased bandwidth.
For more details about this see UCD gains super-fast connectivity via HEAnet.
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Jan 25 2009
In an effort to reach out to the masses, the Vatican has launched its own official channel on YouTube. You can see it at www.youtube.com/vatican. Apparently, it is not getting much attention :o
On a slightly related note, I never realised that the Vatican’s ccTLD was .va, although not many domain names appear to use it!
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Dec 12 2008
Google published the Zeitgeist 2008 earlier this week. This shows the most popular searches on Google during 2008.
The results are broken down into separate results for each country, which is probably more useful than the overall results. One of the interesting things that I noticed is that the term Google is in the top 10 in many countries! I do not know why people search for this using Google, but my guess is that these people are not searching directly on the Google webpage. For example, I have Firefox configured so that I can type my Google search terms directly into the address bar.
It is also very interesting to see that certain terms that are directly related to well known websites, such as YouTube, appear in all of the EU results. Yet nearly all of the EU results have terms that are specific to the country or language. I do not recognise a lot of these ones!
The most popular search terms in Ireland were:
Unfortunately, none of these search terms relate to Irish websites :(
The fastest rising search terms in Ireland were:
Perhaps the most interesting search term on this list is for the Polish social networking website Nasza-Klasa. (This is the most popular search term in Poland.)
There is also an interesting observation about the list of most popular politicians in Ireland in Politician Declan Ganley more popular than Bertie says Google.
More details about the popular search terms in Ireland can be read in “Sarah Palin” the most searched query on Google. Unfortunately, Ireland is not included in the Google Zeitgeist page, and I am unable to find the official source!
The results presented by Google have been filtered to remove terms related to adult searches. I recall hearing that pornography related searches are by far the most popular. However, it seems that Google did not get the filtering totally right this time for the UK results. The original list (see Palin beats Obama in Google’s ‘zeitgeist’ rankings or 2008 Year-End Zeitgeist Around the World until the mistake is noticed) contained the term cam4 under the Fastest Rising category. Let me say that cam4 is certainly not suitable for viewing in work :o For more about this see Ooops, Google Zeitgeist lists a porn site.
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Dec 01 2008
I was looking at a video on YouTube earlier (Making of the Ryanair Cabin Crew Charity Calendar 2009 – not that it is relevant ;), and I suddenly realised that the video player was widescreen! Some quick investigation revealed that some videos already make use of the extra width.
More details about this change can be found in the official blog post Bigger Isn’t Always Better… But in This Case, We Believe It Is.
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Nov 23 2008
The Register has two articles describing how a 19 year old college student in Florida discussed his proposed suicide online, and how he then broadcast his suicide live online to an audience of over 1500 people! The articles are Teen discussed suicide plan online 12 hours before webcam death and US teen tops himself live online.
Naturally this story is very sad, but I think that somebody was bound to commit suicide online some time based on the popularity of the Internet.
I think that if somebody is suicidal then he/she is likely to commit suicide, and it is wrong to blame the Internet for this. Nevertheless, I now expect the usual backlash of people wanting to ban the Internet, YouTube, or whatever website or technology is currently deemed to be the cause of all evil in the world!
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Nov 11 2008
I came across a very innovative YouTube page recently containing a video promoting the Nintendo Wii.
The video is Wario Land: Shake It – Amazing footage!
You need to watch the video to the end to see what I am talking about! I presume that the effect is created using JavaScript.
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Nov 06 2008
I read three articles on TechCrunch today regarding Internet traffic on election day of the US election.
I do not expect that websites outside of the US experienced significant increases, because there is less interest in the US election, and the time differences made it a bit impractical!
Finally, Twitter also had an extremely busy night, as described in OMG, That Was A Big Day. It is a pity that this post does not give some more general statistics. For example, are any of these statistics new records?
I think that it is very impressive that all of the major websites that experienced heavy traffic were able to cope with it. I particularly like Twitter’s approach:
Our technical approach over the last several months has been to find the weakest point of the system, fix it so it’s no longer the weakest, move to the next weakest point, and so on.
I also notice that the new president is a Twitter user! It will be great if he can continue to find time to maintain his online presence!
Nov 05 2008
I have stayed up very late to watch the US election, and it is now clear who the winner is! However, I do not want to get into politics in this blog!
From a technology point-of-view, I am amazed how much attention the mainstream media has given to the online election campaigns. In particular, I am sure that every viewer must now be aware of Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. Also, the winner thanked his supporters by email before making his first public appearance!
It will be very interesting to see some statistics from the main news web sites over the next few days regarding how busy their web servers were. I would expect some records!
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