Public Data Explorer by GapMinder

A very useful tool from GapMinder

More about the tool here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/statistics-for-changing-world-google.html

What's next on GMail and Gtalk?

Guess it would be something like a stealth setting in chat
Though the block option is available, it doesn't let you chat until we unblock them.

With this kind of stealth setting, we can choose which friends can see us online or offline.

History of Internet and who is going to rule?

1. For readers interested in knowing more about Internet this would be a nice read:
History of internet in a nutshell.

2. And now Google is trying to make the web faster. The new protocol SPDY(SPeeDY) is being tested in the labs.
The documentation can be found here.
Link for the SPDY source code.

What would be impact if SPDY is successful?
Will Google file a patent for SPDY?

watch out ;)

Hacking into gmail for images????

Try out querying google with the query: The number 2 can be substituted by any digit(1,2 or 3)
site:2.bp.blogspot.com mail

What can we infer from the results?
1. Is it a hack(:P) showing images from others gmail accounts?
2. Is it just showing images that link to a blogspot account?

Let me know if you know anything about this, would like to learn more about this.

Thanks in anticipation.

10 million servers- where are we heading to?

"Google envisions 10 million servers" says Google's Jeff Dean.

As a system user and a guy with passion for large and powerful systems, the statement fascinates me to know more about the network, the electricity, the storage capacity especially the amout of time it takes to carry out a computation. More important, I would be interested in the size of the hardware maintenance team. Isn't that interesting?

The same news would pop up different set of questions for other people(with no computer background).
A person from India would immediately think of the power consumption and the bandwidth required for the data centers.

The actual question remains(at least to me):
1. Do we need such huge computing power?
2. Where are we finally heading in this 'competition for success,name,power' ?
3. What is the situation of the nature with 10 million servers dissipating lot of heat?

Is Google thinking of Technology and its effect on Nature in the long run?
Is 'Technology' making our lives easy or difficult?

No doubt, this is highly debatable. :)

Update: You can find the presentation here
Thanks Sandeep for the link :)

What is this hacker language?

While doing some experiments with the Google Logo, i landed up in the URL
http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif

And then, tried checking if the directory listing was enabled( I was quite sure that it is not but just for a bit of self -satisfaction) I tried this URL, http://www.google.com/intl/
but this resulted in showing up a page not found message. The interesting part was that it suggested me a URL

www.google.com/intl/ja/

Now, i tried using the search syntax,
intl site:www.google.com/intl/

And my curiosity grew after seeing the word hacker in the URL http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/

This is something interesting.
Learnt that there is a language called a hacker language.
1. Why would Google host such a page?
2. Does anyone use that site?
3. Is there something special about this Hacker Language?
4. Or is this some sort of SEO technique(instead of just showing a page not found exception, also suggesting another URL) to retain users?

How Robots.txt can be useful sometimes.

What's new from Google? No doubt, most of the internet users would be eager to click any article with such heading or text.
Indeed, I am one among those. ;)

At this point of time, I recall a moment when I won a bet of good food. I was able to gain access to one of my friend's yahoo account 6 years back. This was out of sheer luck that I knew his personal information and the security question was very easy to answer. Yeah, that was it. This friend of mine recollected the incident few years back and that was the time when I got the idea of having a security check for such hacks.
My idea was to record the previous login time (And make it non-editable).
Finally, Google has come up with a similar feature in gmail(adding login time, ip address and time spent). Storing the ip address is too good an idea. This would actually give us an idea of the location where the hacker is located. A useful feature enough to make sure that no one else is reading your (personal) mails.And this is one reason why I like gmail.

Well, coming to the actual point. I was actually searching for a parameter in the robots.txt to set the maximum number of scans a bot can perform on my site. Request-rate is the required parameter/setting I can use.
And while I was reading few articles, Google's robots.txt http://www.google.com/robots.txt caught my eyes. Google allowing most of its content not be crawled surprised me. But, this was no waste an effort. I came to know of Google Ventures , useful for entrepreneurs..
So robots.txt gives us some useful information too(if not for robots).
Perhaps, I may be gaining some useful information from other site one day.

Many lines in Google's robot.txt but with a Disallow tag prefixed.
No harm, I am no robot to be disallowed :P