Techhawking

Hybrid cars solved the problems associated with electric cars and fuel guzzling engines. By bringing both of the technologies together, Hybrid cars can function on gasoline and still save costs by switching to an electric engine when possible.

A similar problem in computing industry is forcing storage manufacturers to work on a new kind of hybrid storage device called a Hybrid Drive. This device is a result of combination of the technologies behind regular disk based drive and the faster USB drives on your keychains. This combination provides it with high speed data access and cheap-per-byte pricing in the same storage device.

This concept isn’t new, and if you have worked with storage devices you will remember that most high end RAID devices already have an internal cache which does something similar. Infact most Operating systems, including Windows, Linux has Solaris have builtin file cache too. But most of these devices don’t use non-volatile Solid state (flash) which forces the cache to be destroyed everytime the Operating system is restarted. Solid state cache within the Harddrives can not only survive reboots (if non-volatile memory is used), it can also reduce the dependency on third-party caching software and hardwares which can introduce its own set of problems.

One thing to note is that though overall i/o speed will improve, the Solid state storage within HDDs will probably never completely replace in-memory(RAM) cache.

Though the technology behind this has existed for a while with a few very expensive implementations, its not until now, due to dropping solid state prices, that we might have a real chance at seeing this in action inside our home computers.
References

• Wikipedia - Hybrid Drives
  
• zdnet
• Wikipedia - Solid State
  
• News.com
• Samsung

Pat yourselves on your back for fixing all those servers,
- doing backup,recovery and user creation.
Pat yourselves for saying no to root and yes to sudo,
- for writing ACLs and scripting voodoo…

Pat again for waking at 2am
- just to put your cellphone on charge.
..for dealing with people
- who wanted everything a day past

Pat again for reading 650 mails a day.
- for blocking SYNFIN floods on ur network
..for carrying those secure-ids
- even while you are not at work.

When you are done patting… please stop by a bar
- pick your pagers and throw away..
’cause you all need a break once in a while
- atleast on the feaking System Admin Day !!

Nutch is a very interesting java based crawler and search engine based off the lucene project. The part which captivated me, however, was this component called Distributed File system which was built to support the Nutch’s quest for all the pages on internet.

Google’s plan for giving out wifi access to everyone in mountain view is old news. It just started rolling out. Here is a map of all the Access points in mountain view plotted on the map. Based on my initial analysis it has about 269 Access points all over Mountain View.

If you run a website, you might have heard of Google Sitemaps and DMOZ already. What you didn’t know probably is that Google Sitemaps can now learn from DMOZ if your site is listed on DMOZ.

The problem Google and other search engine face is that though they can crawl your site, they don’t really know how to describe your site to an search engine user. Apart from looking at your description Meta tag they also look at various other sources of information including DMOZ database to find the best way to describe your site. Though in most cases databases like DMOZ can acurately describe  the website, its not always the case, and letting search bots like that of google know that using  a meta tag can be very helpful.