Techhawking

WikiMapia

• This is the first time I happen to stumble upon WikiMapia, which looks like a wiki of maps. Very interesting and creative idea. WikiMapia uses Google Maps API and allows users to mark places and add text to locations around the world.
• Its like  a large world map with people scribling all over it. Google recently updated its global map database to include some very high resolutions satallite images around the world which makes WikiMapia an even more very interesting new service to look out for.

Digg

• Digg has been around for just over a year and has already surpassed slashdot in traffic volume. The Digg 3.0 release party demoed some really interesting new tools which are set to come out soon after 3.0 release on monday. The one tool which already exists is Digg Spy.

IPv6

• US Government has plans to enable IPv6 on backbone routers by 2008.
• Comcast is probably the first large organization who has already started deploying IPv6. Here are some interesting presentation slides from one of their talks.
• I looked up ARIN and noticed that Google, Microsoft and Cisco all have /32 assigned to them which is a significant allotment. Even though ARIN policy kind-of states that /32 allotments requires the aquiree to act as an ISP and give away atleast 200 blocks to smaller ISPs or organizations in 5 years, I don’t think this is enforced. Cisco for example has its IPv6 block since 2000 and is well past its 5 year limit.
• Aparently, during IPv6 I also found out that while IPv6 is being deployed, multihoming is not yet standardized.

Flock

• If you like Firefox you’ll like Flock too. Just like the web is slowing moving towards web 2.0, flock is kind of an extention to the firefox experience which gives you “web 2.0 rich” experience.
• Features like social tagging, blogging and photo sharing are built into the browser. But what I liked the best in flock is its implementation of the RSS new reader.
• Flock beta 1 was released on June 13th.

Google Sync

• Google Sync is a firefox plugin which claims to synchronize your browser settings with your gmail account so that you can carry them with you when you switch desktops.
• Unfortunately though flock is based off firefox, its not supported which is a shame cause I primarily use flock. However, there is a hacked version of Google Sync which will work for flock here.
• BTW, I think that Google Sync is far from mature, ’cause over the weekend Google Sync successfully locked up my Firefox browser on windows XP and even reboot doesn’t bring it up anymore.

If you have been following writings from Daniel M Harrison you would notice how strong his convictions are on this topic. Daniel strongly believes that Google is buying Sun. And any reader who doesn’t understand how Google and Sun operate can easily be swayed to believe this. But not me.

The fact that Google or Sun haven’t publicly denied these new rumors, means that something might be cooking. But Google buying Sun doesn’t sound very interesting.

• Sun has a large pool of talent who know how to create fault tolerant, high performance parallel processing computing infrastructure.
• Google has a large pool of talent who have perfected the art of distributed computing using cheap hardware clusters using free tools and operating systems
• Sun is a hardware, software and services company
• Google makes its revenue from advertisements
• If Google buys Sun, it would be forced to use Sun technology. Microsoft had a hard time switching Hotmail.com from FreeBSD to Microsoft based solutions.
• The change for Google to switch to Sun based hardware and software and the time spent to do it could be quite significant.
• A lot of goodwill for Google stems from the fact that Google is Open source friendly. Even though Sun has made attempts to open its Operating System, the perception is not the same. Google might have to face some negative publicity if they don’t take immediate damage control initiatives after a buy out.

If there is any truth to these rumors, its more likely that its about Java than anything else.

• Google already has an agreement with Sun over cross distribution of Java and Google desktop.
• Based on what I know, its more likely that Google might buy out Sun’s Java technology than buying the whole company itself.
• Java is one platform which is truely write-once-run-everywhere. Nothing else comes closer to this reality.
• Google desktop has made significant inroads into desktop world running Microsoft OS. But lacks critical foothold in non-Microsoft world. This could change if it switches to Java as the application platform for all of its client side applications
• If Google plans to quickly build applications like GDrive and integrate writely.com with other applications running on the local operating system, it would need a more universal platform. Java, though slow, is still faster than javascript and has more access to the operating system to do such tasks.
• With better control over how Java develops, Google could use its strong technical background to speed it up and customize it for its own applications. The way Microsoft is trying to use .NET to spread its word.
• This may or may not be a good thing for Java. But will definitely be a awesome add on for Google.

Its been a month since we heard of google calender rumors. Just when everything has cooled down, Paul stone dug up some links within googles code to a “Google Links” page which had a whole bunch of google services listed. What stood out on that page was a link to “Google CL2″ which said “A calendar for you and the world”. If you have a google account go to this link http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=barc and see for yourself. Image1 Image2

John Resig has come up with a very example of how to do address translation of a physical address into a lat/long using geocoder library. The examples he provided work only in US and Canada.

Steve Jobs launched the new year with a 15″ Intel-based MacBook. Compared to the Powerbook, MacBooks are more than 4 times faster with just a small increase in price. If I hadn’t bought my Powerbook in march last year, I would have definitely bought the MacBook this week. The other interesting feature on MacBook is the MagSafe connector which is nothing more than a simple power connector using magnets to stick to the laptop which easily give way when someone trips over them.

Techcrunch gave birth to a new blog today Mobilecrunch, which would be written by Oliver Starr and will focus purely on mobile technology.

Google video store has opened up…. and all of you who were waiting for it should probably pack up and leave now. Google might have got the search part right, but the UI is probably one of un-appealing. If you really want to see how a video store should look like you can start looking at iTunes which does a good job of helping you find what you are looking for.