Notes: WikiMapia, Digg, IPv6, flock and Google Sync.

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chrome Frame - How to add command line parameters

Image
Chrome frame intentionally does stuff without getting in the way of the user. This sometimes makes things harder to debug. For example how can one debug an issue if chrome frame doesn't even launch ? Apparently there is a flag for that. But you have to know how to enable it. Here are the steps. Make sure chrome frame is installed. We can enable startup flags for dumping debug logs using a policy called AdditionalLaunchParameters If this is just for one desktop, I recommend doing a registry edit (it can be pushed via GPO as well) Add a REG_SZ property " AdditionalLaunchParameters " to " SoftwarePoliciesGoogleChromeAdditionalLaunchParameters " with the value "--enable-logging --v=1" (also documented here  and mentioned here )  [ Attachment 1 ] Next kill the IE browser and make sure chrome is also dead by checking taskmgr Restart IE and go to " gcf:about:version " and confirm that the parameters you added show up next to "Command Line:"
Read more

Creating your first chrome app on a Chromebook

Image
Doing development on Chromebook usually means developing online. There are a lot of sites around for that. But with the APIs getting more mature, its just a matter of time before someone builds a kick-ass IDE which runs natively on Chromebooks without network connectivity. One such tool which I've been exploring for a last few weeks is from Google and called " Chrome Dev Editor " If you have never built and run a chrome app or extension, I'll show you how to do this in 3 easy steps.     Step 1 Launch the app and click on the "+" button to add a new project. Pick a project name and select "JavaScript Chrome App" in the drop down menu.       Step 2 Notice how it automatically adds the minimum code required for it to run. This will be the template you are going to work with. You are almost done, but lets review the files in there to understand why they are there.   manifest.json - This is the most important file. Modify the app name, version number
Read more

Brewers CAP Theorem on distributed systems

Image
Large distributed systems run into a problem which smaller systems don’t usually have to worry about. “ Brewers CAP Theorem ” [ Ref 1 ] [ Ref 2 ] [ Ref 3 ]  defines this problem in a very simple way. It states, that though its desirable to have Consistency, High-Availability and Partition-tolerance in every system, unfortunately no system can achieve all three at the same time . C onsistent : A fully Consistent system is one where the system can guarantee that once you store a state (lets say “x=y”) in the system, it will report the same state in every subsequent operation until the state is explicitly changed by something outside the system. [ Example 1 ] A single MySQL database instance is automatically fully consistent since there is only one node keeping the state. [ Example 2 ] If two MySQL servers are involved, and if the system is designed in such a way that all keys starting “a” to “m” is kept on server 1, and keys “n” to “z” are kept on server
Read more