Messages from Blogs category

on "WowPrizes - Win Apple TV - Incent"

http://network.adsmarket.com/click/imJyl2XKfJSNZG7EXsp6w4xpapZeoqmWiGNqmo2igpmJkGybYJ-B
Publication date: 2009-10-04 more

on "New 13" Apple Macbook - 186621"

http://network.adsmarket.com/click/imJyl2XKfJSNZG7EXsp6w4pncJxnoKmdjmhxxGOcfZW3Y2uVZZw
Publication date: 2009-10-04 more

on "New 16GB iPod Nano - Get it for FREE!"

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Publication date: 2009-10-04 more

kashshahf on "WowPrizes - Win Apple TV - Incent"

http://network.adsmarket.com/click/imJyl2XKfJSNZG7EXsp6w4xpapZeoqmWiGNqmo2igpmJkGybYJ-B
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

kashshahf on "New 13" Apple Macbook - 186621"

http://network.adsmarket.com/click/imJyl2XKfJSNZG7EXsp6w4pncJxnoKmdjmhxxGOcfZW3Y2uVZZw
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

kashshahf on "New 16GB iPod Nano - Get it for FREE!"

http://network.adsmarket.com/click/imJyl2XKfJSNZG7EXsp6w4pncJ1eoqmdjmhxxGOcfZW3Y2uVZp4
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "Microsoft Office 2008 or iWorks?"

Depending on what your functionality requirements are there is always the option of using Google Docs, Zoho, or one of the other free cloud-based solutions.
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "short survey"

I too use a few Apple products, here are my answers. 1. b & e 2. 7 3. 5 4. 5 5. 4 6. 2 7. Yes 8. No
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "Rumor or not? iPod Touch 3rd generation will launch"

 I found this on website today, http://www.uxsight.com/category/168541/ipodtouch3rdgencases.html and I have no idea if it's a rumor or reliable. It is said some place had started to sell the case of the new generation iPod Touch.  I still haven't got any news of the new generation Touch, or this is only a rumor?
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "trouble bootcamp partition and bcd file"

Hi I'm having trouble with vista 64 loading on the bootcamp partition. The screen turns black after logon for way too long. I want to use easybcd from neosmart to rescue the boot sector since I think this is where the problem lies. Does anyone know if doing this will interfer with the normal loading of holding the option key down or booting directly into osx. I'm desperate for an answer. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks Alan
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "How to Get Back my Deleted Mac Mail ???"

This forum posting process bites - It took me about 15 attempts before my post took (And it loses everything you typed in if you don't copy it before hitting the post reply button)
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "How to download free iPhone games"

awesome~
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "iphone downloads"

hi rags, there is no such virus that delets the contents on your iphone or any other memory devices. you do one thing you just connect your phone to pc chose the data storage mode. go to search files option and enable searching of hidden files in the advanced option, if you know the name of your file or a folder which you think is deleted and hit search. then you will find them hiding on your iphone. rightclick on them and uncheck the hide option
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

Great! I'd still prefer using Clone2Go DVD to iPhone Converter, which helps me to convert DVD to iPhone, convert video to iPhone and even download YouTube (HD) videos onto iPhone.
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "safari 4 browser"

Well, it's been a couple of months now, & I've gotten used to the new Safari configuration .... and it really isn't causing any problems for me. So I'm really OK with it for now. But I do want to thank all of you for your feedback !
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

In fact there are many tools can realize that function in copy DVD for mac, like Handbrake, but on my side, I more prefer to use this DVD converter for Mac
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "Don't Buy Apple"

I don't know what to tell you man. They are usually pretty good about replacing stuff if you bring it in to a store. The warranty's last only a year because they want you to purchase the extended warranty for all their products. Lame, i know, but almost every retailer does this. I'd switch to a PC, much cheaper than Apple products, 99% of the software is written for PC's and can be easily fixed. + Windows 7 is coming out pretty soon.
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

Studying a study

[A couple things to note: 1. This is a purely personal blog post--like other blogs posts I do, I haven't run it by anyone else at Google. 2. I'm writing it quickly because I have a lot of work to do. If I get something wrong, please let me know and I'll correct it.] This morning [...]
Publication date: 2009-10-01 more

Pass the Duct Tape

Reading
Publication date: 2009-09-24 more

Watching Yahoo's Transformation

Having not worked at Yahoo in a bit over a year, it's interesting, amusing, and frustrating to watch what's going on over there. Some of their moves confirm feelings I've had for some time, while others are more puzzling. The Search deal with Microsoft was basically inevitable. You could see even two years ago how out-gunned Yahoo was compared to Google and to what Microsoft was rumored to be thinking of doing. Based on what I knew, Yahoo was spending less than 20% of the money on search that Google was and they were trying to do the same worth with about 1/10th the hardware and less mature infrastructure software. Meanwhile, the web kept growing and became more and more real-time. It seems that Yahoo wants to sell Zimbra. I remember when that acquisition happened. I thought it was cool technology and would be great if we actually wanted to compete in the on-line "office suite" market (or whatever), but that never happened. Instead it remained as one of those "enterprise" products that Yahoo has a history of trying and failing at. Remember Yahoo's enterprise instant messaging product? FAIL. Now comes news that Yahoo wants to sell Small Business which includes their web hosting and domain registration businesses. This makes good sense to me. While it's a business that I think has usually made money, it simply wasn't competitive in a day and age when you can get a full virtual machine, storage, and bandwidth from any number of vendors who aren't scared to offer good remote access (ssh anyone?) to the server: Slicehost, Rackspace, Server Beach, Amazon, and so many others. Yahoo's offering may have made sense back in the year 2000 or so when it really competed on price, but this is one of those race-to-the-bottom commodity business and has been for years. People picking on Carol for selling some stock recently? Well that's just dumb. Yahoo is a public company and she really didn't sell that much. I hope that Carol is able to trim the parts of Yahoo that no longer make sense and help bring some focus to the company. I really do. But to be honest, I've seen it before. Terry Semel tried to do something similar when he came on board. But that was a wandering effort that ultimate lacked focus and wasn't ambitious or forward-thinking enough. Jerry and Sue tried this when Terry left, but I really think they were too "Yahoo" to transform Yahoo into what it needs to be. I see how Carol is trying to be smart on the business side, but I'm not sure how Yahoo plans to wow its users. And coming from the Yahoo! Developer Network, I wonder if Yahoo will ever get serious about outside developers. Conferences and Hack Days are great, but I suspect they still haven't figured out how to offer buisness-class APIs (with an exchange of money and an SLA). Aside from YUI and Hadoop, can you really go beyond a prototype with this stuff? It could simply be that I never really drank the YOS/YAP kool-aid and never will get it. Oh, and what about those smaller startups? Should I start to worry that del.icio.us or Flickr is going to go away? What about Upcoming? When their founders start to worry, I feel like I should too. At least Flickr has a business model and appears to still be kicking some ass. MyBlogLog has all but died on the vine, right? Is there anyone left of the original team of 5 or 6 engineers still working on it? No, I think it fell victim to Yahoo's larger social strategy. FAIL. I hope that Carol can be clear, focused, and agressive in re-shaping Yahoo. The half-measures attempted over the last few years simply haven't been enough and never will be. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-09-22 more

Google doesn

We went ahead and did this post on the official Google webmaster blog to make it super official, but I wanted to echo the point here as well: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search. To this day, you still see courts mistakenly believe that meta tags occupy a pivotal role [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-22 more

How my netbook taught me to love xmonad

I've had this low-level urge to try a new window manager for a few months now. I work on a Linux box (Ubuntu) daily and mostly run a number of terminals, GNU Emacs, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome. Nothing too fancy, really. Oh, and a shitty VPN client. Background Most of the time I'm doing this in front of a 24" (or larger) monitor running at 1920x1200, so there's a lot of screen real estate. Yet I was always annoyed by how much time I spent moving windows around or trying to find the optimal layout--always reaching for the mouse. Years ago when 1024x768 was the norm, I ran a heavily customized fvwm2 and enjoyed it. But then I made the move to Windows for a few years and came back to Linux with Ubuntu/Gnome as my "desktop." The Netbook Months ago I wrote about how I love my Samsung NC10. When I'm not at my desk, I'll often use PuTTY to login, resume my screen session(s), and continue working. For what it's worth, I find that the free DejaVu Fonts (specifically the Monospaced one) works exceptionally well. What I realized is that my method of having one terminal in full-screen mode on each "desktop" (thanks to the VirtualWin virtual desktop manager) is surprisingly productive, even on the little 10" screen. At first I considered this a fluke and attributed it mainly to the novelty of working this way. But after a while I realized that it was the focus that this setup enforces. There simply isn't enough room to have a browser on screen to distract me while I'm coding something, reading email, etc. I really need to focus one or a few tightly realted tasks. The cognitive overload of having the whole Internet available really gets pushed off-screen and mostly out of mind. Trying xmonad After a discussion in our chatroom at work the other day, I finally decided to give a new window manger a try: xmonad. A big help was Tom's Introduction to the xmonad Tiling Window Manager which gave me just the information I needed to get started. I used it most of Friday and a bit off and on Saturday, both on my primary work computer and my "home" Linux desktop machine. The experience has been surprisingly positive so far. Most of the hassles have revolved around re-training my hands to learn some new keyboard shortcuts and finding replacements for the few GUI things that Gnome provided on my previous desktop. On thing I particularly like is that most of the keybindings seem very sane out of the box with xmonad. I haven't really needed to customize anything yet. I have found that a couple keystrokes that I use in GNU Emacs appear to be intercepted by xmonad and I haven't found an easy way to undo that or at least discover what they're supposed to do: Alt-w and Alt-q are the two I've noticed. I also needed to resurrect an old xmodmap file that I could use to turn my CAPS LOCK into a Control key and re-discover the right xset command to set my key repeat rate higher than the default: xset r rate 250 30. Other than those few nits, it's been pretty smooth sailing. I definitely feel like I'll be more productive in the long run a result of switching. Have you tried a tiling window manager? Did you stick with it? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-09-20 more

gadgetfreak475 on "Don't Buy Apple"

I don't know what to tell you man. They are usually pretty good about replacing stuff if you bring it in to a store. The warranty's last only a year because they want you to purchase the extended warranty for all their products. Lame, i know, but almost every retailer does this. I'd switch to a PC, much cheaper than Apple products, 99% of the software is written for PC's and can be easily fixed. + Windows 7 is coming out pretty soon.
Publication date: 2009-09-17 more

How to Unlock the Amazing Secret of Unlimited Productivity

All of us could use some help increasing our productivity. So I’m going to share one of my best productivity secrets. This secret can literally CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!! Are you ready? Step 1. Buy a productivity book. Any productivity book will do. I use a book called “The Now Habit.” It doesn’t matter what book you order [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-17 more

Looking for good Yahoo search engineers

I was talking to an excellent new Googler that joined from Yahoo this week, and that reminded me that I meant to do this post a little while ago. So I’ll keep this post short and sweet: if you’re an excellent Yahoo engineer with solid experience in search, Google is hiring. If you want to [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-16 more

Bad Experience with U.S. Airways Dividend Miles

I’ve been having an ongoing bad experience with U.S. Airways over their Dividend Miles. I’d accumulated about 15,000 miles with them and the miles were about to expire. I didn’t have any trips coming up, so I looked for a way to redeem those frequent flyer miles before they expired. U.S. Airways provided a way [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-14 more

Hidden Google Gem: Google Mobile App

We recently recorded a video of one of my favorite “hidden gems” at Google: the Google Mobile App, which does voice recognition to make searches easier on a mobile phone. It’s available for the iPhone, Android phones, BlackBerry, Nokia S60, and Windows Mobile. In the video below, I ran the Google Mobile App through its [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-12 more

mooreee on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

In fact there are many tools can realize that function in copy DVD for mac, like Handbrake, but on my side, I more prefer to use this DVD converter for Mac
Publication date: 2009-09-11 more

30 Day checkin: book challenge

So how did I do on the “15 books in 30 days” challenge? Not too badly–I made it through 12 books. I could probably have squeezed in three more books, but I’d rather take my time and enjoy books than artificially force things for a deadline. I’ll make up those last three books later. [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-10 more

Digg adds nofollow to some links

Digg recently added nofollow to some links on their site: We
Publication date: 2009-09-03 more

Chrome Market Share: One Year Later

Google released the Chrome browser on September 2, 2008. Now that Chrome has been out for about a year and it’s been almost six months since I last looked at Chrome’s market share, let’s take another peek. For the last 30 days, here are my Google Analytics stats for mattcutts.com: For me, 8.97% of my readers run [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-01 more

BlackBerryBold9000 on "BlackBerryBold9000"

Hi I am new here. We are selling blackberry quality sets. BlackBerry is a line of wireless handheld devices that was introduced in 1999 as a two-way pager. We want to discuss more about these sets. "BlackBerry Bold 9000, BlackBerry Storm 9500 BlackBerry, iPhone, BlackBerry Housing Cases, BlackBerry Repair Parts, BlackBerry Curve 8900, BlackBerry Curve 8300, BlackBerry Curve 8330 BlackBerry, iPhone, BlackBerry Housing Cases, BlackBerry Repair Parts, BlackBerry Curve 8900, BlackBerry Curve 8300, BlackBerry Curve 8330"                                                            http://www.sellebuy.com/paa
Publication date: 2009-09-01 more

Hidden Google Gem: My Tracks

I’ve really enjoyed making videos for webmasters. In the most recent recording session, we decided that it would be fun to talk about some of the “hidden gems” of Google: features, products, or tips that you might not know about, but you might like. One of my favorite hidden Google gems is a program for Android [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-28 more

Pandora vs. CDs

I've been using Pandora for streaming music on-line for a while now. I enjoy it so much that I pay the roughly $5-$6 per month for a higher quality stream and because I want to do my part to make sure they stay viable as a business. What's so great about it? Pandora is unobtrusive, easy to use, and really good at finding similar and related music that I'm likely to enjoy. I'm always amazed at how good it is when I create a new station. Just a few weeks back, I told Pandora to create a "U2" station. A few hours later, I realized that I'd been listening to an excellent selection of tunes. I never get bored of the music on Pandora. It's just a part of my day, always playing good music to keep me happy while I'm coding or fixing things. I feel like an idiot for the thousands of dollars I spent on CDs years ago, not to mention all the time and effort that went into digitizing that library multiple times (my own code, iTunes, WinAmp, etc.). If I thought I could get any real money for my 550 CDs, I'd just sell 'em all and send the Pandora crew a nice check with a note: "Keep up the great work." If you've not yet used Pandora, I highly recommend it. You'll be surprised by how often it plays music you like, even with the most minimal input from you. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-08-25 more

WordCamp 2007 talk: Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers

By the way, if you enjoyed my Straight from Google: What You Need to Know talk from WordCamp 2009, you might also enjoy my WordCamp 2007 talk: Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers. For convenience, I’ll include the video below: And here are the slides from the 2007 WordCamp talk: Not everyone has seen this talk, so I hope [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-24 more

New Knol developments

Google launched Knol about a year ago. The big worry back then was that Google might favor Knol in our search rankings. I stopped around various places on the net to debunk that idea back then, but I think it’s safe to call this idea fully debunked now. As I said six months ago: Google Knol [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-21 more

More about generic TLDs in (say) UK results

Some folks that I respect were giving me a bit of a hard time because they felt like I punted on this webmaster video: So let me take another stab at the question, and tell me what you think. There’s a couple effects going on: - first, we’ve been making changes that make it much more likely [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-21 more

lescieyq on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

yep.. Tons and tons video converters. The thing is, iPhone usually supports mp4 or mov imput format, and DVD usually comes with avi format. In this case you need to convert avi to mov format. Aimersoft Total Media Converter for Mac does a good job on it. I myself are using it right noww. I'll share some pics with u.
Publication date: 2009-08-20 more

30 day reports

For the month of May, I didn’t watch any TV. I learned that I don’t miss summer TV that much. For the month of June, I tried to walk 10,000 steps a day. I learned that a walk in the evening is a nice way to wind down and relax. For the month of July, I biked [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-19 more

Send To trick for Google Reader: Autotranslate

You can use Google Reader’s “Send To” feature for lots of fun things. Suppose you subscribe to a blog in another language, such as this French blog. You can add an “Autotranslate” custom link: I used the values Name: Autotranslate URL: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=${url} Icon URL: http://translate.google.com/favicon.ico Then when you’re reading the blog, just click Send To -> Autotranslate: And you’ll open the [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-14 more

Google Reader adds

I’ve wanted this forever. Google Reader just added a feature where you can send items directly to Twitter, Reddit, and a bunch of other places: To enable it, click on “Settings” in Google Reader and then click on the “Send To” tab to choose which services to add. Note: make sure you disable pop-up blocking so [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-13 more

More info on the Caffeine Update

Google recently opened up a preview of our new Caffeine update, and I wanted to give a little more background on this change. At the Real-Time CrunchUp a few weeks ago, I joked that the half-life of code at Google is about six months. That means that you can write some code and when you [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-11 more

Firefox vs. Google Chrome Revisited

Last week, in Google Chrome is the New Firefox, and Firefox the new IE, I ranted a bit about how slow Firefox 3 (notably tab switching and the "awesome" bar") was on my Ubuntu 9.04 machine. Needless to say, I got some good feedback from that post and it prompted it me to do a few things. I've since been running both Firefox 3.5 as well as the Firefox 3.6 trunk code and can say that both are notably faster than Firefox 3.0.xx. The difference between 3.0.xx and 3.5 was substantial and really helped to close the gap with Chrome. Going to the 3.6 alpha nightly builds made it even faster in some places and slower in others--not surprising since it's still in development. Scrolling was drastically worse, but I'm told that's currently in flux. I have to hand it to the Firefox team. They're not taking Chrome lying down. I've found no real issues with running 3.5 so far and it's a bit of mystery to me (which is to say "I haven't researched at all...") why Ubuntu 9.04 isn't upgrading folks to it. I'm really looking forward to seeing 3.6 stabilize. The Javascript and layout performance seems really good in my use so far. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-08-10 more

dragon on "iphone downloads"

hi rags, there is no such virus that delets the contents on your iphone or any other memory devices. you do one thing you just connect your phone to pc chose the data storage mode. go to search files option and enable searching of hidden files in the advanced option, if you know the name of your file or a folder which you think is deleted and hit search. then you will find them hiding on your iphone. rightclick on them and uncheck the hide option
Publication date: 2009-08-09 more

rags on "iphone downloads"

hi guys, i've come to download a cd to my iphone and on doing so it's gone and deleted everything i had on my phone, pictures, videos, other music, i'm gutted. anyone else had this issue with the iphone? cheer, steve
Publication date: 2009-08-09 more

forgo.ltd on "Apple iPhone 3G S 32GB Unlocked $ 300 without contract"

Apple iPhone 3G S 32GB Unlocked $ 300 without contract Meet the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet. 3GS iPhone features video recording, voice control, 16 GB or 32 GB of storage, and more. LATEST IPHONE 3GS PROCESSOR WITH UPGRADED FEATURES AND! This phone is unLocked to AT & T. With an adapter is unlocked SIM. SOFTWARE also unlocked. This phone does not come with a contractual obligation! PLEASE CONTACT U.S. Web: http://www.qudus.page.tl email: forgo.ltd@hotmail.com IF YOU ARE A CUSTOMER WANTS AND ORDER. Note that shipping is through FedEx and took 3 days to reach you. We deliver TO YOUR DOOR STEP. PLEASE NOTE THAT RETURNS ARE ACCEPTED past 3 months from the date of purchase. Size and weight Height: 4.5 inches (115.5 mm) Width: 2.4 inches (62.1 mm) Depth: 0.48 inches (12.3 mm) Weight: 4.8 oz (135 grams)
Publication date: 2009-08-07 more

yasaki on "How to download free iPhone games"

awesome~
Publication date: 2009-08-06 more

Waynett on "How to make a iPhone Ringtone"

<div id="post_message_641105" class="post">Do you love to have a variety of ringtones for your iPhone? But then, do you also think that it's a waste of money to buy ringtones from iTunes store for your iPhone? This tutorial shows how you can make you own customized iPhone ringtones using [color=#1b4ca2]iPhone Ringtone Maker[/color] and the songs/movies on your local computer. Make preparations: [color=#1b4ca2]Download[/color], install and launch the software. 1. Input video or audio files Click the "Browse" button right beside "Input File" label to select the file you want to create ringtone in the window that pops up, then click "OK" button. You will see the file path and name are displayed in the "Input File" textbox. 2. Play video or audio files Click "Play" button to hear the music before creating ringtone and find the part you want to use. Then drag and drop the start & end slider to get music clip to convert, or type the start & end time in the corresponding text box directly. 3. Set output destination Set output destination by clicking "Browse" button on the right side of the "Local Output File" label. 4. Export to iPhone directly If you want, check "Export to iPhone" option to let the program upload the output ringtone to your iPhone directly after conversion. 5. Start creating your iPhone ringtone After all above are finished, click "Generate" button to start creating your own iPhone ringtone. During the creation, you can check the process by the progress bar at the bottom. Just in a few minutes, you make your own iPhone ringtone from the loved music. For mac users, please choose [color=#1b4ca2]iPhone Ringtone Maker for Mac[/color].</div>
Publication date: 2009-08-06 more

Google Chrome is the New Firefox, and Firefox the new IE

I spent too long on Friday screwing around with stuff on my work laptop in an effort to make Firefox's apparent performance not SUCK ASS. Ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 I've been somewhat unhappy, mostly as a result of the well publicized issues with Intel Video on Ubuntu 9.04. I read about possible hope with upgrading the driver which also required a kernel upgrade, so I did both and rebooted. And, as I hoped, video seemed a bit snappier. But Firefox still SUCKED ASS. At this point I was REALLY PISSED. Sure my new video was nice and all but making new tabs (or switching between them) was still slow, and the disaster known as the "awesome bar" (how to disable) still sucked. So on a whim I went and installed Google Chrome. It totally rocks on my Samsung NC10 netbook (running WinXP), so I figured what not give it a try. It turns out that Chrome on Linux is DRAMATICALLY FASTER THAN FIREFOX!. It's been quite stable on Windows, so I'm hoping the same is true on Linux and I can just switch over to it. As of now, Firefox is my primary browser on only half my computers. Chrome seems to be slowly displacing it, just like Firefox replaced the bloated pig known as Mozilla years ago (and the long since stagnant IE on Windows). It's funny. Browsers seem to be like Internet companies. Every few years a new, small, faster one comes along to kill off some (or all) of the previous generation. I guess this is just the latest in that constant evolution. It'll be interesting to see how this new competition really affects Mozilla Firefox. I spend most of my day in gnome-terminal (to screen, mutt, irssi, etc.), GNU Emacs, and a browser. When they're not fast and stable, my life sucks. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-08-03 more

Good books to read for Summer 2009?

I’ve decided what I want to do for August: read 15 books in 30 days. I read three books this weekend: - The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich. - Gang Leader for a Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh. - World War Z, by Max Brooks. I enjoyed all three. Now I need your help. What books would you recommend that [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-03 more

Flying an Ultralight Trike or Weight Shift Control Aircraft

On Saturday Kathleen and I took advantage of the chance to take a short class in Trike flying and then go up for introductory rides. This was an event organized by AreoDynamic Aviation (formerly Amelia Reid Aviation) at the Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose. We arrived to find Pete Marsh's Antares MA-34 R912 Ranger with an 80 horsepower Rotax 912 engine sitting outside the hangar. So I took several photos of the engine, cockpit, and wing while we got a good look at it. A view of the cockpit. Beefy landing gear! The Rotax 912 Engine Glass Cockpit After checking it out, Pete spent about an hour telling our class about Trike flying in Alaska, answering our questions about the sport and the machines, and giving us a little bit of an idea what to expect. For the record, this Trike has electric trim and will cruise at about 70-75mph while burning 2.5 gallons of high octane auto gas per hour. So mileage is comparable to most cars. But the ride is a hell of a lot more fun! And with a 15 gallon fuel supply, you can fly a lot longer than your bladder will let you. Several of us had reserved times to fly 1 hour $99 introductory rides with Pete, and before I knew it my time had arrived. I was really looking forward to the experience. Pete helped me get strapped in and I took a few pictures and a vide as we taxied over to the run-up area for runway 31R. My turn! Strapped in and ready! View out the front. Engine running and we're taxiing! We sit close together. Here's a short taxi video: After a couple other departures, we were cleared to take off! Takeoff video: Check out that view! Look, Ma. I'm flying the Trike! And before I knew it we were in the air and flying. The first few seconds were kid of freaky, given how open the cockpit is. But that quickly faded away and I began to really enjoy the flying. We headed a bit south and then over the first ridge toward the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton where we could play around a bit and I could get a better feel for flying the Trike. Heading for the hills... Me again. All those houses... Another great view. Back there I got to try various flight maneuvers, really get a feel for the air, and even did some soaring in thermals. I was really impressed by how well we could feel the air as the wing tried to move and the distinct changes in temperature as we flew into different pockets. Turns were easy once I got over the idea of forcing them. We also performed a few stalls (though they hardly compare to stalls in a larger airplane or glider)--very benign. I was impressed by how stable the aircraft was too. Let go and it'll pretty much fly straight and level if you're in calm air. The view was, of course, amazing. And being able "feel" the air more directly makes you feel a lot more connected to the atmosphere you're flying in. All in all it was a much more "raw" experience then the glider flying I'm used to. I really enjoyed it. After almost an hour of flying, it was time to head back in and land. Heading in to land. Landing video: After landing, we taxied back to the hangar so that Pete could pick up his next victim passenger. Next up was Kathleen... Strapped in. Ready to go! The took for for a similarly fun 1-hour flight. Takeoff video: I was there to grab a few pictures as the taxied back to the hangar area. Thumbs Up! What a blast!!! Time to let someone else play... Conclusion We both had an absolute blast flying the trike. It's a little like flying a power plane and a little like flying a glider, but it's a very different experience from both. It's a very raw and natural form of flying that really puts you in touch with your surroundings and gives you an amazing view of the area you're flying in. Thanks again to AeroDynamic Aviation for organizing this event. Not only do they provide excellent flight training and aircraft maintenance, Owner Zdravko Podolski has consistently organized events to help pilots expand our flying horizons. We're both very tempted to get a weight-shift control add-on for our pilot certificates. It's worth noting that many Trikes make it easy to swap out the wheels on the landing gear for floats (land on lakes!) or skis (land on snow/ice). Pictures and Video I have the whole set in this Picasa album: Trike Flying at RHV Or you can see a subset in my Trike Flying album on Flickr. The videos are in my YouTube channel as well. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-08-02 more

Who came out ahead in the Microsoft-Yahoo deal?

MSFT and Yahoo announced their deal earlier today. I’m curious what you think--who did better in the deal? Let me know what you think.
Publication date: 2009-07-30 more

Loose Fuel Cap and Losing Fuel In-Flight (with Video)

While our flying trip to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons was great, we had a few problems along the way. Like they say, bad things often come in groups of three. This was our third one. (The other two involved a hiding cat and a blown tail wheel on the airplane). On our way home Saturday, we flew from Jackson, Wyoming (JAC) to Burley, Idaho (BYI) to get a bit of fuel, grab a snack, and take a restroom break. A few minutes in the air after leaving Burley, Kathleen looked back at the left wing and saw fuel streaming back. And it didn't seem to stop. Uh oh! She shot this video. We were closer to Twin Falls (TWF) at this point, so I called up the tower and began our descent down from 9,000 feet to land and check it out. We fully expected the fuel cap to be completely missing. Unlike the fuel caps on a Cessna, there is no chain that keeps it connected to the fuel tank. So if the cap comes off in flight (or was never put back on), you've lost it. The tower cleared us for a straight-in on runway 25 and we landed shortly after a Turbo Ag Cat came in on the opposite runway. We landed, taxied over to the full service fuel and FBO, and parked. I borrowed a a bucket (no ladder handy) from the guy who came over, climbed up, and was astonished to find the fuel cap was there and it felt tight! There are two flanges on the fuel cap that serve to lock it to the neck of the fuel tank. Normally both of them are fitted tightly below the rim. But the guy who fueled it in Burley manage to put the cap on in such a way that only one of the two flanges was engaged below the rim. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-07-27 more

Good workout music?

Okay, so I registered for a sprint triathlon (400m swim, 11 mile bike, 3.1 mile run) in August. Maybe that will turn out to be a really stupid idea, but I’m going to see if I can at least finish. So I need some good workout music, because my current tunes are getting tired. [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-27 more

toptradea on "Wholesale Apple mobile phones, Iphone 3G 16gb&8gb,Iphone3Gs,M89,M88,T32,G1,G2,TV"

Toptrading Co.,ltd found in 1995, our Email&MSN is toptradea@hotmail.com. As a manufacture supplier,we have more than 10 years experience of this business.All products are at prices from original factory.All items have been verified by us, so they are credible.Veries of styles can meets the different customer need, fit customer demand to adjust the production.AAA quality,most competitive prices is our promise. Our main products are Mobile phones, Laptop,MP3/4/5, video games, PSP, Watches and so on, you can click our website http://www.toptradea.com to have a look.
Publication date: 2009-07-25 more

delta1149 on "design metal detector"

<div>Dear Forum,</div> <div> </div> <div>I am looking for someone to design me a state-of-the-art, sleek and ergonomically <span class="yshortcuts">shape metal detector</span> for <span class="yshortcuts">treasure hunting</span>.</div> <div> </div> <div>I was told to call a student at mit or caltech that maybe they would be interested , but no they weren't. I even called an engineering department at a Singapore University and they wouldn't call back.</div> <div> </div> <div>I know there are people out there that would be excited about designing a <span class="yshortcuts" style="cursor: hand; border-bottom: #0066cc 1px dashed;">metal detector</span>. Maybe you lead me to someone.</div> <div> </div> <div>Thanks,</div> <div> </div> <div>Peyton Jones</div>
Publication date: 2009-07-23 more

Sunset over the Grand Tetons

Our trip to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone is going very well. We've been pretty busy, so I haven't had a lot of time to write. But here's a picture of the sunset from tonight. We're taking lots of pictures and video with the Flip and enjoying the scenery. Weather looks good for the next several days too. Not a bad vacation at all. :-) (comments)
Publication date: 2009-07-20 more

Flying to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons

We're heading out on a little summer vacation flying trip this morning in our Citabria. We'll be visiting Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. We'll be flying from San Jose to Twin Falls, Idaho today. Then tomorrow we'll fly from Twin Falls to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. For those pilots or aviation buffs out there, here is our list of waypoints for both days. Day #1 RHV - LVK (Livermore) LVK - L53 (Lodi) L53 - PVF (Placerville) PVF - TVL (Lake Tahoe) TVL - MEV (Minden) MEV - CXP (Cason City) Rest/Fuel CXP - LOL (Derby) LOL - BAM (Battle Mountain) via V6 airway BAM - EKO (Elko) Rest / Fuel EKO - LWL (Wells) LWL - 06U (Jackpot) 06U - TWF (Twin Falls) Rest / Fuel / Spend Night Day #2 TWF - BYI (Burley) BYI - U01 (American Falls) U01 - U02 (Mc Carley) U02 - U56 (Rigby Jefferson) U56 - DIJ (Driggs Reed) DIJ - JAC (Jackson Hole) And you can see our day #1 navigation log as well as our day #1 flight plan (though we filed each of the 3 legs separately with the FAA). Pictures and video to come! We just got a Flip camera for the trip (test video here). (comments)
Publication date: 2009-07-17 more

Summer Book Reviews

I’ve been doing some summer reading recently. Here are a few books I’ve read: Beat the Reaper, by Josh Bazell. Bazell introduces us to Peter Brown, an overworked doctor at a Manhattan hospital. A patient at the hospital sees Peter and believes him to be a hit man who disappeared into the witness protection program. This [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-17 more

Submit video questions for July 2009

This Thursday afternoon I’ll record some new videos, so I created a Google Moderator page where you can post suggested topics and vote topics up and down. I won’t be able to answer every question, but I’ll tackle several popular questions and a few interesting questions. Please suggest topics that lots of people would be [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-15 more

Opinion poll: do you like webmaster videos?

If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you might not know that for the last few months we’ve been posting daily free webmaster videos on our webmaster video channel. That YouTube channel has over 100 videos on it now. We just finished up the most recent round of videos, and now the question is whether to [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-14 more

Why Googlers should read Anil Dash

Anil Dash wrote a great piece about Google recently, and I think all Googlers should read it. Anil makes several good points, including this one: I doubt Google’s internal self-image as an organization has changed to reflect this new reality. “We’re not like some giant company with flashy TV ads
Publication date: 2009-07-13 more

john mosher on "How to Get Back my Deleted Mac Mail ???"

This forum posting process bites - It took me about 15 attempts before my post took (And it loses everything you typed in if you don't copy it before hitting the post reply button)
Publication date: 2009-07-10 more

Jim Andrews on "How to Get Back my Deleted Mac Mail ???"

I need serious help ... !!! I accidentally deleted a folder (with lots of folders inside!) of very important e-mail containing years of research ... !!! Is there any possible way to get it back? I was trying to change the names of folders, from lower case to upper case, and I got a message telling me that I couldn't do that, because there was already a folder like that. I saw an extra folder, and clicked on it, but there appeared to be nothing in it, so I chose Delete from the menu. Only to find out it was the real folder with many other folders inside. I’m using Mac Mail, OS X 10.4.11 -- I did NOT choose Erase Deleted Messages from the menu yet ... !!! Is there still hope to recover all those deleted messages .... ??? I need to get that e-mail back somehow .... Any suggestions ... ??? Help !!!
Publication date: 2009-07-10 more

geekmaster on "How to download free iPhone games"

I found great articles for finding and installing free games into iPhone at a Zimbio wikizine here: Free iPhone Games.
Publication date: 2009-07-07 more

allj on "trouble bootcamp partition and bcd file"

Hi I'm having trouble with vista 64 loading on the bootcamp partition. The screen turns black after logon for way too long. I want to use easybcd from neosmart to rescue the boot sector since I think this is where the problem lies. Does anyone know if doing this will interfer with the normal loading of holding the option key down or booting directly into osx. I'm desperate for an answer. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks Alan
Publication date: 2009-07-07 more

fishup2008 on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

If you Want to Make a Copy of your DVD Disc on Mac Intel, I share you the resource as below: http://www.infopirate.org/_how-make-copy-your-dvd-disc-mac-intel
Publication date: 2009-07-05 more

Making a John Q Public account on Google

One of the advantages of working at Google is that you get to see neat products and features before the rest of the world does. But that can also be a disadvantage. Sometimes I’d like to talk about a fun Gmail Lab or a new Calendar feature but I’m honestly not sure whether the outside [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-04 more

Hailee on "Rumor or not? iPod Touch 3rd generation will launch"

 I found this on website today, http://www.uxsight.com/category/168541/ipodtouch3rdgencases.html and I have no idea if it's a rumor or reliable. It is said some place had started to sell the case of the new generation iPod Touch.  I still haven't got any news of the new generation Touch, or this is only a rumor?
Publication date: 2009-07-02 more

30 day challenge begins: biking to work

The overwhelming winner in my 30 day poll was “Bike to work” so that’s what I’m doing during the month of July. In the third week of July I’ll be out in Boston to speak at SIGIR, but any time I’m heading into the Googleplex during July, I’m planning to bike there. Is there something good [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-01 more

Funny spam email, June 2009

I enjoy posting some of the funny emails that I get. This one made me laugh: You don
Publication date: 2009-07-01 more

ActiveSenior on "safari 4 browser"

I recommended you take the time, and switch to Google Chrome. It is an incredible browser. Really fast, they dont just say it, they mean it! Also, my connection isnt the greatest, and I sometimes would have problems such as, if 10 tabs are open, and if 1 would freeze, the rest would as well. In Chrome, even if one tab freezes, the rest do not. This really saves a lot of time. Instead of always restarting everything, I can just start a new tab, and I am good to continue to do what I was doing. Anyway, I never liked Safari. I mean for iPod its OK, but for computer, not really. Switch to Firefox ASAP, or even better, try Chrome.
Publication date: 2009-06-29 more

Matthew Humphries on "safari 4 browser"

pennwood, importing your bookmarks from Safari to Firefox should be as simple as: File -> Import... -> select Safari -> OK. Do that once Firefox is installed and all your bookmarks shopuld magically appear in Firefox.
Publication date: 2009-06-29 more

ActiveSenior on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

As you see, there are many software's to convert. All of them have their pluses and minuses. It depends on what you will be converting mostly. For example, if you will be converting .avi to iphone format, then you want a software that slacks off in converting other formats, but will be very good (ex. speed and quality) in converting .avi to iphone.
Publication date: 2009-06-29 more

Natural links are better than non-natural

I got a spam email that I thought about blogging about, but decided not to. Then they spammed me *again*. Sheesh. So here goes. If you get an email with a subject like “Affordable Link Building Outsourcing,” think twice. Any email that starts out Make your links appear Natural Link Building is one of the most significant [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-24 more

thumb on "short survey"

I too use a few Apple products, here are my answers. 1. b & e 2. 7 3. 5 4. 5 5. 4 6. 2 7. Yes 8. No
Publication date: 2009-06-24 more

thumb on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

DVD and Video to iPhone Converter suite is another choice. It can convert DVD to iPhone video, AVI to iPhone, MPEG to iPhone, WMV to iPhone, VOB, DivX, XviD, MOV, RM, RMVB, Dvr-ms, etc. to iPhone video MP4 format.
Publication date: 2009-06-24 more

30 days

30 days is enough time to build a habit. Last month, I started trying to walk 10,000 steps a day for 30 days. I didn’t walk 10K steps every day, but I did keep at it until I’d walked over 10K steps for at least 30 days. In the process, I discovered that walking [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-23 more

My review of the iPhone 3GS

Disclaimer: This post is entirely my personal opinion. I also own an HTC T-Mobile G1, which runs Google’s Android operating system. I picked up the new iPhone 3G S this Friday and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts: The Good: - The iPhone 3GS is considerably faster than the iPhone 3G. Especially in the browser, you’ll [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-22 more

percieal on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

4Easysoft iPhone Video Converter provides an easy and completed way to convert video to iPhone including iPhone 3G OS, such as MPEG, VOB, MP4, M4V, QuickTime MOV, etc. for iPhone and convert audio to MP3, AAC, M4A for iPhone with high output quality and fast converting speed..
Publication date: 2009-06-19 more

How to read Persian (Farsi)

Google just added machine-translation of Persian (Farsi): This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian
Publication date: 2009-06-19 more

Distributed Parallel Fault Tolerant File System Wanted

After re-thinking and re-tooling some of the work I've been doing to take advantage of Gearman, I've started to wish for a big file system in the sky. I guess it's no surprise that Google uses GFS with their Map/Reduce jobs and that Hadoop has HDFS as a major piece of its infrastructure. The Wikipedia page List of file systems has a section on Distributed parallel fault tolerant file systems that appears to be a good list of what's out there. The problem, of course, is that it's little more than a list. Do you have any experience with one or more of those? Recommendations? I should say that I'm only interested in something that's Open Source and have a minor bias against big Java things as well as stuff that appear as though it would cease to exist if a single company went out of business. I'm not too worried about POSIX compliance. The main use would be for writing large files that other machines or processes would then read all or part of. I don't need updates. The ability to append would probably be nice, but that's easy to work around. More specifically, these three have my eye at the moment: CloudStore (was KFS) by Kosmix, a C++ clone of GFS MogileFS from Danga, what can I say--I'm a Perl guy HDFS the Hadoop file system It's interesting that some solutions deal with blocks (often large) while others deal with files. I'm not sure I have a preference for either at the moment. But I'm open to hearing about everything, so speak up! :-) (comments)
Publication date: 2009-06-18 more

Matthew Humphries on "Microsoft Office 2008 or iWorks?"

Depending on what your functionality requirements are there is always the option of using Google Docs, Zoho, or one of the other free cloud-based solutions.
Publication date: 2009-06-17 more

BobbyBluehen on "Microsoft Office 2008 or iWorks?"

Hi: I want to buy a MacBook Pro, but am confused concerning comments I’ve been reading about what software to buy — iWorks or Microsoft Office 2008. Many say MO2008 is not good, yet some say iWorks is good, but not as good as how MO2008 works on a PC. My question is this: Does Microsoft make an inferior MO for Macs and a better one for PCs. Also, is it true that iWorks doesn’t transform documents into Word very well.
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

awesomeo on "Microsoft Office 2008 or iWorks?"

I don't know as I've never used either version. You should give OpenOffice.org Aqua before buying anything. It's free and pretty comparable. http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua.html
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

My Drizzle Article in Linux Magazine (XtraDB and Sphinx too!)

After a few years off, I've been doing some writing for Linux Magazine (which is on-line only) again recently. First off, my just published feature article is Drizzle: Rethinking the MySQL Database Kernel. As you might have guessed, it looks at Drizzle and some of the reasoning behind forking and re-working MySQL. I'm also writing a weekly column that we've been calling "Bottom of the Stack" (RSS) which started a few weeks ago. Recent articles are: Sphinx: Search Outside the Box XtraDB: InnoDB on Steroids The State of MySQL The basic idea is that I'll be writing about back-end data processing and systems--the sort of stuff that lives in the bottom half of the traditional LAMP stack. If you have ideas of stuff you'd like to cover, please drop me a line. As a side note, I wrote my first article for Linux Magazine back in June of 2001: MySQL Performance Tuning. Those were the MySQL 3.23 days. How time flies! An amazing credit to some of the folks involved with Linux Magazine, all of my past writings are available there. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

PageRank sculpting

People think about PageRank in lots of different ways. People have compared PageRank to a “random surfer” model in which PageRank is the probability that a random surfer clicking on links lands on a page. Other people think of the web as an link matrix in which the value at position (i,j) indicates the presence [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

Watch my site review session from Google I/O

At Google I/O a few weeks ago I did a site review session with fellow Google colleagues Brian White and Greg Grothaus. The video from that session is live now and I’ll include it below: About 38 minutes in, the session morphed into a general Q&A. So even if you don’t care about site reviews, the [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

franklino on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

to view dvd and video on iphone, you can get clone2go dvd to iphone converter to get the dvd and video converted to the iphone compatible mpeg4 format and then transfer the output files to iphone with the sync of itunes library. This dvd to iphone converter can 1) convert dvd to iphone 2) convert video to iphone 3) be used as youtube downloader.
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

pennwood on "safari 4 browser"

I really (REALLY) don't like the pretty pictures on my bookmarks pages that came with the latest update. I surf (A LOT), have over 500 bookmarks, and Apple just made it a whole lot harder for me to look 'em over. (I'm steamed about this) I already know what the websites look like and who my favorites are, thank you. I'd like my bookmarks back ! Anybody else feel this way too ?
Publication date: 2009-06-12 more

pennwood on "Don't Buy Apple"

My wife bought a Dell desktop & we spent as much on security & service as the Dell cost in just 2 years ($600) before the 'bad guys' trashed it. My Apple cost a little more but I haven't spent a dime on either security or service .... and it's trouble free for almost 4 years. Easy choice for me.
Publication date: 2009-06-12 more

pennwood on "short survey"

Hi Beth. I bought my Apple for security reasons. No viruses. I surf, a lot. Everything works good for me. I'm not addicted to my Mac - I may be addicted to the internet .....
Publication date: 2009-06-12 more

Add Custom Search to any site in two minutes

By the way, you might have missed it at Google I/O, but the Custom Search Engine team has made it really easy to add custom search to any site. Google recently introduced Web Elements, which are simple snippets of code you can copy/paste into your site’s HTML. From the Custom Search Element web page, I copied [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-11 more

Android barcode scanner in 6 lines of Python code

After my last video about using a barcode scanner to add and search books in your library, I was feeling pretty happy. Bar code scanners are pretty cheap--mine cost about $65. But then Google released the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) and it turns out that you don’t even need a bar code scanner. Instead, you [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-10 more

Search your bookshelf with a $65 barcode scanner

(Okay, if TechCrunch wrote about my video then I should probably at least do a blog post too.) Last year I suggested potential Summer of Code projects and one of my favorite suggestions was “How about a good open-source program to manage your book library? Something like the Delicious Library program, but that works with Linux?” [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-07 more

Straight from Google: What You Need to Know

I just gave a talk at WordCamp San Francisco 2009. Thanks to Matt Mullenweg and the Automattic folks for a great time! I think there will be a video up soon, but if you want to browse the slides in the mean time, here they are: You can also download the talk in PowerPoint format.
Publication date: 2009-05-30 more

Hulu Desktop vs. Hulu in Browser vs. Nexflix (Flash vs. Silverlight?)

For a while now we've had a computer hooked up to our large screen television and stereo system. A couple months back I upgraded the motherboard, CPU, and memory so that we could start using the Windows 7 release candidate and Windows Media Center on it. The new hardware also meant we could play back high definition video. Aside from playing back photos in Picasa and various video files, we also stream music using Pandora or play from our library using WinAMP or Media Center. For streaming video, we'd been using Hulu a bit (which is Flash based) and Netflix (which is Silverlight). Yesterday we tried out Hulu Desktop and attempted to watch the Glee pilot. Hulu desktop crashed on the first run after install (could be a Windows 7 issue) but then ran fine upon restarting it. But the video quality was low and quite jerky. It used a lot of CPU too. This made me wonder if it was really taking advange of the video capabilities of our system. It was bad enough that we switched to watching the show using the browser-based streaming. Hitting the full-screen high quality version acually played better there and used less CPU. So the desktop application clearly needs some performance tuning. I compare all of this with Netflix streaming which uses Silverlight and the difference is clear, even in 720p resolution we tend to keep our display set to. Microsoft has done a good job of tuning Silverlight for video. If I recally, they have very good H264 support built-in. That said, I'm glad to see Hulu Desktop out. It makes a lot of sense to have an app that can be controlled via IR remote instead of the wireless keyboard we had been using. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-29 more

The Big ALTER TABLE Test

As previously noted, I've been playing with XtraDB a bit at work. Over a week ago I decided to test compression on one of our larger tables and it took a bit longer than I expected. (root@db_server) [db_name]> ALTER TABLE table_name \ ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=4; Query OK, 825994826 rows affected (8 days 14 hours 23 min 47.08 sec) Records: 825994826 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0 Zoiks! It's too bad we couldn't use all the cores on the machine for the ALTER TABLE, huh? On the plus side, the file sizes aren't too bad. Before: -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 1638056067072 2009-05-24 09:23 table_name.ibd After: -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 587617796096 2009-05-27 07:14 table_name.ibd I'll have more to say about XtraDB and the compression options in a later post. But given the interest that my Twitter messages about this big ALTER TABLE generated yesterday, I figured I'd share a bit more detail here. For anyone doing the math at home, that's going from rougly 1.5TB to 500GB (the new file size is slightly inflated, since this slave managed to replicate about a week's worth of data before I caught it). I was hoping for 4:1 compression and managed about 3:1. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-28 more

Use a Wii Balance Board with Linux

In this post you’ll learn how to make a working Bluetooth weight sensor + fast real-time graphical display with about 200 lines of Python code. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/linux_unix/Talking_to_a_Wii_Balanceboard_in_Ubuntu/'; You can code any Nintendo Wii-like video game for Ubuntu/Linux and the Nintendo Balance Board very easily. Here’s a video demonstration: This post assumes that you can already [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-23 more

awesomeo on "Wireless Filght Simulator Control"

Something like this is about the cheapest you'll be able to do: http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=209708411&listingid=32657468&dcaid=17902 Also, a long USB cable won't work since the maximum length is 16 feet. You need to use special "active" cables or an Ethernet extender.
Publication date: 2009-05-22 more

What you should do next week

Next week is going to be a humdinger. If you’re in the Bay Area, here’s what I think you should do: - Attend Google I/O. If you’re a developer, trust me, I think you’ll get something out of the conference. Just check out the list of sessions, for one thing. The price is $400, but if [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-22 more

grampa on "Wireless Filght Simulator Control"

Good afternoon,  I would like to know if there is an inexpensive wireless usb device that is capable of transmitting approx 50 ft to my PC with out having to use a long usb cable. Gefen, Belkin and Iogear have them [wireless usb hub] available but are rather expensive. I have a contoller for a Remote Control flight simulator program but it requires to be connected  directly to my PC via a usb connection.  Thank you for any consideration.     grampa
Publication date: 2009-05-21 more

Letter to a young journalist

Don’t conclude from my previous post that I dislike journalism. All through middle and high school I woke up early to read the local newspaper each morning. I was the editor of our newspaper in high school. My mother wanted me to be a journalist. I’ve been thinking of the issues confronting journalism for a [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-20 more

Recent piece by Sanford and Brown

(I work for Google, but this is my personal opinion.) Last week I was on vacation down in Florida and I had a chance to tour Thomas Edison’s winter vacation home. The tour guide told us that Edison wired his house and switched on electrical lighting in 1887. Then the tour guide leaned in and quietly [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-20 more

Our CEO Tells It Like It Is

I haven't said a lot about the ongoing battle between Craigslist and certain overly-agressive politicains, but after reading his most recent blog post, An Apology Is In Order, I have to say that I'm really proud of Jim. Having a CEO standing up to politicians and media for what he believes is right and true really reaffirms my decision to join Craigslist last year. Better yet, he's outdone most of the media by, *gasp*, actually linking to relevant information in his post. Many prominent companies, including AT&T, Microsoft, and Village Voice Media, not to mention major newspapers and other upstanding South Carolina businesses feature more “adult services” ads than does craigslist, some of a very graphic nature. For a small sampling, look (careful NSFW) here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. Have you fully considered the implications of your accusations against craigslist? What’s a crime for craigslist is clearly a crime for any company. Are you really prepared to condemn the executives of each of the mainstream companies linked above, and all the others that feature such ads, as criminals? craigslist may not matter in your world view, despite our popularity among your constituents, but mightn’t you want an endorsement from any of the SC newspapers for your gubenatorial campaign, whose publishers you’ve just labeled as criminals? Do you really intend to launch a criminal investigation against the phone company? What about potential new jobs connected to big data center buildouts in SC by Internet companies? Are you *sure* you want prosecute all of their CEOs as criminals??? Keep it up, Jim. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-18 more

Smoked Tilapia with Honey Glaze

Tonight we tried smoking Tailpia for the first time and it came out very well. The full recipe is below the before and after pictures. The fish in the smoker, before adding honey and spices: The fish after smoking: Dinner! Recipe This recipe is very simple but surprisingly tasty. It has some sweet, some smoky, and some spice. Arrange the fish on the smoker grate and coat liberally with honey. Then sprinkle on a bit of each of the following: Salt Pepper Garlic Powder Cayenne Pepper Then smoke for 18-20 minutes with hickory chips. The resulting mix of honey, cayenne, and smoky flavor is truly excellent. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-15 more

MySQL 5.1.34 and XtraDB 1.0.3-5

For a couple weeks now, we've had a MySQL server at work running MySQL 5.1.34 and the Percona XtraDB 1.0.3-5 plug-in. I'm testing an upgrade path for our current MySQL 5.0.xx based servers. Aside from some confusion about the initial setup (getting the built-in InnoDB to stay out of the way), things have gone very well. All of our largest and most active tables have been converted to the new Barracuda file format and I tested compression on the two largest. The first didn't fare so well, but it's a fairly over-indexed table with small rows. The second, however, contains a decent sized TEXT column (classified posting bodies) and it compresses quite nicely. Any change in CPU utilization is not significant. I hope to soon get a second server running and try to increase the compression ratio, going from KEY_BLOCK_SIZE of 8K to 4K to see if we can squeeze some more out of it without much penalty. I love all the extra stats provided by the InnoDB plug-in and the Percona (and Google) enhancements. There are a lot of knobs that I've not yet tried to turn, but it's good to know they're available when that day comes. More to come... See Also: Is MySQL 5.1 a compelling upgrade? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-15 more

What was new at Searchology?

Google launched 3-4 new features at Searchology today. You can read about Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets, or Sky Map in my previous post. But I also pay attention to the small things that Google said. I noticed several tidbits that I don’t think we’ve said in public before. - Pat Riley mentioned a couple [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-13 more

Google Searchology 2009: Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets

Google just finished its Searchology 2009 event. In previous years, Google has used Searchology to introduce Universal Search and Personalized Search. So what was new this year? Several things: Google Search Options. Marissa Mayer referred to this as a handy “toolbelt” that lets you slice and dice your search results. You can do a search such [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-13 more

On vacation for a week or so

Just to let you know, I’m on vacation for a week or so. If you send me email or tweet in my direction, don’t expect a reply for a while.
Publication date: 2009-05-08 more

MoonRiver on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

You can also finish your work through Disk Utility . Just follow this guide : How to Copy DVD with Disk Utility to DVD on Mac
Publication date: 2009-05-07 more

5 things you (probably) don

(I was rooting around and found this leftover post from 2006 and figured I’d throw it out here.) It looks like blog tag has come to the search bloggers. I’ve been tagged by so many people that I yield and surrender obscure facts about me. When I was growing up in Eastern Kentucky, there wasn’t always a [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-03 more

Thinking about thunder

I read an interesting blog post by Mike Markson, VP of Marketing for Blekko, which is the working name for a new search engine planned to launch to the public in a few months. The title of Mike’s post was “Google Likes To Steal Other’s Thunder,” and he mentions several anecdotes to back up that idea. [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-03 more

I love my Samsung NC10 Netbook

A couple months back I got a Samsung NC10 Netbook. I had been on the fence for a long time, trying to decide between the an Eee PC from Asus, the MSI Wind, and the Samsung NC10. Right about the time I was going to finally do it, the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE was announced. I read a lot of reviews from folks who'd bought those netbooks and eventually settled on the NC10. The main deciding factors, in order, were: keyboard layout, build quality, ease of upgrade (mine as 2GB RAM and a 320GB disk, twice the standard in both departments), and Linux support. The MSI Wind was okay in most of those areas, but based on the many reviews I read, the NC10 was a little bit better across the board. So I ruled the MSI Wind out on that alone. The Eee PC 1000HE had just been announced and would have required waiting a few more weeks. Plus, its keyboard had a few quirks--notably the right shift key being too small and offset. Keyboards are really important to me. It had the advantage of a claimed 9.5 hour battery life vs. the 7-8 claimed on the NC10. However, I picked the NC10 and couldn't be happier. Running Windows XP, I routinely get 7 hours of battery life with Wifi on and the screen brightness set low (don't need it any higher most of the time). They range is excellent, keyboard feels right, and it's surprisingly snappy. Building a computer this small and light is really an exercise in design compromises and I thing Samsung nailed it perfectly. I've traveled with it a few times and used it all day at the MySQL Conference without having to worry about being near power outlets. The 2GB RAM is more than enough for anything I'm likely to throw at the Atom processor and 320GB is enough space for all my music, pictures, and pretty much everything except my extensive video collection. I use the NC10 a bit day to day. I think of it as a "couch computer" in addition to use in travel and at a conference. But I've also hooked it up to a HDTV to show off pictures to family and that worked just as well. I could easily see doing a day's worth of work on it with an external monitor and mouse. A couple weeks ago, I grabbed the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) and booted the NC10 off a USB stick to see how it worked. Much to my surprise, it seems that everything worked well without any tweaking. I'll probably stick with XP for now, but it's good to see that Ubuntu would work for me too. If I was looking to buy now, I'd look really hard at the Samsung NC10, ASUS Eee PC 1000HE, and the Samsung NC20 (the 12" model). (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-02 more

neil on "configuring DHCP for OS 10.1.4 on G4 eMac???"

can anybody help. i can't seem to get my Mac on-line. i am using 10.1.4 on a G4 eMac, (it's all i have right now). i did manually insert the IP address from my provider, but still no luck. they suggested i try forums for help. cheers to all Neil
Publication date: 2009-05-02 more

beccagal on "configuring DHCP for OS 10.1.4 on G4 eMac???"

Hi. Try going to your Network settings in the System Preferences and make sure the modem is not checked. Becca
Publication date: 2009-05-02 more

Is MySQL 5.1 a compelling upgrade?

Of the many things I noticed last week at the MySQL Conference, one of the most notable was how many companies have not upgraded from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1 yet. Craigslist is in that camp and it seems that we're joined by the likes of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and about half a dozen other companies that use MySQL heavily. Come to think of it, SmugMug are the only folks I've talked with who've made the jump (video). So it's not much of a surprise that Percona is asking if they should backport 5.4 fixes to 5.0. Given our usage of MySQL to date, the only really compelling reason to upgrade is to get access to the InnoDB plug-in (and XtraDB). I'd like to get compression, some of the various performance patches, and tuning options, so plug-in support is a requirement. But beyond that, I just don't see anything new in 5.1 that we need. As I noted in The Real or Official MySQL? Does Not Matter!, the storage engines matter more than the various add-on features in the server itself. Have you upgraded or are you thinking about it? If so, why? If not, why not? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-01 more

MySQL and Drizzle Tip: Checking configuration file syntax (faking configtest)

In the Apache world, you might be familiar with tweaking your config file(s) and then running $ apachectl configtest to see if the config parses. We've been discussing this on the drizzle mailing list and talking in general about configuration handling and management. Well, it turns out that you can fake it in MySQL and Drizzle too. If you have a new configuration in /tmp/new.cnf, try this: $ mysqld --defaults-file=/tmp/new.cnf --verbose --help And it'll run mysqld (or drizzled), parse the config, report any problems, print help, and exit without initializing storage engines or trying to grab a port. Neat trick! Thanks to Baron Schwartz, Arjen Lentz, and Sheeri Cabral (book) for helping to demonstrate this. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-30 more

Slides from "MySQL and Search at Craigslist"

Last week I delivered a talk titled "MySQL and Search at Craigslist" as part of the 2009 MySQL Conference and Expo. I talked about some of the good and bad of our MySQL work and also talked a lot about our recent Sphinx deployment. The slides are embedded below and here, thanks to SlideShare. (Anyone know why Google Docs doesn't yet handle OpenOffice presentations?) MySQL And Search At CraigslistView more presentations from jzawodn. I gave a copy to O'Reilly but don't yet see them on the conference site. The usual disclaimers apply: I said a lot that's not well reflected in the slides, and I'm sure they're less informative without the audio or video that may or may not have been captured. Either way, hopefully they're useful to folks who saw the talk and even a few of those who did not. I also delivered a condensed version of this talk at the Percona Performance Conference and those slides are available too. Thanks to everyone who provided useful feedback and discussion before and after the talks. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

cloris on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

Movie DVD Copy is also a good choice. Never miss backing up a DVD with Movie DVD Copy. And if you just make copies to your computer, DVDSmith is freeware and can meets your requirements. Both these software can be found at http://www.movie-dvd-copy.com
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

Azymov on "Don't Buy Apple"

NetBSD 4 with OpenBox window manager is a good option--lightning fast, even on hardware deemed 'slow' for Windoze. Apple OS X is a beautiful system--it should be, since it's based on freeBSD, another FREE operating system. Nevertheless, Apple sells their hardware for TOO HIGH A PRICE, being that they essentially use hardware primarily sold to the PC market. (Putting it plainly, Apple loves profit--with little effort on ingenuity. They're not so ingenious as their marketing department wants you to believe.)
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

Hack on Drizzle Full-Time for Rackspace!

Given the current state of the economy, here's a quick job plug for anyone interested and qualified. At the Drizzle Developer Day on Friday, I got to meet Adrian Otto from Rackspace. Rackspace has a cloud offering (think Aamazon EC2) that's called Mosso and is willing to employ full time developers who spend all their time working on Drizzle. Here's what he sent to the mailing list. I was speaking with Eric Day at the developer conference, and I mentioned that Rackspace is wiling to employ full time developers for the specific purpose of furthering the Drizzle project's mission. He suggested that I email you on this list becuase he expected there would be interest in this offer. If you work on the project now part time, and want to make it a full time job working exclusively on the Drizzle project, let me know. The Rackspcae Cloud believes in open source, and we want to do our part to make Drizzle a wild success. Talking with him a bit, the rationale is simple: Rackspace wants to offer the best cloud resources they can. Part of that means having infrastructure that their customers need and works well. They're betting the Drizzle is part of their future, and hiring a few people to work on it makes that future a reality sooner than later. It looks like Mark Callaghan likes the idea too. Anyway, ping me if you're interested and I'll put you in touch. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

Slides from What Craigslist wants and needs from Drizzle

As I previously mentioned, on Friday I attended the Drizzle Developer Day at Sun in Santa Clara. While there I had the chance to speak to the group while everyone ate their salad, pizza, and cookies. The talk was titles "What Craigslist wants and needs from Drizzle" and is available as a Google Docs presentation here. I've also embedded a version of the slides below. I should note here, as I did at the talk, that this presentation is neither comprehensive or completely representative. That is to say that I'm sure there are things I've forgotten. Plus, the fact that I was working with MySQL in other high-volume web shops before coming to Craiglist means that there's definitely some personal bias and pet peeves addressed in there too. Anyway, that's what I presented. Thanks to the fine folks at Sun (soon to be Oracle) for hosting and organizing the day. And special thanks to the Drizzle developers for getting together and showing the rest of us how things work and taking time to talk about their plans. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-27 more

Switching things around

This weekend I decided to mix things up on my blog. So I switched things around: - I took one of my domains, dullest.com, and moved it to TigerTech from pair Networks. - I installed the latest version of WordPress on dullest.com and copied the MySQL database from mattcutts.com to dullest.com. - I changed my blog layout to [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-27 more

Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 7.83 seconds!

Recently I treated myself to a solid-state drive (SSD). That’s essentially a hard-drive made out of memory chips. I bought the Intel X25-E Extreme, which uses faster single-level cell (SLC) memory chips instead of slower multi-level cell (MLC) memory chips. I wanted to put the drive through its paces, so I decided to see how fast [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-26 more

MySQL and Percona Conferences Rocked

Now that it's Friday, I can finally come up for air and say that both the MySQL and Percona Conferences (which I wrote about earlier) surpassed my expectations. Having the two going on semi-concurrently worked out pretty well. At no time did I find myself without at least two sessions I wanted to see. Often times I had to really cut lunch short to make sure I didn't miss anything. Other MySQL Conference veterans I asked has very similar responses. There's a ton of other stuff to digest, and I hope to write up some thoughts in the coming days and weeks. As usual, a big part of the conference for me was being able to meet up with people I don't see often or who I've never met face to face. Meeting up with people solving similar problems at places like Facebook, Google, Mixi, and other high-traffic sites is invaluable. Being able get a good sense of what new storage engines are out there and how modern hardware is changing database systems (SSDs, multi-core servers) proved to be very educational in ways I didn't expect. All the politics and posturing around the Oracle/Sun buyout weren't as significant as I'd expected. People really wanted to get down to business and technology. I enjoyed giving my talks and answering questions about problems that we have and haven't solved yet at Craigslist. I'm heading over to Drizzle Devloper Day in a couple hours. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-24 more

Grabbag questions, April 2009

I scheduled some time today to record video, so I opened up a thread for questions. Post your questions over on Google Moderator so that I can see which questions are popular. I
Publication date: 2009-04-23 more

MySQL and Percona Performance Conferece Lineup

Amidst all the Oracle/Sun/MySQL news today, the MySQL Conference kicks off this week. So I just spent a few minutes putting together my picks for the sessions I'd like to attend at the MySQL Conference and the Percona Performance Conference (schedule). There's quite a lineup and I have some hard choices to make. Both groups have put together excellent events. And, wow, there are a lot of new storage engines and appliances coming out. To make my life easier, I'm putting the list of interesting sessions from both conferences here so I can try to decide where to spend my attention. Sessions I'm Presenting or Part Of I'm presenting MySQL and Search at Craigslist on Tuesday morning and am part of The Great Open Cloud Shootout on Wednesday morning. On Friday, I'll be at the Drizzle Developer Day to talk about "What Craigslist Needs from Drizzle." Tuesday Sessions: MySQL 8:30am - State of the Dolphin - Karen Padir 9:15am - This is Not a Web App: MySQL at Google - Mark Callaghan 10:50am - MySQL and Search at Craigslist - Jeremy Zawodny 11:55am - InnoDB: Innovative Technologies for Performance and Data Protection - Ken Jacobs, Heikki Tuuri 2:00pm - Falcon Storage Engine - Designed for Speed - Kevin Lewis, Ann Harrison 3:05pm - The PBXT Storage Engine: Meeting Future Challenges - Paul McCullagh 4:25pm - Solving Common SQL Problems with SeqEngine - Beat Vontobel 5:15pm - Hadoop and MySQL: Friends with Benefits - Frank Mashraqi Wednesday Sessions: MySQL 8:50am - The Great Open Cloud Shootout - panel 10:50am - Build Your Own MySQL Time Machine - Chuck Bell, Mats Kindahl 11:55am - Using Q4M: A Message Queue Storage Engine for MySQL - Kazuho Oku 11:55am - libdrizzle: A New Client Library for Drizzle and MySQL - Eric Day 11:55am - libdrizzle: A New Client Library for Drizzle and MySQL - Eric Day 2:00pm - Maria: The New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL - Monty Widenius 2:00pm - SAN Performance on a Internal Disk Budget: The Coming SSD Revolution - Matthew Yonkovit 2:00pm - Crash Recovery and Media Recovery in InnoDB - Heikki Tuuri 3:05pm - MySQL Performance on EC2 - Mark Callaghan 4:25pm - Perl Stored Procedures for MySQL - Antony Curtis 4:25pm - High Availability and Scalability Patches from Google - Ben Handy, Justin Tolmer 5:15pm - Optimizing MySQL Performance for ZFS - Allan Packer, Neelakanth Nadgir 5:15pm - Redundant Storage Cluster: For When It's Just Too Big - Bob Burgess 5:15pm - Inserts at Drive Speed: Designing a Custom Storage Engine for Write-Mostly Applications - Ben Haley Wednesday Sessions: Percona 9:00am - Maria In Depth - Monty Widenius 9:55am - The Return of Gearman - Eric Day 11:15am - Fighting Replication Lag - Peter Zaitsev 12:45pm - Evaluating Disk Backends for MySQL Servers - Ewen Fortune 1:35pm - Database Performance with Proxy Architectures - Robert Hodges 2:00pm - Covering Indexes: Orders-of-Magnitude Improvements - Dr. Bradley C. Kuszmaul 5:00pm - Sphinx and MySQL: A Perfect Match - Andrew Aksyonoff 6:15pm - InnoDB Performance Tuning - Peter Zaitsev 7:05pm - CouchDB: Behind the Buzz - Jan Lehnardt 7:55pm - Linux Filesystems: Who, What, and Where - Stewart Smith 9:10pm - Open Q&A: Performance - panel Thursday Sessions: MySQL 8:30am - The SmugMug Tale - Don MacAskill 10:50am - SQL is Dead - Monty Taylor 10:50am - Map/Reduce and Queues for MySQL Using Gearman - Eric Day, Brian Aker 10:50am - Dormando's Proxy for MySQL - Alan Kasindorf 11:55am - Memory Management in MySQL and Drizzle - Stewart Smith 11:55am - Improving Performance by Running MySQL Multiple Times - MC Brown 2:00pm - MySQL Row Change Event Extraction and Publish - Gene Pang 2:00pm - InnoDB Performance and Usability Patches - Vadim Tkachenko, Ewen Fortune 2:50pm - Make Your Life Easier with Maatkit - Baron Schwartz 2:50pm - BLOB Streaming: Efficient Reliable BLOB Handling for all Storage Engines - Barry Leslie 3:50pm - Database We Can Believe In: Stories from the Front Lines (of the Obama Campaign) - many speakers Thursday Sessions: Percona 9:55am - Pushing the Envelope - Don MacAskill 10:50am - The Life of a Dirty Page - Mark Callaghan 1:35pm - High Performance MySQL from a Boring Architecture - Baron Schwartz 3:15pm - Hypertable - Doug Judd 4:30pm - Drizzle's Approach to Improving Performance of the Server - Jay Pipes 7:50pm - MySQL Replication: Getting The Most From Slaves - Peter Zaitsev 9:05pm - Open Q&A: Feature Request Bonanza - panel Friday: Drizzle Developer Day Drizzle Developer Day is on Friday at Sun in Santa Clara. I'm looking forward to many of the talks (some of which will be completely over my head but interesting anyway). Back To Work! And, with that, I need to go work on my presentation! See you at the conference... I'll try to post interesting tidbits on Twitter and tag 'em with #MySQLConf like others appear to be doing. I just found out that I can share my public MySQL Conference Schedule. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-20 more

Oracle Buying Sun, Gets MySQL

Interesting news this morning, just as the 2009 MySQL Conference is starting. As is being reported all over the place, Oracle has agreed to buy Sun at $9.50 per share, giving them to a ton of great technology (Solaris, ZFS, MySQL, DTrace, etc.). One one of the biggest threats to Oracle's core database business (at the low end, at least) for a while now has been MySQL. And now they're poised to own MySQL after Sun bought it not long ago. (It seems like yesterday that Oracle bought Innobase.) As I noted a while back, the MySQL landscape is changing. This news is sure to make the conference more... interesting. Oracle, please get the InnoDB team together with the MySQL team and see about GPLing ZFS. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-20 more

My 8.7M pixel display

A while ago I wrote about Synergy and showed a picture of my desktop as of July 2007: That’s two 24″ Dell monitors (one for a Windows computer, the other for a Linux computer). I’ve had that setup for a couple years and I recently decided it was time to upgrade. So I bought a 30″ [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-20 more

yanyouyu on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

you can visist this site to get more information about this Helpful guide
Publication date: 2009-04-18 more

Lim Bangla John on "How to download free iPhone games"

You gotta either "jailbreak" your iphone or install a special software for that.Jailbreaking can be done at your own risk for free or by a professional ,the jailbreak will allow your iphone to install third-partysoftware for free.;) But with everything there is a price to pay!! GOOD LUCK.
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

Lim Bangla John on "wanna buy a mac!"

YES!This is very much of a big hassle ,there are quite a number of compatiblity issues on the mac.In other words ,you should buy the mac but NEVER usethe mac to do office work!!
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

Lucy Burr on "wanna buy a mac!"

I much prefer the Mac to Windows. A new program called Parallel can be installed on Macs that will allow Windows users to install a version of XP or Vista (?) on the Mac. You might want to look into this since it might make the transition easier. MacMall has bundled versions of these new programs with their newer iMacs.
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

xiaogongzhu on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

iPod Video Converter for Mac Hello,everyone.If you want to know about"How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3",I am very happy to enjoy it with you. iPod Video Converter for Mac(http://www.ipod-video-converter.com/) is useful audio and video conversion software for iPod. Its powerful function enables you to convert all popular audio and video files, such as AVI, MPEG, WMV, MOV, MP4, VOB, DivX, XviD, AAC, AV3, MP3, to the formats supported by iPod including MP4, M4A, MP3, etc.
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

Eric4679 on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

How about AnyDVD? As this program remove the copy protection of a DVD movie as soon as it's inserted into the drive, allowing you then to backup the movie using a DVD backup tool such as CloneDVD and CloneDVD mobile. You can also remove the RPC region code, thereby making the movie region free and viewable on any DVD player and with any DVD player software. Free latest version downloading http://www.dvdripsoft.com/anydvd.html
Publication date: 2009-04-15 more

Eric4679 on "iPhone too expensive for you? Check this out!"

LOL, the most powerful program for iPod at here: http://www.dvdripsoft.com/dvd-ripper-ultimate.html
Publication date: 2009-04-15 more

winniel on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

Handbrake is the best choice, it is nice and free.
Publication date: 2009-04-14 more

Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 17.5 seconds!

Recently I treated myself to a solid-state drive (SSD). That’s essentially a hard-drive made out of memory chips. I bought the Intel X25-E Extreme, which uses faster single-level cell (SLC) memory chips instead of slower multi-level cell (MLC) memory chips. I wanted to put the drive through its paces, so I decided to see how fast [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-13 more

Jeffrey Soleim on "Don't Buy Apple"

Both PCs and Macs *gasp* may have hardware problems! We seem to have gotten to a place in our society where the everyday computer is a simple piece of technology that is 100% without flaws. In reality, if you sit down and think of the sheer mechanics required to manufacture a computer, of any kind, you will quickly gain a huge appreciation for what they are and can do. Let's take most of the components out of the equation for a moment and look at the processor. Assuming it's a white, Intel-Chipset Macbook, it has a mobile Core2Duo processor in it. They have *millions* of transistors in them. These are not simple pieces of technology. Will a few broken transistors affect the overall performance of a processor? Maybe not, but if you get a flawed chip, it can overheat as it's checksum fails for the billions of calculations it does per minute. Get real!
Publication date: 2009-04-07 more

Sponsor Our Ride For Diabetes (Tour de Cure 2009)

In early May, Kathleen and I will be participating it the Tour de Cure 2009, a bike ride to raise awareness and money for Diabetes. Craigslist (my employer) is sponsoring a team that we'll both be riding on. Collectively, our team is trying to raise $75,000 during this years ride. If you have a few bucks to spare for a good cause, please consider sponsoring me or sponsoring my wife (or both!). It's for a very good cause. We're both riding the 25 mile course and would love even a $1/mile contribution. As a bonus, Craigslist is matching all our donations. So if you donate $25, your contribution becomes $50 thanks to the company's generosity. Here are links for a bit more information: Our Team Page Kathleen's Page My Page You can visit either of our pages to pledge on-line. And if you're interested in riding, visit our team page. Thanks for any support you can offer! (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-06 more

rootusercyclone on "Don't Buy Apple"

Just because you have had trouble with Apple doesn't mean you should go around preaching to everyone that Apple computers suck. Most people here have never had problems with their Mac/iPod, and if we did, Apple fixes/replaces the product without hesitation. Just because your computers broke doesn't mean that you should discourage others from buying from Apple. Why does it bother you that we use a computer you don't like?
Publication date: 2009-04-05 more

Happy 4.04 Day!

Today is April 4th, which means that it’s 4.04 day — even in Europe where they switch their months and days around. That means it’s a perfect day to learn what a 404 status code is. Essentially, a 404 is a way for web server to return a “Page Not Found” error when a browser [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-04 more

Chrome marketshare for March 2009

Google Chrome continued its upward marketshare march in March. I was looking at my browser breakdown tonight. Here’s what I’ve got from the last 30 days in Google Analytics: Some different browser marketshare numbers: - Net Applications says that Chrome went from 1.15% to 1.23% in the last ~30 days. - StatCounter says that Chrome topped 2% recently. [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-03 more

Looking into latest live metrics

(Doing the “type up a quick blog post” thing. Let me know if I had any typos.) Thanks to everyone that contacted me in the last few minutes and hours about changes in our search products and quality; we’re seeing the impact in our metrics as well. I hear your feedback loud and clear–no need to [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-02 more

stockshoes1 on "wholesale nike shoes, Nike dunks,"

Welcome to our website ( http://www.sellstockshoes.com ) , we are a leading company specialize in exporting various of brand shoes, such as Nike , Adidas, Shox, Max, Puma, Gucci, etc. All these shoes are Aaaa quality, with certificate logo and cards. Bulk stocks and many styles for you to choose, We accept the mix order and drop ship. Handling all kinds of shipping methods. such as DHL, EMS, FEDEX, UPS, SODEX, TNT, 3-4 days arrival. Online tracking # is available for you.
Publication date: 2009-03-31 more

The Real or Official MySQL? Does Not Matter!

Yesterday Patrick Galbraith asked What is the official branch of MySQL? which got a lot of attention, including on Slashdot (and the token PostgeSQL comments quickly appeared). Here's the funny thing. It doesn't matter anymore. Patrick's question is interesting in an academic sense, but it's mainly a distraction from what really matters. (Hint: What's the official Linux and who really cares? Ubuntu? RedHat? Debian? CentOS?) Storage Engines Nowadays what matters is the set of available storage engines. InnoDB, Percona's XtraDB, PrimeBase's PBXT, Maria, Falcon, and several others are available or will be soon. I predict that for the foreseeable future, any MySQL distribution or derivative must support the storage engine plug-in API that MySQL 5.1 defined. And since that's the case, it largely won't matter which flavor you using. Protocol(s) Look at what's happened in the world of key/value databases in the last few years. More than a few of them speak the memcached protocol as either their native and default or an optional add-on. I suspect the same thing will be the case here. All MySQL distributions and derivatives will speak the "traditional" MySQL protocol (just like memecached has the old protocol). Some of them, notably Drizzle, will have other (newere, better) protocols available as well (much like memcached has the new binary protocol). Summary In summary, the choice of MySQL version or derivative won't matter as much as you might think because they'll have the same Storge Engine plug-ins available (thanks to the shared plugin-in API), they'll all speak a common protocol (this may not be true for replication--watch that area closely), and will largely offer the same subset of SQL and SQL extensions. They'll all be supported by different groups/companies (including some "database appliance" vendors), will all be tuned differently and aimed at slightly different uses cases, and will certainly benefit from a lot of cross-pollination. That doesn't sound so bad to me. The fact that nobody can point to the "real" MySQL in a few years just won't matter. Does anyone ask (anymore) which is the "real" Linux? Nope. And for very similar reasons. Think of MySQL as "kernel" and Storage Engine as "filesystem" and you'll realize we've been down this road before. We're looking at the upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1 soon at Craigslist and don't know if we'll be using InnoDB or XtraDB yet. Time will tell. See Also: The New MySQL Landscape, which I wrote a few months back--before a good chunk of the MySQL team had left Sun. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-31 more

Hacking Google: Retro Links Revives Old Google Feature

Google sometimes turns off features. One such feature that I remember fondly is that at the bottom of Google’s search results, we offered nine other search engine suggestions. The idea was if you didn’t find what you were searching for on Google, you could click on the other links and easily run the same search [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-31 more

Garlic Shrimp and Scallops Recipe

Last week we tried a new Garlic Shrimp recipe that was so simple and delicious that we planned to try it again. On Saturday my wonderful wife came back from the local Safeway and presented me with 1 pound of shrimp as well as about 1/3rd of a pound of small sea scallops. Here's what the final product looked like: Preparation is simple and quick. Cut 2 red chilies lengthwise and remove the seeds. Rinse the shrimp and scallops, keeping the separate. Using a garlic press, crush 6-9 cloves of garlic. Add 5-6 tablespoons of olive oil to skillet or wok. Put the wok on high heat. Once the oil is hot, add the garlic, chilies, and shrimp. Stir frequently. After about 2 minutes, add the scallops. Continue cooking for another 2-3 minutes until the shrimp are pink and the scallops are just starting to get a gold color on the outside (they'll still be tender inside). Serve and enjoy! (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-30 more

Enable Visual Effects in Ubuntu to Increase Performance

For a while now, I'd been running Ubuntu 8.04 on my Thinkpad T61 (work machine) with Visual Effects disabled. Why? There were weird bugs with compiz and xterm that caused corruption at times. So I shut it off and never thought about it again. But a few days ago, I upgraded to 8.10 despite the apparent increase in WiFi related lock-ups I can expect to see (apparently I don't have the Intel wireless in this machine... grumble). Switching virtual desktops, or "Workspaces" as they're called, seemed to be even slower than before--almost intolerable. Just for kicks I decided to go play with the settings. Imagine my surprise when switching that selection from "None" to "Normal" resulted in an dramatic increase in virtual desktop redraw perfomance. Yay! Counterintuitive, but yay anyway. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-25 more

api4me on "free Iphone games and other cool stuff"

I just launch a site with tons of free iphone games never released before http://www.api4.me , please have a look.
Publication date: 2009-03-24 more

Wordle for Nancy Grace TV Show

I recently completed a huge “Media and Journalism” project: I transcribed over 500 hours of the Nancy Grace TV show on CNN. It took a long time, but here is an exhaustive Wordle tag cloud of all the words used in those 500+ hours of television: It appears that all 500+ hours consist of those six [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-22 more

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Publication date: 2009-03-20 more

Aircraft Insurance Surprise

I haven't flown my glider much in the last year and probably won't be flying it again for many months. While that may not be ideal, it means I can spend less money by not paying for an annual inspection and can greatly reduce or eliminate the insurance costs. Or so I thought. It just so happens that my insurance carrier emailed the other day to ask about renewing my policy (it's that time of year). I explained that I probably wouldn't be flying it and would probably let the policy lapse. The countered with an offer of "storage only" or "ground" coverage, which means that they'd still insure it for non-flight related damage. Now gliders are kind of expensive to insure in the first place. The annual insurance bill is roughly the same as it is for our Cessna 182Q (which is worth twice as much as my glider). So I was looking forward to paying a lot less. Wrong! It turns out that moving to storage only coverage still costs roughly 67% (2/3rds) of what the full flight coverage is. I'm still trying to process that figure. That's like State Farm Insurance telling me that if I agree to keep my car in the garage for a year, they'll give me a 33% discount. Apparently, (1) there is a lot of overhead in the insurance industry, and (2) they think I'm far more likely to encounter non-flying damage. And, the best part is this... If I were to cancel coverage all together for the year, I'd have higher rates when I come back next year because of discounts I've accrued with them. "If you let this policy go and then come back later, the new policy offered will be about 15% higher in cost just due to the loss of those discounts." Strangely, I thought those discounts were the result of earning additional ratings (like my Commercial) and gaining experience and flight time. It's no surprise that the first four letters of the insurance company most glider pilots use are "Cost", huh? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-20 more

How to Write a Chrome Extension in Three Easy Steps

I just installed a “hello world” Chrome extension from this Chrome Extension HOWTO page. When you surf to www.google.com, the Google logo is replaced with a Lolcat: Here’s how to write your own Google Chrome extension in three steps: 1. Install the developer-channel version of Google Chrome. I don’t know if this is 100% necessary, but new [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-19 more

Gone to PubCon and SXSW + Lots of Videos!

Expect light blogging for a week or so because I’m traveling. I posted my 2009 travel schedule, but I’m doing a keynote at PubCon in Austin and then I’ll stick around for South by Southwest. It’s my first time at SXSW, so if you see me, say howdy! For the PubCon keynote, we’re going to try [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-11 more

Clickable transcript of my Canonical Link Element talk

Recently I’ve been playing with linking to specific parts of a video and incorporating YouTube subtitles. Then I realized that you could do a neat trick. YouTube allows you to create closed captioning with a simple text file that looks like this: 00:00:07.000 Hi everybody. Welcome back to another video. We’re doing this thing where when we [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-11 more

How many links per page?

I’m about to publish a blog post with a ton of links in it — almost two hundred of them. So before I did that, it seemed like a good time to talk about Google’s recommendation to “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).” Why do we provide [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-10 more

DroboCare from Drobo: bleah

I bought a Drobo about a year ago. Recently I got this pop-up window: Wait a second — I bought this storage device, and now want me to extend my license “to continue to receive the latest updates”? If you go to the url mentioned in the pop-up, you see that for $49 for a year’s [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-09 more

People I would pay to life stream

I’ve been listening to the Penny Arcade podcast and it started me thinking about lifestreaming. There’s at least a few people I would pay if I could watch them stream their day over the net, either because they’re funny or interesting somehow. I thought about it a little bit, and here’s the list that I [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-09 more

Show and Translate YouTube Captions

Video captions are interesting. For example, if you subtitle a video in the same language as the video, you can help people with low literacy improve their reading skills. Or if you’re in a meeting, you could watch a video silently and read the captions. The TED conference is also thinking about subtitles. I think they’ve [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-06 more

New Craigslist Search Features

I haven't said a lot here about what I've been working on at Craigslist recently. But Craig mentioned me today in his blog and that made me remember that I should say something. :-) Much of my work has been behind the scenes infrastructure stuff, but some of that is translating into new features that craigslist users can see. And, as of this morning, a lot more users are seeing the fruits of that labor. As I noted a few weeks back in Sphinx Search at Craigslist, I've been hacking a lot on search. Here's a screen shot to show you what I've been calling "nearby search" (though "nearby results" is probably more appropriate). If you run a search in a city and there aren't many results, we'll also run the search in nearby areas to see if we can find matches there too. The above example was a search for "2008 mazda" in my hometown of Toledo, Ohio. The "nearby" results are clearly separated from local matches and local matches are still given priority. The feedback has been generally positive so far. Though, with any change, some folks aren't happy. I can't say it's going to stay in this exact form. We may need to tweak the interface, the radius of the nearby search areas, and so on. But on the whole I think it's a helpful improvement when you're looking for something that's a bit harder to find and you're willing to drive an hour or two. As of earlier today, it's available in most smaller and medium sized US cities. It'll probably come to the remainder of cities before long too. I've been testing it for about a week and a half, starting with about a dozen cities and then adding about twenty more late last week. This morning I mostly flipped the big switch. Of course, this opened the flood gates for similar feature requests: custom radius searches, state wide searching, search ALL of craigslist, etc. In related news, a couple months back I expanded the search help page to include advanced search syntax, including grouping, negation, OR queries, and more. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-06 more

Link to a specific part of a YouTube video

If you want to link to a specific part of a video on YouTube, you can. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s Notice the “#t=31m08s” on the end of the url? That link will take you 31 minutes and 8 seconds into that video. Linking to a particular minute and second can be really helpful — for example, that link [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-05 more

Why Google won

(This is just a post from my personal perspective, but I hope it’s helpful.) Every few weeks or so, someone contacts me and says “Hey Matt, there’s page out on the web about me that I really don’t like. Is there any way to remove it from Google’s index?” People don’t usually say it like that. [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-03 more

Paid posts should not affect search engines

Normally I wouldn’t weigh in on “sponsored conversations,” because I’ve talked about similar subjects before, but it’s worth reiterating Google’s position on paid posts that pass PageRank and why we feel that way. Here’s the short version as a comment that I left on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog: Clear disclosure of sponsorship is critical, and that includes [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-03 more

Book Review: Anathem

I have a sneaking suspicion that hanging out on Twitter is causing my attention span to grow shorter and shorter and … wait, what was I talking about? Oh, short attention span, right. So as penance for all that microblogging, I decided to set myself a thick book to read. I chose Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. I’ve [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-03 more

Top 5 signs you are anal-retentive

You keep large redundant amounts of all your sundries such as laundry detergent so that you never risk running out. You don’t just sort the money in your wallet by $1, $5, $10, or $20, but also sort the bills by wear-and-tear so that you get rid of the bills in the worst shape first. You look [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-02 more

Grab bag questions

I have some extra time in my calendar today, so I thought I’d open up a thread for questions. Post your questions over on Google Moderator so that I can see which questions are popular. I’ve only got 45-60 minutes, so I can’t answer every question, but I’ll try to answer at least a few [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-26 more

Learn More about the Canonical Link Element

A week or so ago I did a post about the canonical link tag, including a pointer to a 3-4 minute video about the tag. If you enjoyed that video but wanted to learn more, last week I sat down and recreated the presentation that I did at SMX West. You can watch the “director’s cut” [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-25 more

Last call for

This is the last call for “noresult” pages. If you want to mention examples, please send them to us this week. Here’s how to do it.
Publication date: 2009-02-24 more

Do you get these emails?

Every so often I get emails to my old school account that begin Dear Professor Dr. M. Cutts Taking in mind your valuated achievements in mathematics, it is a pleasure for us to invite you to publish a work in “International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics”. I never finished my Ph.D. because I stopped working on it to join [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-23 more

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Publication date: 2009-02-21 more

buka on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

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Publication date: 2009-02-20 more

Pointers for Google Japan paid-post story

I just did a joint post about the Google Japan issue on Google’s Japanese webmaster blog. There’s also a post on Google’s main Japanese blog. If you don’t read Japanese, you can also watch the video where I recently talked about this. To the extent that I can speak on behalf of Google, I apologize [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-19 more

Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes

Last week Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced support for a new link element to clean up duplicate urls on sites. The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following: <link rel=”canonical” value=”http://example.com/page.html”/> That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-16 more

Windows 7 Impressions

I'll admit it. I still run Windows on a few machines--mostly because I have software that needs it (like flight planning or my scanner tools). And it's good on a notebook where drivers are tricky in Ubuntu at times. But I've also been using Windows XP Professional on all my Windows boxes (one desktop, one laptop, and one HTPC) for a long time now. However, as of a couple days ago I'm running the Windows 7 Beta on my Thinkpad T61. And you know what? I completely agree with the reviews I've seen. It's good. I basically never touched Vista (since it was teh suck) but Windows 7 is snappy, easier to use, and the transition from XP isn't that hard at all. Plus it has drivers for everything. This definitely doesn't feel like a beta at all. In fact, it reminds me of the Windows NT 4.0 beta days. I ran the beta as my desktop operating system for quite some time and loved it. For a long time I believed that nothing produced by Microsoft would displace Windows XP Professional, but I'm really starting to think they've got a starting chance. And if it's even a bit faster and leaner when the full release comes, that's all the better. I just hope there's an in-place upgrade option for those of us using the beta. And I hope they're smart about the pricing--especially if they really want to get folks off of XP. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-02-13 more

White House CTO? Bigger fish to fry first...

Over on the Sunlight Foundation blog, Ellen Miller asks White House: Where is the CTO?. Pardon my bluntness, Ellen, but what are you smoking? Don't you think there are higher priorities right now? It seems to me that Obama and his administration have their hands more than full working on the economic problems we're facing along with rebuilding some of our important international relationships. I'm as much of a technology geek as the next guy, but it really won't bother me if the punt on the whole CTO thing for a few months while some of the bigger fish are fried. I can't say quite why, but this call for immediate action on a CTO feels like a bit of headline grabbing and irresponsibility at the same time. Sure, they could come out and name a CTO tomorrow and I'd applaud the move. But I really hope they're keeping their priorities in check. Part of being a good leader is deciding what can wait and what cannot. Appointing a CTO can wait. Fixing our economy cannot. Update: It looks like Kara has jumped on this too. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-02-12 more

Write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script

Suppose you want to write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script. Here’s an example spreadsheet that you might want to update from a script: I did some searching and found this page, which quickly led me to the Python Developer’s Guide for the Google Spreadsheet API. There’s a simple “Getting started with Gdata and Python” [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-11 more

Playing With CouchDB: First Impressions

About a week ago, Nat posted Open Source NG Databases on O'Reilly Radar. That caught my interest because I'm playing with some "alternative" databases for some of our data at Craigslist. Don't get me wrong, MySQL is great. But MySQL isn't well suited to every use case out there either. (I'll talk more about this at the MySQL Conference.) Meanwhile, I left a comment on that posting about CouchDB and have been playing with it a bit more since then--mostly loading in test data, figuring out the data footprint, performance, etc. Overall, I'm impressed and encouraged. I agree with what Ben Bangert said. The simple API is great but the lack of a schema to worry about really makes my life simple in this application. I don't have any initial plans for views, but writing them in Javascript is an interesting idea. I can definitely appreciate the flexibility there. And having good replication built-in solves one of my big needs. I'm sure my thinking will have evolve after I've loaded a few hundred million documents in, but so far I'm really liking it. The CPAN modules in Net::CouchDb do a pretty good job and get you up and running quickly. I had a knee-jerk response to tweak a few things there but quickly realize that they're far from being the bottleneck anyway. It seems that without any tuning or fancy work, I can get about 75-100 inerts/sec on my desktop class Ubuntu box (Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66GHz, 1GB RAM, single 80GB SATA disk). That's not bad for out-of-the-box performance. And doing the math on space used for a document set (after compaction), I'm seeing roughly ~3KB/doc. That's a bit more than I expected but really not bad at all. I wonder if there's a future for gzip compression in CouchDB. Or maybe we should just use ZFS... (comments)
Publication date: 2009-02-11 more

Where to find me, first half of 2009

Here’s the speaking/travel that I’m expecting to do in early 2009: January 17-22, 2009: My wife and I journeyed to Washington D.C. to see the Presidential inauguration. It was very cold. February 4-7, 2009: I just attended the TED conference down in Long Beach. It was pretty amazing. I got to pick Bill Gates’ brain on his [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-10 more

Google and Big Ideas

I love Om Malik and respect him greatly. I’m hoping to corner him for lunch sometime to pick his brain on ways that Google could improve. But today he happened to do a tweet that caught my attention just as my morning caffeine was kicking in. Om said “I think google has no big ideas. [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-04 more

Good books to read?

Here’s my current “to-read” books: Are there any other great/recommended books to read that you would suggest adding to the list?
Publication date: 2009-02-02 more

Making Homemade Pasta is Fun, Easy, and Delicious

Over the last year or so we've slowly been accumulating new kitchen toys and cookbooks. And we've been experimenting with new recipes during that time. See Jeremy's Crockpot or Slow Cooker Chili Recipe for an example. But things seem to have been kicked into a higher gear recently. You see, we asked for (and received--thanks Mom and Dad) a KitchenAid Artisan 5-Quart Stand Mixer back during Giftmas. And my wonderful wife got me the KitchenAid KPRA Pasta Roller Attachment and the The Complete Book of Pasta and Noodles to go along with the mixer. My expectation was to mostly use the mixer for the occasional bread mix (which I haven't tried yet) or cookie dough (ditto). But Kathleen is a big pasta fan and the meals in the book sounded quite tasty. So a few weeks ago I began to experiment with making my own pasta. Much to my surprise, it's a fairly easy and fun process. To make basic pasta, all you really need is some eggs and flour. In fact, 3 larger eggs and 2 cups of all purpose white flour is enough to get started. The real trick, as it turns out, is getting the moisture level of the pasta right and working with the resulting dough. You want it to stick together just the right amount with the right texture. No too dry and not too wet or sticky. And you need to let it "rest" long enough that you can work with it. Anyway, last night I made my third round of basic pasta and feel like I'm getting the hang of it. Combined with grilled chicken breasts, grilled asparagus, and a tasty olive oil and garlic sauce, it's just fantastic. Fresh pasta really tastes so much better than the dried pasta you buy at the store. It's hard to describe the difference. It's lighter, tastier, and less prone to sticking. You simply must try it. I highly recommend that pasta book too. If you're getting serious about pasta and want a variety of recipes (both for the noodles and sauces), it's a wealth of good information. Next we need to try some of the more interesting pasta recipes that use more exotic flours and spices added in. Pictures of my first and second pasta making adventures are on Flickr in Making Pasta. Have you made your own pasta? What's your experience been like? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-02-01 more

rugbygal on "artwork"

i have had a few problems, i didnt back up my iphone or ipod when my pc got a virus,  i lost every thing,  i brought a new pc and managed to get every thing back onto itunes,   but i have lost most of the artwork on my iphone and ipod,  has any body got any ideas how to get it back.
Publication date: 2009-01-29 more

Webspam in 2009?

It’s the beginning of the year, so I just wanted to get some outside opinions: what would you like to see Google’s webspam team tackle in 2009? Here’s how I asked for suggestions in 2006: Based on your experiences, close your eyes and think about what area(s) you wish Google would work on. You probably want [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Ideal conference badge

I don’t even know how many conferences I’ve been to in the last decade, but it’s probably 30-40. In that time, maybe 2-3 conferences have really nailed the conference badge for attendees. Here’s what the ideal conference badge should look like, in my opinion: I’ll walk you through the important features of this badge: - Each attendee’s [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Some fun links

I caught up on some of my non-search feed reading this weekend. Normally I’d drop some of these links in my Twitter stream, but I ended up with a ton of links. So I thought I’d drop them here. In case you missed it, Google’s webmaster console launched a new Webmaster Tools API a few weeks [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Video of my

If you need a search fix, we just posted a video on the official Google webmaster blog. Essentially I recreated a talk I did for Web 2.0 and posted it online. You can also watch it below if you’d prefer: and you can also view the presentation slides I used or watch the slides directly below: I’m [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Give Google feedback on

I recently posted asking what issues the Google webspam team should tackle in 2009. Getting this outside feedback is really handy, because it’s helpful to compare our internal perceptions against what annoys hundreds of people outside Google. After the first 150 or so comments I did a very rough tally of suggestions to see what [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Talking to a Wiimote in Ubuntu 8.10

To add Wiimote support on Ubuntu 8.10, start by running the command “sudo apt-get install wminput wmgui lswm” to install the CWiid library and associated software. If you’re using a desktop machine, you probably don’t have Bluetooth capability. If you run the program “lswm” and see the message “No Bluetooth interface found” then you need to [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

In DC for the inauguration

My wife and I decided to head to Washington D.C. for the inauguration, and I’m already glad that I did. On the way out of a party, I spotted Minnesota Senator-elect Al Franken (Update: he’s not a Senator-elect yet, as the results haven’t been certified). Someone asked him to do a short “Hi kids, stay [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

How Not To Launch A Twitter Account

Recently someone registered a Twitter account name “mattcuttsmapxl,” which is very similar to my Twitter account name. The account was following many of the same people I follow, which is pretty annoying because people had to check whether it was me or not (it wasn’t). The account got suspended, but someone made a new account [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Detecting Googlebombs

I recently did a Googlebomb post over on the Google Public Policy Blog. I’ve talked about Googlebomb phenomenon before (also see more Googlebomb background here). Just as a reminder, a Googlebomb is a prank where a group of people on the web try to push someone else’s site to rank for a query that it [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Four Things You Need To Know About Knol

Recently Google mentioned that 100,000 different articles have been posted to Google Knol. I’ve been meaning to talk about Google Knol for a while, because there’s a few things you need to know. It seemed especially relevant after I saw the Silicon Alley Insider article about Knol on Techmeme, so I figured that I would [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

hagai1979 on "problem to upload song from itune"

hello i hold an ipod callasic 120 gig i, trying to upload song via the itunes the problem is that i see tish song on my ipod via the itunes but when i browese the ipod after when the ipod disccounct to the computr or itunes i cant see them!!! any help! thank in advance hagai
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

maccolar on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

If you want to rip DVD to computer, here is a step by step guide for you http://www.mac-dvd.com/mac-guide/how-to-rip-copyright-dvd-and-copy-dvd-on-mac.html If you want to copy DVD to another blank DVD disc, you may refer to this guide, it works pretty well for me. http://www.mac-dvd.com/mac-guide/how-to-copy-dvd-and-remove-copyright-on-mac.html
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Aashka on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

thank you I owned a iPhone a year ago and i tested many iphone softwares including free and free trial version, but I did not find one meet my need until the emergence of aiseesoft dvd to iphone suite, it is so wonderful that can help me convert my home dvd to iphone, convert my video downloaded from youtube, limewire and other online sites to iphone, even can help me backup the iphone movies and musics to my pc, more even it allow me split, join, crop my dvd and video, it also has other functions such as take snapshot, select subtile, sudio track, adjust the bitrate and so on, oh, it is too wonderful to lose it, i strong recommend it to everyone and gave my appreciation to Aiseesoft as well. Just enjoy your iphone time with it!
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

ahmadmina on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

There is a free download DVD to iPhone video converter software available at http://www.diyinternational.net/downloads/audio.html
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Sal Cangeloso on "How to download free iPhone games"

my favorite free iphone games right now: lux touch, Space deadbeef, rogue, and topple. Anyone have any other suggestions?
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

IlanaSense on "Where did all your attention go?!"

And how can you get it back? http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/26/my6sense-pioneering-digital-intuition-500-alpha-invites/ (iPhone only)
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

My Dumb Cat Video

It's Friday and this is the Internet, so I present to you Cats Eating Chicken, or "My Dumb Cat Video" (embedded below too). The background is that we had a bit of leftover grilled chicken the other night and decided to bust it up and feed it to the cats. Amusingly, they all got together to partake of the feast, but a couple of them got curious about the camera too. Both Timmy (white and grey) and Thunder (mostly grey) give the camera a sniff or two. My boys (Barnes and Noble) remained single-mindedly devoted to devouring the meat. Anyway, we found it rather amusing. Have a good weekend... (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

The New MySQL Landscape

Interesting things are afoot in the MySQL world. You see, it used to be that the MySQL world consisted of about 20-40 employees of MySQL AB (this funny distributed Swedish company that built and supported the open source MySQL database server), a tiny handful of MySQL mailing lists, and large databases were counted in gigabytes not terabytes. A Pentium III was still a decent server. Replication was a new feature! Hey, anyone remember the Gemini storage engine? :-) How times have changed... Nowadays MySQL is sort of a universe onto itself. There are multiple storage engines (though MyISAM and InnoDB are still the popular ones), version 5.1 is out (finally), and the whole company made it over 400 employees before it was gobbled up by Sun Microsystems (a smart move, IMHO, though history will judge that) a while back. If I had to guess 5 years or so ago what would be interesting to me today about MySQL, I'd have been really, really wrong. The future rarely turns out like we think. Just ask Hillary Clinton. Here's a little of what's rattling around in the MySQL part of my little brain these days... Outside Support, Patches, and Forks The single most interesting and surprising thing to me is both the number and necessity of third-party patches for enhancing various aspects of MySQL and InnoDB. Companies like Percona, Google, Proven Scaling, Prime Base Technologies, and Open Query are all doing so in one way or another. On the one hand, it's excellent validation of the Open Source model. Thanks to reasonable licensing, companies other than Sun/MySQL are able to enhance and fix the software and give their changes back to the world. Some organizations are providing just patches. Others, like Percona are providing their own binaries--effectively forks of MySQL/InnoDB. Taking things a step further, the OurDelta project aims to aggregate these third party patches and provide source and binaries for various platforms. In essences, you can get a "better" MySQL than the one Sun/MySQL gives you today. For free. Meanwhile, development on InnoDB continues. Oh, did I mention the part where they were bought by Oracle (yes, *that* Oracle) a while back? Crazy shit, I tell you. But it makes sense if you squint right. Anyway, the vibe I'm getting is that folks are frustrated because there's not a lot of communication coming out of the InnoDB development team these days. I can't personally verify that. It's been years since I corresponded with Heikki Tuuri (the creator of InnoDB). So folks like Mark Callaghan of Google have been busy analyzing and patching it to scale better for their needs. And we all benefit. Drizzle Taking things a step further yet, the Drizzle project is a re-making of MySQL started primarily by Brian Aker, who worked as MySQL's Director of Architecture for years. Brian is now at Sun and, along with a handful of others at Sun and elsewhere, is ripping out a lot of the stuff in a fork of MySQL that doesn't get used much, needlessly complicated the code, or is simply no longer needed. In essence, they're taking a hard look at MySQL and asking what it really needs to provide for a lot of it's uses today: Web and "cloud" stuff. He visited us at Craigslist a few months ago to talk about the project a bit and get our input and feedback. I believe it was that day I joined one of the mailing list and started following what's going on. Heck, I even build Drizzle on an Atom-powered MSI Wind PC regularly. It's great to see a re-think of MySQL going on... keeping the good, getting rid of the bad, and modularizing the stuff that people often want to do differently (authentication, for example). It's even better to see the group that's hacking on it. They really have their heads on straight. Unanswered Questions Why is all this even necessary? Are the "enterprise" customers and their demands taking focus away from what used to be the core use and users of MySQL? Is Sun hard to work with? It's clear that both the MySQL and InnoDB teams could be doing more to help. But having worked at a large company for long enough, I realize that things are rarely as simple as they should be. Will this stuff get integrated back into mainline MySQL? Will Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat pick up OurDelta builds? What about Drizzle? Will Drizzle hit its target and be the sleek and lean database kernel that MySQL once could have been? Hard to say. It's hard to guess what the future holds and too easy to play armchair quarterback about the work of others. But these are question worth wondering about a bit. What's it all mean? Nowadays MySQL has a much slower release cycle that it used to. It's still available in "commecial" and free ("community") releases. There's still a company behind it--a much larger one in fact. But one that also has a vested interest in showing how it works better on their storage appliances or 256 "core" computers and whatnot. Clustering is still very niche. Transactions are not. Meanwhile, all the cutting edge stuff (at least from the point of view of scaling) is happening outside Sun/MySQL and being integrated by OurDelta and even Drizzle. The OutDelta builds are gaining steam quickly and Drizzle is shaping up. Heck, I'm hoping to get an OurDelta box or two on-line at work sometime soon. And I'd like to put a Drizzle node up too. I want to see how the InnoDB patches help and also play with the InnoDB plug-in (and its page compression). The next few years are proving to be far more interesting than I might have expected from a project and technology that looked like was on a track straight for Open Source maturity. And you know what? I like it. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Talk Announcement: MySQL and Search at Craigslist

I recently learned that my talk has been accepted for the 2009 MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, California. It is currently scheduled for Tuesday the 21st and titled MySQL and Search at Craigslist. Here's the abstract (which I've promised to expand upon soon): Millions of people search for things every day on craigslist: tickets, cars, garage sales, jobs, events, and so on. This talk will look at the recent evolution of database and search architecture at Craigslist, including performance, caching, partitioning, and other tweaks. We'll pay special attention to the unique challenges of doing this for a large data set that has an especially high churn rate (new posts, edits, and deletes). And we strive to do this using as little hardware and power as possible. If you're coming to the conference, drop by and harass me. :-) If you're not sure check out the full schedule--there's a lot of good stuff packed into the conference already and a lot of talks are still not even posted. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Twitter as a Dynamic DNS Service

I occasionally wish to know the IP address of my home Cable Modem or DSL connection but don't really care if it's available in DNS or not. It occurred to me that if I could programmatically detect the IP change, I'd be able to notify myself via Twitter. At first, I wanted a simple web service that'd tell me my IP address--something like WhatIsMyIP.com but an API suitable for simple scripting. Not finding anything, I created this massive PHP script instead and hosted it on my server: That made it easy to write a simple bash shell script that can be run from cron every few minutes. It uses curl to hit that script and compares the result with the previous result (stored in ~/.last_ip). If they differ it updates the file and tells twitter, again using curl. Of course, I had to create that new twitter account and then follow it in my main account. But, hey, that wasn't so hard. Now I have a Web 2.0ish social dynamic DNS thingy that uses Twitter. Aren't I cool and buzzword compliant?! (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Don't Bet on Moore Saving Your Ass

Over on the 37signals blog, DHH writes Mr. Moore gets to punt on sharding. His argument is basically that if you continually delay fixing your data storage and retrieval layer, Moore's Law will be there to save our ass--over and over again. Bzzzt. Wrong answer. Depending on future improvements to fix your own bad planning is a risky way to build an on-line service--especially one you expect to grow and charge money for. It's easy to forget history in this industry (as Paul pointed out in the comments on that post). There was a point a few years ago when people still believed the clock speed of CPUs would be doubling roughly every 18 months for half the cost. Putting aside that Moore's Law is really about transistor density and not raw speed, we all ended up taking a funny little detour anyway. Until recently, the sweet spot (in terms of cost and power use) was probably a dual CPU, dual core server with 16 or 32GB of RAM. But soon that'll be dual quads with 32 or 64GB of RAM. And then it'll be quad eight core CPUs with 128GB or whatever. But notice that nowadays we're not all running 6.4GHz CPUs in our servers. Instead we're running multi-core CPUs at slower clock speeds. Those two are definitely not equivalent. A funny thing happens as you add cores and CPUs. You begin to find that the underlying software doesn't always... get this... scale. That's right. Software designed in a primarily single or dual CPU world starts to show its age and performance limitation in a world where you have 8, 16, or 32 cores per server (and more if you're running one of those crazy Sun boxes). You see, David is talking specifically about MySQL (and probably InnoDB), which is currently being patched by outside developers precisely because it has multi-core issues . Its locking is expensive and not granular enough to utilize all those cores. It's expensive in terms of memory use too. And there are assumptions built into the I/O subsystem that don't scale well in today's world of fast multi-disk RAID units, SSDs, and SANs. People are hitting these issues in the real world and it's definitely becoming a serious bottleneck. See Also: The New MySQL Landscape. Moore's Law is no silver bullet here. A fundamental change has occurred in the hardware platform and now we're all playing catch-up in one way or another. I'll discuss this a bit in my upcoming MySQL Conference Talk too. The world is not nearly as clear or simple as DHH is suggesting. Perhaps they can get by with constantly postponing the work of sharding their database, but that doesn't mean you should follow their lead. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Jeremy's Crockpot or Slow Cooker Chili Recipe

I've been making variations on a crock pot chili recipe for the last few months and finally have a combination we really like. Ingredients 1.5 - 2 pounds of ground beef 1 medium red onion 1/2 medium or large yellow onion 1/2 - 1 cup of frozen yellow sweet corn [see notes below] 1 green bell pepper 1 jalapeno pepper 1 14-16 oz. can of petite diced tomatoes [see notes below] 2 15-15 oz. cans of pinto beans [see notes below] 1 11.5 oz. can of V8 juice (hot if you can find it, regular otherwise) 1/2 tsp. salt 1 tbsp. chili powder 1 tbsp. cayenne pepper Directions Chop the red onion and add it with the ground beef. Brown over medium heat. While the meat and onion are browning, add beans, V8, and spices to the crockpot. Chop green pepper, yellow onion, and jalapeno and add them as well. Once the meat has browned and onions softened, add them to the crock pot as well. Cook on low heat for 6-8 hours, stirring occasionally. Serve with freshly made corn bread or fresh noodles. Optionally top with shredded cheddar cheese and onion. Enjoy with a nice cold beer, if that's your sort of thing. :-) Notes Safeway sells 15 oz. cans of Pinto Beans that are "Mexican Chili Pinto Beans." They work very well if you can find them. Safeway also sells 14.5 oz. cans of Petite Diced Tomatoes with Garlic and Olive Oil. Also highly recommended. Some people use canned Stewed Tomatoes in their recipes but I find them to be too chunky. I like a nice uniformly thick chili. Trader Joe's sells some truly excellent frozen Organic Super Sweet Cut Corn. Get it if you can. They also sell a good corn bred mix. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

A Job That Matters

In Tim O'Reilly's Work on Stuff that Matters he elaborated on three criteria that constitute "stuff that matters" for his readers: Work on something that matters to you more than money. Create more value than you capture. Take the long view. A number of folks where surprised when I announced that I was joining craigslist back in July but it's an organization that I really admire. Having been there about 6 months now, I can definitely say that it's a job that matters based on Tim's thinking and my own. Every time I meet someone and tell them where I work, their reaction is quite positive. They've had a good experience with craigslist, like the service, love the philosophy, and so on. Craigslist matters ordinary people--not just technology nuts. Similarly, I know that we create more value than we capture. The majority of our service is free and usage seems to be growing all the time. People I talk to get such good responses with craigslist classifieds (compared to, say, newspapers) that I know we're giving people more than their money's worth. As for taking the long view, I think being a non-public company helps that a lot. I've rarely thought about what "the next quarter" will bring. It's quite a contrast from my years at Yahoo. When we're discussing technology infrastructure, I'm always trying to think ahead a year or two (or more). But the day to day ups and downs just don't feel as important the way we operate. I like that. All in all, I've been very happy with the change and am glad that Tim posted something that helped me to explain what I like about it. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Sphinx Search at Craigslist

A couple days ago, Andrew posted a news item titled Sphinx goes billions to the Sphinx web site. Last but not least, Powered By section, now at 113 sites and counting, was updated and restyled. I had long wondered how much Sphinx search queries are performed per month if we sum all the sites using it, and whether we already hit 1B page views per month or not. Being open-source, there's no easy way to tell. But now with the addition of craigslist to Powered By list I finally know that we do. Many thanks to Jeremy Zawodny who worked hard on making that happen, my itch is no more. :-) Well, I guess the cat's out of the bag! My first project at Craigslist was replacing MySQL FULLTEXT indexing with Sphinx. It wasn't the easiest road in the world, for a variety of reasons, but we got it all working and it's been humming along very well ever since. And I learned a heck of a lot about both Sphinx and craigslist internals in the process too. I'm not going to go into a lot of details on the implementation here, other than to say Sphinx is faster and far more resource efficient than MySQL was for this task. In the MySQL and Search and Craigslist talk I'm giving at the 2009 MySQL Users Conference, I'll go into a lot more detail about the unique problems we had and how we solved them. For what it's worth, the implementation isn't really done. I did update the search help page on the site to reflect some of the capabilities (hey, look! OR searches!) but there are features I have planned that I'd like to expose as time allows. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Obama Interest in Kenya During the Primaries

A little over a year ago, my wife and I traveled to Africa for our honeymoon and wedding (and a lot of sight seeting--more on that over the next few weeks). Part of that time was spent in Tanzania and part of it was in Kenya. This was during the craziest part of the 2008 presidential primary race when Hillary Clinton had the perceived lead over Barak Obama and every other would-be democratic nominee. What was surprising to us is how aware of Obama and the primary process the average folks in Kenya appeared to be. We were asked on many occasions if Obama was going to be President of the United States of America. Even back then, over a year ago when he was in second place, there was an undeniable interest, hope, and genuine excitement about his prospects. Given the post-election turmoil that erupted in Kenya near the end of our trip, it's no surprise that Kenyans were celebrating his election and inauguration a few days ago. If anyone needed hope for change and a promising future after political unrest, it was the people of Kenya. When is the last time that a presidential election had such a far-reaching affect on ordinary people? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Hetch Hetchy and Wapama Falls Hike Pictures and Panorama

Last weekend we flew up to Pine Mountain Lake and drove into Hetch Hetchy to hike to Wapama Falls. The weather was fantastic for mid-January: clear and in the high 50s to low 60s. After about 15 minutes on the trial, jackets and outer shirts came off, and we were down to jeans and t-shirts. Kathleen took several pictures of the Yosemite Valley area and the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the flight up with our Canon SD800 IS. Here are a few of them. You can see the full set in the Flickr photo set titled January 2009 Flight to Pine Mountain. I shot about 250 more with my Canon 300D and you can see a few here. The full set is on Flickr in Wapama Falls Hike in Hetch Hetchy Valley. The picture at the top of this post was stitched together with autostitch on Windows and touched up in Picasa. There are still more pictures of the hike that she took with the SD800 IS to come as soon as I get them on-line... You can always watch my full photo stream is here. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Browser Market Share?

I hadn’t looked at my browser marketshare in a while, so I fired up Google Analytics: Rough browser numbers are Firefox 57.58% IE 26.07% Safari 6.48% Chrome 5.11% Opera 2.35% Mozilla 1.44% SeaMonkey 0.48% Mozilla Compatible 0.18% Konqueror 0.13% Camino 0.04% OneStat says that they see 0.54% share for Google Chrome. Net Applications provides an hour-by-hour graph, which is nice, but they hardwired it to look for the string “Chrome 0.2″ when Chrome is on version 0.3 [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-26 more

Opa! is Good Greek Food in Willow Glen

A month or so ago, the long under-construction Opa! opened its doors on Lincoln Ave in downtown Willow Glen. Wanting to try it for a while, we walked down on Friday night for dinner. And we were not disappointed. The Good The menu is straightforward and has a good variety of Greek food. We ordered the Keftedes (Greek Meatballs) as an appetizer. The dish consisted of two well prepared meatballs and an excellent sauce. For the main courses, we selected a Beef Souvlaki Pita (hers) and Seafood Souvlaki (mine). Both came with the most excellent Opa! Fries. (Think: garlic fries with a twist.) The food came in a reasonable amount of time and our waitress was very friendly and helpful. It was very tasty and portions were not excessively large either. Their drink menu contains a selection of beers and a good selection of Greek wines as well. The wine we sampled was quite good and is apparently available at Costco. Needless to say, we're going to have to verify that for ourselves. ;-) The interior is well decorated. I especially like the large TV monitor that shows what songs are playing over the sound system. Pricing was reasonable. Dinner for two with drinks, an appetizer, and desert (Baklava!) was about $50. Not the sort of thing we do often, but definitely not out of line with other favorite eating establishments. The Bad Opa! is a small sit down restaurant with tables for 2 and 4 (mostly) that also handles to go orders. It's often very full and could definitely benefit from more space inside. As a result, the tables are fairly close together and the waitresses occasionally bump into customers. But space isn't easy to come by in Willow Glen's downtown. More Opa! has over 60 ratings and reviews on Yelp and is also discussed a bit on Willow Glen 2.0. If you're looking for good Greek food in the area, I'd highly recommend giving Opa! a try. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-11-24 more

Where did udevmonitor go?

In case you’re looking for the “udevmonitor” program on the Intrepid Ibex version of Ubuntu, it’s changed; use “udevadm monitor” now: $ udevadm help Usage: udevadm COMMAND [OPTIONS] info query sysfs or the udev database trigger request events from the kernel [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-23 more

Trying (and failing) to get Ubuntu to work

I really want to run Ubuntu, but it shouldn’t be this hard. Plugging in an SD card reader that I picked up from Best Buy shouldn’t cause a hard freeze of my system (on both Gutsy Gibbon and Intrepid Ibex): The card reader works fine in Windows. At this point, I’m honestly thinking about crashing the [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-23 more

Virtual terminals not working? Check your keyboard.

(This is a boring post that I’m writing for people that have this same problem in the future. Just skip it.) Every good Linux user knows that if you want to drop from X down into a text-based virtual terminal, you can press control-alt-F1 (or any other key up to F6), and control-alt-F7 returns you to [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-23 more

Reindeer Car Antlers are a Great Holiday Present

Last year I got these reindeer car antlers for my wife. This year she let me have them for my car. They look like this: (Note: this is the picture from the catalog, not one of our cars.) Tons of people stop, stare, and then break out in a smile or start pointing out my car to [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-23 more

gapmusic on "For sale:Apple iphone 3G 16GB...Samsung Omnia 3G 16GB"

G MUSIC & SONS LIMITED(GAPMUSIC AND SONS LIMITED) is  global reputable International company that specializes in Sales, Supply and Distribution of brand new ,musical equipments and Electronics Gadget of the Highest Quality still at very affordable prices. The long-term relationship with clients is the first priority we have been concerned. We manage our business in the most honest and trustworthy ways. We offer our clients with high quality products in reasonable prices that make them get a promising profit and valuable business. Besides, we have dedicated staffs to provide the best services for our clients. Contact  the Sales Management ia below possible Emails... Place your order immediately: gapmusicltd@hotmail.com gapmusicltd@yahoo.com gapmusicltd@gmail.com PIONEER DJ MIXERS Pioneer DJM-3000 DJ Mixer......................................350Euros Pioneer DJM-600k DJ Mixer (Black Face)...................380Euros Pioneer CMX3000 Dual Rackmount CD Player............400Euros Pioneer DJM-600 Pro DJ Mixer.................................400Euros Pioneer DJM-1000 Professional Club DJ Mixer...........600Euros Pioneer DJM-800 Pro DJ Mixer................................600Euros Pioneer SM-1000 Audio and ideo Mixer...............1800Euros PIONEER DJ PACKAGES Pioneer CDJ800MK2 CD / MP3 Turntable + DJM800 DJ Mixer Package.........1000Euros PIONEER CDJ-1000MK3 / DJM-600 MIXER DJ PACKAGE.............800Euros PIONEER CDJ1000MK3 / DJM800 DJ PACKAGE ..................1,200Euros Pioneer DJ-X1 / Pioneer SW DJ SYSTEM ....................2000Euros Pioneer DJM-500 / Technics SL-1200MK2 ......................550Euros PIONEER DJ PLAYERS Pioneer CDJ-800MK2 Digital CD/MP3 Player...........300Euros Pioneer CDJ-400 Tabletop CD Player....................350Euros Pioneer CDJ-1000MK3 Digital CD/MP3 Player........450Euros Pioneer DJ-1000 Tabletop DD/CD Player..........700Euros Pioneer DJ-X1 Digital Turntable Player..............800Euros APPLE I PHONE Package content: iPhone 3G Stereo Headset with mic Dock Connector to USB Cable USB Power Adapter Documentation Cleaning/polishing cloth SIM eject tool Apple iPhone 3G 16GB Unlocked Phone..............350Euros Apple iphone 3G  8GB Unlocked Phone.......... ....300 Apple iphone 4GB Unlocked Phone cost...............200.   Nokia Phone Nokia8800 arte Mobile Phone..400 Nokia N96 16GB Mobile Phone..350 Nokia N95 8GB Mobile Phone..300 Nokia N81 8GB Mobile Phone..250 Nokia n80 Mobile Phone............160 Nokia N82 GPS Mobile Phone...250Euro   For fast ordering and MSN conversation please contact us ia Place your order immediately: MSN: gapmusicltd@hotmail.com Email: gapmusicltd@yahoo.com Yahoo messenger:gapmusicltd@gmail.com Your interest will be highly appreciated. With Best Regards Management.
Publication date: 2008-11-22 more

Bash Trick: Watching Multiple Background Jobs

I recently had a need to add some error checking to a bash script that runs multiple copies of a Perl script in parallel to better utilize a multi-core server. I wanted a way to run these four processes in the background and gather up their exit values. Then, if any of them failed, I'd prematurely exit the bash script and report the error. After a bit of reading bash docs, I came across some built-ins that I hadn't previously used or even seen. First, I'll show you the code: wait.sh This is the bash script that runs the parallel processes and gathers up the exit values. #!/bin/bash FAIL=0 echo "starting" ./sleeper 2 0 & ./sleeper 2 1 & ./sleeper 3 0 & ./sleeper 2 0 & for job in `jobs -p` do echo $job wait $job || let "FAIL+=1" done echo $FAIL if [ "$FAIL" == "0" ]; then echo "YAY!" else echo "FAIL! ($FAIL)" fi sleeper And here's the Perl script that I wrote in order to test the functioning of wait.sh. It accepts to arguments. The first is the number of seconds to sleep (to simulate the delay associated with doing work) and the second is the exit value it should use (any non-zero value indicates a failure). #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my $time = $ARGV[0] || 1; my $exit = $ARGV[1] || 0; sleep $time; exit $exit; Discussion New to me was the use of let to do math on a variable so that I can count up the number of failures. Is there a better way? There's no native ++ operator in bash. Similarly, using jobs to get a list of pids to wait on provided to be a very useful idiom. The code is straightforward and works for my purposes. But since 99% of my time is spent in Perl rather than bash, I wonder what I could have done differently and/or better. Feedback welcome. And, if this is at all useful to you, feel free to take it and run... Finally, I'm starting to really dig gist.github for showing off bits of code. It's good stuff. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-11-22 more

on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

Iquite lilethe wonderful all-purpose dvd ripper - Extra DVD Ripper Express. Not only convert DVD to iphone, but also to YouTube FLV Video file, WMV Video file, AVI, DivX, XviD, VCD, SVCD, MPEG, Apple iPod, Apple TV MP4 Video file, Sony PSP MP4, Sony PS3 Video file, Microsoft Zune Player for WMV and MP4 Video file. That's why I chose it. I bought it at 10% off at http://www.gutensoft.com.
Publication date: 2008-11-21 more

Jool5 on "ipod iphone zune psp apple tv software guides"

Cool! Those were all very informative and comprehensive, too! Keep it up!
Publication date: 2008-11-21 more

Jool5 on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

That was a good review! Thanks a lot!
Publication date: 2008-11-21 more

Jool5 on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

You guys posted a lot of good info and apps on here! Thanks for sharing!
Publication date: 2008-11-21 more

LadySharm on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

MelodyCan Protected Audio/Video Converter is a software tool you can use for conversion of wide range of different audio/video file formats to most commonly used formats like MP3, WMA, WAV. This software is especially useful in case if you have protected music/video files you want to listen on playback device, which doesn't support particular DRM technology, like MP3 CD player, iPod/iPhone, Zune or other portable digital player, cell phone, Pocket PC, etc. Tips: * The music content must be legally obtained and can be played on the computer where MelodyCan is installed. * Works on x64 Vista/XP! MelodyCan DRM Converter popular tasks are: * Converting protected files to unprotected format * Convert DRM protected WMA files * Convert iTunes to MP3 format * Convert itunes protected movie * Convert DRM protected songs * Convert Rhapsody files to MP3 * Convert protected video * Unprotect WMA files * Convert iTunes Videos to MPEG * Convert protected RAX to MP3 * Remove DRM from WMV files * Remove DRM protection * Remove DRM legally
Publication date: 2008-11-19 more

9 tips for the Google Mobile App for iPhone

Here are some tips to help you get the most out of Google’s new Mobile Application for the iPhone. To get Google Mobile App on your iPhone, go to the App Store and search for “Google Mobile App,” or click on this link to install from a computer. If you have an older version of Google [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-19 more

Google Adds Voice Recognition to iPhone App

I have a very good feeling about Google’s new iPhone app that does voice recognition. I’ve been playing with this voice recognition application for several weeks and I have to say that I’m really impressed. First and foremost, the voice recognition works really well. Crazy long-tail specialized vocabulary is tricky (more on that later), but [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-18 more

TV Watching and Happiness

In one of those "well, duh!" moments the other day, I came across a headline on Slashdot that said Unhappy People Watch More TV. Given that I mostly stopped watching TV quite some time ago and consider it to be one of the more rude devices in our culture, I clicked thru to read about how others have discovered what I'd already guessed was true... A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as 'very happy' spend more time reading and socializing. 'TV doesn't really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,' says researcher John P. Robinson. 'It's more passive and may provide escape--especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. Imagine that... Stagnation and exposure to negative information leads to sadness. It goes on... The data suggest to us that the TV habit may offer short-run pleasure at the expense of long-term malaise.' Unhappy people also liked their TV more: 'What viewers seem to be saying is that while TV in general is a waste of time and not particularly enjoyable, "the shows I saw tonight were pretty good. Another shock. TV provides only a short-term reward (kind of like a drug hit). If this resonates with you a bit, or you suspect deep down that there's more going on with the influence of TV in our culture, I highly recommend reading Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman if you have not already. It's too bad this stuff doesn't get taught in school--where, I'm told, teachers are using PowerPoint more and more. *sigh* (comments)
Publication date: 2008-11-18 more

on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

Now powerful MelodyCan 5 in 1 Convert released new version Works on x64 Vista/XP!
Publication date: 2008-11-17 more

on "How to remove DRM protection of iTunes m4p songs and wma audio files"

As the music in iTunes is encrypted with DRM, you cannot directly put it on any non-Apple MP3 player. The easiest way is to burn the music to an audio CD and then rip it back to Windows Media Player or a similar program as an MP3. Or you can get some software to help you. I use TuneClone to do this. Though not free, it is very well worth a try. Below is its step by step tutorial about how to get iTunes music converted to MP3: http://www.tuneclone.com/itunes8-m4p-to-mp3.php
Publication date: 2008-11-17 more

mwbauers on "Don't Buy Apple"

I bought my first Mac...... a Performa in 1996....... it still works let me count...... I'm now up to three newer Mac desktops and a pair of ibook/macbooks and a couple of iPods and an iPhone, I've never had any major problems with the equipment, and only a couple of very minor and easily fixed by myself problems. Not too bad for over 12 years........ I've also gone through 3-4 standard PC's over those same years. They have been mainly major problems to keep going. It's not the hardware that keeps failing on those, it's the Windows OS's............ Except for some special hardware that requires the old PC's [cnc-gear] I'm now doing all of my Windows work on the two newest Macs. I don't expect to have to buy another Windows only computer except for cnc-control, having both mac and Windows on thesamecomputer with each bootable and virtual is just too good a set-up to pass up, for me. But the mac/Apple hardware is just fine......... and I'm a guy that never leaves the equipment in it's stock hardware config.........
Publication date: 2008-11-17 more

A word about metrics, part III: market share of Google Docs?

I’m not sure what Google Docs market share is, but I thought it would be interesting to mention a couple data points and add a new data point. Data point #1: Compete. Compete just estimated that 4.4M visitors stopped by Google Docs in September, which is just a hair below 2.4% of the U.S. online population, [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-17 more

Asynchronous MySQL Client in Perl

I recently found myself wishing for an async library for MySQL. My goal is to be able to fire off queries to a group of federated servers in parallel and aggregate the results in my code. With the standard client (DBD::mysql), I'd have to query the servers one at a time. If there are 10 servers and each query takes 0.5 seconds, my code would stall for 5 seconds. But by using an async library, I could fire off all the queries and fetch the results as they become available. The overall wait time should not be much more than 0.5 seconds. While I found little evidence of anyone doing this in practice, my search led me to the perl-mysql-async project on Google Code. It's a pure-Perl implementation of the MySQL 4.1 protocol and an asyncronous client that uses Event::Lib (and libevent) under the hood. The code contains little in the way of documentation or examples, aside from the simple bundled test script. After a bit of mucking around with it, I managed to cobble together a working example. It looks like this: #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use Event::Lib; use Data::Dumper; use MysqlAsync; use AsyncCaller qw/schedule/; $Data::Dumper::Terse = 1; $|=1; my $expected_results = 25; my $results = 0; my $dbh; for (1..$expected_results) { # my $secs = int(rand(5)); my $secs = rand(5); my $query = qq[select sleep($secs)]; schedule(0.001, sub{ my $dbh = MysqlAsync->new( database => { host => "localhost", port => 3306, database => "mysql", passwd => "xxxxxx", user => "root", }, connect_timeout => 1, max_requests => 25, db_timeout => 10, # logfile => "/tmp/mysqllog", ); $dbh->get_array($query, \&result ); }); } event_mainloop(); exit; sub result { my ($result) = @_; if (defined $result) { print "result: " . Dumper($result); } else { print "error: " . Dumper($dbh->error()); } $results++; # all done? if ($results == $expected_results) { exit; } } __END__ Sure enough, that code runs in just a bit more time than the longest query it executes, rather than the sum of all the query times. What still surprises me is that this code doesn't appear to get a lot of use (or at least discussion) in the real world. In the PHP world, the mysqlnd driver offers async queries. So count this as my contribution to demonstrating that Perl can do async MySQL queries too. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-11-15 more

Post-Election Thoughts: Equal but Not

I'm happy that Barack Obama won the election. I think it's time to stir things up a bit. What really bothers me is that fact that we still don't have equal voting in this country. We certainly have the technology to share vote counts quickly and efficiently, so who not just do that? Why screw around with an electoral college anymore? It seems disingenuous at best and an outright lie at worst to call Obama's victory a "landslide" when the actual percentages of the popular vote (the only vote that should count) were so close. Yet the large difference in electoral vote counts is supposed to make us believe that something very different happened. And the media was more than happy to play along with that deception (what a surprise, huh?). It should not be possible to lose by having more votes than your opponent, but it is. Why does nobody seem to care? (See: electoral college, specifically this.) Of all the countries that have tried to copy our model of democracy in the last 200 years or so, can you name a single one that adopted the electoral college as a piece of their political infrastructure? I'd love to have my vote count as much as everyone in all the other states. Why is that so hard? (comments)
Publication date: 2008-11-14 more

Pubcon/WebmasterWorld conference, here I come!

I arrive Wednesday afternoon for the 2008 Pubcon conference, and I’ll be staying until after the networking event on the last day, which is the heart of the event. It’s the heart because the networking event is held at a pub, and the original idea of Pubcon was that some of the best parts of [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-12 more

Fun email

Every so often I get an email like this: Dear Webmaster, I have browsed your site and I’m interested in purchasing advertising space in it. I am mainly interested in placing a new page on your site with content and links that I will supply. Please let me know if you would like to discuss this further or if [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-08 more

bendy on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

I'm looking for some help here - please bear with the story... Ok, essentially I used to use a Sony walkman mp3 player, with all my music files on a laptop with Sonic Stage. That laptop has since been stolen (I've still got the mp3 player) but due to a new ipod, I now use iTunes on my work lapotp. Because it's a work laptop, any 'enhanced' CDs (ie those with videos, etc on them) won't transfer to the library; the laptop just won't recognise them in the drive. Consequently there's a large element of my music collection that I now can't put on to iTunes. So I was wondering if it would be possible to: 1) Install sonic stage onto my new laptop and somehow dump the files onto it from the Sony mp3 player, and then 2) Convert these Sony files into iTunes 'friendly' files? Any help much appreciated. cheers bendy
Publication date: 2008-11-05 more

beth on "short survey"

Hi all, Im currently writting a dissertation project on Apple company (in short what makes it so popular and addictive) and I would be extremely grateful for answers on those simple quesions: 1. Can you name the reason why you've decided to buy Apple product? (you can select more than one answer) a.company adverts b.functionality c.i just stick to the brand d.friend's recommendation e.i like the overall look of the brand f. just think that other brands are crappy 2. How many Apple products did you buy during last 5 years? 3. How would you grade Mac's functionality? (1-5) 4. How would you grade Mac's stability (1-5) 5. How would you grade PC functionality? (1-5) 6. How would you grade PC stability? (1-5) 7. Do you consider yourself as a part of Apple community? 8. Do you attend any kind of Apple user meetings on regular basis? Thanks in advace for all of u and big up!!
Publication date: 2008-11-04 more

Tom Willmot on "short survey"

Moved to the Apple Forum. I too use a few Apple products, here are my answers. 1. b & e 2. 7 3. 5 4. 5 5. 4 6. 2 7. Yes 8. No Hope I'm not to late.
Publication date: 2008-11-04 more

Vote vote vote!

The polls will be closed by this time tomorrow, so don’t forget to vote, everyone.
Publication date: 2008-11-04 more

Halloween 2008 wrap-up

I missed a few Halloween tidbits: - Our Halloween post on the Google webmaster blog gives you a feel for Halloween at Google. The dog dressed up as a lion was pretty awesome. There was also a guy dressed as the Android from Google’s mobile phone OS. - What happens when a witch accidentally collides with a [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-03 more

My Halloween 2008 Costume: Rick Astley

digg_url = 'http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/my-halloween-2008-costume/'; For Halloween this year, I decided to be Rick Astley. With a little bit of hair spray, spray-on hair color, and some make-up for a widow’s peak, it looks like this: What fun. To make the costume complete, I took my Android G1 phone and bought a copy of Never Gonna Give You [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-01 more