Solar Powered Beauty

Heard this phrase the other day on 'have I got news for you' ... Paul Merton quoted a cab driver saying something along those lines, thought it was brilliant.

This rings true as I sit here at greenwich on this sunny afternoon.

Cloud Neigh

If I was to ask you to upload all your documents, pictures and goodies from you desktop to the internets your reaction is more than likely be ... 'go chew on a gum tree bark'. Well folks hate to tell you that this but the future of computing is about to take off to the cloud.

Cloud computing

A concept that's been around for longer than I'd like to admit my ignorance to it, claims that the processing power should live in the cloud, another word for the internets, as a result of which people share the processing power allowing for a bigger and meaner processor to churn the binary than just little piddly things we call desktop processors.

One of the oldest and well known example of cloud computing application is, or should I say was before the re-branding ... Hotmail. The email voo-doers ran a server that managed all your e-mail, plus spam and those days had some real spam, with you accessing it all through a web browser.

What people take for granted is the fact that in order to receive emails you need a dedicated machine, listening for that ring tone and picking up all your messages while you are out (your computer being switched off), a lot like an answering machine. This function is performed by an email server (no relation to me) brought to existence for the sole purpose of listening for your emails. Technically speaking there is no requirement for google, yahoo or microsoft to provide free email management, but they do because their business model makes money through adverts.

Pros
If you have not yet deduced the pros let me give you some hints:

a) you will never have to upgrade your computer again, U'll just need a machine with a fast net connection and a browser, all applications will be processed remotely on a server with you interfacing with the results through the browser.

b) you will be able to access your computer from anywhere ... so every computerhas a 'memory' of your computer.

c) never have to worry about backups or data loss as many of these server farms are based in a range of locations.

Cons
The most obvious one I hear you scream is ... Security ... And I totally understand. But consider this, how safe is your data on your machine and are you, average Joe/Jane, better at fighting off Trojans than a team of geeks who's idea of Friday night is some good only OOP (object oriented programming).

The other thing to consider before you fully write the cloud off is that most of your sensitive data already lives online in a form of an email of sorts.

The only true limitation at the moment is the reliability of net access ... You do not want to be caught in the headlights with your pants down and without a connection. That said, with multiple mediums allowing online access these days (mobiles, hotspots, etc) its only a matter of time before we put our faith into the net ... like we did for electricity back in the day when we made a leap of faith from a largely mechanical to electiral based world.

Winds of change
The winds of change aren't just blowing but hurling things all over the place and then some. People are slowly getting used to, and in many cases addicted to, life of the net.

Forces at work
There are two forces of at work here Push, pushing us up to the cloud from our desktop, and Pull, lifting us uo into the cloud. Google(pull), Adobe (pull) and Microsoft (push) are just a few of the names behind these forces.

> Google is pulling us up in the cloud with offers of its services like google mail, docs, picasa ...

> Adobe AIR; is a very clever initiative, allowing developers to create desktop applications that brings the online experience to you desktop, leveraging some of the local machine's processing power to enhance the web experience ... A step towards the cloud.

> Microsoft Silverlight (push); this a move by Microsoft to push information from the desktop to the cloud, similar in nature to AIR. Another initiative by Microsoft is its Live MESH project that let you synchronize several machines to each other so for instance allowing your home machine to replicate the assets on your office machine, this is a oversimplified view of MESH.There are many other pulling forces about with the likes of getdropbox and amazon offering online storage as ways of backup, enticing you to get used to putting you data online.

If you think about it, these titans, namely google, microsoft .. Are laying down the ground work to ensure their place on the network for the future .. probably when the machines rule the world. This is especially essential for Microsoft because the direction things are heading, operating systems are soon to be a thing of the past, time when tyrants ruled the world, which just happen to be their core product.

Our involvement with the development of the cloud is reminiscent of a forg in a boiling pot. If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it'll jump out but if you put the frog in the water before firing up the stove it will merrily sit there in its own stew as it slowly gets cooked.

The water is about to reach boiling point, are you ready.

Formatting - it's a suck

Formatting my computer and setting up a WAMP server on the other ... Ohhh the pain and the heart ache !!

Sound of Smells

A though occurred to me today as I was waiting for my scolding coffee to cool down for my consumption. Do smells have a sound?

Allow me to elaborate;
a) Does one sound older or smarter if their breath smells like coffee?
b) does alcohol breath sounds like you are having fun, or you are a fun person to hang out with?

The answer is yes .. generally speaking .. but depends on the experiences you have had with those smells and the association of your neural network.

Its a safe generalization that coffee makes you sound smart because most hard-core coffee consumers tend to be white collar office workers with higher than average intelligence (excluding outliers that come with all data sets). Therefore majority of the public has associated coffee smell to intelligence, vis-sa-vi drinking coffee makes you sound smart.

Next questions: do colors have a smell ? I for one hate the smell of blue.

When getting lost is not an option but a choice

In the past few weeks I have been tolling the deep crevices of the internets, looking for tips and tricks on sorting out tailoring google maps to my specs. Listed here are some useful links I found on my 'travels'.

Latitude;
Google Latitude is the back bone to my location app. Its a service that rinsed in the background on your mobile, updating your current location per the phone gps.

Warning: if you use this make sure that you have unlimited data plan.

There are two main problems with latitude:
a) it does not remember where you have been, only showing the real time location; and
b) there is no manual over ride on the frequency with which the location is updated ... google give a blurb about power management on mobile devices as an excuse for the absence of this feature.

Another useful Link:

javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

Copy-paste this in you browser when you are at google maps and it will give to the latitude and longitude of the location at the center of the screen. A useful tip of getting the lat/lon position is to right click on the map and select 'center map' option.

Tech;
The google API for those interested can be found here and there are plenty of good examples flying around in their documentation.

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/flash/

Once you get a hang of it, its a little bit addictive ... I am so hooked !!

Brighton Day Trip - Gatwick interrupted

I was kinda busy taking picture of the cloud strikes when this taking-off plane interrupted the framing ??

There is a movie reference in this post ... Can anyone guess the name?

Brighton Day Trip - The verdict !

The first picture is what my expectation was from the day ... All positive with lights and the works ..

The second expresses how I felt when the realisation of no-sand beach dawned on me ... that's right I felt like a broken-burntout-cheated- and many other adjectives that I can't care to spell right now ...

Can't say it was a fun day .. But it sure was funny !!

Time to pack it up.

my disappointment form the beaches of Brighton ... I mean com