Blog

so i don't have internet at home yet and haven't been getting my usual daily dose of tech news, but today i read cringely's latest column, where he speculates on the future of google's web accelerator, among other things.

i'm not too sure about his analysis.. it seems like this would require a lot of effort on google's part, with very little in the way of concrete returns. sure, they could put text ads on every page you see, but that could just as easily be accomplished by a google browser (remember gbrowser?). buying up a ton of dark fiber and then squandering it on something like this seems like a colossal waste, and i seriously doubt google's going to do it.

offloading page rendering from client browsers to a cluster of servers makes sense only if the client machine doesn't have the horsepower to run a rendering engine. these days, even pocket pcs are powerful enough to run full blown rendering engines (see opera mobile, for example). blackberries also have their own on-device rendering engine - although it's not great, it does work at a reasonable speed. only when you start getting down to resource-strapped cellphones do you need to offload the rendering to a server or a cluster.

in fact, for most clients, doing server rendering would actually slow down the browsing experience based on server load and network latency. the main speedup would come from caching common requests and prefetching, both of which can be done with something similar to the current iteration of GWA or a gbrowser/proxy combo.

also, it seems to me that yahoo! is starting to get squeezed from every direction. they're losing out on search and email services to google, and on media to apple. the rest of their services aren't that great and will eventually also be taken over by google (picasa et al). yahoo's been dormant for a while - they just don't make headlines anymore. even though they're still hiring like crazy, i doubt they'll continue to grow as much until they do a major restructuring of their company and focus on something instead of being mediocre at everything.

[ 0 Comments... ]

see my other post (need to login) for trip details.

[ 0 Comments... ]

.. leaving for the gobi desert today on a 6-day trip. will not have internet.. :(

[ 0 Comments... ]

so, here i am in the seoul airport, waiting for the flight that is the third leg of my trip. thankfully, i found an internet cafe thingy and so have something to do while waiting.

as usual, transiting through the US was the worst part of the trip.. they search through everything. the US-visit guys at pearson airport were morons. while i was waiting in line there, they making racial cracks about previous passengers. and were just generally rude to boot. the guys at SFO were much better.. they had a more professional attitude. they also have this newfangled device that searches for explosives residue by blowing air at you and then presumably analyzing the particulates in the air. nifty.

anyhow, i got to meet megazork in san francisco, after 2.67 years. that was good.. :) also, over the two flights i've already had, i've watched ocean's twelve 1.75 times, national treasure 1.5 times, bridget jones' diary (sequel) 0.25 times (man that movie sucks - although i guess i'm just not in their target demographic), lemony snicket once, and some other movie that was apparently very forgettable, since i don't remember it.

finally, the difference in time between here and waterloo means that quest will become available just as i'm boarding the next flight, so i probably won't get to check that for a while.. :( bah well.

ETA: for some reason i can't seem to access livejournal.com from this internet cafe. either the website is down or is being blocked.. :(

[ 5 Comments... ]

so the hard drive that i blogged about on LJ last term resurfaced. apparently fai had it all along. so on the way back from campus pizza today, we (mostly chris) kicked it along, threw it on the ground numerous times, and mashed at it with rocks until the cover finally fell off. then this little pillowy-pouch thingy fell out, followed by the write head protector, the write head, and a couple of magnets. the platters are now severly dented and don't turn, but it's still very recognizable as a hard drive. amazing how long it lasted..

[ 2 Comments... ]

so the SECC meeting today effectively threw out the possibility for me to take CS 466, which I had wanted to take next term. It's the only interesting ATE that's offered in the fall and that doesn't have an OS prerequisite. as such, it was probably the one course for which i didn't have a fallback plan of some sort.

so, finally, after much wrangling and course lookup-ing, i seem to have moved enough things around that my schedule seems somewhat decent again.. although really it's just the least of many evils. also, this means i get to squeeze in real-time alongside the applied AI course next summer.. that should be fun - i won't see the sun at all until august.

[ 0 Comments... ]

the world is coming to an end! i just tried a google search and i got a SERVER ERROR! from google! i was in shock.. then i took a screenshot of it, hoping it'll be worth millions some day.

screenshot

[ 2 Comments... ]

so i've been playing around with some ajax code (asynchronous javascript + xml) (the stuff that google uses all over the place to make it's websites so snappy) since it looks like it's fairly well supported by most browsers and is actually a useful way to use javascript. today i came across this, which looks really cool. direct manipulation of xml in javascript.. really nifty. if more browsers supported e4x, i can imagine a ton of websites switching to using it.

[ 0 Comments... ]

i just got an email from bluehost (webhost for this website) about a 15-minute downtime on saturday due to upgrades.. it's nice to have a webhost that is actually reliable, unlike others i've had to deal with *cough*webhostingcanada*cough*...

i also realized i'm using a pathetically tiny amount of the disk space and bandwidth i'm allowed to.. i'm almost considering putting up some giant videos for download just so my bandwidth usage is more noteworthy.. :)

[ 10 Comments... ]

so gmail is upping it's storage to 2 GB today, with an infinite-storage plan (they'll keep upping it as long as you need more). what i find particularly cool is the counter they've stuck on gmail.com - a quick peek at the source code shows that the counter will hit 2050 MB at 6:00 AM tomorrow. Odd that they used 1025 instead of 1024 and their counter runs for 30 hours instead of 24. i guess they're just accounting for all the time zones across north america..

ETA: it's not just the counter on the main page; if you log in to gmail and check your % usage, the total size seems to be going up incrementally too.. cool :)

[ 4 Comments... ]