Ratchet up the stocker fears. Google has just released Street View for Salt Lake (including Utah and Davis Counties).
Some of you may recognize the following locations. I’ll post about the fears and privacy concerns later.
Category Archives: Internet - Page 2
Google adds Greater Salt Lake Area to Street View
Posted by Reluctant
on February 16, 2008
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Google Apps rocks!
Posted by Reluctant
on January 6, 2008
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Recently, I got a new server. While trying to get the email handling installed, I became very frustrated. Not only did managing the email consume a majority of my server administration time, but it took a lot of bandwidth just dealing with the spam I received. Because I’ve had my main domain (acucore.com) for over 7 years, it gets a large amount of spam.
But with the introduction of IMAP for Google Email (including their free gmail.com email service), Google has opened up a whole new world for me. In addition to the gmail.com service, Google has a service called Google Apps (previously Google Apps for Your Domain). It allows you to use several Google services (including email, calendaring and docs) with your own domain. This is ideal for small businesses.
Where is the world is Santa?
Posted by Reluctant
on December 24, 2007
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Ever wanted to know exactly where Santa is on Christmas Eve? Well, usually you would have to wait for the news or something similar. But this year, the traditional Santa trackers (NORAD) and Google have teamed up to give you the best way to track Santa.
Santa can now be tracked through Google Earth. If you don’t have Google Earth installed, click that link to download it. Then visit NoradSanta.org to download the tracker link. It will open in Google Earth and a nice 3D graphic of Santa and his reindeer will display and he will continue to move throughout the world. If you don’t want to download Google Earth, then NoradSanta.org has an embedded map that will update when Santa moves. But Google Earth updates much more often and is far cooler.
He’s already started and is in Ethiopia as I type. Not only is this a lot of fun for the kids, but it’s a great world geography lesson too!
Enjoy!
PS. For an interesting history on how NORAD started tracking Santa, check out the Wikipedia article.
Personal communication with today's technology
Posted by Reluctant
on December 16, 2007
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A while back, I read an article about how todays technology, meant to bring people together across great distances, is actually destroying personal communication. It gave 7 reasons “the 21st Century is Making You Miserable.” I’ll link to the original article at the bottom, but be warned, it has some inappropriate language and content. But the 7 reasons are very interesting and enlightening. Now most of these are self explanatory. Some require some explanation which I’ll give afterward. I’ll list them here:
Google Street View has embeddable panoramas
Posted by Reluctant
on December 11, 2007
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Google just released a new feature for Google Maps. It’s an enhancement to Street View, the feature that allows you to see a 360 degree view of the streets in select cities. Now, you can embed the street view panoramas within your own web site. So I figured, I would try it out. Here’s one of my mission apartments in San Francisco:
OpenDNS — your friend and mine
Posted by Reluctant
on October 25, 2007
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I use a DNS (domain name system) service called EveryDNS. A DNS service allows me to point domains at a specific server on the Internet. Translating “www.ramblingengineer.com” to the IP (internet protocol) address of my server. DNS is part of the backbone of the Internet and makes the world go ’round. There are two components that make up the DNS on the Internet.
- DNS server — This is the server that contains the address mapping from name to IP address.
- DNS client — This is a process (usually running on your desktop) that sends a query to the DNS server and asks to which IP a name points.
Google Translate is user enabled
Posted by Reluctant
on April 22, 2007
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Sometimes a company does something very innovative and you think… well, duh, why didn’t anybody else do something like that before.
Google translate does something that will have the same affect. There are many companies that do online, automatic translation of text. It’s been around for years. But since the good old days, when babelfish was the only translation service, the translation has always been quite poor. And even if you didn’t know the language from which you were translating, you new from the resulting translation into your language that it didn’t work well.
Google personalizes online maps
Posted by Reluctant
on April 15, 2007
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Google recently announced a new feature for Google Maps. It’s called “My Maps”, but the name doesn’t really do it justice. This new feature now brings Google Maps a little closer to the functionality available in Google Earth [download]. Don’t get me wrong, Google Earth has so many more amazing features that it blows Maps out of the water, but it’s an installed desktop application.
The huge benefit of Maps is that you don’t need to install an application in order to use it. It works in any modern browser and is lightweight and quick.
The beginning to the end of DRM?
Posted by Reluctant
on April 9, 2007
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For the first time ever, a major recording label has signed a deal with Apple iTunes Store to sell DRM-free digital music, although at a higher price. EMI holds the rights to many top recording artists including The Beatles. This is the first time a major recording label has agreed to sell digital music without digital rights management and it so happens to be a deal with the largest digital music store.
DRM and fair-use
There is a huge controversy over DRM, which limits the transfer and copying of digital multimedia files. In most situations, DRM limits what many consider “fair-use” of copyrighted materials.
A new desktop environment… Mozilla
Posted by Reluctant
on March 26, 2007
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Almost everyone has heard of Mozilla. The Mozilla organization is the descendant of Netscape and is the producer of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. One of the little known technologies behind the Mozilla products is called XUL (pronounced zool). XUL is a scripting language (and interpreter) that provides all the user interface for Firefox and Thunderbird. It’s very powerful and several stand-alone applications have been built with it.
So recently, some Mozilla developers tossed around the idea of creating a new desktop environment built on the XUL technology. This would not only compete with Gnome and KDE, but also with Windows, Mac OSX and many of the other platforms. Because the heart of the Mozilla technologies has been ported to all kinds of different platforms, this new desktop could potentially run on many of the diverse kernels (the software that connects all other software applications with the hardware — the heart of an operating system).
This would be amazing! The Mozilla Desktop (has a nice ring to it) would provide a universal interface to many different platforms. Regardless of the underlying technology, the user experience would be the same. And XUL could handle all the intricacies of the diverse platforms. Windows users could more easily switch to Linux or Max OSX (or Solaris for that matter) without having to relearn an interface.
Of course, there are all kinds of issues that would need to be worked out in order for this to really work, but it’s the best start to a centralized user interface that we’ve ever seen.
So what do you think? For you tech guys, do you think this is feasible? And for you non-techies, is this something you would like?