Alfred's musings

Note to self: Don't be daft! Remember the Olympic ticket sale fiasco when designing the next high-concurrency system. What a disappointment. I've been dreaming about one day attending the Olympics, and when it was announced that the Olympics was coming to London, I was excited, at least because I expected that I would be able to attend some of it. The first round of ticket sales have come and gone, and it's now old news that about 1.6m people applied and only 1/2 of them got any tickets. What was good about the first round, was that they did not create a huge peak load on ticket servers in their process. However, the second chance ticket buying, was done on a first come first served bases. Except with the remaining 800 000 people all up at 6am armed with a VISA card and a list of the available events, the organisers (Locog) and VISA and Ticketmaster should have expected some spike in demand... but no. It was not more a first come, first NOT served affair. I know this

I've talked about presentations before , and decided it's worth posting an update on tips specific for presentations with Google Presently (our presentation product as part of Google docs), when used on a Mac or on a Chromos machine like my CR-48. 1) The right screen size: After you connected your projector or external screen, resize (or hit the green + button in your browser). Why? The external display and Mac OS will negotiate the right screen resolution, but the layout of your presentation in the browser will not know that the screen size changed. By forcing the browser to re=think it's size, you ensure that the slides and preview are displayed properly. 2) Full screen shortcut: cmd+shift+F (for Full screen) removes borders and other stuff - this is *the* way to do your slide show. 3) Cache the content: As presently draw down content from the interweb, you slide show can never be forgotten home. You never need to find a USB key. You never quire some additional und

I've mentioned some cute home pages before, and my favourite is probably the PacMan one. Today I was surprised with another very nice home page... especially *just* for me! Google knew my other birthday  too - so this is a very nice surprise! Thank you Google. (Another nice touch was that Google HR sent me a massage voucher. Very good!!!)

I've always bought into Microsoft's Software + Services story. In a nut shell, S+S says we'll get the optimal experience if we combine web services with smart software (rich clients) that can consume these services. I always used to say that some things would never be serviced just over the internet... things like spell checker and video editing would always require some fat client. But I've been proven wrong: Having a spell checker in the browser makes much more sense, and using dictionaries from the cloud can be *much* more relevant and accurate! And as for video editing... I've recently used http://www.youtube.com/editor and it has benefits of thousands of CPUs to do rendering... much better than on the desktop! Microsoft also dreamt at one stage of "the programmable web" where even rich clients would essentially get the rendering instructions from XML, therefore making it possible to deliver everything via the web... an effort ultimately culminating

I just  realized another reason why working at Google is so fantastic. It's really got a sunny perspective on the planet. I recall when I joined Google London just over a year ago, it was sunny every day coming in to the office. And more: T oday, while looking at a Google Earth sight seeing tour playing in our offices, I realized that the entire planet is sunny! :)

I've commented about a few robotics things recently ( tennis , cyborgs and more ), but I'm buzzing about the potential opened up with the combination of AppInventor , Lego NXT Mindstorm and Android. AppInventor allows me to build a simple application for Android mobile phones by *just* dragging and dropping a few puzzle pieces around to build the logic and UI. The NXT Robot is a bunch of Lego Technic bricks, plus some sensors (e.g. Ultrasound, light, touch) and a few motors (but not just any old motor, effectively stepper motor style thing where you can control the speed and exact rotation angles), and a Lego CPU that can control the lot, and talk to all... including talking to the phone (and AppInventor app) via bluetooth... The possibilities are endless. Well, I've been playing with a few ideas... it can become a mobile controlled curtain open & closer, or the mechanics that can make my space travel for my phone easier by for example deploying the parachute when t

Even though Contoso does not formally appear on my CV, it could just as well, as I've spent sooooo many hours working on Contoso systems. But the big news is that Contoso has gone Google , now running on Google Apps. Welcome Contoso & all the Contoso employees!