Alfred's musings

There are many articles on how to switch the original CR-48 Chromebook to work on other mobile platforms... with Developer mode and more... but I've just tested on the latest Chromebook software (and originally CR-48), and it's working nicely in the UK (I've got a Vodafone SIM) without fiddling with developer mode. Just plug it in and go! Next: I've got to try this in South Africa.

Just a bit of light humour... and not an accurate reflection on all of these companies (especially the ones I've worked with), but still funny! And I know Manu has been asked to extend this to include IBM, Oracle and a few others :)

I'm over the worst after the disappointment this morning trying to buy Olympic tickets . I eventually concluded that even over loaded servers could be a way of extending the lottery. But the emotions around Olympic tickets have sparked interesting debates at work amongst the really smart Googlers, with many algorithms on how it could be optimised without discrimination, and my preference is the model suggested by " paulmarkj " in a comment below this post . Or - we could simply run a race, and the first to get to the tickets, get 'em ;)

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...