Archive for July, 2011

My one is faster than yours!!!! (internet that is!)

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

Akamai’s ‘State of the Internet’ Report Enters Fourth Year of Analyzing Global Connectivity, Attack Traffic and Broadband Consumption, and Ireland has made it to 10th  position.

Who and what is Akamai well the folks in Akamai transparently mirror content—sometimes all site content including HTML, CSS, and software downloads, and sometimes just media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, and video—from customer servers. Though the domain name (but not subdomain) is the same, the IP address points to an Akamai server rather than the customer’s server. The Akamai server is automatically picked depending on the type of content and the user’s network location. Why would you do this The benefit is that users can receive content from whichever Akamai server is close to them or has a good connection, leading to faster download times and less vulnerability to network congestion or outages.

So why do people look at this report, well it gives a insight into who and what is connecting to the Internet globally.

Highlights include from there press release

Internet Penetration
In the first quarter of 2011, more than 584 million unique IP addresses from 237 countries/regions connected to the Akamai Internet platform. This represents 5.2 percent more IP addresses than connected in the fourth quarter of 2010, and an increase of 20 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago.

Mobile Consumption & Connectivity
In the first quarter of 2011, the average measured connection speed for known mobile providers worldwide ranged from a high of slightly more than 6 Mbps to a low of 163 kbps.

Earnings season

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

So its earnings season, some of the winners and losers are listed here.

ARM Holdings PLC on Tuesday posted a 21% rise in net profit, These are the people that make the chips inside the mobile phones.

RIM the people that make the blackberry, RIM’s net income for the first quarter was $695 million, or $1.33 per share, just ahead of the analysts’ forecast of $1.32. However, the income figure was down from $769 million, or $1.38 per share, in the same quarter last year.

Apple’s Q3 earnings exceed estimates: $28.57 billion revenue, $7.31 billion profit, 20 million iPhones sold

Google reported revenues of $9.03 billion in the second quarter of 2011, representing a 32% increase over second quarter 2010 revenues of $6.82 billion

Vmware Year-over-Year Revenue Growth of 37% to $921 Million.

Microsoft reported an 8 percent year-over-year revenue increase, to US$17.37 billion, and a whopping 30 percent jump in profit to $5.87 billion.

IBM’s reporting a 12 percent year-over-year jump in revenue to $26.7 billion and an 8 percent increase in profit to $3.7 billion.

Printable solar cells

Saturday, July 16th, 2011

normal paper can now be used for solar cells, so anyone for solar wallpaper on the room, The sheet of paper looks like any other document that might have just come spitting out of an office printer, with an array of colored rectangles printed over much of its surface. But with this paper you can clip wires to it and shine a light on the paper, and hey presto! power! More here

Sligo I.T. wins Imagine Cup

Friday, July 15th, 2011

Team Hermes from sligo Ireland took home top honors in the Software Design competition.

The team designed a device that plugs into a car and monitors dangerous driving behavior and road conditions, providing instant feedback to both the driver and the car owner. The team’s solution uses embedded technology, Windows Phone 7, Bing Maps and the Windows Azure cloud computing platform to change driving habits and reduce road deaths.

The team’s face book page is here!
Read more from their local paper here.

SSD power loss report updates

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

Intel apparently has a issue “8MB bug” with SSD Drives a link is here to the form posting

http://communities.intel.com/message/131623#131623

 

Need a high res cam ?

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

I haven’t got enough pixels in my camera so the European space agency, has decided that it wants to give me more pixels, only 1 billion of them, I’ll be waiting for my next SLR with one billion pixes. More info here

The Facebook thing is a good Idea, but I don’t want us to expend a lot of resources and time on it.

Friday, July 8th, 2011

I was having an argument with myself on social media and how it works the other day. “The Facebook thing is a good Idea, but I don’t want us to expend a lot of resources and time on it.” but then “It’s that we need a team to manage it. It’s hard enough to get people to put stuff up on the web.”

The thing with social media is that it has to be social, and the point of social media, is that it is interactive, waiting a week to put a post up, is not interactive in social media terms, Its reckoned that it takes about  2-3 hours a week (http://mashable.com/2009/09/22/facebook-pages-guide/)  at a minimum.

We are also in a web 2.0 bubble so there is a little too much hype on social media at the moment, There is good reason for this  hype as the Linked in IPO (http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:LNKD ) pushes the bubble up more(http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/2870-How-LinkedIn-Makes-Money-Behind-the-IPO-Numbers). So there is the inevitable push to social media is great, as we have now social media consultants , With the GroupOn IPO coming, you will be hearing more hype and more social media consulting going on, but if there’s people out there with money that need to spend it, I’m sure social media consulting is the way to go.

Then I came across this where students are now starting to move off facebook, so I think you website has to be your core medium, and facebook and twitter etc. should be used to drive content to your website

South Korea moving to digtial text books by 2015

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

South Korea announced this week that it plans to spend over $2 billion developing digital textbooks, replacing paper in all of its schools by 2015. Students would access paper-free learning materials from a cloud-based system, supplementing traditional content with multimedia on school-supplied tablets. The system would also enable homebound students to catch up on work remotely.

The digital textbooks will contain the contents of ordinary textbooks and various reference resources such as multimedia and FAQs to help students understand the materials better. The government also wants to build a cloud computing system in all schools, so that users can access a database of all digital textbooks and choose what they want from their tablet PCs.

More here

Resizing images on the fly

Monday, July 4th, 2011

This is hand little script for resizing images on the fly, you need to have imagemagick installed on your linux box, but it puts out 5 folders of images of different sizes, so its perfect for thumbnails and quick corp’ing.

it uses convert out of the image magic liabary


#!/bin/bash

#http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php
echo "\n Running resize script \n";

echo "Making 460x images ";
mkdir scriptresizedx460;
for i in `ls | grep -v scriptresized | grep -v Cropped110x`;
do convert -resize 460 -quality 95 -compress JPEG -density 72 -strip $i resized_460$i;
mv resized_460$i scriptresizedx460/;
done

echo "Making 50x images ";
mkdir scriptresizedx50;
for i in `ls | grep -v scriptresized | grep -v Cropped110x`;
do convert -resize 50 -quality 95 -compress JPEG -density 72 -strip $i resized_50$i;
mv resized_50$i scriptresizedx50/;
done

echo "Making 70x images ";
mkdir scriptresizedx70;
for i in `ls | grep -v scriptresized | grep -v Cropped110x`;
do convert -resize 70 -quality 95 -compress JPEG -density 72 -strip $i resized_70$i;
mv resized_70$i scriptresizedx70/;
done

echo "Making 110x images ";
mkdir scriptresizedx110;
for i in `ls | grep -v scriptresized | grep -v Cropped110x`;
do convert -resize 110 -quality 95 -compress JPEG -density 72 -strip $i resized_110$i;
mv resized_110$i scriptresizedx110/;
done

echo "Making 220x images ";
mkdir scriptresizedx220;
for i in `ls | grep -v scriptresized | grep -v Cropped110x`;
do convert -resize 220 -quality 95 -compress JPEG -density 72 -strip $i resized_220$i;
mv resized_220$i scriptresizedx220/;
done

echo "Cropping 110x images ";
mkdir Cropped110x;
for i in `ls | grep -v scriptresized | grep -v Cropped110x`;
do convert scriptresizedx110/resized_110$i -crop 110x100-0-50 Cropped110x/croped$i;
done

Hopefully this helps some one.

Double mobile devices battery life

Friday, July 1st, 2011

So when your wifi device is looking for packets, that takes battery life, so why not sleep the device in congested areas. A Duke University graduate student has found a way to double the battery life of mobile devices – such as smartphones or laptop computers – by making changes to WiFi technology.

The energy drain is especially severe in the presence of other WiFi devices in the neighborhood. In such cases, each device has to “stay awake” before it gets its turn to download a small piece of the desired information. This means that the battery drainage in downloading a movie in Manhattan is far higher than downloading the same movie in a farmhouse in the Midwest.

The Duke-developed software eliminates this problem by allowing mobile devices to sleep while a neighboring device is downloading information. This not only saves energy for the sleeping device, but also for competing devices as well. it seems pretty logical that if there are network collisions going on out there in TCP land, buy letting them sleep, it could avoid draining the battery, by preventing the devices network stacks clashing.

more here