In the video we talk about Universal Mind, how SpatialKey came to be, a lot about what SpatialKey is and how it works. I dive into the architecture a bit and how we leveraged the cloud to build out our infrastructure.
Thanks to Jon and James hosting us, we crashed Jon's house for the video. I think Doug tossed back the most beers I can't keep up with him and still talk.
Cnet has an article on quick dowload, easy to install, small memory footprint applications. With large, overbloated applications being the norm these days it is nice to see a few of these out there.
If you have a GMail account more than likely you have lots of space to spare. I ran into a utility that allows you to mount your GMail account as a hard drive in windows.
GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium. GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer.
GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to. The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. GMail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the GMail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures. Because the GMail files will clutter up your Inbox folder, you may wish to create a filter in GMail to automatically move the files (prefixed with the GMAILFS letters) to your archived mail folder.
Google launched the Beta of its long anticipated Desktop Search tool for Windows today. The application acts as your own personal Google Server and indexes the contents your system by file name, or in the case of select file formats, by the contents of the file. It runs on Windows XP and Windows 2000 (with Service Pack 3).
The free download indexes the full text of email created in Outlook or Outlook Express, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, AOL Instant Messages, and caches the pages you view in Internet Explorer so you can revisit the page later "even if its live content has changed or you're offline."
The install is really simple and after you install it starts indexing. If you are working on your system then it will take a while to index. As soon as it realizes the machine is idle it starts churning away. After it indexes the data you are presented with a browser based interface much like the google we all know. Yes is it lightening fast, typing in JRun on my machine turned up 24,107 entries for files and 27,823 for web history, all that in .5 seconds. It looks through basically anything on your machine and indexes it. For free you can't beat this. it is on my short list of the best windows utilities I have ever used.
I am a big fan of the iTunes program and I download all my music through iTunes. I also own an iPod but I found it frustrating I could not listen to the music with our in dash MP3 players that we have in our cars. I purchase the music but without the iPod the songs are useless if you want to take it with you. A few searches on the internet turned up partial solutions but I thought I would share the entire solution with you. This process only works if you are the actual owner of the song and have it authorized through iTunes. I am in no way promoting piracy, I bought the songs legally from iTunes.
The process involves two pieces of software to handle the decoding. First you will use "hymn" to turn the m4p (protected) file into a m4a that you can play anywhere. Then you will use dbPowerAMP to convert the m4a into an mp3 file.
1. Download hymn http://www.hymn-project.org/ To make the instructions as simple as possible download hymn and unzip it to the C:\hymn directory. Hymn is a command line tool for windows that is pretty easy to use. There is a GUI available for the MAC.
2. Copy the mp4 files you want to convert to C:\hymn (if you understand windows you can just add c:\hymn to your path, if not don't worry and continue). open a MS dos command prompt window start>>accessories>>command prompt
3. Run hymn on each of the files you are converting C:/> C:/> cd hymn C:/> hymn thenameofthefileiwantoconvert.m4p
You will need to do this for every file you want to convert or put multiple files in the command line
C:/> hymn filetoconvert1.m4p filetoconvert1.m4p
The m4a files will be created in the same directory. You can use the hymn command line options if you want to send them to another directory.
You are now ready to convert the m4a files to mp3 files. In order to do this you will need a converter. I use the dpPowerAmp converter.
6. From there you can just highlight the m4a files in windows explorer. Right click with the mouse and select the "Convert To" option. Choose the quality and the folder you want to store the mp3's in and click "Convert".
The end product is a mp3 file that you can play anywhere. It is a bit of extra work, but you could possibly automate the process further. It is worth noting that the m4a file still has the original purchasers information in the file. Do not pass these files around to your friends. If they end up on the internet you could be prosecuted for piracy.
I have always found search engines interesting and based on some of the statistics I collect from referring pages I wrote some code that displays the latest referrals from the google search engine. I also like to see where my pages rank and what topics are most viewed on my site. I collect the data by using the cgi.HTTP_REFERER variable and storing it in a db. I parse out the google querystring using a UDF called GetGoogleKeywords from http://www.cflib.org.
Google added yet one more tool that I find quite interesting. The Google Desktop bar allows you to search google without ever opening a browser. I think this may be another tool that I keep in my toolbox.
An article on ExtremeTech poses the question "Why can't we make Linux easier?". While the installations have come a long way, the GUI's and ease of use leave a lot to be desired. I run both Windows and Linux at home and would love to depend more on Linux, but there are still issues I run into with dependencies and programs that just won't do what I need them to do. Especially in the area of Multimedia. Running as a server Linux is really hard to beat but as a primary desktop environment it could use some vision. Read through the article and comments I think you will find them interesting.
Extremetech is featuring an excellent article on building and configuring a Linux Server for your home. The first article featured was an article on building a server. The next set of articles cover the installation and configration portions. The articles include the following:
I just learned about Nick Bradbury's latest project, FeedDemon, an RSS news aggregator. Nick's work in the web development tools space has been pioneering, with HomeSite being the most popular HTML text-editor ever released, and TopStyle, the standard productivity tool for CSS editing. Versions of both HomeSite and TopStyle are included with Dreamweaver MX.
Two derivatives of the popular Kazaa peer-to-peer filesharing service now actively attempt to block scans by the RIAA and other agencies, escalating the P2P war to a new level....more
With multiple instances of JRun or multiple java processes in windows you may only see javaw.exe or jrun.exe (jrun.exe is just a wrapper for java.exe and serves as a launcher) in the task manager. How do you know which one is which. That is where a utility like Process Explorer from SysInternals comes to the rescue. http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml
Just select Options > Highlight Services to see what you're running. Right-clicking on a service and selecting Properties gives you all the information you need on the resources it's using.
I have been in the pursuit of a manageable online photo album solution. I built one with CF using a C++ CFX tag that stores images in a db and it has been great for years. I am looking for a java based solution to get away from CFX tags. One solution I am looking at is a Dreamweaver Extension. I will let you know what I find.
Mozilla's small and light Firebird browser (nee Phoenix). This Firebird download site always provides the latest daily build considered to be a bit more stable. Windows users want the win32.zip version. Firebird doesn't have an installation routine. You just unzip it and create a shortcut for the Phoenix.exe file. (This may shortly change to the Firebird.exe file.)
After two years of delays, Microsoft (Quote, Company Info) Thursday embarked on one of its most important software releases in its history. I have not taken a close look at Windows 2003 yet. I hope some of the security flaws have been ironed out.
Many Versions to Choose From Formally known as Windows .NET Server, the company is releasing four separate versions of the Windows Server 2003 platform:
Web Edition - Web serving, Web hosting, E-Mail, Workgroup Functions
Standard Edition - Enterprise Applications, Middleware, Larger Workgroups
Enterprise Edition - Database, Large Enterprise Applications, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Scientific Computing and Modeling (SCM)
Datacenter Edition - Largest Databases, Largest Enterprise Apps, Corporate ERP and SCM, Server Consolidation
