The Power of Cloud Computing

Instead of building one super computer to satisfy the computing needs of a corporation, or a cluster of organizations, cloud computing is based on thousands of simple computers managed by complex software. Google is concentrated in this technology like a laser beam. As this concept spreads, it promises to expand Google’s footprint in industry far beyond search, media, and advertising, leading the giant into scientific research and perhaps into new businesses. In the process Google could become, in a sense, the world’s primary computer.

For full article, visit <http://epiac1216.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/the-power-of-cloud-computing/>

Firefox – Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 …

Mozilla released yesterday the second beta for Firefox 3 with some 900 bug fixes and improvements over the previous version, including some new features, user interface enhancements and more.

High on the list of priorities for many users is tightening up Firefox’s memory usage and beta 2 shows Firefox 3 continues to squash and eliminate the memory leak bugs. The “what’s new” page for Firefox 3 beta 2 says that over 300 memory leaks have been plugged since Firefox 2, with 30 of those coming since the release of beta 1. The release notes also claim that Firefox 3’s memory footprint has been significantly reduced.

Some comments:

• Perhaps the most striking change is the redesigned Location Bar autocomplete menu, which now highlights which parts of the page title and/or URL match the entered text … <http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=22782>
• Improved security features such as: protection from cross-site JSON data leaks, tighter restrictions on site-specific content using effective TLD service, better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, version checking for insecure plugins … <http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2007/12/18/firefox-3-beta-2-now-available-for-download/>
• [Improved in Beta 2!] Speed: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in Beta 2, and will show further gains in future Beta releases … <http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b2/releasenotes/>
• There are of course some known issues which you might want consider before upgrading. Firefox 3 is still a beta after all. For instance, the new versions of Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail are both a mess in Firefox 3, though the classic versions work just fine. A rather annoying bug in beta 1 on OS X, which causes the CTRL-L shortcut (and occasionally the mouse as well) to not actually put the cursor in the location bar appears to still be around in beta 2.However, despite some bugs here and there I’ve been using beta 1 as my primary browser since it was released and have had no problems with it crashing or leaking memory. The speed is phenomenal compared to Firefox 2 and with the second beta out the door Firefox 3 is shaping up to be the best browser since, well, Firefox 2.

  Here’s the new Places Manager in action (note that I’m using the Proto theme for OS X):

  The new location bar makes finding visited and bookmarked sites much easier than previous versions:

  

  The Firefox 3 Download Manager now lets you see not just where a file is, but where it came from and more:

  …  for full article <http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/12/firefox-3-beta.html>

How to Create a Time-Lapse Video of any Web Page

Remember the time-lapse movie that helped you visualize the movement of tech stories on Techmeme? It did attract lot of eye-balls and as promised, here’s the secret recipe on how to make such a time lapse video with (almost) free software.

The process is simple and has two main parts – 1) Capturing screenshots and 2) Stitching all these images together so they appear as an animated movie or a flipbook.

Techmeme saves a snapshot of its homepage every 5 minutes and each snapshot has a unique URL with the timestamp. For instance, the snapshot of Techmeme at 1:50 PM ET, January 15, 2008 is available at www.techmeme.com/080115/h1350.

To capture those hundreds of screenshots, I created a simple macro (snippet below) using AutoHotKey that would automatically generate URLs, type them in the web browser, press the print screen key and then save the screenshot as an image – this ran in a loop 600 times capturing 50 hours of changes.

techmeme=http://www.techmeme.com/08010
url=%techmeme%%Date%/h%Hours%%Minutes% <- Create URL
Send, {CTRLDOWN}l{CTRLUP} <- Reach the Browser Address Bar
Send, %url% {ENTER} <- Paste the URL and Hit Enter
Sleep, 5000 <- Wait 5 seconds for the web page to load
Send, {PRINTSCREEN} <- Capture a screenshot

You may be wondering how the Print Screen key will save the screenshot to an image file when all it does is capture the current screen content to the clipboard ? That’s possible through SnagIt (available for a 30-day trial at techsmith.com) – You just mark the region that you wish to capture and SnagIt will do everything else.

Once you have all the screenshots, import all of them as a sequence inside Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere Pro, Camtasia, QuickTime Pro or any other video editor – just bring down the image transition time to 0.1 second (or less) and export the animation as a GIF or any video format. The results are always pretty amazing.

You can extend the trick to make time lapse movies of Google Maps, your road trips, construction sites, etc.

(Originally written by Amit at Labnol)