Category Archives: Google

Google Tech Talk : 7 ways to ruin a technological revolution

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James Boyle gives a fascinating talk about how one might go about undermining the technological revolution of the last 30 years. It’s an alarmist talk, he exaggerates for comic effect but not all that much and it’s extremely thought provoking, especially when we consider the question … how many of those things are we doing now? Much of the talk is around Intellectual Property rights and what that has meant to the technological revolution up and until now, and also how it might evolve going forward. Also he touches on Google’s standpoint on copyright and IP with reference to the Libraries project and Google Books.

One of the funniest anecdotes he mentions is when he spoke to someone from one of the collections societies and said to them “theres always been a private space where people can enjoy music, like in the shower” to which the indivual replied “thats just a problem of monitoring” , on the grounds that it could be interpreted as a performance! 😉

Code reviews at Google with Mondrian

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Another excellent Tech Talk. Our development group at Talis has been experimenting with different ways to carry out code reviews and I think its safe to say were still trying to find what works best for us.

I think this tech talk is very relevant not just to the discussions were having internally, but to any organisation that is serious about wanting to ensure that they are developing great, maintainable software.

Google Patent Search service launched

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Google has launched a patents search service at http://www.google.com/patents which as a service looks quite interesting.

On a slightly a related subject ZDNET reports that U.S Patent Office awarded a Design Patent to Google that covers “the ornamental design for a graphical user interface” of Googl’e search results page. Google are not patenting “searching” but that the specific visual look of their search page.

Some critics are pointing out that the awarding of this patent is more evidence that the granting of software patents is spiralling out of control. This whole issue is currently being debated by the Supreme Court.

The maths behind Google’s page ranking

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David Austin penned this article, which is currently being featured by The American Mathematical Society. The article details how Google’s PageRank algorithm works, which can be summarised as:

The fundamental idea put forth by PageRank’s creators, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, is this: the importance of a page is judged by the number of pages linking to it as well as their importance

The article is fascinating to read and Austin does an excellent job illustrating the workings of the algorithm using mathematical forumulae, diagrams and some examples.

Hashing, Searching and Sketching

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We are doing a lot of work at Talis at the moment on refining the indexing and searching capabilities in our platform. To that end I’ve trying to get up to speed on subject; anyway I came across this fascinating tech talk over at google on using Hashing and Sketching to get improved search results. Its a little over an hour long, and does get very technical in parts but nonetheless it gives a really insight into the possible gains that can be achieved through locality sensitive hashing functions and sketching ( the compression of large complex objects into a few bytes and then comparing these representations to determine how similar objects are).

SearchMash, Google Spreadsheets and Google Docs updated

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Looks like Google have been busy. Theres been major updates to Google Spreadsheets and Google Docs. You can access both at docs.google.com using your GMail account. In addition to being able to create documents and spreadsheets using Googles new online editors you can also upload documents in MS Word, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML and Text. Once you have created your document you can download it to your desktop in any of the above formats. The same is true of Google Spreadsheets. You can also invite other users to share your documents online. Finally you can now publish your online documents and spreadsheets directly to your blogs!

SearchMash Logo

SearchMash is Google’s new web search interface, just without the Google branding apparently in an attempt to ensure impartiality amongst test users. The new search interface boasts some cool features – integrating web search, images, video, blog and Wikipedia searches all into one dynamic page with modules that expand and collapse. I really do like it … it aggregates results from several sources onto one easy to use screen. Try it for yourselves.

Cluster your JVM to simplify application architecture

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Watched this tech talk over at google today, about using Terracotta’s DSO to act as network attached memory sharing critical parts of the Java Heap across servers. The talk focuses on how clustering in the runtime provides a simpler development environment without hindering scale out.

Got me thinking about how this could be quite useful for building distributed applications.

Find out more at http://www.terracottatech.com/.