Mike’s ramblings

Today I stumbled across this photo on Panoramio and somehow I was flabbergasted. Not because it is a pretty picture, which it is, but because one can clearly see on the Google Map, that the mark where the photo was supposed to be taken is accurate down to the meter.

When I saw that page I could envision a future in which we just sit at home and visit places by clicking on a Google Map and it shows us a complete tour with videos and photos of everything. Admittedly not the most interesting thing from a social standpoint, but it shows us how far technology has progressed.

Does this page mean anything to you or does it leave you untouched?

At the recent MySQL Conference & Expo there was a very interesting panel called “Scaling MySQL - Up or Out?” where people from some of the internet’s top sites gave quite a good insight into their setup of MySQL and sometimes also some nice tidbits about their storage and web server setup. Sheeri Cabral made a video that is really worth watching and that I’ve uploaded to Google Video. (The original can be found here.)

The raw numbers are below the fold and courtesy of Keith Murphy, Venu Anuganti and Ronald Bradford.

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Nanosolar a company started by German founder Martin Roscheisen recently shipped its first CIGS solar panels. They have developed a technique to print their light active ink onto all kinds of materials. The thin-film panels produced this way come out at price of $1/watt for a total installation cost of around $2/watt. This makes the technique comparable to coal energy (which costs about $2.10/watt)!

In this price included is a nice margin for Nanosolar. They report that the costs to produce the panels are around 40 cents/watt. These numbers are amazing. What is even better is the fact that this company is already mass-producing these panels. If they continue to drive down the costs, we can soon cover all kinds of surfaces with these panels. These are truly exciting times in my opinion.

I’ve written about this technique at the end of August and Mashable now brought my attention to the first product that popped up , which lets you easily use the feature. (There was a demo before, but you could not save the images.) Rsizr is a flash online image utility like every other, but this feature makes it truly stand out. What lacks for me though, is that you can only make the picture smaller and not size it up. Hopefully they integrate this feature in the near future. (Before it will be integrated into Photoshop?)

This image resizing technique is absolutely amazing. It is actually not only a technique to resize images, but also makes it possible to make objects (or people) in a picture disappear. What it does is basically take out parts of the image which it thinks are not important. The real difficulty obviously lies in finding the right part of the image to take out.
Once again an image (this time a video) is worth more than a thousand words. Check it out. Your jaw will drop.You can find more on the technology here: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/Source: Techcrunch