Yahoo released a cool web application for your desktop to access several emails that includes Yahoo, Gmail or any POP/IMAP Client
One of the great thing is, you can save these mails for off-line usage. Setup if pretty easy.
It also allows you to integrate with other services from yahoo such as calendar which is a cool feature. It really competes with Google calendar in this application. Now I have to check how I can sync it with my iphone.
It didnt get my tasks/calendars/notes from my yahoo calendar, probably there is a way.
Phoenix has landed successfully on MARS deploying its parachute on the North Pole region (which is same as Northern Canada region on Earth). US $420 million project spacecraft will try to find micro life if ever existed on Mars.
Phoenix will dig into the ice upto 1 meter to find any life if they have ever lived. It will also study the MARS atmosphere.
Some of the first information is relayed from Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex in Australia, it also played active part in Apollo 11 Mission. I have visited this center and quiet amazed.
Microsoft Research has launched a great product for researchers, novice and space enthusiasts, they call it as Worldwide Telescope, a Similar tool used by NASA to do space exploration on their desktops.
A seamless virtual environment similar to Google Earth or Google Sky but it has much data available and you have your Galileo Telescope in your desktop.
Microsoft Research claims the WorldWide Telescope is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space-based telescopes to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe.
WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data.
It is not real time, but they will be constantly updating the pictures, and they were taken in varying times in the past.
It is released a free resource to astronomy and education communities which is a Microsoft’s brainchild of 16 years research which is an extension of Jim Gray’s work.
It is quiet exciting for novice users like me to explore space.
Running a website 100% of the time is very crucial for businesses. Even few minutes or hours, downtime affects business a lot, for small businesses percentage is much higher. Enterprises uses tools such as nagios for monitoring the services which includes web servers, database servers etc.
Another alternative is Open NMS which is first enterprise grade network management platform made under opensource license and there is Zenoss which is equally comparible to nagios written in python. When you compare with Nagios, Nagios wins as it has lots of features as they promise and many things such as controlling dependable services etc are done which are very important for enterprises.
However, above tools needs lots of resources and setting up is very time consumable, there are many web alternatives mainly for small/medium businesses which can monitor the services. These tools are quiet handy and ease of setup.
Host Tracker a web monitoring service, they have a free service with limited features and with a little pricing they have many other features which is quiet good.
Important thing in monitoring is alerts and many of the services has the email alerts and sms alerts with a little pricing.
Alternatively, there are many other web services such as SiteUptime and Montastic which have similar features with different features and pricing plans.
Recently I came across a nice monitoring service mon.itor.us which looks very promising and claim as free though they have bit of pricing for SMS alerts. So far it performed well with the tests and it doesnt send you annoying alerts which many other services do, It is getting popular and worth giving a try. It can monitor the website externally and also monitor CPU, memory, intranet etc internally. Easy to start.
Cloud computing is in which tasks are assigned to a combination of connections, software and services accessed over a network. This network of servers and connections is collectively known as “the cloud.” Computing at the scale of the cloud allows users to access supercomputer-level power in a distributed network. Users uses browsers, thin clients, mobiles to access the services. Processing power, bandwidth, memory are managed remotely. Cloud computing is used in the system with business model software as a service.
Many companies are embracing Cloud Computing which means they are changing their data centers with help of virtualization technology and reducing the complexity using systems such as Xen etc.
In virtualization, software deployment has become easier as hardware is reduced, (citrix is one of popular service to give applications for the users). As the hardware resources are less and shared by the users thus reducing the costs.
With use of cloud computing or grid computing, infrastructure maintenance and applications development is separated and also from physical resources.
Users interact with the cloud using User Interface
Services has list of services they can access
Systems Managements manages the resources to be given to the user
Provisioning tool provides the services to the users
Monitoring tool monitors the resources required for the users and allocates them accordingly
Cloud computing use virtual storage can be either one physical storage or it can be on multiple networked servers.
IBM has released new servers to do the cloud computing, they have launched water cooled servers to make use of cloud computing. Developers can actually forget about the hardware resources and control their software. and IBM is very keen in developing their hardware in cloud computing which will be the future.
Many companies are providing the applications using web services which uses cloud computing.
Amazon uses cloud computing to provide their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud called as EC2 which uses XEN Virtualization. It lets you use amazon computing resources with their cloud computing platform and create your own application environment (virtual machine) and use web services to use them, with security and permissions, and pay only for the services you use. This is an inexpensive solution to use amazon resources.
Google has launched recently an app engine for developers which is under beta now. It lets you use their resources on the same platform which they use for their applications, such as gmail, docs etc. Developers can develop their application, initially they support python (it may extend with other languages in future), and publish an application and can also provide webservices to access the application. App engine also enables developers to create their own datastores (databases).
Yahoo partnered with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to support research on cloud computer which is owned by Tata Sons Ltd., a Mumbai, India will lend their super computers.
Microsoft has launced its Live Mesh , with its SDK developers can make applications in their platform and data can be shared across the users which is a mesh. Developers can be create web application or rich client application using the mesh and accessed anywhere and can use the underlying resources.
SalesForce have released their cloud computing architecture on the name of Force.com which lets you create a business application and development process is rapidly fast.
Check out a video on cloud computing by Pinceston University research
Withe the popularity of Internet, everyone likes to use the services on the Go, and cloud computing is the way to go. Many companies like this are investing in cloud computing and keen to give the users their services to grab the market opportunity in the technology.
Murali K,
July 30, 2008
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