Posts Tagged ‘Google Inc.’
Sunday, May 23rd, 2010
On the web, people have absolutely no patience. Your link pops up in Google search, someone clicks it, and the stopwatch immediately starts ticking. If your company’s website doesn’t pop up in two to three ticks, I can guarantee that before the fourth tick visitors will click the back button and try the next links in the search results. Whether you are building your website or contracting it out, make sure your site loads quickly.
You can certainly use a stopwatch to time your site, but doing so is actually a bad idea. Your browser may store graphics and other items in its cache to decrease load times on subsequent visits, so a stopwatch may not provide an accurate indication of how long a page really takes to load for the first time visitors. Better tools are available. My favourite is Pingdom Tools at tools.pingdom.com, where you type the URL of the site or page you want to test and click the Test Now button. Pingdom Tool tests the page and displays the total time required for it to appear on the screen. Results also include a chart that displays the loading time for each object on the page, useful for identifying bandwidth hogs. If your site seems slow, it’s imortant to assess what is slowing it down. Fortunately, a couple of other free tools can help. To get started,you’ll need to install the following on your computer:
- Mozilla Firefox web browser
- Firebug
- Page Speed or YSlow
To test a page, open it in Firefox, click Tools Firebug, Open Firebug and then click the Page Speed or YSlow tab and click Analyze Performance (for Page Speed) or Grade(for YSlow). Both the tools list factors that contribute to site speed, flag areas that need improvement and provide recommendations for fixing problems.
BUILDING FOR SPEED
Both You can do a number of things right now to speed the performance of your website, including:
- Keep it simple. Don’t let window dressing slow your site.
- Combine Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) into a single file.
- Streamline your CSS by eliminating all unused styles.
- If your site is running on a blogging platform, install a caching plug-in.
- Trim images whenever possible.
- Specify image dimensions.
- Use CSS Sprites to combine background images into a single file.
- Avoid flash-based websites
- Move your website from shared to dedicated server or choose a more dependable, higher quality hosting service.
- Use a content delivery network such as Akamai Technologies to deploy contents across geographically distributed networks.
Tags: Clocks, Firebug, free tools, Google Inc., Horology, search results, Stopwatch, Technology/Internet, YSlow
Posted in Ajatus, OpenSource Software, SEO, Web Development, web | 4 Comments »
Monday, March 8th, 2010
 Typing is sooo yesterday. Google Gesture Search, a freshman out of Google Labs, lets you find stuff on your Android phone by drawing letters on the touchscreen as if you were jotting on a notepad. In addition to Android’s existing search by voice, image, and barcode, Gesture Search is yet another keyboardless input method for your touchscreen phone. At the very least, Gesture Search is a fun proof-of-concept; at most, it will hook a few dedicated touch keyboard haters. Here’s how it works. With Gesture Search running, you write letters by swiping your fingertip on your touchscreen as if it were a whiteboard. With each character you input, Gesture Search live-searches your phone’s contacts, bookmarks, and music and displays the results on-screen. Tap an app, contact, bookmark, or song to launch it or view the contact. (For contacts, tap the green phone icon to start a call.)
When you start Gesture Search you get a plain black screen with a cursor-like pointer on the footer. You draw your first letter, and Gestures puts it at the bottom of the screen and displays matches in your phone’s application list, contacts, bookmarks, and if enabled, your music library. Then you draw the next letter to narrow your results further.
As you can see, a letter that can pass as either an H or an A will match both. You can’t be a slowpoke while you swipe, either: Gesture Search can recognize letters that involve more than one stroke–like a T–if they’re timed correctly. That is, don’t wait too long to cross your T, or Gesture Search will think it’s an I. (Hint: If you’re consistently not fast enough, in the app’s settings set “Writing Speed” to “Slow.”)
If you want to delete a letter, you can: to backspace, in the footer, just draw a line from right to left as if you were pushing the delete key back. Then you can re-enter the character.
Typing is sooo yesterday. Google Gesture Search, a freshman out of Google Labs, lets you find stuff on your Android phone by drawing letters on the touchscreen as if you were jotting on a notepad. In addition to Android’s existing search by voice, image, and barcode, Gesture Search is yet another keyboardless input method for your touchscreen phone. At the very least, Gesture Search is a fun proof-of-concept; at most, it will hook a few dedicated touch keyboard haters. Here’s how it works.With Gesture Search running, you write letters by swiping your fingertip on your touchscreen as if it were a whiteboard. With each character you input, Gesture Search live-searches your phone’s contacts, bookmarks, and music and displays the results on-screen. Tap an app, contact, bookmark, or song to launch it or view the contact. (For contacts, tap the green phone icon to start a call.)When you start
Gesture Search you get a plain black screen with a cursor-like pointer on the footer. You draw your first letter, and Gestures puts it at the bottom of the screen and displays matches in your phone’s application list, contacts, bookmarks, and if enabled, your music library. Then you draw the next letter to narrow your results further, as shown above.As you can see, a letter that can pass as either an H or an A will match both. You can’t be a slowpoke while you swipe, either: Gesture Search can recognize letters that involve more than one stroke–like a T–if they’re timed correctly. That is, don’t wait too long to cross your T, or Gesture Search will think it’s an I. (Hint: If you’re consistently not fast enough, in the app’s settings set “Writing Speed” to “Slow.”)If you want to delete a letter, you can: to backspace, in the footer, just draw a line from right to left as if you were pushing the delete key back. Then you can re-enter the character.
Gesture Search is available for Android 2.0+ only. Search for it in the Market, or scan the QR Code below with your Android device to install it.
Tags: Android, computing, Google Inc., Google Labs, Input/Output, Mobile software, Smartphones, Technology/Internet, Touchscreen
Posted in OpenSource Software, Web Development | 2 Comments »
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
For most of us database is synonymous to tables, tuples, SQL, RDBMS, or normalization, but is that what databases actually mean or is it beyond just the relational data-model? Relational data-model although the most popular and the most accepted data-model is not apt for all problems. And how far can we go by mapping all our problems on to the relational data-model. After certain table size eventually the database starts slowing down so we move towards replications via multiple configurations which obviously increases the operating expenses. Now when this is not enough we employ some expensive sys-admins to configure sharding for our database for which we require still more resources or pay a fortune worth of money to the “Big Guys” like Oracle and Microsoft to tweak our databases for performance. But is this the future of databases? I guess not. Let us have a look at what other database options which are not based on the RDM and are free from SQL:
- MongoDB: It is a very high performance open source, schema-free document-oriented database.It provides a JSON like data-store mechanism which can free the software architects from the limitations of the RDBMS. It also supports full indexing including inner objects and arrays, dynamic queries, query profiling, efficient storage of binary data including blob data, replication and fail-over, auto-sharding for extreme loads and we thought MySQL was ultimate for databases?
- CouchDB: It is a free and open source document-oriented database written in the Erlang programming language which is a functional language. It is well suited for local replications and vertical scaling. It again has a JSON data-store as documents which need not share a schema, but retain query abilities via views. Views are a combination of aggregate functions and filters and are computed in parallel, much like MapReduce. With bindings for many languages this is sure to become one of the most popular databases in the future.
- Mnesia: It is a distributed database system written in Erlang. The data-store of Mnesia can be considered Relational but isn’t what someone familiar with SQL might expect. A database contains tables. Relationships between them are modeled as other tables. A key feature of Mnesia’s is tables can be reconfigured within a schema and relocated between nodes, not only while the database is still running but even while write operations are still going on which make both the read and write operations extremely fast and fault tolerant.
- Cassandra: It is an open-source distributed database management system with a five dimensional Key value hash. It was developed by facebook and open sourced in July 2008. It provides a structured key-value store with eventual consistency. The major components of a Cassandra data-model are Columns, SuperColumns, ColumnFamily and KeySpace. It is considered as a Hybrid of the BigTable and Amazon Dynamo Key Value store. It is currently used by facebook, twitter and Digg.
- HyperTable: It is an open-source database based on Google’s BigTable. It used HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) as a storage file system and is distributed.
- Amazon Dynamo Key-Value Store: It is a proprietary high availability Key-Value data-store which has properties of both Databases and distributed hash tables. It powers parts of Amazon Web services.
So seeing these I am sure Relational Databases are soon to loose their share of importance when concerns like high scalability of databases arise.
Tags: Amazon.com Inc., BigTable, CouchDB, Data modeling, Database, database management system, Database management systems, Database theory, Databases, Document-oriented database, Dynamo Key-Value Store, Erlang, Google Inc., HDFS, HDFS ( Hadoop Distributed File System ), JSON, Key-Value Store, Mnesia, Oracle Database, RDBMS, Relational database, Relational model, software architects, SQL, store of Mnesia, Technology/Internet, Web services
Posted in Database | 11 Comments »
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