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The 2008 Paralympic Summer Games officially opened in Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium yesterday,
where over the next 11 days, 4000 athletes from 150 countries will compete in 20 sports for 472
gold medals. Be sure to check out Paralympic
Sport TV's YouTube channel over the next two weeks for event footage, profiles, interviews and
more.
A few athletes to watch for: world No. 1 wheelchair tennis player Esther Vergeer from the Netherlands, Canada's
Chantal Petitclerc, German swimmer
Kristen Bruhn and South African sprinter
Oscar Pistorious, aka "The Blade Runner." Pistorious's recent attempt to qualify for the South
African Olympic team electrified the sports world, but he'll be challenged by a highly-competitive
field of sprinters. Here's a recent profile of Oscar:
Some interesting facts about the XIII Paralympic Games:
> The host country of China is looking to surpass the 63 gold medals they won in Athens in 2004.
In preparation for the Games, the Beijing city government made subway stations wheelchair
accessible and added 2000 wheelchair-accessible buses and taxis.
> Sixteen of the 213 athletes on the U.S. delegation are military veterans, including swimmer
Melissa Stockwell, an Army veteran of the Iraq War, and discus and shot put thrower Scott Winkler,
an Army veteran of the campaign in Afghanistan.
> Wheelchair rugby -- or "murderball"
as it's known to most fans -- has its own welding shop in the Olympic Village to repair dents and
busted chairs resulting from high-speed collisions.
In addition to watching all the action, you can upload your own Paralympic moment to YouTube and
add it to Paralympic Sport TV's YouTube
group.
Hadoop is a Java-based distributed application and storage framework that's designed to run on
thousands of commodity machines. You can think of it as an open source approximation of Google's
search infrastructure. Yahoo!, in fact, runs many components of its search and ad products on
Hadoop, and it's not too surprising that they are a major contributor to the project.
MapReduce is a method for writing software that can be parallelized across thousands of machines
to process enormous amounts of data. For instance, let's say you want to count the number of
referrals, by domain, in all the world's Apache server logs. Here's the gist of how you'd do it:
Get all the world to upload their server logs to your gigantor distributed file system. You
might automate and approximate this by having every web administrator add some javascript code to
their site that causes their visitor's browsers to ping your own server, resulting in one giant
log file of all the world's server logs. Your filesystem of choice is HDFS, the Hadoop
Distributed Filesystem, which handles partitioning and replicating this enormous file between all
of your cluster nodes.
Split the world's largest log file into tiny pieces, and have your thousands of cluster
machines parse the pieces, looking for referrers. This is the "Map" phase. Each chunk is
processed and the referrers found in that chunk are output back to the system, which stores the
output keyed by the referrer hostname. The chunk assignments are optimized so that the cluster
nodes will process chunks of data that happen to be stored on their local fragment of the
distributed file system.
Finally, all the outputs from the Map phase are collated. This is called the "Reduce" phase.
The cluster nodes are assigned a hostname key that was created during the Map phase. All of the
outputs for that key are read in by the node and counted. The node then outputs a single result
which is the domain name of the referrer, and the total number of referrals that were produced
from that referrer. This is done hundreds of thousands of times, once for each referrer domain,
and distributed across the thousands of cluster nodes.
At the end of this hypothetical MapReduce job, you're left with a concise list of each domain
that's referred traffic, and a count of how many referrals it's given. What's cool about Hadoop
and MapReduce is that it makes writing distributed applications like this surprisingly simple.
The two functions to perform the example referrer parsing might only be about 20 lines of code.
Hadoop takes care of the immense challenges of distributed storage and processing, letting you
focus on your specific task.
Since Hadoop is written in Java, the natural way for you to create distributed jobs is to
encapsulate your Map and Reduce functions into a java class. If you're not a Java junkie, though,
don't worry, there's a job wrapper called HadoopStreaming which can communicate with any program
you write with the usual STDIN and STDOUT. This lets you write your distributed job in Perl,
Python or even a shell script! You create two programs, one for the mapper and one for the
reducer, and HadoopStreaming handles uploading them to all of the cluster nodes and passing data
to and from your programs.
If you want to play around with this, I really recommend a couple of howtos written by German
hacker Michael G. Noll. He put together a walkthrough for getting Hadoop up and running on
Ubuntu, and also a nice introduction to writing a MapReduce program using HadoopStreaming (with
Python as an example).
Are any Hackszine readers using Hadoop? Let us know what you're doing and point us to more
information in the comments.
What we thought might have been an AIR app in the making,
may be something entirely different. With social video sharing sites such as Youtube and Vimeo it can be hard to keep
the recommendations flowing. Hundreds of videos are added to these sites daily, but only a select
few are really worth our time. With no easy way to sort through these uploads, Vimeo is asking
the community for help in finding a solution. Today the site has announced the launch of Vimeo
Toys. These toys aims to give users an interactive and visually appealing way to find more
video content. Here's a look at what's available.
VimeoLand & Pulse
The VimeoLand toy gives a look at recent
happenings on Vimeo. VimeoLand displays an interactive landscape of characters that represent the
latest actions from Vimeo users. Hovering your mouse over a character will display a pop-up
containing one of the following recent actions:
A comment
A like
Recent signup
Recent upload
Each action includes a link to the profile of the user who completed the action and a link to the
video that the action took place on. What's a little random and unique about VimeoLand is an
airplane that flies back and forth above the landscape. Clicking the plane will cause a random
video to be dropped from the plane's cargo. It's pretty nifty. Vimeo fans will find this
particular toy to be very useful and entertaining.
If you're looking for something less flashy with the same notifications we recommend the only
other Vimeo Toy available at the moment: Pulse.
Making Your Own Vimeo Toy
We're interested in seeing what other unique visuals developers will create with Vimeo Toys. To
help developers get started, Vimeo has listed a sample XML file with over 50 activity items to
choose from. Vimeo's team of workers will decide whether or not your toy is worth being featured
on Vimeo. We'd rather see the community take a vote on what stays and what goes.
What we think would really be interesting is to see Vimeo and developers take things to the next
level and allow for a visual graph of what our friends, or a select group of users, are up to on
Vimeo. Nevertheless, we're happy with what we see so far and look forward to see what else is
next.
The site has grown from
180 million profiles a year ago to 260 million today, they say. Registered users have also
grown, from 17 million to 25 million. Compare that to 680,000 profiles and 40,000 users for Geni.
230 million photos have been uploaded to the site, which is available in 25 languages and has 5
million monthly unique visitors. Support for ten more language will be released this month.
Investors have certainly noticed MyHeritage’s stellar growth. The company has raised a new
round of funding - $15 million in a Series D round led by Index Ventures and joined by current
investor Accel Partners. That brings their total capital raised to $24 million.
New Features - Recognize Those Faces
MyHeritage’s facial recognition, which works a little like recent Picasa
enhancements, lets you train the service by tagging a few photos of an individual. MyHeritage
then starts to auto-tag other photos that you upload of that person, too. Users don’t have
to upload photos directly, either. They can sync from Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, etc. And once the
photos are properly tagged with people’s names, MyHeritage will re-sync them back to the
original services.
Just to reiterate that, MyHeritage has created a heck of a tool to let users auto-tag photos with
people’s names on the services they already use.
Ever since I did the last update I've been unable to upload to my .mac account. It basically just
hangs on the keychain update. I've tried everything I could find online about fixing keychains but
nothing has worked so far. I'm thinking about deleting iweb all together and reinstalling. Is there
any way to back up my website so I can used it again after reinstall?
Ok so my app update has been review for over 2 weeks, and today I get an email with this in the
contents:
Quote: At this time, my_app_name cannot be posted to the App Store due to an issue encountered
during the review process. In order for your application to be considered for the App Store, please
re-upload your binary to iTunes Connect. They don't tell me what the issue is or what I should do
to correct it, just to reupload my binary. Very helpful guys, thanks. Has anyone else had this
before? :confused:
You can spend a good chunk of time searching the web for an ecard that isn't annoying,
cheesy, ad-ridden, or some combination of all three. Or you can grab a picture, choose a song, and
send a super-clean, customized ecard through Postcard.fm. Simply upload an image file and MP3 to
the free, no-registration-required site, add a message, and mail it out. The recipient gets a link
to your e-postcard page, with no ads in sight (at least for now). This means you can be as cute,
clever, snarky, or affectionate as you want, rather than letting some oddly-shaped critters express
your wishes. Postcard.fm [via MakeUseOf.com]
Just to clarify, there are two separate uploads for the files that swspjcd brought up. I can
confirm that one of the uploads had a single segment in part .r45 corrupted whilst the second
upload was not corrupted. To complicate the matter further, for that particular file (.r45), only
the US server farm returned it as corrupt while the EU farm was not corrupt.
So depending on which version of .r45 you downloaded, and which continent you connected to, you may
have received a corrupted segment, regardless of SSL.
That all assumes that you have a properly working network connection. If you run firewalls or other
network intercepting proxies like antivirus software, then you'll have to learn how to configure
them correctly.
Badcar is right in pointing at a transit server corrupting the feed somewhere. One of the servers
in the Path: feeding our US farm has corrupted the files. I don't know if it's eweka, I haven't
checked that.
You can spend a good chunk of
time searching the web for an ecard that isn't annoying, cheesy, ad-ridden, or some combination
of all three. Or you can grab a picture, choose a song, and send a super-clean, customized ecard
through Postcard.fm. Simply upload an image file and MP3 to the free, no-registration-required
site, add a message, and mail it out. The recipient gets a link to your e-postcard page, with no
ads in sight (at least for now). This means you can be as cute, clever, snarky, or affectionate
as you want, rather than letting some oddly-shaped critters express your wishes.
Join us now for our weekly review of Web Technology news. This week was dominated by
the launch of Google's new open source browser Chrome. As the Ed tweeted during the week: how
often does a major Internet company launch a brand new browser? Check out our extensive coverage
and analysis below.
This week we also reported on another major announcement from Google: a YouTube-like app for
Google Apps. Finally, check out our poll - it asked our readers what word processing tool they
mostly use. The results may surprise you...
In what may be the story of the year in Web tech, this week Google launched Chrome, its open source
app browser. Can Chrome kill IE? Will it kill Firefox? Or will it go the way of Google Base,
Google Sites and other Google Flops? The browser became available for Windows users in 100
countries and 43 languages this week. It's Live now at google.com/chrome.
As mentioned, we at ReadWriteWeb extensively analyzed this big news. Here is our coverage...
The news first leaked on Monday morning via Google watchdog Phillipp Lessen, who scanned and posted a printed comic he
received in the mail from Google. You can view it here.
In the comic, Chrome was framed as a browser for applications instead of just web pages.
As soon as Chrome was made available as a download, the ReadWriteWeb team took the new browser
for a spin. We walked through it live and shared our screen as soon as the browser became
available. The video of our session is posted below. Thanks to DimDim for help with this.
You can also see the slideshow from the press conference here:
Our coverage of
Chrome initially touched on issues like browser
performance and business implications for Firefox - but one thing we picked up on shortly after
was a curious section of the
Chrome Terms of Service.
The terms include a section giving Google "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and
non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly
display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the
Services." That seems pretty extreme for a browser, doesn't it?
Later in the week Google
removed the offending section of the Terms of Service. It seems that the default Google
service TOS includes these kinds of claims, even though they may not be as appropriate in some
circumstances as in others. We're not sure when such claims would be justified but we're glad
they've been removed from Chrome. Here's the original version
of the End User Licensing Agreement.
It wasn't all good news for Google. Ryan Narraine, a security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab,
reported that Chrome also
inherited a potentially serious security flaw from the old version of WebKit it is based on. An
attacker could easily trick users into launching an executable Java file by combining a flaw in
WebKit with a known Java bug and some smart social engineering. Security expert Aviv Raff, who first discovered this flaw, set up a
demo of the
exploit here. (Note: This page will automatically download a Java file onto your
desktop). You can safely click on the download, as it only opens up a notepad application written
in Java.
This week Google
launched a new product for the enterprise market, Google Video for business. It's a new
application in the Google Apps office suite, enabling workers to upload and share videos inside
their organizations. Videos can be shared on an individual, group or company-wide basis. Google
sees it being used for such things as executive communications, product training, trip reports,
"social videos" for the company intranet.
We think this has the potential to break open the Web Office market, because up till now nobody
has done rich media for the enterprise as an easy to use browser-based package. Google Video for
Business manages to do this, mostly because of YouTube's influence.
We ran a
poll a year
ago asking which word processing tool you used the most. What we
were really driving at was: how many of you are using an online word processing
service (Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, etc) as your main tool, instead of a traditional
desktop one (MS Word, OpenOffice, etc). We ran the same poll this year:
The best of the online word processers was still, you guessed it, Google with their Docs program
at 17% at time of writing. But Microsoft still dominates this market, polling at 48% of our
readers using it as their main tool.
I have Iphone 1st gen, FW 1.4 unlocked by iPlus and was trying to upgrade to 2.02 with Winpwn 2.5.
I followed the instructions here http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1572, but I allways get the 1603
Error when trying to upload the Custom FW to iPhone with iTunes.
Everything goes OK, I build the custom FW, enter the DFU mode (iPhone screen says its ready to
proceed to iTunes), but when I try to upload the custom FW to iPhone, I allways get the 1603 error,
and iPhone gets stuck in recovery mode. I tried renaming the custom FW (deleting the custom), tried
it on another PC, tried with iTunes 7.7.043 and 7.7111, no success. I tried like 10 times, no
success.
I suspect there might be something wrong with the custom FW built by winpwn.
Now I have restored it back to 1.4 in iTunes and unlocked again with iPlus.
Any suggestions what else to try?
Another question, once I have the custom FW built by winpwn, can I use it directly with iTunes? (or
does the winpwn put in some special state)
Google has been busy with their new Chrome browser, but they've also released several updates to their Picasa Web Albums and Picasa desktop photo management
application. In an attempt to compete more directly with popular sites like flickr, Google has implemented facial recognition,
Creative Commons rights management, and an Explore feature that allows users
to view photos from around the world. The Picasa desktop application, now in beta 3,
includes the ability to retouch photos, create collages and slideshows, and upload directly to
YouTube. You can read more about the latest improvements by visiting the What's new page from
Google.
The ability to upload and share photos when you're on the road is very important to the mobile
user. I've been drawn to Picasa Web Albums since its creation primarily because it
was linked to my Gmail account, I felt like it had less advertising, and it felt more
mature and secure. I like the having the ability to upload my photos and keep them
private, only sharing them with a few family members. Now Google is appealing to the
global, social crowd as well. Although both Picasa and flickr have the ability to
keep photos private, they both push the idea of sharing photos with the world. Even
the flickr motto reads, "Share your photos. Watch the world." I don't
want to world to watch me, but I do like to peruse pictures from around the globe.Â
Official Video for the Sugababes' new single "Girls". The music video premiered on Channel 4 at
11:25 on the 6/9/08 and (I think) I'm the first to upload it ^_^
is there a way i can get mobile me and leave all the email and sync features alone? after all this
stuff i have been hearing i dont want my stuff to get messed up. however i would like to upload my
website onto the nice features..
then again i can just buy a webhosting plan from 1n1 or lunarpages or something.. hmm well just
wondering.
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
What we thought might have been an 
You can spend a good chunk of time searching the web for an ecard that isn't annoying,
cheesy, ad-ridden, or some combination of all three. Or you can grab a picture, choose a song, and
send a super-clean, customized ecard through Postcard.fm. Simply upload an image file and MP3 to
the free, no-registration-required site, add a message, and mail it out. The recipient gets a link
to your e-postcard page, with no ads in sight (at least for now). This means you can be as cute,
clever, snarky, or affectionate as you want, rather than letting some oddly-shaped critters express
your wishes.
Join us now for our weekly review of Web Technology news. This week was dominated by
the launch of Google's new open source browser Chrome. As the Ed tweeted during the week: how
often does a major Internet company launch a brand new browser? Check out our extensive coverage
and analysis below.
This week Google
launched a new product for the enterprise market, Google Video for business. It's a new
application in the Google Apps office suite, enabling workers to upload and share videos inside
their organizations. Videos can be shared on an individual, group or company-wide basis. Google
sees it being used for such things as executive communications, product training, trip reports,
"social videos" for the company intranet.
We ran a
poll 
users
to view photos from around the world. The Picasa desktop application, now in beta 3,
includes the ability to retouch photos, create collages and slideshows, and upload directly to
YouTube. You can read more about the latest improvements by visiting the 
