Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 29, 2011
by sjvn01
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+1 for Google+

Is Google+ really as good as you’ve heard it is? Yes, it is. Long before Facebook and Twitter existed, I was using “social networks” such as mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups. I was also a dedicated user of BIX, CompuServe and GEnie. So, when I say Google’s new Google+ is the best social network I’ve ever used, I think that means something.

Why? Well, there are several reasons. First and foremost, I love the circles concept.

Circles are how you organize the people you choose to follow on Google+. People can add you to their circles, but they’ll see only those posts that you choose to make public unless you add them to one or more of your circles. Even then, you can easily choose which of your circles will be allowed to see certain posts.

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July 28, 2011
by sjvn01
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Google gets into the Content Delivery Network business

You have to give Google credit. Instead of being content with being the king of search and online advertising, they also want to rule smartphones, Android; Web browsers, Chrome; and now they’re trying the Content Delivery Network (CDN) business on for size.

In the Google Webmaster Central blog, Ram Ramani, Google Engineering Manager, announced, that Google was “releasing the latest addition to the Page Speed family: Page Speed Service.”

Ramani continued, “Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS [Domain Name Service] entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices”

Google claims that in their testing “we have seen speed improvements of 25% to 60% on several sites. But we know you care most about the numbers for your site, so check out how much Page Speed Service can speed up your site.”

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July 27, 2011
by sjvn01
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Ubuntu Linux gets serious about business partners

Most people, who like Linux, love Ubuntu. Oh they may object to Ubuntu’s new Unity desktop, but at day’s end, they still use Ubuntu. Technology businesses though have a more jaundiced view of Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company. Canonical, though, is now taking steps now to make its potential hardware and software partners happier.

First, Canonical is trying to become better friends with its reseller partners. Their new channel partner program, Ubuntu Advantage (UA) is “designed to help resellers bring a new set of support services for Ubuntu server, desktop and cloud installations direct to businesses. The program is launching with global partners, including CSS in the US, Asia and Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA).”

The name of the game, according to Canonical, is to “provide enterprise customers with access to the tools and support they need to get maximum return from their Ubuntu infrastructure including round the clock support, Ubuntu Landscape management and monitoring tool, knowledge base and legal cover. Ubuntu Advantage helps to minimize any impact on mission-critical services and reduce the cost of system downtime. The Ubuntu Advantage partner program extends the availability of these services beyond Canonical and, for customers, adds local resources and responsiveness to the expertise that Canonical continues to provide.”

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July 26, 2011
by sjvn01
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Paradise Lost: Paris Hilton arrives on Google+

Those of us lucky enough to be on Google+ love it. Oh, we may get really upset about Google’s real name policies, and how Google’s attempts to improve it haven’t gone far enough. But, we only get so passionate about it because we love it so. We love how it allows us to have intelligent, private conversations in our select circles, how we can have multiple-person video-conferences at will, and how…. who the heck let Paris Hilton in here!

Ack!

Yes. It’s true. Google+ has gone from being the hangout of the technical elite and buddies to being the latest online hangout of that star of amateur porn and really, really bad reality TV, Paris Hilton.

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July 26, 2011
by sjvn01
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Internet IPv6 adoption is going no-where fast

I’m not the least bit surprised that more people and companies haven’t moved to IPv6. Yes, they know that we’re running out of IPv4 Internet addresses. Indeed, some may know that Asia’s already run out of IPv4 addresses. But does that mean that they’re switching over to the IPv6 Internet? According to Akamai’s State of the Internet 2011 1st Quarter, the answer is a big fat no.

It’s not like the Internet has stopped growing. Far from it. Akamai, a major content delivery network (CDN), reports, “In the first quarter of 2011, over 584 million unique IP addresses, from 237 countries/regions, connected to the Akamai network – 5.2% more IP addresses than in the fourth quarter of 2010, and 20% more than in the first quarter of 2009. Although we see more than half a billion unique IP addresses, Akamai believes that we see well over one billion Web users. This is because, in some cases, multiple individuals may be represented by a single IP address (or small number of IP addresses), because they access the Web through a firewall or proxy server. Conversely, individual users can have multiple IP addresses associated with them, due to their use of multiple connected devices.”

And, let me remind you that that estimated billion is just for those who’ve connected through Akamai to make a Mac OS X Lion download or watch a video. We’re closing quickly in on IPv4’s hard limit of 4.3-billion. Indeed, according to ABI Research our smartphones and tablets alone will hit the one billion IPv4 mark in 2011.

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July 25, 2011
by sjvn01
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Google revises Google+ real name management policy

Over the weekend, Google annoyed numerous one-time Google+ users by blowing away their accounts because they’d broken Google’s name restrictions. That went over well. As I asked at the time, “What was Google thinking!?” Google’s senior VP of social, Vic Gundotra, explained Google’s logic for insisting on real names, as an attempt to set a positive tone, “like when a restaurant doesn’t allow people who aren’t wearing shirts to enter.” Now, Bradley Horowitz, Google’s VP of Google+, stated on a Google+ post that Google will be changing its naming policies “as soon as possible. We’ve already improved our process, and the changes below should arrive in a matter of weeks.”

First, Horowitz apologized for how Google had been handling many of its Google+ users’ choice of names. “We’ve noticed that many violations of the Google+ common name policy were in fact well-intentioned and inadvertent and for these users our process can be frustrating and disappointing. So we’re currently making a number of improvements to this process– specifically regarding how we notify these users that they’re not in compliance with Google+ policies and how we communicate the remedies available to them.“

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