Blog of Hamlesh

Image Metrics are getting closer and closer to crossing the “uncanny valley”.

I’ve realised that I actually find it quite annoying, so its been switched off

Ocean explorer Robert Ballard takes us on a mind bending trip to hidden worlds underwater, where he and other researchers are finding unexpected life, resources, even new mountains. He makes a case for serious exploration and mapping. Google Ocean, anyone?

Some extracts from the talk that I really enjoyed and got me thinking;

“The mid-oceanic ridge covers almost 23% of the Earths total surface area.”

Robert poses an interesting series of question;

“Why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? Why do we have programs to build habitation on Mars and we have programs to look at colonising the Moon but we do not have a program looking at how we colonise our own planet and the technology is at hand.”

Another amazing presentation give at the TED conference in March 2008!

I’ve just been watching a presentation (”The future of the internet and how to stop it”) given by Jonathan Zittrain a professor at Harvard, and he mentioned something that I’d not come across before that I found quite interesting.

Anyone that has a blog or any other website where visitors can feeback information / comments etc know the problem with comment spam. A “captcha” (the funny little image you get asked to type in) is one of the common ways to protect against this. Spammers are now overcoming this by setting up free p**n sites (i’ve censored this out as to not upset the google bots). So on these sites, before seeing the picture, they ask you to validate a captcha, which is pulled in real time from a blog, and feeds the right response back. Now thats kinda clever

The presentation is on youtube, and if you have over an hour to spare, I recommend you check it out (if geekery interests you, which if you’re reading my blog, it does).

This is amazing! Disturbing, but amazing!

If you are a fan of widgets, check out Widgetbox.

Thats all for now

Busy++

This is apparently what the new Telecity Powergate facility will look like.  They’ll be deploying flywheel UPSs, which is nice

PS: Yeah yeah, I haven’t posted anything in ages, been really busy (as always I guess).

Blue Lock is a free and open source application for Windows, that monitors the proximity of your Bluetooth phone or device and automatically locks your computer whenever it’s out of range (e.g., you’ve walked away from your computer). The usefulness will depend on the strength of your Bluetooth devices, since it’s not really going to do its job if you’ve got a strong signal and receiver that keeps a connection from across the office. But if it works well with your Bluetooth devices, Blue Lock provides a simple way to keep your computer secure when you step away for a few seconds but forget to hit Win-L.

Google is about to make landing page load time a factor in their AdWords Quality Score. The goal is to reward fast-loading websites and punish slow-loading ones, all to improve the ever-important user experience.

From Google’s Inside AdWords blog:

Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

This change is being rolled out in March and will soon take effect. Having a well-performing website is important, and Google has just given you another excuse to make it a priority.

Why load time is important

We all know that no one likes waiting for a website to load. Here is Google’s motivation from the AdWords Help Center:

Users value ads that bring them to the information they want as efficiently as possible. A high-quality landing page should load quickly as well as feature unique, relevant content. Fast load times benefit advertisers as well, since users are less likely to abandon a site that loads quickly.

Time to monitor your load time!

You can test your website load time with the Full Page Test included in Pingdom Tools (this test is performed from Dallas, USA). If you want a browser-based test made from your own computer, Yahoo has an excellent Firefox add-on called YSlow that will help you analyze your website load time in great detail.

Google has some basic tips for how you can improve your load time values in regards to the Adwords quality score.

• Use fewer redirects.
• Reduce the page size by using fewer, smaller, and more highly-compressed images.
• Do not use interstitial pages.
• Minimize the use of iframes on your landing page.

Yahoo has published a set of “best practices” for speeding up websites, though some of the advice may be overkill for smaller sites (such as the use of a CDN).

Hosting is a key factor

Where you host your website also plays a key factor in how quickly it will load. If your customers are based in the UK, and are searching Google in the UK, hosting in the USA may be detrimental to your quality score.

HostPlanetUK - UK based reseller website hosting

UK servers, UK staff, 24/7 support, 100% uptime (proven)