The Blog of Rudy Amid » google

More Broadband Options, Please!

rudyamid — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 23:59:12 +0000

Last year, I blogged about the possibility of Google installing super-fast broadband internet to my city Anaheim. A year has passed and Google has just decided to give it to Kansas City, Kansas. Lucky them! Hundreds, if not thousands of people, are getting 1000 Mbps broadband connections. It’s a step towards the future for everyone in Kansas.

For me, I’ve since upgraded to 6 Mbps AT&T, but only lasted for a few months. Now, I’ve dropped their DSL in favor of Time Warner Cable’s Roadrunner broadband for three reasons:

Cost. Roadrunner is running a promotional $30/month.
Speed. The standard one has bandwidth upto 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload¹.
True Unlimited. AT&T will start to cap and charge additional fees for over-the-limit use (aka overage). Cable modem does not have overages².

The biggest reason is obviously these stupid overages. They are a step backwards for internet commerce and productivity. Bandwidth caps will stifle innovation. I don’t understand why AT&T has to do this since 98% of their customers are not bandwidth hogs. Maybe they got the numbers wrong. I don’t use that much bandwidth, and certainly don’t want to start thinking about my bandwidth use.

Anyway, I’m still hopeful to see the ultra high-speed broadband in my neck of the woods. Cheap, or even free, bandwidth will be the dream. I sure hope Google can set the standard and lead it all the way.

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More Broadband Options, Please!

Versus AT&T’s upto 6 Mbps download and 0.5 Mbps upload
At least not yet

Ga-Ga over Google!

rudyamid — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:53:21 +0000

Without fail, every time Google releases something, the crowd is all over it. I’m certainly a fan. Other than the usual Google search, I use a lot of their applications on a daily basis. Google does produce mostly good stuff, but some are just fluff. Here’s the quick rundown:

Google Usefulness

Life Magazine photo archives on Google image search. Searching through classic photographs within a speedy search engine is just awesome.
Street View on Google Maps. Imagine virtual tourism, without ever leaving my home or office. Much cheaper too. The exception: I can’t use it in some parts of Germany and Switzerland. Scheissen¹ !
Google RSS Reader. I use this practically every day. Fast and robust, as expected from a Google app.
Gmail. I was impressed with Google Mail since it first went beta. I particularly love the spam filter – worked sensationally! I even advertised my Google mail address in plain sight by posting regularly to Usenet. It caught virtually all of the spam emails! Now they’ve added Google Video Chat embedded in Google Mail, which I haven’t used yet.
Google Cloud Computing. The way Businessweek described it, made it impressive:

The only search company built from the ground up around hardware. Investing more than $2 billion a year in data centers. Far and away the leader in cloud computing.
Google Docs. I love the idea of not having to rely on OpenOffice or Microsoft Office to do a quick document. I love the idea of being able to share those documents online.
Google Insights. With virtually everyone using Google search engine, data mining trends using Google Insight can reveal some interesting results. Vladimir Prelovac has some fun and insightful examples.
Google Android. It’s an exciting alternative to the Apple iPhone and the monolithic Nokia Symbian. It’s even a contender to RIM Blackberry. The list of applications is growing steadily. Not bad for a new phone OS just released a month ago.
Google Chrome. Another alternative to the big three web browsers, except Google’s promises it will be faster and more robust. It did find it perform much better on Ajax scripts, than Firefox and IE. After the third beta release, it’s slowly getting there.
Google Picasa. Improving on every release, this is my best photo fixer and organizer.
Google News Aggregator. This is the ultimate tool for news junkie. I don’t read/watch mainstream news regularly, so this site gives me a quick glance on what’s currently making headlines.

Google Uselessness

Google Mail Themes. Come on – plain white and blue background is just as good as brown and sunset. The background is dynamic, yes, that’s nifty. But still useless. I’ve seen this before with iGoogle anyway.
Gmail as a cloud storage. Due to network bandwidth limitations, this is not an ideal solution for storage. It’s not a solution for Enterprise users either for privacy concerns.
Google Docs. I know, I did say I love it, but the privacy concern just makes it slightly useless.
Google Android G1 on T-Mobile. They made a poor choice with the network carrier for the introduction of the G1 phone. T-Mobile’s service and coverage are terrible for my area. Ever more bad news, my reliable cell phone carrier, Verizon Wireless, is reportedly going with Microsoft. It’s too bad. No Android in my future, yet.
Google Talk. It’s under utilized and under featured. Yahoo Messenger has a big lead on instant messaging. In my case, it’s only as useful as how many of my friends and family use it. So far, they’re all using Yahoo IM.

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Ga-Ga over Google!

Pardon my German

Cloud Computing Hype

rudyamid — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:59:33 +0000

Ever since I attended the JBOSS World User Conference in February 2008, I’ve been getting a lot of junk emails from companies touting “Cloud Computing” technologies. It’s the latest buzzword in the tech industry. With big players such as Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, it sure gets a lot of attention. Essentially, cloud computing is the outsourcing of commonly used Enterprise software, usually a database or collaboration engine. It also includes the hardware and its support. So all I have to do is come up with a lightweight web application to talk to it. It’s a model similar to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), except I don’t have to manage the back end infrastructure.

The glaring problem of cloud computing is trusting customer’s data outside the Enterprise. I work for a conservative company. Management has uneasy feelings about placing the company’s most valuable asset to someone else to manage. Coincidentally, I’ve just wrapped up a project that moved our customer data behind our firewall, into our own self-managed database and Enterprise applications. For us, we’re just not ready for cloud computing. It’s not that we won’t ever buy into it – we’re just waiting when (or if) the technology matures and gets a wider adoption first.

There’s plenty of chatter out there on the blogosphere about cloud computing hype. I read these articles to start, and gained quite a bit of insight from them:

Cloud Computing on Wikipedia
Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing by Tim O’Reilly
IT’s Global Cloud: Let it Rise! by The Economist
Economic Downturn Could Force Adoption Of SaaS Solutions by WebGuild

Photo Credit: ptdrumm

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Cloud Computing Hype

Google 2001

rudyamid — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:13:34 +0000

Ever wonder if your site made it in Google back when they first started?

Google just put up a nostalgia page featuring their oldest index. It’s a full featured search page, returning the crawled web pages in the year 2001. To my surprise, searching for my last name revealed my good old domain name as the #1 result! Back then, SEO techniques weren’t invented, so I didn’t even know how to be on top of their search result list. My site was just up and available. Apparently for Google, that was good enough.

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Google 2001

Google Mapping Lunch Bits

rudyamid — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:08:11 +0000

Lee at Epiblogger pointed me to this neat Google Maps WordPress Plugin. I had trouble getting it to work initially, but after a few tweaks, I figured it out. In this post, I’m featuring my “Lunch Bits” Editions 1-19 on the map below. Click on an orange marker to see the pop-up info of the restaurant’s website, and which Lunch Bits edition featured it. Check them out!

Center of Map
map: Curry House Irvine – Editions: 9-10 15 17 19
map: Bagels and Brew – Editions: 19
map: Foothill Ranch – Editions: 8 14
19
map: Kaju Soft Tofu Irvine
- Editions: 6 19
map: Panera Bread – Editions: 18
map: Spice Thai – Editions: 16
map: The Fish Market Irvine Spectrum – Editions: 16
map: Avilas el Ranchito – Editions: 14
map: Lucille’s BBQ – Editions: 13
map: Chick-Fil-A – Editions: 12
map: Red Robin – Editions: 11
map: Fukada Japanese Restaurant – Editions: 7
map: Dove Canyon Country Club
- Editions: 5
map: Benihana – Editions: 4
map: China Garden – Editions: 3
map: Pho 99 – Editions: 2
map: Islands – Editions: 1

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Google Mapping Lunch Bits

Google’s Blogspot Player

rudyamid — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:40:37 +0000

Leave it to Google to come up with something cool and useful (and addicting). The latest is the Google Blogspot Player that lets you browse the latest pictures on blogspot.com, Google’s user blogging site, to quickly figure out what’s out there. I’m easily entertaintained, so it is fun to discover this and the few hundreds (thousands?) of other blogs out there. Try it!

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Google’s Blogspot Player

No blog spam here

rudyamid — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:53:04 +0000

This internet… who invented it? Who owned it? I like to congratulate whoever it is that made it possible for people like me to share thoughts with my family, friends, and total stranges who are willing to sacrifice 10 seconds of their time to read my blog. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been on-and-off writing blogs, and it didn’t kick into full gear until early 2007 when I came across WordPress app . It just made it so much easier for me to edit and customize my own blog site. Now, like most blog sites that I see out there, there’s a temptation to plaster advertising, such as Google Ads, for easy money. Personally, I hate visiting a website, especially reading a blog site, that are littered with ads. You know who you are! Fortunately, there is such a thing as AdBlock plugin for Firefox browsers that kills most of the annoying ads such as the flashing “punch the monkey” ones. What can’t be block, unfortunately, are blogs that contain copies or paraphrased versions of the original articles – also littered with ads. This is known “blog spam“. The original intent of blogs was to peer into one’s (creative) thoughts, now it could potentially be a vehicle of greed and junk info.

On that note, I can promise that my site will never have ads. I don’t take any money from anyone to write and run this blog. A waste of time? Maybe. If I have fun writing and sharing my random thoughts to those who care, it really doesn’t matter what everyone else thinks.

Update: Found the São Paolo “ad free” city pictures by Tony Demarco.

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No blog spam here

The Blog of Rudy Amid » google

More Broadband Options, Please!

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