BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Four sound effects that made TV history

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Four sound effects that made TV history

The BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, a pioneering force in sound effects, would have been 50 this month. Ten years after it was disbanded, what remains of its former glory?

Deep in the bowels of BBC Maida Vale studios, behind a door marked B11, is all that's left of an institution in British television history.

A green lampshade, an immersion tank and half a guitar lie forlornly on a shelf, above a couple of old synthesisers in a room full of electrical bric-a-brac.

These are the sad remnants of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, set up 50 years ago to create innovative sound effects and incidental music for radio and television.

Not a laptop in sight: Delia Derbyshire at work

Browser Stats

KOKOGIAK: "One of the advantages of working on a website that gets a fair amount of readership is the visibility of that traffic and what it says about the browser usage of the general population. My day job is with boston.com, which has a moderately large level of traffic (Alexa rank of 1,591, fwiw). Being a general news site with inbound links from really diverse sources, I'd like to think that we get a good representative cross-section of the web at large. My management was kind enough to allow me to share some numbers, giving a look at what web browsers people are using today, compared with a year ago.

Top line assessments: IE still rules. As of January, 2008, IE7 and IE6 each have a 34% share of our users (with IE7 barely ahead). Add in all other various IE versions in our top 20, and IE usage is still well over 70% (even though it's down from 76% one year ago). Firefox 2.0 jumped from 6.63% in Jan 2007 to 20.21% in Jan 2008. Gecko-based browsers (FF, Mozilla, Netscape) are now used by almost 22% of our audience, compared with 18% last year.

Interestingly, there appears to be some consolidation as well. The top 4 browsers from Jan 2008 (IE7,IE6,FF2,Saf3) combined make up 93% of our audience - In 2007, the top 4 (IE6,IE7,FF1.5,FF2) made up only 87%.

Safari 3, which wasn't even in existence in January 2007, has rocketed into the top 4 in less than a year. Overall Safari usage (all versions) grew a bit, and now is 6.12%, compared with 4.66% last year. Notably, Safari 3 for iPhone (and iPod Touch) is now our 11th most-popular browser.

So, the story for January 2007 - January 2008 is: IE7 is very slowly overtaking IE6 (after a year and a half, 7 has barely overtaken 6). But those leaving IE6 are not all moving on to IE7 - IE overall share is down by 6%, Firefox usage is up by 13% and Safari usage is up by 2%.

Hands on with Live Mesh | Nic Fillingham | Channel 10

Hands on with Live Mesh | Nic Fillingham | Channel 10


Have you ever had to email yourself a file or found that you had four different versions of the same document on four different PC's? Wouldn't it be awesome if you had a synchronized copy of all your important files on each of your devices and access to them at any time via nothing more than a web browser?
Live Mesh is a new piece of technology from Microsoft that allows you to do all this and more including a 5GB Live Desktop 'in the cloud'.
George Moromisato and Noah Edelstein from the Live Mesh team came into the Channel 10 studios and gave us a demo of the Live Mesh Technical Preview that goes live today at www.mesh.com

David Heinemeier Hansson: The secret to making money online

David Heinemeier The secret to making money online : "David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and Partner at 37Signals gives insight into creating a profitable startup company."

Watch live video from HackerTV on Justin.tv
This is a really great presentation, funny and insightful. Worth a look.

Yahoo! Launches World's Largest Hadoop Production Application (Hadoop and Distributed Computing at Yahoo!)

Yahoo! Launches World's Largest Hadoop Production Application (Hadoop and Distributed Computing at Yahoo!): "This process is not new (see the AltaVista connectivity server). What is new is the use of Hadoop. Hadoop has allowed us to run the identical processing we ran pre-Hadoop on the same cluster in 66% of the time our previous system took. It does that while simplifying administration. Further we believe that as we continue to scale up Hadoop, we will be able to scale up our production jobs as needed to larger cluster sizes.

Our team is very excited about the deployment of the Yahoo! Webmap on Hadoop because it demonstrates that although Hadoop is still at a very early stage in its development (perhaps even immature), Hadoop is now capable of handling truly Internet scale projects in a cost effective manner. This and a number of other production system deployments in Yahoo! and other organizations demonstrate that Hadoop is gaining traction in the market and adding real value."

InfoQ: Hypertable Lead Discusses Hadoop and Distributed Databases

InfoQ: Hypertable Lead Discusses Hadoop and Distributed Databases: "1. How would you describe Hypertable to someone first hearing about it?
Hypertable is an open source, high performance, scalable database, modeled after Google's Bigtable. Over the past several years, Google has built three key pieces of scalable computing infrastructure designed to run on clusters of commodity PCs. The first piece of infrastructure is the Google File System (GFS) which is a highly available filesystem that provides a global namespace. It achieves high availability by replicating file data inter-machine (and inter-rack), which makes it impervious to a whole class of hardware failures that traditional file and storage systems aren't, including failures of power supplies, memory, and network ports. The second piece of infrastructure is a computation framework called Map-Reduce that works closely with the GFS to allow you to efficiently process the massive amount of data that you have collected. The third piece of infrastructure is something called Bigtable, which is analogous to a traditional database. It allows you to organize massive amounts of data by some primary key and efficiently query the data. Hypertable is an open source implementation of Bigtable with improvements where we see fit."

Hbase/HbaseArchitecture - Hadoop Wiki

Hbase/HbaseArchitecture - Hadoop Wiki: "HBase uses a data model very similar to that of Bigtable. Users store data rows in labelled tables. A data row has a sortable key and an arbitrary number of columns. The table is stored sparsely, so that rows in the same table can have crazily-varying columns, if the user likes

A column name has the form ":" where and can be any string you like. A single table enforces its set of s (called "column families"). You can only adjust this set of families by performing administrative operations on the table. However, you can use new strings at any write without preannouncing it. HBase stores column families physically close on disk. So the items in a given column family should have roughly the same write/read behavior.

Writes are row-locked only. You cannot lock multiple rows at once. All row-writes are atomic by default.

All updates to the database have an associated timestamp. The HBase will store a configurable number of versions of a given cell. Clients can get data by asking for the "most recent value as of a certain time". Or, clients can fetch all available versions at once.

Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today.

Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today.

AWS trades heavily on the fact that Amazon itself is the biggest customer. "We tend to build the things people are asking for internally," Jassy says. And the idea that AWS is mostly about wringing extra bucks (especially off-season) out of Amazon's data centers? "We've far exceeded the excess capacity of our internal system," Jassy says. "That ship sailed 18 months ago." For a company at which operational data is a state secret, that's a telling detail: AWS is now big enough to be piling up its own silicon.

lighttpd fly light

lighttpd fly light: "Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility -- all of these describe lighttpd (pron. lighty) which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems. And best of all it's Open Source licensed under the revised BSD license.

lighttpd powers several popular Web 2.0 sites like YouTube, wikipedia and meebo. Its high speed io-infrastructure allows them to scale several times better with the same hardware than with alternative web-servers."

The showdown: apache vs. lighttpd - I’m Mike: "The showdown: apache vs. lighttpdBlogging, Web Development May 7th, 2007 - 5,026 viewsIs lighttpd faster than Apache? Can Wordpress handle high traffic websites? Rumors spread like wildfire on the web, and sometimes it’s hard to separate the truth from evangelism and clever marketing. Today I’m going to put Wordpress to the test, running under Apache and lighttpd, and see if a clear winner emerges.To find out more about how I came up with these numbers, check out my post explaining how to measure your web site’s performance.For these tests I used ab, a popular benchmarking tool distributed as part of the Apache project. I ran each test multiple times, varying the number of concurrent connections. The results below show the maximum number of requests per second each server could handle with a default installation, with APC installed, and with WP-Cache enabled."

Ning's Infinite Ambition -- Viral Networks -- Social Networking Start-Ups | Fast Company

Ning's Infinite Ambition -- Viral Networks -- Social Networking Start-Ups Fast Company
Chen calls a viral loop the "most advanced direct-marketing strategy being developed in the world right now." And make no mistake: Viral expansion loops are about marketing, just not in the traditional sense. "Nothing can be truly viral unless it is good," Wilson allows. "You can create a crappy application, build viral hooks in it, but if it's bad, then nobody will follow the viral channel, and the company will go out of business." But if you create something people really want, need, or merely enjoy, then your customers will grow your business for you. Users, just by using a product, are, in essence, offering a testimonial. "When your currency is ideas, people become emotionally attached," Ning's Bianchini says. "Then you become a public utility like Blogger, YouTube, or Facebook."

Phixr - Online Photo Editor

Phixr - Online Photo Editor: "Let's pretend you are on vacation. Feels good, doesn't it.Now, let's also assume that you are at some internet cafe in a country far from home and want to email the photos you've just taken with your digital camera to your friends and family at home to share the unique experience.There is only one problem. These photo files are huge. And a nice border around the photo would be nice, apart from some color adjustments. .... Too bad.. this computer doesn't have any image editor installed.That's just one situation where phixr comes handy! Another typical case are computers in schools or companies where users are not able or not permitted to install software.Phixr can directly e-mail photos to your friends, and it can upload photos to your account at the following third-party websites:"

Google AppEngine

Google AppEngine - A Second Look High Scalability: "It's been a few days now since GAE (Google App Engine) was released and we had our First Look. It's high time for a retrospective. Too soon? Hey, this is Internet time baby. So how is GAE doing? I did get an invite so hopefully I'll have a more experience grounded take a little later. I don't know Python and being the more methodical type it may take me a while. To perform our retrospective we'll take a look at the three sources of information available to us: actual applications in the AppGallery, blogspew, and developer issues in the forum."

A good explantion of Twitter

twitter.zappos.com: "I know that I've been spending about half an hour every time I try to convince my friends to sign up for Twitter. At first, they think it sounds interesting but aren't really motivated to sign up. Sometimes it's been a multi-week long process. But finally they relent and sign up, probably just so they can shut me up. I walk them through the signup process, step by step, and then slowly but surely, they become addicted and their lives are never the same again.So to save me from having to give the same spiel over and over again, I decided to create this page for anyone new to Twitter."

Blog This Bookmarklet

Testing the BlogThis! bookmarklet

Dissecting 0.9's dojo.js | The Dojo Toolkit

Dissecting 0.9's dojo.js | The Dojo Toolkit: "It is entirely possible to use just dojo.js and nothing else from Dojo, and still build great progressively enhanced web sites. It can be considered similar to the basic jQuery or Prototype libraries. It includes all the basics you need from a JS library: DOM querying, event binding, XMLHttpRequest (basic AJAX) and basic effects, plus a few extras for module loading and making JavaScript, CSS styles, and the DOM easier to use."

Dojo 1.1 Released | The Dojo Toolkit

Dojo 1.1 Released | The Dojo Toolkit: "The moment has arrived. I've been anticipating this since the first new fixes to trunk were made, shortly after the 1.0 release. I am proud -- no, elated -- to announce what marks another solid run of around-the-clock development: The Dojo Toolkit version 1.1

There were two goals: Preserve API Compatibility, and continue to innovate. With over 800 marked bugs addressed, and countless DojoX enhancements landing, it's easy to forget exactly what has been going all this time. We've written up 1.1 release notes to browse as a starting point, the changelog is available, and most importantly, the download is in place. Check it out, give it a test drive."

Tagneto: The Beauty of Dojo 1.1

Tagneto: The Beauty of Dojo 1.1: "I am really amazed at the amount of work that has gone into Dojo 1.1. The more I use it, the more I feel it is the complete JavaScript toolkit solution. You can do the small, quick progressively enhanced web sites using just Dojo Base from the AOL CDN, but scale all the way up to very rich experiences that use the full power of widgets, awesome data stores, offline storage, and incredible 2-D drawing capabilities (with charting!).

I feel the Dojo community is really hitting their stride now. Great job everyone!"