Servers, artifacts, browsers, and embedded Python:
- Google’s Data Centers — Silicon Valley’s version of a celebrity nookie video, where we get to answer the question, “are they really as good as we imagine?” Everyone’s raving about each server having its own 12v battery. My eye was caught by the way the speaker attributed the efficiency to metrics: “Early on, there was an emphasis on the dollar per (search) query,” Hoelzle said. “We were forced to focus. Revenue per query is very low.”
- Future Artifacts from Umeå Institute of Design. Tongue-in-cheek “products” as speaker gifts, very nice. My favourite is the Criminal Love Implant: A team of Swedish scientists built these to combat the emotional tranqulizers we are injected with in our youth to dampen the unpredictability of love. Nothing says I love you like a crime of passion. (via timo’s delicious stream)
- PlainView — a chromeless web browser for presentations, built on WebKit, for OS X. (via joshua’s delicious stream)
- Python on Tiny Embedded Wireless Devices with Synapse SNAP (PDF) — slides from a talk at PyCon about running Python on tiny embedded platforms. Lust. The embedded devices contain a Python bytecode interpreter. You blast your code down to them over the wireless mesh network the devices themselves are realizing via a special USB dongle connected to your computer. From your Python code running on a device you can make unicast or multicast XML-RPC calls to the other devices running on the network. (via Hacker News via joshua’s delicious stream)