Archive for June, 2006

Jatalla – New web search engine’s experience

Wikinews has reported a new web search engine called Jatalla, which uses only user generated submissions as results, is coming soon. It’s a different approach from the search engine leader Google, which rank relevance based in sites that link to a given web page, according to the PageRank alghoritm. Let’s wait for the beta version of the search engine, expected to go out in July. One interesting comment is in Jatalla’s FAQ, which says “If you believe (as do we!) that humans are still smarter than computers, you have come to the right place.

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Google increasing its computing power

My friend Marcel Ferreira sent me this article which says Google is building two brand new data centers, as big as two football fields, on The Dalles, Ore. Google’s increasing power is reflected in the location of the data centers, near to a hidroeletric dam, in the Columbia river. Nice is “The cooling plants are essential because of the searing heat produced by so much computing power” :-).

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Spyware killer

I’ve came across Bruce Eckel’s old weblog and found a post about Spybot-Search & Destroy to eliminate spywares, malwares, trojans from Windows. It’s uncommon from Bruce’s normal entries. Btw, if you are struggling with this (who are immune to these kind of pragues with Windows?), try this tool.

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Aurora 7500 Desktop

Take a look at this cool Aurora 7500 Desktop. The winners of Extend Firefox Contest will receive this machine with a nice and great firefox design 🙂

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Ant “Could not find the main class. Program will exit”

Last week I was struggling with Ant because I changed my Eclipse installation path and I couldn’t run my build.xml anymore. The solution for this problem I’ve found out here.

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Microsoft on net nasties

Funny news from AustralianIT. Even Steve Ballmer couldn’t rid a Windows infected machine from virus, spyware, worms et cetera. Is there any possibility to rely on Microsoft’s security yet?

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Explorer Destroyer

If you want people switching from IE to Firefox, take a look at this
tool. You can even earn money from Google for each person you switch! Firefox users, join up for this battle :-)!


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Association or Aggregation?

I’ve been discussing with my co-workers when we have to use Aggregation or Association in UML models. Martin Fowler in UML Distilled, 3rd Edition says aggregation is the part-of relationship. It’s like saying that a car has an engine and 4 wheels as its parts. But aggregation was included in UML to differentiate from association, because in pre-UML days people didn’t knowhow to differentiate them. But aggregation, as Fowler says, is meaningless. Jim Rumbaugh says “Think of aggregation as a modeling placebo”. Association is a way to notate a property in our classes, but you don’t manage the life cycle of the associated property, as the aggregation relationship do. The solid line between the classes define the way one instance of the associating class can execute methods (operations realizations) of the associated object. So, why to use aggregation?

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Blu-ray – The next-generation optical disc format

Have you ever thought about recording HD (high definition video) with a format which can hold up can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc? Yeap, this can be achieved with Blu-ray, the next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA). There are some nice photos from Blu-ray players, recorders and media too.