Addicted To 1’s and 0’s

Adobe has just announced that they have teamed up with Google and Yahoo! to help improve the way in which search engines catalogue .swf files.

According to their press release:

Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first-class citizen in searchable web content. This will increase the accuracy of web search results by enabling top search engines to understand what’s inside of RIAs and other rich web content created with Adobe Flash technology and add that relevance back to the HTML page.

Improved search of SWF content will provide immediate benefits to companies leveraging Adobe Flash software. Without additional changes to content, developers can continue to provide experiences that are possible only with Adobe Flash technology without the trade-off of a loss in search indexing. It will also positively affect the Search Engine Optimization community, which will develop best practices for building content and RIAs utilizing Adobe Flash technologies, and enhance the ability to find and monetize SWF content.

This is BIG news to put it lightly. Flash files have always been partially searchable via Google, but now there is no doubt as to what content is picked up by the spider. This was a great move on Adobe’s part, most likely fueled by growing competition in the form of Microsoft’s Silverlight. See, working in an open-market does have it’s benefits!

Firefox 3 was released with much fan-fare last week, including a marketing campaign from Mozilla to set a new record for “most software downloads in 24 hours” in the Guinness Book of World Records. According to their “World Record FAQ,” they hoped to beat the number of downloads that version 2 of Firefox saw, which was 1.6 million. Well they’ve recently updated their “Download Day” site, indicating that in the 24-hour time period after publicly releasing the new version, the software was downloaded over 8 million times. Since then they’ve counted over 20 million downloads and that’s just from their official site (due to server lags, the release was quickly put up on private mirrors, so the real download number will never be known).

Want to celebrate your participation in this event? Why not (other than for the obvious reasons)? Mozilla now lets you print out your very own “personalized” Firefox 3 Download Day certificate by entering your name on their “Flaunt It” portion of the website. Click on the image posted above for an example of what it looks like (it will open in a new window). Now you can be the envy of your IT staff… this will surely show them you’re hip to the latest software releases and maybe they’ll show you how to install that cool screensaver you’ve been having trouble with!

Sooooo corny… but i couldn’t resist.

You read that correctly, apparently Atlanta has been added to Google Maps street view in celebration of their service turning one year old! The above picture is the street-view of The World Of Coke (located downtown) but it has worked well with every other location i’ve thrown at it so far. Go check it out by going to http://maps.google.com and search for an address in Atlanta. Clicking on the street will bring up the box you see above, or select the “street view” link. Live traffic is also up and running so you can also use google maps to check how bad I-20 is before heading out to work.

If you’ve ever wondered about the technology behind Google Maps Street View, here’s a quick diagram taken from Popular Mechanics:

That’s about as basic as it gets, so if the above info-graphic seems like common sense to you and you’d like to know more behind the actual specifications behind the process, checkout this great article on their website. It even includes a ride-along with the google street view truck in action.

Now you can embed Google Earth into your website or even any pre-existing Google Maps using their recently updated API. With just a simple line of Javascript you can take any existing map and make it 3D using the parameters already in place, thus over-laying your map markers onto the actual satellite view of the area.

This is a pretty cool new feature, imagine someone mapping out all the disc golf courses in the US, then when you select one from the large map, it goes into a google earth view letting you actually SEE the course itself. A very nice addition to the Google API library.

To incorporate it into your site, either go to the Google Earth API page, or the Google Maps API site. Either one will explain how to properly embed the service into you page/application.

Ok, well Open Blue Dragon officially was released 3 days ago, but who’s counting…. it’s the first freely available, enterprise level JAVA CFML server released under the GPLv3 open source project. They plan to release a pre-configured version for both VMWare and Amazon’s EC2’s service, however in the meantime you can head on over to their download page and grab the actual source files, the J2EE WAR distribution, or a pre-reconfigured jetty instance (easy install). There’s also already an instructional video on how to install it on your mac in their forums. Released by New Atlanta, this is a big move to keep Cold Fusion developers from having to learn a new language (let the flame war/hate mail begin)… although the way that they’re releasing it is pretty-cool. It’s designed to run seamlessly with even the ’soon to be released’ Windows Server 2008 ensuring those wanting to switch over to becoming a .net shop/provider, now don’t have to give up any cold fusion apps that might be in place. By the way, Blue Dragon is used to help host power-social-networking site myspace.com…. so this isn’t your small-time server engine.

Also released (today though), was the long awaited, much talked about Open Solaris enterprise server as well. Easily integrated with virtualization software like VMWare or VirtualBox or even installed by itself via the live-cd, you can find all the various methods of download on their site as well as you have the opportunity to get an official cd sent to you via mail (if you act fast that is). They do admit to leaving out a few install options that are present in the current Solaris 11 update, however they claim that might change in the near future. What they did not leave out of this release were the best parts (in my opinion) - The ZFS file system, DTrace as well as their patented Solaris Containers which make virtualization a breeze. I think they skipped out on the SPARC integration but last I checked I didn’t have any type of mainframes lying around here, so the versions provided work great on my machine!

It’s been a big week for open-source releases of once expensive server software. I get the feeling this can only make things harder for companies like Microsoft, who still haven’t released the latest Microsoft Server 2008 from beta yet, to compete when similar enterprise level resources are available at no cost. It’s only due time until they go open-source as well…. although I’d say it’d still be a few more years.