Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Google's prime properties like Google Earth, Gmail, Picasa, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, Google Calendar are said to have been developed in the "20 percent time" or one workday a week Google gives it's developers to work on whatever projects fan their passions. Among the other "20 percent time" projects that NY Times's tech columnist David Pogue highlights is a somewhat trivial but interesting Google Sets . ...type in several items in a series (like “cleveland browns” and “dallas cowboys”); Google fleshes out the list with others like it (all the other football teams). Great when something’s on the tip of your tongue (a kind of fruit, president, car, holiday, currency) but can remember only something like it. These are nice conveniences on the Internet that let you find you what you want based on correlated things. You can now even search an image with a correlated image or identify a song by humming a few lines on your mobile.

A study on team dynamics has found that groups that had a bad apple (a person with a personality type of "Depressive Pessimist" or "Jerk" or "Slacker") would perform worse and other team members begin to take on the bad apple's characteristics. ...the worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs. Jeff Atwood writes... While it's depressing to learn that a group can be so powerfully affected by the worst tendencies of a single member, it's heartening to know that a skilled leader, if you're lucky enough to have one, can intervene and potentially control the situation. Still, the obvious solution is to address the problem at its source: get rid of the bad apple. Even if it's you. So how to spot a bad apple in a team or know if you are turning into a bad apple? Jeff quotes Steve McConnell on the possible warning signs that you're dealing with a bad apple on your team: 1. They cover up their ignorance rather than...

Speaking at WSDM 2009, Google Fellow Jeff Dean in a keynote talk shared how Google has grown from 1999 to 2009. Various search engine enthusiasts have blogged about the facts presented in the talk from their own notes. Excerpts: Google handles 1000 times more queries now with 1000 times more processing power (# machines * speed of the machines). It uses 1000 machines to handle a single query compared to just 12 previously. Query latency has improved from under 1000ms to normally under 200ms now. Crawler updates now take minutes compared to months in 1999. For many pages, search results now change within minutes of the page changing. Rolled out seven major rearchitecture efforts in ten years. In-house design from the ground up: rack design, pc class motherboards, linux, and in-house software (GFS, BigTable, etc...) Google's machine translation models use a million lookups in a multi-terabyte model just to translate one sentence. Popularity comes at a price. Google is now accused...