Gary's blog

The Travelling Geeks are coming to the UK during the first week in July. They have a fair agenda and it will be possible to catch them in a number of places. However, I liked the Cambridge session - Energizing your Business through Social Networks, that and I am in the UK at that and its in Cambridge! Any reason to visit Cambridge, one never knows, you could bump into Aubrey de Grey in Cambridge ;)

I picked up on a trend this morning from AppLogic’s Bert Armijo twitter post, that data centres are starting to consider running at 100 Fahrenheit (°F) according to Jon Brodkin. I found this little fact quite interesting and it lead me to convert this figure to a scale I understand, my frame of reference, Celsius.

Not a twitter idea, it has to be said, twitter is not very good at telling stories and it is very good at telling stories at the same time. The quantum nature of twitter. Some things cannot be mircoblogged or maybe they can :)

The other day I blogged about how useful it may be to the search for Air France AF447 to add the latest satellite images of the Atlantic and open it up to the Google Earth community to scour the ocean for debris. That became less relevant when they announced later that day that debris had been found.

They have now announced that the debris did not come from the plane. Two things here:

I recall that not too long ago, Google Earth released the latest satellite photos for an area over west Nevada on 9th September 2007, to help search for the wreckage of renowned adventurer, Steve Fosset, who crashed on 3rd September 2007.

It occurs to me that CAPTHCHA could be somewhat better and indeed is. CAPTCHA has been a staple of Web 2.0 and is fairly effective for the purpose it serves. We know that it is possible to circumvent captcha, delivering users looking at a porn site CAPTCHA images and getting new porn images for each captcha they enter correctly, which is pulled from some mail service by some bot and the user enters the CAPTCHA and sends it back to the bot through the webserver. New mail account established.... begin spamming.

Once again, it seems as if there may be a simple solution to a grave problem, teenage pregnancy. As always these things need some thinking about. On the surface, it makes sense.

Make it a legal requirement that teenage boys from the age of x to y, have to carry a condom and any sexual intercourse between any persons under the age of x must involve the use of a condom at all times.

Problem, almost, solved.

Google has a fault in its longer term business strategy.

I am not intending a pun here, however it is fairly punny.

Google along with the entire Silicon Valley USA, coined in January 1971, have a fairly bleak outlook at some point in the future. Not to be a doomsday prophet, just pragmatic. It seems to me that Silicon Valley companies, may need disaster recovery procedures that go well behind the realms of infrastructure and data and enter the realm of personnel.

In a lunchtime follow up to my post yesterday on the hacker that stole the Virginia medical records, I think the comedy of the event for this poor soul has not been looked at yet and you have to wonder about this poor fool.