Just how massive is Google, anyway?

Here are some interesting facts about google you may not know.

First of the math stuff, a googol is a 1 followed by 100 zeros (to put it in perspective, the amount of electrons in the entire universe is estimated to be a 1 followed by 79 zeros, yeh take that electrons!).

And now for the fun stuff. The main reason why Google's homepage is so bare is because the founders didn't know HTML and they wanted a quick interface.

Techcrunch Down? Oh the irony

As you'll be able to tell from the screenshots I woke up today and rather then hunt for food chose to take my daily dose of facebook and techcrunch.

While techcrunch had blogged just the other day about 2hours of downtime from the large social beast that is facebook, today the tables were turned and techcrunch is DOWN!

The screenshots clearly show the techcrunch site down for a peroid of time, although I only experienced about 5 minutes of downtime.

I'll have to hunt the interwebs for a possible cause but it interesting to see nobody can be up 24/7 :)

Got your own NodePony yet?

My NodePony & ThinkGeek Monkey

I've often wondered where ponies came from.


Over the weekend,
I discovered a closely guarded secret...


...and I thought I'd share.

how to grep like a pro

The great thing about grep is that it's such a powerful command. The downside to grep, is that it's such a powerful command!

Taking the time to learn grep is one of the smartest things you can do, think of grep as the best personal assistant you'll ever have and it can find anything for you, if only you know how to ask. With a little bit of help from the interwebs, Google and even a couple of real life books you'll be grepping like you've never grepped before.

What is grep?
grep searches for whatever you ask it and shows the results on the screen.

grep is command line search utility that was originally written for Unix. It's name actually comes from the words global / regular expression / print (pretty geeky hey). The grep command will search files for lines that have the search term (or regular expression) that you supply, it then prints them to the standard output.

Google Instant, because fast wasn't fast enough

That's right guys I had to write something about Google Instant Search.

Results as you type.

No clicks.

SEARCH ON.


People seem to be amazed by this feature, with one test case user proclaiming "I didn't have to press enter".

I know how hard it can be to muster up the strength to press that enter key but fear no more, Google has eliminated that burden from your life, and saved you 2-5 seconds for each search in the process! (Seriously though we <3 you Google).

How many Google's are there?

Have you ever wondered, how many Google search engines there are? Let me give you a hit there's more than one!

Google search for "the droids we're looking for"

If you've opened your web browser (chrome I hope) and typed in google.com you might have noticed it takes you straight to google.com.au (assuming you're in Australia and not using a proxy, sorry to all my non-Aussie readers you'll have to use your imagination for this post).

Google (and many other search engine companies) have localized versions of their search engines which can show you information specific to your language or location.

Tech Blogs you need to know about!

How do those birds lift that whale?

In the world of tech, information is key.

With so many tech blogs in the interwebs it's hard to find a great tech blog. For lots of readers out there blogs are still a mystery. Where are the good blogs, how do you find the best source of tech news, how do you even connect to this tech blog community?

Now if you've read more then a couple of my posts at radical systems tech blog you might have picked up on the fact that I love me some technology. This tech blog is a way for me to express my ideas, connect with other like minded tech enthusiasts and give something back to the interwebs that I'm acusomed to taking so much from!

But what about all the other tech blogs the interwebs have to offer?