Our friends over at Unpopular Radio are featured in today’s Straits Times on the topic of “More tuning in to TV and radio on the Net”.

Congratulations Channai and team for making it into the first two pages of our local papers.

FRRO is proud to be the technology partner for Unpopular Radio. Our team of professional server administrators help to ensure the smooth operation of their shoutcast stream so that the Unpopular Radio team can concentrate on developing excellent content for their listeners.

From CNET,

Stephen Shankland writes about Google’s Datacenter Infrastructure and what runs the search/advertisement giant. You have to read it for yourself! Its pretty amazing to finally read about Google and how they operate on the backend.

Here are some quotes,

Google doesn’t reveal exactly how many servers it has, but I’d estimate it’s easily in the hundreds of thousands. It puts 40 servers in each rack, Dean said, and by one reckoning, Google has 36 data centers across the globe. With 150 racks per data center, that would mean Google has more than 200,000 servers, and I’d guess it’s far beyond that and growing every day.

In each cluster’s first year, it’s typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will “go wonky,” with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there’s about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.

The MapReduce reliability was severely tested once during a maintenance operation on one cluster with 1,800 servers. Workers unplugged groups of 80 machines at a time, during which the other 1,720 machines would pick up the slack. “It ran a little slowly, but it all completed,” Dean said.

And in a 2004 presentation, Dean said, one system withstood a failure of 1,600 servers in a 1,800-unit cluster.

Well, if that isn’t amazing, I don’t know what is.

Microsoft Press Release

Now this is strange though, despite having gone through a fierce battle with ODF and eventually having their standard, OOXML, ratified as a global standard as ISO/IEC 29500, why the turnaround now?

Quoting sniplets from their press release:

The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for 20 different document formats within Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel and Office PowerPoint. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.

Microsoft will join the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) technical committee working on the next version of ODF and will take part in the ISO/IEC working group being formed to work on ODF maintenance.

The company will also be an active participant in the ongoing standardization and maintenance activities for XPS and PDF. It will also continue to work with the IT community to promote interoperability between document file formats, including Open XML and ODF, as well as Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY XML), the foundation of the globally accepted DAISY standard for reading and publishing navigable multimedia content.

Why now? Why create a standard and then go the other direction?

Lester & I just came back from Barcamp Singapore II, an event generously organized by the awesome people over at E27, PHP Usergroup as well as Garag3.

Andrew McGlinchey (Geo Product Manager for SE Asia, Google Singapore) started the Unconference by sharing with us the cool things developers have created using the Google Maps API as well as the new features that Google Maps are now sporting.

He also talked briefly on the whole Google Maplets API, and showed us this cool demo of a mash-up of two maplets which allows one to find the nearest hotels based on a street name/area and then calculate the distance between that hotel and any other landmark or position in the map.

Gerald Lim, Chief Technology Officer from Bak2u then proceeded on next, to talk about Mobile Security and why it is so important in today’s day and age.

We then broke into 2 breakout groups, one focusing on Mobile applications and the other on Webapps using Google Map’s API. We decided to attend the mobile application track as we felt that it was more interesting.

Watching all presentations by Widgeo.us, Tencube, MobileSorcery & Cinepura, really got us thinking about how can we push our company one step further. How can we differentiate from the already saturated hosting industry here.

We were really excited about Tencube & Cinepura. Tencube is basically a mobile security company, similar to the Bak2u guys, but we felt that Tencube have a really slick and aesthetically pleasing UI to their web application. Basically, Tencube installs a software on your mobile phone, which you can then control remotely online through their web application. Their service allows you to lock the phone, send out an alarm, backup your contacts, data and relevant information onto their web application and then re-downloads it to a new phone, as well as completely wipeout your phone in the event of theft.

Although there were many physical limitations to their software, like people just doing a hard-reset and having full access to the phone, we thought that the ability to store your phone contacts online and then sync it to another new phone (in the event that the lost phone is no longer recoverable), is something to lookout for.

Cinepura on the other hand is basically a simple web-based application that is optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It allows users to find out Cinema showtimes for the day as well as display IMDB ratings for the movie. So no longer do you have to manually look through the different films on IMDB just to grab the ratings. Everything is sorted by IMDB rating on Cinepura.

I don’t think many people know this, but we at FRRO, are also involved in web-development as well as web-design work. So if you guys have any web development work that needs to get done, drop us an e-mail. We’re available for hire and we do development mainly in PHP/mySQL.

We’d also like to hear comments from you on features or quirks that you think we can improve on or implement on FRRO.

Lets get in touch.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7290322.stm

Google’s Zurich Office. Slidesssss. Yum.