Monthly Archives: August 2008
Googleplex
I like to think that working at Refresh can be an enjoyable experience however after reading through an article featuring the Google campus at work this morning; I feel our employee benefits package may be woefully inadequate.The article focused on the Googleplex complex which is situated a few miles from San Francisco bay and forms the headquarters for one of the most powerful companies in the technology industry.
Although comparatively dwarfed by Microsofts Redmond complex, Googleplex currently houses two million square feet of office space with an additional one million feet planned for upcoming expansion.It is home to approximately 8,000 workers and due to the typically young age of its workforce it has been likened to a college campus.
Looking purely at the physical characteristics, the Google complex includes:
-A number of free cafes that will serve food at any time of the day; these cafes between them serve … Read the rest
Defragmentation
One of the easiest ways to gain a little extra speed from your computer is to defragment the hard drive every now and again.As your computer uses files it has a habit of splitting them up in to different clusters of data on your hard drive which results in something called fragmentation – rather than storing everything in a neat sequential order your data gets dotted around the place.The result of this is that when your computer comes to use a file that has become fragmented it has to access from several places on the disk which results in slower loading times.
A disk defragmenter is designed to organise your hard disk back in to some kind of order so that your computer has to do less work and hence becomes more responsive.I have in the past talked about this subject but made the mistake of suggested the defrag utility … Read the rest
Data Formats
Whilst arranging my old belongings in preparation for moving home I came across an old computer cassette that I created years ago for a covertape which was to be given away with a fanzine I used to edit when I was younger.The publication focused on the retro Commodore 64 computer and every issue we would put either a 5¼” floppy disc or cassette (depending on whether or not the customer owned a floppy drive) filled with game demos on the front cover.
With this standard audio cassette filled with ancient games in my hand I glanced across at a BluRay disc on my desk and realised quite how far storage media had progressed in recent years.At the time I thought that this week it would be a nice idea to have a brief stroll down memory lane together to recap on the formats of yesteryear:
Punch Cards – Whilst they … Read the rest
Google PageRank
I often trump Google as being my Search Engine of choice and one of the main reasons behind this is due to the relevancy of the results that it returns.Most would just take these results for granted but I believe that sometimes it’s nice to know what factors contributed to a page being recommended to me.If you have a website then a basic understanding of Search Engine processes will set you in good stead as understanding how they recommend sites is the first step to learning how improve your own positioning in the results.
Allegedly there are currently around 150,000,000 websites active on the Internet and, as such, getting them in to any kind of order isn’t a particularly easy job.In order to catalogue websites in to their database the search engines employ the use of computer programs known as ‘spiders’ which follow links from one website to another, documenting … Read the rest
Undelete Plus
Although I have covered this subject before in the past, I am still getting a large number of people regularly e-mailing me asking how they can undelete a specific file so thought it might be time for a quick recap.
The Windows recycle bin is a godsend for many users as in the majority of circumstances a deleted file will be transferred to the recycle bin so it can be quickly recovered if necessary.There are some instances however when a deleted file won’t go via the recycle bin or alternatively the bin will be emptied before the mistake has been discovered. However fortunately there is usually still a way to retrieve the data.
In order to understand how this is possible, we need to understand a little more about how your computer manages deleted files.When you request that Windows deletes a file, rather than actually physically removing it from the … Read the rest
