Why are we seeing Chrome

Why is Google releasing chrome?  It it just to bring a new browser to the market or do they have bigger plans in the works.  There are some interesting things that Google did with Chrome.  Providing each tab with its own memory space and giving it clean look.  I was chatting with a friend of mine about this and he had some gripes as to why it's not available on the Mac or available as package on a Linux distro (source files are available on Linux).   Chrome was only released on Windows.  It could be that Google is only interesting in grabbing the Internet Explorer users from Microsoft or it could be something bigger.  Could this be the start of the cloud platform?  Put a application out in the marketplace that can really handle the stresses of being the centerpiece of a cloud environment. 

There are a few things that have me thinking this may be the case.   Chrome has a minimalist look, meaning there is very to the browser interface unlike Firefox or IE.  If you click on the paper icon you can view the Task Manager…. This struck me as odd, why would they include the task manager for a browser.  You can get more memory details of the sessions running on Chrome, very snazzy. Each tab on the browser is given its own memory space and processor resources.  This way if a site kills your session it’s won’t kill everything.  This can be handy if all your applications use a browser.  You have the ability to drag tabs out of the browser and have them run as its own browser (I’ve always wanted this feature.)  You have the ability to reorder the tab arrangement.  The “Most visited” page shows your browser history as icons.  There is the ability to search your web history on the most visited page.  When Chrome is in full screen mode the tabs almost look like the task bar on windows.  These are just a few things that caught my eye when looking at Chrome. Thin-clients here we come!

Hot Moonlit night with moon

Hot Moonlit night with moon,
originally uploaded by ebmarquez.

Tonight on the way to bed I noticed how bright the moon was. With nothing better to do I brought out the camera and caught a couple of photo's. It's amazing how much color is picked up with just moon light.

Google Street View

This struck me as being pretty funny this morning. As some people know Google has it's new service called street view. I'm still waiting for Seattle to make the list. Back to what I started this post about. What are the odds that this would happen. In Australian man was captured by Google Street View passed out on the sidewalk infront of his home.

Cat Camera

The Internet has proved to be the most random tool on the planet. I came across Mr. Less - Project for cats and pets. If you've ever wondered what life was like from your animals perspective here's your chance. http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/ some of the photo's people have posted are pretty funny.

Here come thin-clients

Recently in the news I've noticed the new ultra mini-pc's like the CherryPal. This started the gears spinning in my head about thin clients. The great thing about using a thin-client is your client machine doesn’t require a lot to run it. You could use a simple dumb machine to connect to your actual workstation. These days this could be a virtual machine in a datacenter with a super fast internet connection. Is this the age where thin-clients are deployed to the masses? The entire infrastructure is already in place to do something like this with small businesses having an internet connection. I’ve seen this as a working model where I work. Here’s a little background.

I work at a large company and the team I work in provides virtualized server, Citrix, virtualized database solutions. These are services that are offered from within the company at a large scale. This could be a model for building a thin-client company. In a sense within the company we are the outsourced solution for the other arms of the company. These environments were built to save money and drive efficiencies within the organization. This allows us to secure all our data but offer the end user a fully functional machine that we maintain.

Seeing all this work happen it got me thinking… Not everybody needs a full blown computer at their desk to get their job done and most home users don’t require much. I took my wife as an example, when she’s at home. The only time I see her on her computer after work is to do a few things. She checks her email if you lucky, do the bills with excel, surf the internet. She doesn’t use her computer for much and it’s almost a waste to buy a new system since most of the functionality isn’t used. How many people do you know that are like that. The people at CherryPal saw the same thing I did. Let’s take what CherryPal built to another level.

What if you could connect to another company use add more features or services to this ultra–mini machine? You could make this machine a fully functional machine by connecting to a thin-client service. An example would be; if you wanted to run some software that organized recipes but it won’t install on the client machine you have. If you had this thin-client service you could have access to a XP or Vista virtual machine where you could run this software. This would save you from upgrading your computer to run a simple piece of software. Ahhh, you don’t need a fancy computer to run Vista you can just connect to virtual machine as a service. You wouldn’t really have to worry about backups or system upgrade, and patches. I think this is the future of computing and we are going to see a lot more small client computers coming out. Look out Microsoft the model is about to change.

Lavender Festival

IMG_1540,
originally uploaded by ebmarquez.

On Saturday we decided to head over to the Vashon Lavender Festival for a little get away. It turned into a really nice day on the island. The festival offered a bus for the visitors to reduce the amount of cars on the island. After not finding any parking on the mainland we decided that it would just be easier to take the car over. This is not the first time she's seen lavender plants but it was the first time she has seen so much of it. She was really interested in watching the bees gathering up all the pollen. We made sure she knew that the bees are not something we try to touch; they can “bite.” Bees don’t really bite but she doesn’t understand sting yet, she knows the word bite.
At the second farm we visited we came across a lavender distillery. My first thought was lavender alcohol? No, that wasn’t the case they used the distillery process to extract the essence of lavender. Wow, that stuff was strong! It looked like it would take a few pounds of lavender to make maybe a quarter cup of the essence. For the amount of lavender that goes into the process not very much comes out.
Julia wasn’t very interested in how the distillery worked, she was more interested in watch the other kids ride the tree swing. At this part of the day Julia is right in the middle of her daily nap and we could tell by looking at her. She looked really tired by this point relaxing on a shaded chair watching the other kids play on a tree swing. Seeing how tired she was we decided to head home and hope she would nap in the car. With the hum of the road on the way home she knocked out cold within minutes. This was a good day and I think we will be back next year.

Private 4th of July Show

This 4th of July was fantastic! This year unlike last we headed out the Mikes annual 4th of July shindig. Unlike most years at his hour this year was special. Dave ended up making his own circuit boards and software program to automate his show and launch the firework with the music he picked out. (To the left is a picture of the launch control system he put together.)
As if that wasn't enough for the show one of their friends was a professional singer and she sung the national anthem with fireworks shooting off, WOW! I would say this show rivaled some small shows that some cities put on every year. Luck for me this year I had my new Canon XTi to capture the show with. I can't wait to see what they do next year, I know Dave has already started planning.
My photo's of the show.