Martello

In a previous post from 2008 regarding the large scale (albeit temporary) loss of Internet connectivity in the Middle East and India, I discovered a great map of the world’s undersea cables. This map came up in discussion again recently and more specifically, how and when did all of the cables get there?

This reminded me of a related article from earlier this year which talked about the World’s Critical Infrastructure and which included a basic time line of some of the word’s undersea cables:

• 1850: First international telegraph link, England-France, later cables joined other European countries & USA with Canada.
• 1858: First trans-Atlantic cable laid between Ireland & Newfoundland; failed after 26 days & new cable was laid in 1866.
• 1866: First trans-Atlantic (copper) cable carried telegraph messages at 12 words a minute. These cables were promoted as the eighth wonder of the world emphasizing cooperation between UK and the United States.
• 1884: First underwater telephone cable service from San Francisco to Oakland.
• 1920: Short-wave radio superseded cables for voice, picture & telex traffic.
• 1956: First trans-Atlantic (TAT-1) telephone cable initially had a capacity of 36 telephone calls at a time; calls cost $12 for the first 3 minutes. Invention of repeaters (1940s) & their use in TAT-1.
• 1961: Beginning of high quality, global network.
• 1986: First international fiber-optic cable joins Belgium & UK.
• 1988: First Atlantic fiber-optic cable, TAT-8, had a capacity for 40,000 simultaneous phone calls, 10 times that of the last copper cable. This is when submarine cables started to outperform satellites in terms of the volume.
• Today: Each fiber pair within a cable has the capacity to carry information including video that is equivalent to 150,000,000 simultaneous phone calls. Almost all transoceanic telecommunications are now routed via the submarine cable network instead of satellite.

The failure after just 26 days of the first cable to be laid from Ireland made me smile.

Source: CircleID, 26 April 2010

We have an old rack server that runs a version of Solaris 10 for X86. For the most part, this machine never gives any trouble and we very rarely need to reboot. However, in recent months when we have rebooted it,  it has sometimes failed to boot, failing with a system console error that looks something like:

cannot read biosint
trap type 13 (0xd) err code 0x98b8 eip=0x0
...lots of register and stack trace data...
panic: corrupted boot archive . . . boot loader
Press any key to reboot

We found the instructions detailed here resolved this issue for us (although the error message is not exactly the same).

I first came across the Live Plasma project in early 2006 but rediscovered it again recently. This article on Visual Complexity describes it as:

Liveplasma maps and displays music and movie search results with linkages and groupings, making a good use of Amazon.com’s API. After the search term is submitted, it’s immediately surrounded by other artists; the closer they are, the more similar they are in style to the target. The user can search, map, discover new movies or artists then save and share their maps.

It really is quite a lot of fun to use, and good for discovering similar bands to ones you already listen to. It’s also good for finding movies with your favourite actor that you may not have seen before.

I also noticed on Michele Neylon’s recent article that the Last FM Playground project looks to be doing something along the same lines. I wonder if the are also using the Amazon APIs.

FeedHenry, one of the startup companies from Waterford Institute of Technology where I work, received some positive press today in relation to the recent launch of eircom’s new Personal Services Portal (PSP). The new Web 2.0 portal, called “my eircom“, is powered by FeedHenry and allows users to completely personalise their experience of the eircom website, allowing them to share the wide range of applications and services on offer to other web and social networking platforms as iGoogle, Facebook and many others.

Global Press Coverage

• FeedHenry website
• Silicon Republic  News
• Reuters
• TMCnet

Just when you think you’ve finally gotten your head around the fact that you can fit 16GB of data on a memory card no bigger than your fingernail (MicroSD), along comes the next-generation of memory cards, SDXC, which proclaim a whopping 2TB on the same form factor!

The website referenced above suggests that a 2 TB SDXC memory card could store around 480 hours of HD recordings, or 136,000 photos. However, looking backwards to previous technologies and storage terms, 2 Terabytes is the equivalent of two thousand Gigabytes, or 2 million Megabytes, and would be roughly equivalent to 1,388,888 floppy discs (of the 3.5″ high density variety from the nineties which had a capacity of 1.44MB).

Oh the times they are a’ changing…