• General Document Management:Dropbox, pair it with Truecrypt and you have a safer, encrypted online storage environment
• Photos: Flickr (pictures I share publicly) and Picasa (my private photo albums, has a nice desktop app too)
• Document Authoring: Google Docs (Not enough praise for this, I have done Twitter data collection with it, Project Management, Drawing up quick budgets and dont even get me started on the forms interface)

There are many more applications that have taken us to the cloud and back. The reason I am very much appreciative of the cloud is that I work on multiple computers and on my phone. There used to be a time when you were tied to your computer, the PC era as it is called, to do everything. You bought applications, dreaded “apps”, that did your word processing, photo editing etc. Then you had your portable storage, Thumb Flash drives, that you carried around to transfer files etc. How I fondly remember this age. Now though I have a service like Dropbox that syncs all my work across my computers and phones. I can access my files anywhere, edit and all the changes are synced and backed up, in the cloud. Now I have 500 GB harddrive that I have to send in for repairs but have not been bordered for a while because I have found storage mechanisms in the cloud. I know that this does not bode well for me when I finally return full time to South Africa. Fid I ever tell you that South African bandwidth is expensive? Anyway I am getting sidetracked lets get to the Music.

Google Music

Google Music Album View

Google Music was announced not too long ago, but long enough for me to forget that I had asked for a Beta invite. I got the invite about two weeks ago and started playing with the service about a week ago. Google Music has a simple job. It backs up your whole personal music collection on the internet. You can access it anywhere (without downloading it at the moment). You can play it on your Android phone or whichever contraption that has Adobe Flash I guess. Isn’t that awesome? Yes it is. Yes it is. So let me explain my workflow when it comes to music. I normally have to copy music from my desktop that has a lot of storage and has my whole music collection that has been amassing since about 2001. I copy it to my laptop, my phone and any other gadgets that need music to live. The problem that normally comes up is when that sone that I want to listen to today is not on my laptop or on my phone. I normally am away from the desktop in some exotic location and which I could just listen to that song through accessing my desktop. I have looked at multiple ways to do this but never got really interested in any of the solutions. So this is where, for me, Google Music Beta comes in. It monitors my desktop music collection and uploads it to the cloud. When I am in the lap, under a tree somewhere or travelling I can just go to the website and still listen to my music collection. Its backed up so in the event of loss you can still listen to it. Yes I said listen, not download, because for the moment there is now download functionality.

The service is a good concept. We might all start arguing then about how well it will do compared to Amazon Cloud Player (Offers free 5GB storage) or the iCloud offering that is coming from Apple. There will also be the shift of the legal lines of music and how artists (Ahem Music companies) will make money out of these services that might just store 10% legal music and 90% illegally obtained music (See what I did there, I am optimistic arent I?). Even just after the Google Music Beta was announced and the reviews started coming in, the whole question of the legal grey areas started. Ars Technica:

“The Google Music service is operating in a bit of a legal grey area because Google has not obtained licenses from the music labels. During a press briefing at Google I/O, the company said that it had initially sought licenses but was unable to establish mutually acceptable terms with the music industry. The negotiations eventually broke down and Google decided to continue the project on its own. ”

For iCloud it is different as they are getting buy in from the major music labels, but what is interesting is the iTunes match feature. Basically it will match your music collection to better quality versions of your music and make those available to you to also download. Now how could this not go wrong. Basically you could get that illegal copy of a cd from wherever people get them and then get it matched with iTunes match (for a fee that is so nominal its crazy) and voila you have the legal album. Obviously I am glossing a lot of details here. There are agreements between the labels and Apple most probably for royalties for songs played or downloaded through iTunes Match but the amount from royalties would require lots of music to be useful for the record companies. Indie labels are already backing out: Gizmodo. For small labels and artists this would mean their music would sell for a pittance while legitimizing illegal music.

The music business landscape is changing constantly. There has been a large fight between old world and new world. I have not really offered any view on this yet but I thought it was something interesting to write about given the services popping up. This post was not even a survey of these services, there are much much more of them. I just wrote about 3.

U2 Playing in the Cloud

Lets finish this off with a music inpired item. Checkout the Kollaboration cover of my song of the moment, Lupe Fiasco’s “The show goes on”

My first semi technical post. The fun world of the technology we often neglect, Web Browsers (you are using one to view this!!!). I have now been using Google Chrome for over a week. I am pleasently impressed by it. Now the question is: Should I switch? The first problam is that I use Firefox on all of the platforms I use. I mean I have firefox on my Mac OS, on My work Linux Mint (Pre Installed), My Windows XP and Vista installations. All of the firefox installs also talk to each other and  synchronise. I have become hyper productiive using Firefox, to the extent that I have developed some bad browser habits. I have been one to experiment with browsers in the past and seem to have never moved away from Firefox since version 1. Yes its a memory hog (with lots of plugins, which I have), but it works and I have even become accustomed to the crashes (sounding like microsoft now, maybe I am getting old). It started out simple and now is a complicated beautiful organised mess of add-ons and themes.

First lets look at memory. There are a lot of articles on this out there on the interweb. Let me show you how Chrome runs on my machine. Just take a look at the task manager stats.

TaskManager: Breakdown of memory usage of browsers

Now Firefox has one window open with just one web page. It is taking up a lot of memory already. Safari is second there. Then if you look at the chrome processes (yes multiple), there a lot of them. This is because I have about 10 tabs open in chrome. Each tab in chrome is a seperate process in the OS (Check out the info on Chrome: Comic Book style).  It provides some robustness for the browser. So if one page has problems loading it will not halt the whole browser. This happens to me frequently with webites that have java apps (not javascript).  Now look at the google chrome task manager that allows you to kill problematic pages;

ChromeTaskManager

Pretty neat. There are even more articles on memory and browsers check and pros and cons of the multi-process model. Now back to will it replace my Firefox. Not at the moment. While writing this post chrome did a halt, the whole browser. I had to try and kill the process in windows. Problem is now I see 15 processes. I did find it finaly. The glitch happened with trying to import settings Firefox. Didnt work out. Another thing I wanted to look at is the acid test. This is a test of web standard compatability. Check out the details here. All of the browsers I have on my windows XP install passed. Check

Acid2 test.

Top right is safari, clockwise, then Chrome, then Firefox then IE7. All of them have the smiley face so they all passed. I dont have opera. Still dont like it. I use it on my cellphone but cant get into it on my PC. You can also check out my website rendered by each of the browsers. Look and see if you can spot any differences or not.

www.vima.co.za Chrome Rendering

www.vima.co.za Firefox Rendering

www.vima.co.za Safari Rendering

www.vima.co.za IE 7 Rendering

Well thats it for today. This is not an in depth analysis of the browsers. Sorry Mitry. I do not have that type of technical expertise but it was fun for me to write. I did not have Netscape. I dont think I will ever install it again on my machines.Feel free to leave any comments about your experiences.

You can check out the specs of the machine I used for testing here (its the windows desktop)

Thembi Great Hall

Saturday 18 October decided to walk around campus while it is quiet and empty. Yeah more time for reflection and calming. Yeah away from the next big Tech thing and more to introspection and planning. The campus is beautiful. I think the impulse came from walking around the other university  (Tukkies). It was a stark contrast on that day to Wits. No I don’t mean by that way. I mean Wits has already started exams and campus is mostly empty, but at Tuks lectures are still going so lots of people on campus. Thats Thembi in the pic the, convinced her to do the last part of the walk. It was a fun visit to Tukkies though. Maybe an intertwined future? Maybe…….

I had been postponing the walk for weeks now. I would like to do a photo essay of Johannesburg in the next few months. The big places as well as the small places. The photos wont be fantastic (Cant afford a fancy camera like my sister), but they will have stories. They will be mostly on Facebook but I am working on moving my almost 10 GB picture collection to Google Picasa. Check out my current gallery below. More work on that Thesis and now there will be less work on any external projects. There will be a couple of launches in the next few weeks but nothing too fancy.

Barack Obama Site

Vima for Obama, now is official. Yes its on. I have been following the elections closely. The debates have been fun, downloaded all of them from the iTunes service. Again as I have been working on my social awareness (not that I am not aware), the debates have really been interesting. The most maybe was the Biden and Palin debate. It was great. So november 4 is not far now. Also remember to register to vote (8-9 November) for the South African election. The elections will be held next year in the first half of 2009.