Saturday, April 23, 2005

Singapore: First Impression

I am on a business trip to Bangalore India. The trip via Hongkong and then Singapore on Singapore Airlines elapsed 32 hours (my longest air travel so far), which made the 11-hour trip to Shanghai seem trivial. I wanted use the other route via Frankfurt (22 hours) but it was completely sold out. Well, this 32-hour trip turned out to be not nearly as bad as I thought. Travelling West definitely helped. I adjusted to the Hongkong time (GMT -8, same as Singapore time) first and then 3.5 hours more to India time during one long day. I was able to sleep quite some on the 3 flights. The Singapore Airlines agent at San Francisco Airport was great to book the best seat in Economy Class for me, an isle seat in the first row of a segment (and thus now seats before me and more than ample leg room). BTW, she didn't ask. She just figured I am tall I guess.

The 9-hour lay-over in Singapore turned out to be great. I didn't faint walking under the scorching sun with sleep deprivation. Singapore looks very Chinese to me because most people you see are Chinese. But it also feels weird to hear good Mandarin spoken by the average people in a foreign place. Most signs are in English (Is the average Joe on the street really that good at English?). Singapore is indeed a clean place, as I had heard before. All the way from the aiport to down town to around the city, I could hardly find one building that was not clean. The whole place just seemed so orderly. People were very easy, unlike in other large cities where you have to fight your way all the time.

Before you see the pictures, make sure you remember to click on each picture to see its caption IF you view them in a slide show. Flickr doesn't support seeing the captions in a slide show, which is a missing feature in high demand.

Link to the pictures.

Saturday, April 09, 2005

Java Can Scale Down Too

Java can not only scale up but down.

Sunday, April 03, 2005

Size of the Textual Web

In this interesting talk, Jeff Dean pointed out the size of the web that Google deals with:
  • ~4 billion pages
  • ~10 KB/page
  • ~40 TB
This is much smaller than I thought. If you have a 100Mbps connection to the Internet and keep it fully loaded 24x7, you can download ~3TB per month. So you need ~13 such connections to download the whole web in a month, which is not a small requirement, but still within reach.

One note is I think the 10KB/page content is what Google cares for search (regular, not image, not video, etc.) per page. So it's mostly textual.