Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for April 12th from 17:02 to 19:13:

• Dubai bashing and ‘what-aboutery’ – Joi Ito’s Web – Joi Ito comments on various recent negative articles on Dubai.
• A VR Geek Blog » Diva – Exploring your database in 3D – Visualization tool for looking at relational database structure in 3D, with optional data glove VR interface. Wonder if they ship with the cool techno music that's playing in the demo videos.
• Polar Rose | Naming is sharing! – Face recognition service, currently scans Flickr photo collections for tagging to Facebook names.
• iSerenity – A collection of background / ambient noise, including ocean, rainforest, city street, library, etc
• A Bunch of Great Strategies for Using Memcached and MySQL Better Together | High Scalability – Notes on approaches to data caching in web applications.

These are my links for April 11th through April 12th:

• Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds – Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
• The dark side of Dubai – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent – "Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging."
• Topless Robot – Hot Girls Have Lightsaber Strip-Fight for Your Viewing Pleasure – Star Wars CGI meets fake body spray ad
• Poll Result: Best VPN to leap China’s Great Firewall? – Thomas Crampton – - Witopia – Undisputed winner. Quality of service, speed of surfing, though it is said to be relatively expensive at US$50 to US$60 per year. Hotspot Shield – Bandwidth limits can be painful. Force you to wait until the next month if you use it too much. – Ultrasurf – StrongVPN
• InfoQ: Facebook: Science and the Social Graph – In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008 (November 2008), Aditya Agarwal discusses Facebook’s architecture, more exactly the software stack used, presenting the advantages and disadvantages of its major components: LAMP (PHP, MySQL), Memcache, Thrift, Scribe.
• The Running Man, Revisited § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM – a handful of scientists think that these ultra-marathoners are using their bodies just as our hominid forbears once did, a theory known as the endurance running hypothesis (ER). ER proponents believe that being able to run for extended lengths of time is an adapted trait, most likely for obtaining food, and was the catalyst that forced Homo erectus to evolve from its apelike ancestors.

This is a bottle of water I got recently while having a quick lunch at the Galleria Market (Korean grocery store) in Santa Clara. I was expecting a generic bottle of Arrowhead, Crystal Springs, or even Costco water, but this is apparently shipped in from Korea. The main selling feature is that it contains naturally occuring semiconductors.

Here’s what the label says:

Ge+Alpha is a pure natural mineral water which originates from the gold ore and sericite layers in the deep mountains. It is rich in essential minerals and contains 60ppb of organic Germanium.

The Geumgangsan Hot Springs in North Korea also features naturally occuring germanium water.

Apparently there are various claims that it’s good for your health, up to the point of curing cancer. I have no idea whether this is a good thing or not, but it’s pretty random. I tend to associate germanium with old transistors rather than drinking water.

Obtaining clean drinking water can be a major problem in many parts of the world. UV disinfection systems can work well if power is available, either from the grid or from locally generated power. This particular project has conducted some field trials in Mexico, with good results. The primary contaminant in the wells was organic, mostly fecal matter, not mineral or chemical contaminants.

The UV-Tube Project is part of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL) at University of California at Berkeley. The project focuses on improving water quality for people in developing areas where other water treatment methods are not applied consistently because of their cost, inconvenience, complexity, or energy requirements. The goal of the UV-Tube Project is to design and promote the UV-Tube—an affordable, simple, and easy to use household water disinfection device that uses ultraviolet (UV-C) light to inactivate pathogens. UV-Tubes can be built from materials available in developing areas and thus can be disseminated easily through community workshops hosted by local non-governmental organizations or sold by small-scale entrepreneurs

The home-built system costs around $41, plus $4 per month in operating costs, compared with $300 and $26 per month for a commercial UV water disinfection system.

UV Disinfection Basics (from the UV-Tube project site)

via Engadget and News.com