Now it goes into the third round of Best of Web (#BoW). Every Monday, as promised, I post a few of my favorite internet finds. This week I’m a little late, but Monday just prior to 23:00 clock still Monday. (So I’ve reached my own goal again this week.)
Today there are some links about hardware and software hacks, IE toolbar programming and WordPress speed optimization. Also featuring: A infographic for nerds, the answer to the question “How to cluster a handful of Raspberry Pis?” and a short video to your general amusement. Let’s go!
Use the Raspberry Pi as Babel Fish
Ok, it’s not a real Babel fish, but Dave Conroy’s Raspberry Pi project is getting close to Douglas Adams Babelfish. He has “taught” the Raspberry Pi to translate between a lot of languages using various online translation APIs. The Raspberry captures your speech by using a microphone, converts it to text, sends the text to a translation service and then reads out loud the translation. Finally it does all that almost fully automatically in near real time and between over 50 languages.
Millions lines of code
Once again I discovered a nice infographic on informationistbeatiful.net. This graphic shows over 50 software products and their lines of source code. There is software listed from a few thousand lines, ranging up to several million lines of code. I was really surprised to see that the source code of a development environment such as Visual Studio 2012 consists of more lines of code than the entire Windows 7 operating system. Maybe this might also explain the high price of Visual Studio …
Write toolbars for IE in C#
The next topic for today deals with toolbars for Internet Explorer. Yes, I’m ok and I’m really serious about that. Toolbars. Internet Explorer. Two concepts that seem to be frowned upon for many in this days. But I can tell you from personal experience – neither the one nor the other is dead, and as long as there are developers out there who have to deal with the development of toolbars for Internet Explorer, the following three articles have their right to exist.
When developing a toolbar for the Internet Explorer you say “COM object” instead of “XML”. You say: “rather difficult than easy”. Writing a toolbar for IE in C#.NET? Difficult, but not impossible. The first article deals with the basics of toolbars, the second one tries to eliminate ambiguities that might come up while reading the first article and the third article describes again the intricacies of Internet Explorer concerning toolbars.
Speed up WordPress by using Redis
I think it can not be disputed, that WordPress is one of the most widely spread CMS. Likewise it can’t be disputed, that WordPress has gone from slim Blog CMS to a fully-blown heavyweight in the CMS scene. Unfortunately, with the increasing functionality, WordPress has also become somewhat slower/sluggish and because load times play a crucial role in the context of search engine optimization as well as for visitor satisfaction, you should really try to speed up your WordPress installation. And this is where Jim Westergren’s blog comes into play. In his blog, he explains in detail how to incredible speed up your WordPress with Redis. The best example of this technique is his own blog, which has more than impressive loading times.
A cluster out of Raspberry Pis
The last article for today is again about a Raspberry Pi project. Specifically about how to build a cluster of Raspberry Pis and then use this as a web server/webgrid. Sure there has been one or the other article on computer grids build of Raspberry Pis, but I have never seen a website with so much and detailed information about building a Raspberry Pi cluster as on Steve Breuning’s website. Whoever is serious interested in clustering one or more Raspberry Pis or simply wants to see some performance benchmark, shouldn’t miss this link tip of the week.
The smallest garage in the world
Finally there is again, as also in the last two Best of Web round ups, a short video. This time it is to go about the supposedly smallest garage in the world. Don’t be scared by the Dutch (?) audio track – you don’t need it, to understand the video. The true message still comes across…
