Fans of LOLCats can exhale: The 'I Can Has Cheezburger' book, which culls individual LOLCats from the famous Web site of the same name, is about to hit bookstore shelves.
(Credit: Icanhascheezburger.com)If you're a big fan of LOLCats like me, then you probably are very familiar with Icanhascheezburger.com, a community site where the most active practitioners of the phenomenon involving funny pictures of cats mixed with odd, badly spelled phrases ply their trade daily.
To the uninitiated, LOLCats can be hard to decipher, especially given that many of them are subtle meta references to the phenomenon itself. So regular Icanhascheezburger.com visitors are well-versed in phrases involving things like "Ceiling Cat...," "I'm in ur...," "...ur doing it wrong" and so on.
Over the last year-and-a-half, the site has become massively popular, with tens of millions of monthly visitors and even a series of spin-off sites, all in spite of the fact that it was hardly the originator of the phenomenon.
At the Gnomedex conference in Seattle in August, I Can Has Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh talked about the origins of the site and where the LOLCat phenomenon had come from.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)Now, the creators of the site have cobbled together several dozen LOLCats from the site into I Can Has Cheezburger? the book. A slick little volume subtitled, "A LOLCat colleckshun," it features the famous fluffy gray cat so familiar to fans of the site on the cover.
I was really looking forward to the book, as I figured it would cull the best of the site's thousands upon thousands of user-created entries. And since I can always feel confident that a visit to the site will have me ROFLMAOing--rolling on the floor laughing my (butt) off--I expected that the book would induce much the same reactions, except even more concentrated.
Sadly, that wasn't the case.
... Read moreAdding hidden items in Web sites is what separates good developers from great ones. Below I've compiled a list of 10 of my personal favorites from the past few years. If you have any of your own feel free to share them in the comments.
1. The Konami code. The infamous code sequence that appears in many video games old and new (↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A) has a place on the Internet too. Two sites that we know of take advantage of this to yield humorous results. The first, and most recent, is Google Reader. Inputting the code graces your feed source menu with one of the ninjas found in the newly skinnable sharing pages. This trick also works on GameSpot.com. Entering in the code and hitting enter at the end will take you to the cheats section for Contra, the game for the Nintendo Entertainment System for which it's best known.
2. Yahoo's singing yokel. If you remember the 1990s you'll remember this wonderful yell--the sound of the Yahoo yodeler. To hear it any time just click on the ! at the end of the Yahoo logo on Yahoo.com.
3. JetBlue wants a sandwich. The infamous peanut butter jelly time dancing banana (background) was briefly a part of JetBlue's travel search site. Typing in "PBJ" into the search box while holding shift and clicking the search button would pull up a clip from Fox's Family Guy with the dog Brian doing the dance. It was removed shortly after it was discovered. You can still see a shot of what it looked like here.
4. Google Easter eggs (3 parts)
- Google bombs come and go. Their very nature depends on search relevancy, so no one Google bomb will stick around forever. Two of the more prominent ones had to deal with the George W. Bush presidency, including the infamous faux 404 page for "Weapons of mass destruction" and the search for "miserable failure" which would link up to Bush's profile at the White House Web site. A more humorous iteration exists using Google's built-in calculator in relation to Douglas Adams' masterpiece The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Searching for "the answer to life, the universe, and everything" yields 42, which you'd understand if you had read the book.
- Google Moon. Google's mapping services are chock full of secrets. For a while Google Moon had a really great one. When zooming too far into the surface of the moon it became cheese, something that was later removed probably at NASA's request or improved topography. Here's a video someone captured of it by KoolAidGrenade at Metacafe.
- Ridiculous languages in Google Search. Remember the Swedish Chef from The Muppets? Why not make him your liaison to the world of search? Amidst the myriad of language options in Google you'll find "bork, bork, bork" which serves up your results in the gibberish language of the fictional Swedish Chef. Believe it or not Google gets over a million page views a day in Swedish Chef according to Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience.
If Swedish ain't your thing, there's also Elmer Fudd from Loony Toons and Esperanto, the language that belongs to no nation or people. However the best of all is Google for h4x0rs (hackers), which you can get to by going to 600673.com (Google spelled out in leet speak).
Is The Moon Made Of Cheese?!? ACCORDING TO GOOGLE.COM - video powered by Metacafe
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SAN FRANCISCO--The inner workings of Google just became a little less secret.
The search colossus has shed only occasional light on its data center operations, but on Wednesday, Google fellow Jeff Dean turned a spotlight on some parts of the operation. Speaking to an overflowing crowd at the Google I/O conference here on Wednesday, Dean managed simultaneously to demystify Google a little while also showing just how exotic the company's infrastructure really is.
Google fellow Jeff Dean
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)On the one hand, Google uses more-or-less ordinary servers. Processors, hard drives, memory--you know the drill.
On the other hand, Dean seemingly thinks clusters of 1,800 servers are pretty routine, if not exactly ho-hum. And the software company runs on top of that hardware, enabling a sub-half-second response to an ordinary Google search query that involves 700 to 1,000 servers, is another matter altogether.
Google doesn't reveal exactly how many servers it has, but I'd estimate it's easily in the hundreds of thousands. It puts 40 servers in each rack, Dean said, and by one reckoning, Google has 36 data centers across the globe. With 150 racks per data center, that would mean Google has more than 200,000 servers, and I'd guess it's far beyond that and growing every day.
Regardless of the true numbers, it's fascinating what Google has accomplished, in part by largely ignoring much of the conventional computing industry. Where even massive data centers such as the New York Stock Exchange or airline reservation systems use a lot of mainstream servers and software, Google largely builds its own technology.
I'm sure a number of server companies are sour about it, but Google clearly believes its technological destiny is best left in its own hands. Co-founder Larry Page encourages a "healthy disrespect for the impossible" at Google, according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, in a speech Thursday.
To operate on Google's scale requires the company to treat each machine as expendable. Server makers pride themselves on their high-end machines' ability to withstand failures, but Google prefers to invest its money in fault-tolerant software.
"Our view is it's better to have twice as much hardware that's not as reliable than half as much that's more reliable," Dean said. "You have to provide reliability on a software level. If you're running 10,000 machines, something is going to die every day."
Breaking in is hard to do
Bringing a new cluster online shows just how fallible hardware is, Dean said.
In each cluster's first year, it's typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will "go wonky," with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there's about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.
A look at a custom-made Google rack with 40 servers from a modern data center. Infrastructure guru Jeff Dean showed the snapshot at the Google I/O conference.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland-CNET News.com/Jeff Dean-Google)While Google uses ordinary hardware components for its servers, it doesn't use conventional packaging. . And, Dean said, the company currently puts a case around each 40-server rack, an in-house design, rather than using the conventional case around each server.
The company has a small number of server configurations, some with a lot of hard drives and some with few, Dean said. And there are some differences at the larger scale, too: "We have heterogeneity across different data centers but not within data centers," he said.
As to the servers themselves, Google likes multicore chips, those with many processing engines on each slice of silicon. Many software companies, accustomed to better performance from ever-faster chip clock speeds, are struggling to adapt to the multicore approach, but it suits Google just fine. The company already had to adapt its technology to an architecture that spanned thousands of computers, so they already have made the jump to parallelism.
"We really, really like multicore machines," Dean said. "To us, multicore machines look like lots of little machines with really good interconnects. They're relatively easy for us to use."
Although Google requires a fast response for search and other services, its parallelism can produce that even if a single sequence of instructions, called a thread, is relatively slow. That's music to the ears of processor designers focusing on multicore and multithreaded models.
"Single-thread performance doesn't matter to us really at all," Dean said. "We have lots of parallelizable problems."
The secret sauce
So how does Google get around all these earthly hardware concerns? With software--and this is where you might think about dusting off your computer science degree.
A Google data center, circa 2000. Note the fan on the floor to cool servers.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland-CNET News.com/Jeff Dean-Google)Dean described three core elements of Google's software: GFS, the Google File System, BigTable, and the MapReduce algorithm. And although Google helps with a lot of open-source software projects that helped the company get its start, these packages remain proprietary except in general terms.
GFS, at the lowest level of the three, stores data across many servers and runs on almost all machines, Dean said. Some incarnations of GFS are file systems "many petabytes in size"--a petabyte being a million gigabytes. There are more than 200 clusters running GFS, and many of these clusters consist of thousands of machines.
GFS stores each chunk of data, typically 64MB in size, on at least three machines called chunkservers; master servers are responsible for backing up data to a new area if a chunkserver failure occurs. "Machine failures are handled entirely by the GFS system, at least at the storage level," Dean said.
To provide some structure to all that data, Google uses BigTable. Commercial databases from companies such as Oracle and IBM don't cut the mustard here. For one thing, they don't operate the scale Google demands, and if they did, they'd be too expensive, Dean said.
BigTable, which Google began designing in 2004, is used in more than 70 Google projects, including Google Maps, Google Earth, Blogger, Google Print, Orkut, and the core search index. The largest BigTable instance manages about 6 petabytes of data spread across thousands of machines, Dean said.
MapReduce, the first version of which Google wrote in 2003, gives the company a way to actually make something useful of its data. For example, MapReduce can find how many times a particular word appears in Google's search index; a list of the Web pages on which a word appears; and the list of all Web sites that link to a particular Web site.
With MapReduce, Google can build an index that shows which Web pages all have the terms "new," "york," and "restaurants"--relatively quickly. "You need to be able to run across thousands of machines in order for it to complete in a reasonable amount of time," Dean said.
The MapReduce software is increasing use within Google. It ran 29,000 jobs in August 2004 and 2.2 million in September 2007. Over that period, the average time to complete a job has dropped from 634 seconds to 395 seconds, while the output of MapReduce tasks has risen from 193 terabytes to 14,018 terabytes, Dean said.
On any given day, Google runs about 100,000 MapReduce jobs; each occupies about 400 servers and takes about 5 to 10 minutes to finish, Dean said.
That's a basis for some interesting math. Assuming the servers do nothing but MapReduce, that each server works on only one job at a time, and that they work around the clock, that means MapReduce occupies about 139,000 servers if the jobs take 5 minutes each. For 7.5-minute jobs, the number increases to 208,000 servers; if the jobs take 10 minutes, it's 278,000 servers.
My calculations could be off base, but even qualitatively, that's enough computing horsepower to make the mind boggle.
Fault-tolerant software
MapReduce, like GFS, is explicitly designed to sidestep server problems.
"When a machine fails, the master knows what task that machine was assigned and will direct the other machines to take up the map task," Dean said. "You can end up losing 100 map tasks, but can have 100 machines pick up those tasks."
The MapReduce reliability was severely tested once during a maintenance operation on one cluster with 1,800 servers. Workers unplugged groups of 80 machines at a time, during which the other 1,720 machines would pick up the slack. "It ran a little slowly, but it all completed," Dean said.
And in a 2004 presentation, Dean said, one system withstood a failure of 1,600 servers in a 1,800-unit cluster.
Next-generation data center to-do list
So all is going swimmingly at Google, right? Perhaps, but the company isn't satisfied and has a long to-do list.
Most companies are trying to figure out how to move jobs gracefully from one server to another, but Google is a few orders of magnitude above that challenge. It wants to be able to move jobs from one data center to another--automatically, at that.
"We want our next-generation infrastructure to be a system that runs across a large fraction of our machines rather than separate instances," Dean said.
Right now some massive file systems have different names--GFS/Oregon and GFS/Atlanta, for example--but they're meant to be copies of each other. "We want a single namespace," he said.
These are tough challenges indeed considering Google's scale. No doubt many smaller companies look enviously upon them.
Update at 12:10 p.m. PST: Comment from Zango has been added.
Good riddance: Facebook has banned the "Secret Crush" application due to reports of its affiliation with a notorious spyware manufacturer.
The social-networking site confirmed the breakup on Monday: "Facebook is committed to user safety and security and, to that end, its Terms of Service for developers explicitly state that applications should not use adware and spyware," a statement from the company read. "We have contacted the developers and have disabled the Secret Crush application for violating Facebook Platform Terms of Service."
Lonely Facebook users eager to find which of their friends had the hots for them were served up with the nasty news last week. According to a report from security firm Fortinet, invitations luring members with the message "One of your friends might have a crush on you!" contained a link to software from Zango, a company whose name has become almost synonymous with adware. Upon installing the application, users were informed that they needed to "invite" at least five more friends to Secret Crush before going on, and then were invited to download a "Crush Calculator" application that contained Zango software.
Tragically, duped Facebook members never did get to learn which people on their friends list had crushes on them.
Zango has publicly denied involvement with Secret Crush, publishing a blog post dismissing Fortinet's claims and saying that Secret Crush hadn't disappeared--it had just changed its name to "My Admirer."
"In the case of the Zango ad seen by Fortinet, if clicked it would have taken a consumer to Zango's standard plain-language notice and consent page where consumers could choose to install Zango software and access (without subscription) a Zango Astrology application--or choose not to install the software," the Zango blog post read. "Although we did not purchase this ad directly, it was placed by one of our advertising partners within the Facebook system, which appears to be a completely legitimate practice."
Spyware and adware claims are nothing new in the social-networking world; Facebook's chief rival, the News Corp.-owned MySpace.com, has had issues with adware masked as YouTube videos, for example. The recent news nevertheless raises the question of how quickly Facebook, or any other site that accepts third-party developer content, should be expected to take action in this kind of situation. AllFacebook reported that 1.5 million users had installed Secret Crush before it was taken down; this kind of situation will certainly add to the debate over how attentive a company built on user- and developer-generated content needs to be.
In its statement concerning the Secret Crush takedown, Facebook responded pre-emptively to potential criticism by stressing that members should be aware that they are dealing with third-party content on the Facebook Platform. "Users should employ the same precautions while downloading software from Facebook applications that they use when downloading software on their desktop," the company warned.
Think Secret, the Apple rumor Web site, will no longer be published, under the terms of an undisclosed settlelment with Apple Inc. The site issued a small press release on the matter late last night, with Think Secret's publisher Nick Ciarelli noting, "I'm pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits."
The site was sued by Apple in 2005 regarding leaks about upcoming hardware and software products that later came to fruition, including an updated iLife software suite and the Mac mini desktop computers that were showcased at the Macworld Expo in 2005.
Think Secret was being represented by attorneys in conjunction with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and in March, the site had attempted to get Apple's lawsuit dismissed on the grounds of it being a First Amendment violation, although to no avail.
The news is certainly a big hit to other large Apple rumor sites including 9to5Mac, Mac Rumors and AppleInsider. Sites like these encourage news tips and leaks about upcoming or unannounced Apple products, which is what got Think Secret into trouble in the first place.
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