Takumi's Blog

Every year Fortune releases the top 100 companies to work for. Last year Google placed #2, but this year, it’s #1!

Our new No. 1 sets the standard for Silicon Valley: free meals, swimming spa, and free doctors onsite. Engineers can spend 20% of time on independent projects. No wonder Google gets 1,300 resumes a day.

It sounds like a great opportunity if you could get a job at Google. I’m sure everyone there is innovative and intelligent…. so envious!

I guess knowing places where competition is harsh really makes you think about how hard you want to push yourself.

Time fly’s by, it really does. Even though I know that, I hadn’t realized that the eMac sitting in my moms office is about 4 years old! 4 years, a lot has happened in four years.

Apple introduced it’s xserve product line, upgraded it’s iMacs, and even made the transition to intel products. Everyone knows Apple’s going to be bringing more innovation to the PC market, after all, they probably are just getting started.

Designed in California has a detailed product listing of all of Apple’s products since 1997. Not just the product listings, but also detailed information on when things got upgraded, prices, etc. It’s a great site to take a look at sometime, I’m sure you’d be surprised by some of the things you find.

I’ve been using the Google Apps for Your Domain since March, and I’ve loved their initial idea, and keep loving the new features they add on to it. (Though, I think they need to work on collaboration between the services for the domain. Like, the ability to create shared calendars that are automatically added to all other users, the ability to have a ‘private’ and a ‘public/synced’ address book, to have Google Docs integrated and also having ‘private’ and ‘public/synced’ categories).

Up until now, you needed to have your own domain to be able to sign up for the service. Which probably means you already have your own hosting too. I guess the next step would be to add the ability to purchase domains that just use Google’s services right? Well, that’s what they did.

If you don’t already own on, then you can buy a domain, and have it automatically setup with all of Google’s Apps for Your Domain!

I guess they’re going to be finishing up the beta soon, or maybe it’ll always be in beta (like Gmail), either way, it’s a good service that keeps improving.

All the major internet providers have huge IP backbones, interconnected with 10GB/s fiber optics. But that’s not going to last us long, the need for more bandwidth has become higher with streaming video and HD content on the internet. GigaOM’s article goes into the detail of how it works.

Infinera, together with Level3, Internet2, University of California, Santa Cruz brought 100GB/s interconnectivity to reality. What’s this going to mean for most of us? Well, our providers will be able to offer us faster connections, and a lot more people will be able to maintain the new, fast connections.

Azureus and BitTorrent are already in the works of making P2P video content a reality, and if that really does go mainstream, this new bandwidth will be needed.

Although, it’s not going to be standardized for a while. IEEE took nearly 5 years to make 10GB/s standard, and this time around we can’t wait that long!

Nearly everyone knows about the Million Dollar Homepage, and the 21-year old behind the idea. I mean, he made a million dollars off of a simple webpage!

1000Tags.com is trying to bring about something similar to it, but instead of pixels, using Tags.

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Perpendicular hard drives are the replacements for traditional ones. Some of you know what they are, and some don’t. Perpendicular hard drives store the data vertically instead of horizontally, which allow more bits to be packed into a certain area.

Hitachi has made a somewhat cheesy animated video introducing and explaining what perpendicular hard drives are. It looks like it’s targeted for kids, I’m serious!

Have you ever been in a spot where you want some icons to use. Like, for anything? IconBuffet has a collection of nice icons (for free, and $).

I mean, how nice can the icons get? There’s over 40 collections for free (each one with about 10 icons). Blinksale is one of the icon sets that are for free… they look pretty good don’t they?

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Apple’s intel computers have been phenominal. Everything from speed to sales, it’s all been going up.

The first thing I noticed when I touched my first mactel (intel mac) was the responsiveness of the OS in general. Finder windows open and closed without delays, iTunes opens up much faster, etc.

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Akamai has been the backbone for a lot of content delivery on the internet. Apple uses them for streaming their videos, AOL uses them for podcasts, Microsoft probably uses them for something too (ugh).

Nine Systems, which I haven’t heard of before, but they “make media work.” Their flagship product, the Stream OS manages content, DRM for the content, and sales/delivery of it.

With Akamai’s acquisition of Nine Systems, I’m sure the new Akamai will become an even better backbone for content delivery on the internet.

Text-Link-Ads is a great source of income for bloggers. It’s a win-win situation for both the advertiser and the blogger. And the guys at TLA have been pumping out new features there like RSS advertisements.

Now they’ve done it one better. The new service ReviewMe, provides a way for bloggers out there to review a product, earn money doing it, and for the advertisers to get cheap word-of-mouth and immediate feedback on their products.

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I know this is kinda off topic for what I write about, but the Guardian published an article about a poll-type thing that Google had earlier.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, one reason is Google is getting really friendly with it’s user base, and another is, well, I didn’t expect the results that came out.

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Every organization needs project management software. Whether it be NetOffice, Basecamp, eGroupWare, etc.

37signals is well known as the creator of Basecamp, the internet’s leading project management software. They provide a hosted solution, which means it’s on their servers. The interface is easy to use, and it’s based on a subscription model.

But I think, after some quick usage, activeCollab is probably one of the best. And the plus is, it’s free, and downloadable. It hasn’t reached 1.0 yet, and is still alpha software, but I suggest checking it out, it’s worth it.

News sites. There’s lots of them. And most of them look the same. NYTimes.com used to look like all the other news sites, but recently, they updated their site.

And guess what. It’s awsome.

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For some authors it’s really hard for them to find a publisher willing to publish their book. The authors have the content, and just need someone to bridge the gap between them and their readers.

I’d love to write a book someday, unfortunately until that day I need to improve my writing. I do have a few ideas for what I could write about, but nothing definite.

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