Photo Tech EDU Day 1: Photo Technology Overview
Google EngEDU
1 hr – Jan 18, 2007

Google Tech Talk
January 17, 2007

ABSTRACT

The goal of PhotoTechEDU is to have a Photographic Technology short course for engineers. The course will teach:

- useful properties of light and image formation
- theory and techniques of photographic optics and image capture
- theory of colorimetry and techniques of color reproduction
- and lots more… Read the rest of this entry »

A Googly MySQL Cluster Talk
Google engEDU
55 min – Apr 28, 2006

Google TechTalks
April 28, 2006

Stewart Smith
Stewart Smith works for MySQL AB as a software engineer working on MySQL Cluster. He is an active member of the free and open source software community, especially in Australia.

ABSTRACT
Part 1 – Introduction to MySQL Cluster The NDB storage engine (MySQL Cluster) is a high-availability storage engine for MySQL. It provides synchronous replication between storage nodes and many mysql servers having a consistent view of the database. In 4.1 and 5.0 it’s a main memory database, but in 5.1 non-indexed attributes can be stored on disk. NDB also provides a lot of determinism in system resource usage. I’ll talk a bit about that.

Part 2 – New features in 5.1 including cluster to cluster replication, disk based data and a bunch of other things. anybody that is attending the mysql users conference may find this eerily familiar. Read the rest of this entry »

Algorithmic Mechanism Design
Google engEDU
57 min – Aug 15, 2007

Google Tech Talks
August 15, 2007

ABSTRACT

One of the challenges that the Internet raises is the necessity of designing distributed protocols for settings where the participating computers are owned and operated by different owners with different goals. Over the last decade or so there has been much research that aims to address these issues using ideas taken from the micro-economic field of mechanism design. In this talk I will survey the current state of the field: how mechanism design is applied in computational settings, how far can classical ideas go, and what are the challenges for further research. Among the applications discussed will be combinatorial auctions, cost sharing, scheduling, and routing in networks. Read the rest of this entry »

Using Static Analysis For Software Defect Detection
Google engEDU
1 hr 3 min – Jul 6, 2006

Google TechTalks
July 6, 2006

William Pugh

ABSTRACT
I’ll talk about some of my experience in using and expanding static analysis tools for defect detection. The FindBugs tool developed at the Univ. of Maryland is now being widely used, including inside Google.

I’ll give an overview of FindBugs, show some of the kinds of errors we routinely find in production code, discuss the methodology we use for enhancing and expanding FindBugs and some of the recent additions to it, discuss ways of incorporating FindBugs into your development process (such as being able to get a report of all the warnings introduced since the last release of your software), and talk about the future of static analysis, including things such as a new Java JSR to provide standard annotations for things such as @NonNull and @Tainted. Read the rest of this entry »

Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop
Google engEDU
1 hr 27 min – May 4, 2007

Google Tech Talks
May 4, 2007

ABSTRACT

The computer desktop metaphor is ubiquitous, but how much work do we get done there? None! Time is entirely wasted navigating or shuffling content to the application in which we can finally work. What lessons can we learn from designing interfaces without the desktop and without applications? Is it even possible? And how does this apply to the Web? Currently, Web applications are often more usable than their desktop-based counterparts because each one does one thing and does it well. Desktop applications used to be the same way, but over time — as applications grew to support the the users in the long tail — each became a complex portmanteau of all possible features. If we are not careful, our Web apps will suffer the same conglomerated fate. Mashups and services help to solve the problem on the development end by freeing functionality from any particular application. But, there is currently no way to offer that wealth of possible functionality to users in a scalable way. Would it be nice to embed a dynamic map into your Gmail message? Sure. A Flickr slideshow? Sure. But for Google to offer those in addition to the hundreds of other possible options, would clutter the interface beyond usability. What’s needed is a universal method of accessing functionality: a way of harnessing the power of services without the need for application developers to explicitly support them. I’ll be demonstrating such a method.

The talk demonstrates that a ZUI plus a universal method of accessing functionality spells the death of the application-centric computing model and the desktop-design paradigms. Read the rest of this entry »