Sachin Breaks Records, Servers too!

Imagining how could Sachin be the cause of breaking down servers! Employees at cricinfo know it better.
On that record breaking day (24th Feb 2010) and when Sachin was on 190 odd, he breaks a couple of Cricinfo's servers. In spite of Cricinfo having workarounds for handling peak client requests, they never expected that the concurrent users could reach such high levels. The outcome is that they have ordered a couple of Sachin Tendulkar server and are hoping to be ready for the next peak. Sachin's page recorded some 45 million page views that day and is yet another technically proved fact that he is the "God of Cricket".

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is a open source software suite of office tools and come as a cost-free substitute for Microsoft Office. It supports over 110 languages and works on almost all operating systems. Sun Microsystems is its primary contributor with support from Google, Novell, IBM, RedHat and other companies.

Here is the screen shot of the various components that constitute OpenOffice suite.

• Writer - a word processor like MS Word. The best part of Writer is the feature to export the document as a Portable Document Format(pdf).
  
• Calc - a spreadsheet like MS Excel
• Impress - a presentation program like MS Powerpoint
• Base - a database management system like MS Access
• Draw - a graphic editor
• Math - a tool for mathematical formula creation
  

"My Location" - Feature for Google Maps for Mobile

"My Location" is a feature which lets applications running on your phone, to figure out the exact/approximate geographic location that you are currently in.
For handsets with built in GPS functionality, the user's current location details(latitude/longitude) are provided by the Global Navigation Satellite System. The accuracy in this case is very high and it could locate the user in the vicinity of 10 meters or less.
But currently, most of the handsets are not GPS enabled which means that there should be an alternative to find the user's current location. Google provides a way to figure out the location details for non-GPS handsets by using the cell tower id of the network service provider that the user uses. Google maintains a database of all the cell tower ids for most of the countries and also the latitude and longitude details that belong to these cell ids. The accuracy of locating the user is in the range of 400 meters to 5 Kms based on the density of the cells in a particular area. This service is much faster and consumes less battery than the GPS service. Click for the official Google video explaining this feature.

A similar feature is provided by Google to on its Google maps for the desktop browser wherein the user's current location is determined based on the IP Address or the WiFi zone that he is connected to. Check this link for the browser and setting options.