Search blogs subscribed in Google Reader

Basically, there are two ways to searching all the blogs in your Google Reader. One is to use Google custom search engine, and the other is to use Google gear and Greasemonkey script.

The details about the latter option is described in Raúl's blog. The offline function of Google Reader works for me, but the Greasemonkey search script halts everytime I try to start the offline search. I cannot figure out what is the problem.

What I currently use is the first option: create a custom search engine that has all the links of subscribed blogs in its site list. The details is described on Google Operating System blog. The search function really helps when you want to testity some 'Déjà vu' of your reading.

MS's new desktop

Just checked the advertisement of MS surface. Its cool. That's what a group of HCI folks are investigating on. Will it become the future standard equipment in luxury hotels, stores, or office?

HPCS2007 poster: Towards an HTTP-based Service Platform with High Scalability

This year, HPCS comes to Saskatoon, and I submitted a poster titled "Towards an HTTP-based Service Platform with High Scalability". The abstract is the following.

HTTP is a message transportation method used by the majority of so-called web services or services on the web, which are implemented by using SOAP or POX/JSON. The application of Ajax has dramatically increased the load on service platforms by long-lived connection and frequent polling. For most multithreading platforms implementing thread-per-request policy, this raises scalability problems for threads since the performance of each thread will be degraded when the total number of threads increases. Service orchestrations can also introduce thread scalability problems when they have long lifetime and involve message exchanges with multiple high-latency partner services.

This poster discusses the issues for an HTTP-based service platform to achieve high scalability. We compare the options for platform implementation of IO, thread pool, asynchrony, and continuation, and propose a design for highly scalable platform for both atomic services and service orchestrations.

Interesting panel records from TSSJS2007

TheServerSide has posted records of three interesting panel in TSSJS2007. They are worth watching.
SOA Technology Panel - TSSJS 2007
The Next Application Platform - TSSJS 2007
High Performance Computing Panel - TSSJS 2007

The keywords that are talked are SOA, EDA, EAI, high performance infrastructure, ESB, Ajax, mashup, management, and scalability(scale out).

Reload a page in Firefox

A weird problem happened to Firefox of my desktop today. Some Wikipedia pages could NOT be correctly loaded because of CSS problem. 'Reload the current page' just did not work, similar as F5. Restarting Firefox did not help either. Then I figured out that I need to reload and override the cache. That is Ctrl+F5. It is better to learn all the shortcuts and find more tricks.

Created a calendar for University of Saskatchewan academic schedule

I always need to visit this page to get the university schedule like the close day and last day to do something. And I searched on Google Calendar, and did not find a similar calendar. So I decide to create one that may be useful for everyone. I include only the highlighted events, close date, and important day for graduate students there. I will try to remember to update the calendar when the schedule for 2007-2008 is available. The calendar's title is University of Saskatchewan Academic Schedule. The iCal link of the calendar is http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/rqor6pie0u4vq3fhfpvmpsu5cc%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
Or you can subscribe the calendar by click

Got a booklet of UofS centennial stamps

I found an intra-campus envelop in my mailbox in the department office this morning, and it turned out to be a beautiful gift from the university, the stamps to celebrate the centennial of our university.