To infinity and back... you'll have to wait a bit more for 'beyond'

Lets just say you have USD 200k to blow on a holiday.
And lets say you can afford only a day for that holiday.
Where would you go and still be the envy (or derision) of the rich and famous/notorious?

Sir Richard Branson has the ready answer for you -- A trip to the outer-reaches of Earth on Virgin Galactic (VG)!

You'd have read them in the news by now, about the unveiling of the 'mother ship' called WhiteKnightTwo that will carry your space ship to a height of 18,000 meters (60,000 feet!). There, it will release the actual spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, where the spacecraft will then fire up her hybrid rocket engines, and continue the journey -- all the way up to 110km in the thermosphere.

110k is the distance from Port Klang to Seremban -- only this time you'd be travelling vertically, from ground zero, straight up! Oh yeah, you, your 2 pilots and your 5 other travelling companions be zipping at over 3 times the speed of sound (4200km/h)! Now that's adventure with STYLE!

Source: Wikipedia: WhiteKnightTwo, carrying SpaceShipTwo between her twin hulls

And how will your ride look like? The pictures above and below look like something straight out of Japanese sci-fi anime. But hey, this is for real! Both these planes were designed by the uber-genius of an aerospace designer, Burt Rutan, and built by his company, Scaled Composites.

Never heard of him? He was the guy who designed the first ever plane -- the Rutan Voyager -- to successfully fly around the globe non-stop, without refuelling. This is also the same guy who designed the first ever, privately-built spacecraft -- SpaceShipOne -- to make 2 successful trips to sub-orbital space within 2 weeks. He won the US 10m-dollar Ansary X-price for his efforts.

Source Wikipedia: SpaceShipTwo, something straight out of reality!

So how, interested? Sorry friends, you'll have to get in line. VG claims the first 100 seats have already been snapped up -- and paid for in full -- for flights that will be happening in the next 2 years. A further 170 clients have paid a deposit for future flights. Eventually, the price would come down to a much 'cheaper' US 20k per pax.

That's peanuts compared to the US 20 million Dennis Tito reportedly paid to be the first tourist in space. Tito is not alone in this elite club. Since then, four other space tourists have also paid hefty sums to experience life as an astronaut.

To be fair, this comparison is like comparing a ferry ride to holidaying on the QE2. The VG flight will last 2.5 hours, let you experience momentary weighlessness, before making a slow decent back to earth. In contrast, the 'real' space flight will see you zipping at 25,000 kmh, spend a few days in the international space station, and make countless orbits around earth!

Still. Going to space is going to space. And whether it costs 20k or 20 mil, not many will have that kind of bragging rights to say they were up there with the gods!

Ain't it Cuil? (pronounced 'cool')

Big news on the technology front today... firstly, is the unveiling of the commercial space carrier, White Knight two, and then this -- cuil.com -- touted by some to be the eventual 'Google slayer'.

Cuil.com is built by ex-Google staff, and they claim that they have built a better search engine than their ex-employer's.

But a search engine is a search engine is a search engine, right?

Most search engines will tell you 'no'. Like in the case of Google, it has secret rules and complex formulae to allow them to rank a page largely by popularity, in order to return the best results for any given search. Yahoo and others have tried to replicate the 'intelligence' in the search but failed.

With cuil.com, they hope to leapfrog Google with something even more advanced to give better results by topic relevance and not mere popularity. The key difference is that it tries to understand and merge 3 things together...

• The context of your search statement or question

• The context of the contents in the 121billion web pages Cuil claims to index. (That is almost 4 times to what observers estimate what Google is indexing today)

• The context of the pictures in those web pages they index

The result is supposed to be more intelligent search results that are accompanied by relevant pictures.

These guys just launched this service, and will have some fine tuning of the algorithms to do. And so far, the results have been quite amusing. There are spot-on hits, and quite a number of misses as well!

For fun, I did a number of searches and here are some of the results:

Search #1 - a famous, iconic brand, such as IBM.

• Subjects closely related to the company are neatly organized into sections with helpful descriptions on the subjects giving user a preview of what to expect

• Explore by Category box conveniently provides further related topics organized in neat sub-categories

• The images that accompany the results look quite 'normal' initially until you start looking at them closely, and you realize that some of the items (See the 'previous' button?) don't quite belong there
  

Search #2 - Topic of the day, e.g. White Knight Two (dunno what's that? Read my next post coming soon!)

• First result got the correct subject, but the picture showed a white orchid (probably of a similar name). Another shows the knight chess piece!
  

• Subsequent ones had the correct picture but the subject was totally different

• Get this, there's even a picture promoting Japanese AV (porno) title (see bottom right)! Just how that is related to a space ship is beyond me!! In fact, The Register had also reported something similar, in that the search for a French academician resulted with gay photos!!
  

Search #3 - Local blogging personalities - Paul Tan (motoring blogger)

• Successfully showed his blog as the first search result! Not bad.
  

• Seems to share the same penchant as Google to display results from Wikipedia (which isn't necessarily a bad thing!!)

• Interestingly, the Explore by Category box decided to list down things related to Malaysia instead. Quite a nifty feature and pleasant surprise

Search #4 - Local blogging personalities - Kenny Sia (er, famous blogger?)

• Lists other bloggers or articles talking about him, but interestingly, does not show Kenny's actual blog! Poor Kenny!
  

Go ahead, try it yourself and have some fun. Do tell me if you get any interesting results!! :) ==> Cuil.com

You think you can survive a hard disk crash?

If you think about it, its kinda like the subject of death.

Everybody knows that it is bound to happen. Its just a matter of time, some say. Yet, people would rather not think about it... and hope that its something that happens only to 'other people'. And even if you do prepare for it, or think you are for such an event, it is never pleasant and the results, often devastating!

Ouch!

But life goes on!! Really. Unless you're resigned to good 'ole paper letters, listening to music from vinyl or CDs, watching in VHS of DVD movies and storing all your photos in reams of hardcopy albums, you're bound to have emails, MP3s, AVIs and JPGs which you need to store in the hard disk in your PC.

The obvious answer, to protect yourself from losing data in a crash, is of course to backup. And there are loads of backup solutions our there which you can use. Just Google for "freeware backup software" or some derivative of that and you'll find more solutions than you need. Or, if you're too lazy, you can find a few useful ones here.

However, I have a problem with the way most backup software works. Typically they take a complete backup of whatever it is you need to protect. And then, you'll need to do periodic backs to ensure the latest data get saved as well.

The simplest way is to do a fresh backup every time. That means you backup an entire copy of everything you have (both old and new files) into a new backup image. Its simple, it has everything in one image. But doing full backups take a lot of time and a lot of storage space. You'd have to be super kiasu, super kiasi, and super rich to afford the storage for such a solution.

The alternative is to do a one-time full backup of what you have at that time. And for the newer files, you do incremental backs. The software cleverly figures out what is it that has changed since your last backup and stores only those.

That cuts down on the massive storage you need. But now, if you need to restore the data, you'll need the original image plus all the incremental backups to be able to restore things completely.

Oh and depending on the software, you may not be able to access the individual files from your backup unless you restore the full image. Which is a major drag if what you need is just to get one single item from your years of backup!

Having fun yet?

Someone forgot to backup?

Honestly, I have never bothered with this kind of backup!

What I really need is to be able to have a copy of the same thing onto another hard disk; and be able to access that backup the same way I would access my main data. In other words, what I need is a 'mirror'.

This is where I introduce to what is likely the BEST MICROSOFT TOOL for this kind of needs. This tool is very simple to use... small and lightweight... fast... its been around and has been running reliably for me... and best of all, its FREE.

Friends, if you don't already know what I'm talking about... its the one of MS' best kept secret, the MS SyncToy.

What it allows you to do is to create 'folder pairs'. And you have a choice of using 5 different relationships between the pair of folders to achieve what you need to do.

• Synchronize - Whatever you do on each side of the folder pair is replicated to the other side. Useful when you need to work on both folders and want all your changes to be reflected to the other side.

• Echo - Like the above but synchronization only happens one way. (MS describes it as from the 'left' or source folder to the 'right' or target folder)
  

• Subscribe - Like Echo, but this time it is from 'right' to 'left'
  

• Contribute - Like Echo, but if you delete a file from 'left', the same file on the 'right' is left untouched
  

• Combine - Like Synchronize except renames and deletes are not replicated over

Simple-to-use interface

It just take a minute to set up your folder to be backed up. And running it requires just another click. The initial run for a new folder pair will make an exact copy of whatever is it you have on your souce folder. For subsequent refreshes, SyncToy intelligently and very quickly scans through and only picks out the updated files to act upon.

A couple of pre-requisites though.... Firstly, you need to have the MS .NET Framework for SyncToy to work. (yeah, groan!) Secondly, get yourself a second hard disk. It wouldn't be much of a backup if you copied your data back onto the *same* hard disk, right?


Still wondering if you can survive a hard disk crash?

If you already have a backup solution, PLEASE continue and be diligent in backing up!

If you don't have one, then give MS SyncToy a try -- you'd stand to lose more by not doing anything!

This tool isn't perfect though!

After a while of using it -- especially if you're not careful with configuring your folder pairs -- you'd end up with the potential problem of having too many duplicate files in your target folder. Its not life-threatening or anything!! Just an annoyance.

But fret not, in my next post, I'll talk to you about another nifty tool to fix this problem!