ResearchBuzz

I thought the Internet was the Internet, but you can also consider the Internet as “the Cloud”. And there’s a lot going on in “the Cloud,” from applications to hosting to content delivery systems. Several companies provide products and services to the Cloud, and Cloudbook has a directory of over 1200 of them.

(If, like me, you are somewhat confused about what Cloud computing is, Wikipedia can give you an overview. There’s also a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg that helped me understand it better.)

So anyway, the Cloudbook Products and Services Directory is available at http://www.cloudbook.net/directories/products-services-directory. The products and services listed there are divided into several broad categories, including applications, platforms, and network services. I decided to take a look at the applications and got a list of subcategories that included sales, marketing, data, collaboration, and human resources.

The “Collaboration” subcategory seemed interesting so I looked at that. I got a list of companies and basic description of the services. Some of them I had heard of (Zoho, Basecamp, SmugMug) and some I had not (Brainshark, GoView, etouches). Applications are listed in company name’s alphabetical order, not application name alphabetical order, which can be a bit confusing at first.

I still don’t quite understand what makes Cloud computing different from, say, applications that happen to be hosted on the Internet, but maybe I’ll get a better idea by exploring this directory. I was interested to see that this site was supposed to have more listings for government and research clouds as well as cloud groups, but alas, every one of the links I tried led me to a 404 error….

After my writeup about Calendar Labs last week, I got a note from reader MF about Sunrise Sunset Calendars, available at http://www.sunrisesunset.com/. This site has apparently been around for years and years, but either I hadn’t heard about it before or I’d heard about it and forgotten. The site allows you to create your own custom sunrise/sunset calendar. The front page also has sunrise and sunset times for selected sites all over the world.

The direct link for creating your own calendar is http://www.sunrisesunset.com/custom_srss_calendar.asp. Choose a city, a month for which you want a calendar, and a few options (kinds of twilight to display, whether you want moon phases, time type, etc.) Once you enter all that you get a no-frills calendar that prints on one page in landscape format.

This is going to be handy to figure out when I can go exercise when it’s actually light outside! A useful application, though if you’re looking for sunrise/sunset information for individual days, I would recommend Wolfram|Alpha (do a search for February 3 1931 sunrise in 90210 at http://www.wolframalpha.com and you’ll get both sunrise information and a time calculation.)

A hat tip and block of suet to Zen Birdfeeder, which tipped me off to the new release from the New York State Ornithological Association. The NYSOA has released its quarterly journal, The Kingbird, as a free searchable archive. The current archive contains 228 issues that span from 1950-2007 — that’s about 8 million words on almost 16,000 pages. You can get direct access to the journals at http://nybirds.org/KBsearch.htm.

This is a nice setup they’ve got organized on this page. You can browse through a list of the issues and download the ones you want (they’re PDF files and about 8MB each.) There are also four indexes you can download instead, if you’re looking for several things. And, there’s a keyword search engine too. There’s a specify query syntax to find regional reports and wildcards are supported.

I did a search for suet and got 212 results, from “A Sparrow Hawk Dines on Suet” to “Region 5 – Fall 1971″. The snippet with the search results only gives you a little context, and unless the date is referred to in the article title you’re going to have to figure out the issue of the Kingbird that’s being found via the file name on the PDF. Yup, these search results return pages as PDF files, though it doesn’t seem to be a problem. I wanted to check out “Short-eared Owls in a Suburban Housing Development” and the PDF downloaded quickly and was readable once I increased the zoom to about 150% (at 100% it was not readable at all on this monitor.)

Nicely done, NYSOA! A large archive of bird data that’s very easy to both browse and search through.