VideoClix, a Vancouver-based provider of technologies for clickable interactive video (which it calls "hypervideo"), said last week that it has signed a deal with Dailymotion, a Paris-based company which claims that its flagship broadband video portal is the world's second-largest. According to VideoClix, its technology will provide Dailymotion users with an "active and engaging" experience while providing advertisers with a non-intrusive way to reach their target audience. "This partnership brings clickable video to the masses on a global scale," VideoClix CEO, Babak Maghfourian, said in a prepared statement. "It's a win, win, win for audiences, publishers and advertisers alike."

The following maps represent the first stage of a project I am embarking on to map out some of the spatial contours of Wikipedia. Data were obtained from the August 2009 Wikipedia geodata dump organised by user Kolossos. The information was then ported over to a GIS. There are almost half a million geotagged Wikipedia articles (i.e. Wikipedia articles about a place or an event that occurred in a distinct place), so the preparation time alone for the files needed to create these maps was almost a week.

The Photos application is one of Facebook’s most popular features. Up to date, users have uploaded over 15 billion photos which makes Facebook the biggest photo sharing website. For each uploaded photo, Facebook generates and stores four images of different sizes, which translates to a total of 60 billion images and 1.5PB of storage. The current growth rate is 220 million new photos per week, which translates to 25TB of additional storage consumed weekly. At the peak there are 550,000 images served per second. These numbers pose a significant challenge for the Facebook photo storage infrastructure.

Il est souvent difficile, voire impossible, de communiquer avec Apple. Lokan en a fait l'expérience ce week-end lors de la conférence de presse consacrée à la présentation de l'Apple Store de Montpellier

People also want to know when their friends were nearby, but it's not always convenient to keep checking Latitude to see if a friend has recently shown up near you. After working on this for a while, we realized it wasn't as straightforward as sending a notification every time Latitude friends were near each other. Imagine that you're Latitude friends with your roommate or co-workers. It would get pretty annoying to get a text message every single time you walked in the door at home or pulled into work. To avoid this, we decided to make Location Alerts smarter by requiring that you also enable Location History. Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you're at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you're either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time. Keep in mind that it may take up to a week to learn your "unusual" locations and start sending alerts.

Multiple trips to Japan and constant frustration at being unable to read the language has sparked off an unusual typographic project at johnson banks. Earlier in the year we started seeing if we could combine the English language and Japanese script in some way.

Each Sunday I will introduce a tree, and you will have the week to get to know it. Whenever possible, I will mention several locations where it can be found.

Last week, in conjunction with its latest redesign, Facebook released “suggestions for helping friends,” a feature that aims to get you to assist your friends that don’t appear to be actively using the site and “reconnect” you with old contacts.

One unfortunate side effect of the feature: it started recommending those you’d rather not connect with, and in some cases, deceased friends.

When it comes to releasing source code, I’ve always been torn. I really believe in the philosophy of open source, but I’m intimidated by putting my code out there for everyone to see. Underneath it all, I’m probably scared of being exposed as some kind of a charlatan (”You call that programming?”). So, to pre-empt that possibility, I’ll start by saying this: I’m not a great programmer. My code is clean and fairly well-structured, but don’t expect to find any particularly advanced code wizardry or complicated mathematics. I do, however, think that the projects that I’ll be sharing over the week contain some good ideas, and a lot of helpful techniques. Hopefully you’ll find one or all of them useful.

The logging module defines a standard API for reporting errors and status information from all of your modules. The key benefit of having the logging API provided by a standard library module is that all python modules can participate in logging, so your application log can include messages from third-party modules.