Lewis Hamilton shows us inside the McLaren Technology Centre
Lewis gives us a tour in this interesting video showing the inside of the McLaren Technology Centre. The first thing I noticed is it is clinically clean. Check out the ‘clear desk’ policy later on in the video!! How can anyone work somewhere that tidy!?! That isn’t natural.
Lewis comes across as a easy going guy and completely different compared to when he is hounded by the press asking stupid questions trying to catch him out.
P.S The video looks very new, I think it was filmed the week after the Bahrain GP 2009 (end of April).
The Stig on Street View
LOL. Top Gear’s ‘The Stig’ has been spotted in the BBC Centre on Street View:
Google Street View UK
I am truly fascinated by the brilliantness of Google Street View in the UK that has recently been made live. The quality of the images is amazing. I really want to know how many photos are stitched together to cover just the handful of cities in the UK. How do they get lined up so perfectly? How much storage space do they take up? Fascinating stuff.
Anyway, here is a warm welcome from someone in Edinburgh 
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Google Maps Gems
Still my favourite application on the internet, Google Maps has thrown up some more gems. ‘Time’ had a great article highlighting some of the best ones. Here is my favourite; Where Planes Go To Die (zoom out for full effect):
Google Maps is unique. There is so much data that I reckon people will be finding odd and interesting landmarks for years to come. Once ‘maps’ has been exhausted then people still have Street View to trawl through. I can still lose hours at a time to Maps, Street View and Earth. This is what the internet is about 
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‘Minority Report’ technology is here
I remember watching Minority Report when it was released and being blown away by the technology in the film, most notably the whole futuristic User Interaction (UI) thing. When the characters were using their hands on clear ‘windows’ (physical, not MSFT) it looked so natural and intuitive.
Oblong Industries Inc has created a real world representation of this futuristic UI. One of the founders was the science advisor for Minority Report so it is no coinicidence in the similarities. Here is a demo:
Heathrow T5 and Google Maps
My Google Maps fascination continues. Terminal 5 at Heathrow is a masterpiece of engineering. The logistics and challenges were mind boggling. For instance, they couldn’t build the new control tower in place due to disruption. So they built it at the edge of the airport and moved (?) it in one piece at night in a 5 hour window of downtime.
Google maps really shows how Heathrow is like a well oiled ‘machine’. The maps show so much detail, it is quite fascinating. Terminal 5 was a work in progress when the mapping plane took the photos. Here is hoping for updated images soon.
As a side note, Microsoft Live Maps has a stunning bird’s eye view of Heathrow. This is even more detailed than Google Maps. The fact you can rotate the viewpoint still amazes me.
Who will win the Formula One drivers title?
Google Earth Gigapxl photo viewing
This is what the internet was designed for. I’m speechless at this, you read it right that is a 1000 megapixel image. Or put another way you would need a video wall of 10,000 television screens to capture as much information as that contained in a single exposure (!?).
Load up Google Earth 4.3 and in the sidebar find Layers then drilldown through ‘Gallery’ and turn on ‘Gigapxl Photos’.
Now look for a mountain icon with binoculars and click to bring up the dialogue. Finally, click ‘Fly into this ultra high-resolution photo’. Now you can move and zoom all the way into the photo using normal Google Earth controls. Truly astonishing level of detail.
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- Locations of Gigapxl images
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- Finding the Gigapxl images layer
Backups and robocopy
After many years of computing I thought it would be a good idea to back my data up properley instead of ad-hoc CD burns here and there. I opted for a 120GB Western Digital Passport USB hard drive. Couldn’t be easier to use just plug in and copy your data. What I decided to do was employ a tool I use at work which is part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools. The tool in question is robocopy. If you are using XP then you can install the toolkit to gain access to robocopy. If you are on Vista it is part of the OS, just type robocopy at a command prompt.
This tool is great for copying large amounts of data between servers. It is robust and has plenty of options. <geek> Best of all it gives you stats at the end of the copy.</geek>
If you want, you can get robocopy to ‘mirror’ (/MIR) your data between target (usb disk) and source (main disk). This works both ways though, if you delete a file of the source it will delete it off the target aswell! One other thing to note about robocopy is that it copies at the folder level.
An example command would be: robocopy /s /e /r:1 c:\mydata e:\backup\mydata
This command copies c:\mydata and all subfolders including empty ones to e:\backup\mydata retrying a file copy once if fails. This assumes c: is your internal local hard disk and e: is your external disk.
Copy the above command for each of your other main folders on your system, stick it in a .cmd script file and schedule it to run monthly with task scheduler andyou are well away to a clean backup solution.
Media Converter – the free online audio and video converter
Media Converter is an awesome tool. Great for downloading and converting YouTube videos for your portable media player. Also able to just rip the audio from a video. Find a music video on YouTube you like and you can rip the audio to an MP3 file! Great stuff.
