HP Enterprise Services says its new 360,00 sq. ft. Wynyard center is 40 percent more energy-efficient than conventional data centers thanks to its harnessing of wind to lower temperatures of IT equipment and plant rooms.

Data centers are known to be electrical power hogs and major carbon emissions culprits. Traditional data centers use thousands of megawatt of electricty per year. Much of that energy usage and emissions are the result of cooling systems. HP’s data center, is trying to take a more intelligent approach by harnessing the natural cold winds.

The system keeps the hall at a constant 24 degrees Celsius, or approximately 75 degrees Fahrenheit. The outside temperature only rises above that for about 20 hours per year. (The facility uses traditional chillers for those occasions.)

By 2011, HP expects the average U.K. data center to spend $15.33 million per year on cooling systems. That means efficiency and going green is a smart financial move, too.

Here’s how Wynyard cut its carbon footprint:

• Eight 2.2 meter-diameter steel and plastic fans in each of the four halls in the data center are used to supply air. Another eight are used to exhaust air.
• A mixing chamber in the facility recirculates air to maintain conditions in the 5m-high pressurized plenum, or cavity, below the computer equipment.
• There are 8,100 square meters of technical space at an average capacity of 2,260 watts per square meter to a tier 3 standard.
• Humidification and cooling coils in the data center tune the outside air condition, while modular filters remove contaminants.
• The facility is harvesting rainwater, which it filters and stores in 80,000-liter tanks. It uses this water to maintain proper humidity levels in the air that’s brought in from outside.
• The facility uses light-colored server racks because they reflect light, allowing for 40 percent less lighting to be installed compared to using black cabinets.

The average price per kilowatt-hour? About $0.117, which will save Wynyard approximately $1.4 million per hall with a carbon footprint of “less than half” the competition.

Recently, I came across a great website, Icon Finder, which allows you to search for icon for almost every application. IconFinder.com allows you to search through a huge database of  almost 124,176 icons.

All you need to do is type the name of the application or a web service and it will show you all the available icons available in the database.

The site has a very clean and uncluttered interface that makes it easy to find anything you want!

Taking occasional backup of your data is relatively easy to do, you can simply copy your important files to a CD, DVD or a flash pen/memory card. If you have a lot of data you might want to also consider getting an external drive to hold all your precious data. For more vital data, one should also consider storing backup copies of the same data off site, in case of physical damage due to fire, floods, explosions or earthquakes.

The main problem is to actually remember to do your back-ups! One could opt in to a simple reminder on your schedulers or cell phones, however the best option would be to install a backup software to handle this task for you.

Some time ago, we reviewed GFI backup, a FREE and easy to use backup software that could help you manage such a mundane task. You can read the review here or take action now, and get started on your backups! Click here to download GFI Backup for FREE.

How could Nokia do this? The Nokia n97 has been released just under 2 months ago, and they come up with an announcement of a newer… much better phone! Don’t get me wrong… I haven’t regretted buying the N97 at all, it works great and I love everything about it. However as of today, I think this was probably the worst purchase ever.

The new phone features a different operating system than the Nokia’s usual Symbian OS – which probably means that Nokia might be slowly moving now towards the Linux powered Maemo 5 operating system.

The N97 features:

• a much improved touch screen navigation using the Maemo OS
• faster CPU (600mhz)
• more RAM to handle the current running applications
• improved graphics performance with PowerVR SGX with OpenGL ES 2.0 support

So if you are currently craving to buy a Nokia N97 just wait! STOP! you’d be better off waiting until October when the N900 is planned for release.

Twitter 2.0 – my vision for a better twitter.

I’ve taken some time to write this post and write my ideas on how twitter can be improved and did my best to create a cheat proof system that would allow twitter users to have a better experience. I’ve taken my points and joined Twitter, digg and eBay to finally create the system below.

• Voting buttons – (digg style) – the voting buttons on the side of the picture would allow the people who receive the tweet to vote on it’s value. A person that finds the value useful can vote for it. The second button is to add to favourites, and the bottom button is to rate the post as spam.
• Score Bar – The score bar calculates the percentage of good value posts together with the posts considered as spam, and creates a user score. – this however should be calculated only based on the user tweets, and not in any way relative to other users. It can also be calculated according to a certain time period (Say 30 days). I got the idea from the eBay seller rating.
• User States – Active, Silent or Disabled – Any users that are within set target user score would be the normal active users, silent users are those who get below a set user score threshold and are therefore punished by switching them to silent mode, where they can only receive tweets, or maybe limit the URL posting capabilities. any users who end up in silent mode for an x amount of times will be disabled – and probably considered as spammy accounts.
• User grouping – this is an additional feature that I think would enhance Twitter’s usability a lot. There should be an easy way to categorise the people you follow into groups. Like for example – twitter users who talk about technology, some might be bloggers, some might be companies and organisations etc…

In my opinion, these are all great ideas that could be incredibly useful for all users and to have a better experience while using twitter. Let me know what you think on the above points in the comment area. I do have a lot more ideas on how twitter can be improved… but ill write those up in another post later on. I’m looking forward to hear your thoughts!

• Slow – the iPhone has become slower and slower with every OS upgrade. Every time I noticed that the applications would work slower than my grandma on a good day! Scrolling sometimes isn’t so smooth and a application hang-ups are becoming very common. A slow device is something i really don’t need.
• Carrier Locked – I travel very often, and I have the need to be connected to the web all the time. With the iPhone you have a great wi-fi connection, however most of the times, this is just not enough. I love to be able to just buy a pay-per-use topup card whenever I travel and be able to use a 3G connectivity everywhere I go. With the iPhone, you are locked to one provider, and any other sim card wont work! (unless you unlock).
• On screen keyboard – Whilst I can’t say the on screen keyboard sucks, it’s just not good enough as a physical keyboard. You have to constantly look at the keyboard to make sure you are touching the right button. A physical keyboard is so much better!
• Battery life – The iPhone’s battery life is just awful. On a normal day use, it can barely stand for a whole day. I need to carry around my charging cables or external battery all the time. And this got even worse with the latest 3.0 firmware. The non-removable battery doesn’t help in this case either.
• No Multitasking and background applications – This is just one of the features I miss the most. On the iPhone, you cant just have a background instant messaging application running, if you want to check your email during a chat session, you have to close the window to switch to something else – this is just so wrong
• Flash support – I’m very surprised that such a capable device has no support for sites that use Flash. It shouldnt be a big deal. There are tons of sites that use flash, and with the iPhone, you just wont see anything.
• Ancient Camera – Come on! only 2mp on the 3G version and 3.5MP on the 3Gs! That is just so encient, and by the way… no flash!
• Apple is too bossy – Apple have the right to decide what apps can go on my phone and which of them cant. I just don’t like that. I wish to have all the applications I want without any restrictions. (Thanks ~Cydia!) Apple can just decide freely to reject any application to their app store and also kill any application.
• Not enough reasons to upgrade to the 3GS - A speed boost, video camera capabilities, magnetic compass, and voice controls are not good enough to make me fork out my cold hard earned cash for a new iPhone – sorry.

Is there anything i messed out? – let me know! I’ll be glad to add more to the list, please list the features that you don’t like in the comment area below.

I will be upgrading to the Nokia N97 very soon (I’m eagerly waiting for it through the post!!), and I will try to do a comparison review between the Apple iPhone and the N97 soon after I try it out for a couple of days.

It surprises me how many website owners don’t realise this, but the web is REALLY world wide. Once you put something online, everyone who is connected to the Internet can see this information.

This fact occurred to me some days ago while browsing around some online shopping sites. I was trying to find a particular product, and I was lucky enough to find a ton of sites that offered this particular item. However, when I was going through the usually painful purchasing options, the sites would not offer shipping outside of their own region/country.

This really surprises me since this information would be best shown to the user well in advance, not right at the end of the purchasing process (that most of the times require a long user account registration form and e-mail address verification!!).

Current technologies allow the sites to understand where the visitor is coming from, and therefore, it would be relatively simple to notify the visitor that the website accessed does not offer any shipping to his current location. If this is not possible due to any imaginable excuse… it would be extremely simple to just add a small banner/image saying that “We only ship to X, Y and Z” No big deal right?

A good example of a website ordering system done right is at www.overstock.com. Once you visit the website, it shows you right near the search bar that shipping to your country is possible. Well done to Overstock for such functionality! On the opposite side, a shopping system done wrong would be Amazon.com. They allow you to browse their entire catalog, and by the time you are almost finished to order, you are taken to a page that informs you that “Sorry, this item cannot be shipped to this address!”. I understand that companies would have some restrictions where they might want to sell their products, however, please do let us know in advance!

This lack of “international” thinking is also often present when certain companies organise events, webinars, web conferences etc… they usually just point out times and dates in their own local format and time zone, whilst completely ignoring other country time zones.

But nothing’s perfect, and some things that keep happening over and over again are some of the reasons that make me cringe or hit something/one

Here’s my list of Twitter Pet Peeves: – in no particular order

• People who only post URLs in their tweets.
• Impersonal auto direct messages when you follow someone (argh!!!)
• Impersonal auto direct messages expecially when you actually started following me first, and I just reciprocated! (double arghhhh!!)
• People who post loads of quotes from popular people… that is just so boring!
• Twitter is all about being social, read other posts, reply and comment back – not just only posting messages regarding yourself or your business.
• People who request information that you can’t send as a public message (like an email address) – and then don’t follow you – you cant send a direct message!
• Constantly mentioning and bragging about your followers count or posting messages about your recent drop of 5 followers and posting messages like… OMG lost 5 followers since yesterday… I wonder why!
• People who like to share EVERYTHING they are doing. example…
• I’m at the bar
  I’m having a beer.
  There’s a hot girl in the bar looking at me, should I go talk to her?
  I’m going to the bathroom first, then ill go talk to her.
  Came out of the bathroom, it smelled awful!
  Walking towards the girl!
  I said hi!
  She said hi, and smiled!
  I offered her a drink, her name is <insert name here>
  She wants a tequila… (hmmm! hardcore!) Nice boobs too!….
  and the story goes on…….!

• Twitterers who just follow to be followed, and then they un-follow you, that’s just LAME.
• I guess you got this a MILLION times – HEY, I just found a method how to get 16,000 visitors in a month! Visit this page for more details – its expecially bad when you receive this from a user with just a handful of followers… LAME!
• Horrid, very busy, overly colourful or very badly made profile background. eww!
• People posting a tweet with all the top trending topics hash tags in one message… whats the point??
• Site functionality pet peeve – when you press enter in the message box on top, it should be posted immediately! you have to manually click the update button!!
• Negativity! – If you had a bad experience with a company, its OK if you post a message explaining your bad experience. You should however post a follow up if the issue was resolved.
• Longitude and latitude for location – who cares really?
• Integrating your twitter feed into Facebook – That is SO bad! I wonder what your Facebook friends who are not familiar with twitter will be saying when they will start seeing stuff like RT @whoever , and #whatever!
• Welcoming every new follower you get. “Welcome, @john, @steve, @tracy, @wholefoods, etc…”

There are plenty more, but i’m leaving this open to some discussion, please post your worst pet peeves in the comments area below, and ill post them in an updated list, together with your twitter link (if you post it together with your comment of course!)

Feel free to start following me on – http://www.twitter.com/codem

2. You live for months in a 10×10 room with someone you barely know who you fear might kill you while you sleep.

3. You always talk about what life will be like once you’re out.

4. You get excited when the cafeteria serves you something resembling real food.

5. You take classes that are completely useless to you in the real world.

6. Everyone around you is an amateur philosopher or poet (or coke dealer).

7. You’re looked at as a scourge on the community.

8. Beer is more valuable than money.

9. Riots are a usual occurence.

10. You try to make friends that can help you ‘on the outside’.

11. You only go outside for an hour a day.

And of course…

12. If you go in unprepared you’re probably going to get f*cked in the ass.

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