Posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 1:16 am by Philip Devitt
It’s been over a fortnight since a bout of “man-flu” knocked me for six, infact there was a half written blog that I’ve just deleted which I never got around to completing or publishing while attempting to stem the river of mucus that seemed to eminate from most of my front facing orafices - it was not a pleasant sight to behold. In typical fashion I only really started to feel better on the Sunday evening which pretty much meant that my Friday night and Saturday were ruined; being ill on work time is almost forgivable, but being ill on my own time ? Obviously these bugs have NO sense of fairplay.
I’ve been trying, and may I add failing, to do less geek-like things; for some reason I have a strange notion that building a distributed filesystem similar to the one used by Google is the way of the future and have in some small way been trying to emulate the filey goodness of the Lord Google using the Java language. My first port of call was obviously to see what else was out there by using that most hallowed of search engines, the Good Lord Google itself. Surprisingly enough some people have tried something similar, the Nutch project attempts to implement an entire Google-like search engine, complete with it’s own distributed filesystem and distributed processing model. Quite how successfully it implements it I’m not really prepared to say, but I’ve not managed to get the distributed file system to work in any sensible manner.
St. Patrick’s night was the final nudge which tipped me off the waggon; how selfish of an entire nation to coerce me into buying and consuming pint after pint of their finest stout ale. I suppose it was a good excuse to go and see my old friend and favourite web enterpreneur at his local Irish club. It was during this meeting that we came across the idea of creating little pixel banner adverts somewhat similar to the Million Dollar Website idea. An example of the idea can be seen at the top of the side bar to the right.