I mentioned in a previous blog entry that a photo I'd taken was currently doing the rounds - and here it is.
It's a 720 megapixel image of Sydney Harbour, made by combining 169 individual photos from a 6.2 megapixel Canon 10D.
Click here or on the photo below and you'll be able to view the full image, including the ability to zoom in further than you'd think possible
You may not have heard the term viral marketing, but you've almost certainly experienced it, and most likely even played a part in it's spread.
Virtal Marketing is what we used to call word of mouth, grown up for the Internet. It's where a marketing company relys on others to spread their message using the Internet - blogs, web forums, usenet, websites, etc. In order to do this, they need to come up with something with a high coolness factor - something that people will want to share with others.
Many Australians will be aware of the Carlton Draft "Big Ad", which was released on the net 2 weeks before it was first played on TV. In that 2 week window it was downloaded from the internet over a million times - before it even appeared once on TV! How did they do this? Google for "carlton draught" "big ad" and you'll see how - almost 37,000 pages containing these terms, most of them blogs or other user-created websites.
About 3 weeks ago I discovered first-hand exactly how viral marketing works. It all started innocently enough - a webpage containing a photo I had taken of Sydney Harbour. It wasn't exactly your average photo - but more about that in a later blog entry.
I put the photo on a webpage, and told almost exactly nobody. I emailed the URL to a few friends, and pasted it to 2 IRC channels with collectively about 20 active people on them. A few days later I checked my weblogs and noticed that I was getting some hits from http://forums.overclockers.com.au/ - someone from one of the IRC channels has posted the URL into the forum. A few hundred hits over a few days - I thought nothing more of it.
A few days later I checked the logs again, and found that I was now setting hits from a few dozen different blogs and forums. These ones hadn't come directly from me, but were 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation of people forwarding on the link, and were resulting in around a thousand visitors per day.
Over the next 2 weeks things escalated a little. First it was digg.com, then the New York Times website, and literally thousands of others (well over 3000 different refering URLs at last count). The few hundred visitors has grown to over 400,000 visits, and over 3/4Tb of traffic.
Let me say that again - I gave the URL to around 30 people, maybe half of whom bothered to look at it. Through word of mouth those 15-odd people passed it onto, directly and indirectly, almost half a million people! All with a marketing budget of exactly $0.
Try doing that without the Internet!
Anyone that has ever raised a call with Sun Support will know of Explorer - it's the tool we use to collect a snapshot of the state of a system to assist in supporting that system.
A few days ago we successfully released Explorer 5.5, which is now available at http://sunsolve.sun.com/explorer along with a list of changes and documentation.
One of the biggest features in this version is something people have been asking for for a while - the ability to automatically upload an Explorer to Sun over HTTPS.
When configuring Explorer 5.5 it will ask :
If you answer "y", then uploading Explorer to Sun is as simple as running "explorer -P".
At this stage you can't set a proxy server in Explorer itself, but it will honor the "HTTPS_PROXY" environment variable, so you can run it as follows :
You can also set it by adding a HTTPS_PROXY entry to the /etc/opt/SUNWexplo/explorer/default file, but keep in mind that this will be overwritten if you reconfigure Explorer.
Well it's been over 2 years since I first created this blog, so I've decided it's about time I actually start writing something in it!
So who am I? I'm a System Support Engineer (SSE) working in Support Services, based in Sydney, Australia. Exactly what the SSE position entails varies a bit over the world, but here in Australia SSE's are the people who look after most of the support for Sun systems under Platinum support, especially for bigger customers. I like to think I push the limit of what an SSE does a bit more than most - hopefully you'll get to see what I mean as I post more here...