Upgrading Removable Storage on Android Device

Upgrading your removal storage (microSD) on your Android is really easy. Just unmount, remove the microSD, copy all the files from the old card to the new microSD card, install the new card into your Android device. Android will detect the card and mount it automatically. Ignore the messages to format the card. You are done.

I just did this on my Android phone upgrading from the 2GB microSD card that come with the phone to a larger 8GB Sansdisk microSD card I had laying around. I copied the files from the old card to a local folder on my Mac, then copied the files onto the new microSD card. There is no proprietary DRM or other stuff on the removable storage that Android creates so is really straight forward. Good to know. This should also work on any Android tablet.

Google News Badges is something different

These kind of bring gaming to reading News, good strategy. See the Shareable News badges post. This kind of makes reading news a bit of a game for online news junkies.

Google+ First Impressions

I was provided a Google+ invitation in the first week of the Google+ launch. After activating my account and using it for the past week, I can say that this thing has potential. I really like the Circles features and how it is nicely integrated into my Google Docs and Android mobile phone. I think Google has finally developed a social networking product and applied its lessons learned form past failed attempts (Buzz, Wave) and even learned a few lessons from its competitors (Twitter, Facebook). Powering Google+ is Java on server-side, Javascript (using Closure framework), and some HTML5 on the client-side (Google+ Technological Details). For storage it uses BigTable and Colossus (Google Filesystem v2). The technical details are discussed here. The technology stack employed by Google+ definitely provides evidence based on scalability lessons learned from Twitter who started off using Ruby on Rails (RoR) for everything and has been spending the past few years migrating their server-side processes towards Scala (language that runs on a JVM) for performance reasons. Twitter still uses RoR for client-side but has since migrated its server-side infrastructure to Scala.

You can read about the Google+ ‘buzz’ (no pun intended) all over the web these past few weeks. The adoption rate is even at a respectable level, 10 million users in the past two-weeks (see Google+ grows to 10 Million Users). The question now is, can it become a viable social platform for all of Google’s apps and services. Based on what I have seen, I think yes. And the really important part is that Google is just starting to rev up its enterprise integration services leveraging Google+. This will be an interesting evolution to watch.

Google+ Technology

Behind the scenes of the recently launched Google+ project is Java, Javascript, and some HTML5 as per mentioned in the Google+ Technological Details article. Interesting that they use Java on the server-side, Javascript and HTML5 on the client-side. Google has learned some lessons from Twitter and Facebook on this implementation. They are also using BigTable and Colossus which is Google's real-time indexing system.