Thursday, November 29, 2007

Junee Rhythm'n'Rail Festival


The first annual "Junee Rhythm 'n Rail" festival will be held on the weekend of 7 - 9 March 2008. The festival will be a celebration of Junee's strong railway history and of the depth of artistic talent in the area.

Vintage and steam trains will bring visitors from such places as Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Griffith and Cowra. Organisers estimate some 2,000 - 3,000 people will visit the town with accommodation provided by local hotels and motels, private homes and Tent City.

Local organisations have the opportunity to benefit directly whilst helping to make the festival a success. Proceeds from the festival will go to local drought relief charities, CanAssist and Variety Australia.

Broadway Museum will be assisting in the festival by conducting a display of handmade knitted, crocheted or woven rugs. So bring along your Granny Rugs, your Baby Rugs, or even your Fanciest Rugs. Prizes will be presented in four categories - Prettiest, Most Popular, Oldest and Most Unusual.

Three days of activities have been organised with two Guinness Book of Records attempts to be held on Saturday 8th March. The first is a record attempt for the Longest Licorice String, and second, a record attempt for the most guitars playing a single tune. Junee's Vaughan Logan has written a piece of music for many guitars to be played in the attempt.

If you can help in any way, want tickets, need accommodation, want to join in the record-breaking guitar playing attempt, or just want to know more about it, please vist the Rhythm'n'Rail website and use the contact form.


This article has been cross-posted on Toni's Corner of the World.

Monday, November 12, 2007

How Quickly the Years Pass



Friday, November 09, 2007

History of the Search Engine - What Came Before Google?

I read an article today that I thought was quite interesting and have reproduced it here in the hope that you, too, find it informative.

Although we credit Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines for giving us the system we use to find the information we seek, the concept of hypertext came to life in 1945 when Vannaver Bush urged scientist to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all man kind. He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex.

But there is a long list of great minds that have given us the information system we now use today. This article illustrates some of them. Here is the History of the Search Engine:

Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963. His goal with Project Xanadu was to create a computer network with a simple user interface that solved many social problems like attribution. While Ted's project Xanadu, for reasons unknown, never really took off, much of the inspiration to create the WWW came from Ted's work.

George Salton
George Salton was the father of modern search technology. He died in August of 1995. His teams at Harvard and Cornell developed the Saltons Magic Automatic Retriever of Text, otherwise known as the SMART informational retrieval system. It included important concepts like the vector space model, Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), Term Frequency (TF), term discrimination values, and relevancy feedback mechanisms. His book A theory of indexing explains many of his tests. Search today is still based on much of his theories. History of the search engine uses some of the same techniques even today.

Alan Emtage
In 1990 a student at McGill University in Montreal, by the name of Alan Emtage created Archie; the first search engine. It was invented to index FTP archives, allowing people to quickly access specific files. Archie users could utilize Archie's services through a variety of methods including e-mail queries, telneting directly to a server, and eventually through the World Wide Web interfaces. Archie only indexed computer files. With Archie, Alan Emtage helped to solve the data scatter problem. Originally, it was to be named archives but was changed to Archie for short.

Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill
Archie gained such popularity that in 1991 Paul Linder and Mark P. McCahill created a text based information browsing system that uses a menu-driven interface to pull information from across the globe to the user's computer. Named for the Golden Gophers mascot at the University of Minnesota, the name is fitting, because Gopher tunnels through other Gophers located in computers around the world, arranging data in a hierarchical series of menus, which users can search for specific topics.

Tim Berners-Lee
Up until 1991 until there was no World Wide Web. The main method of sharing information was via FTP. Tim Berners-Lee wanted to join hypertext with the internet. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire (a prototype created with help from Robert Cailliau) to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor, called WorldWideWeb, and developed on NeXTSTEP. He then created the first Web server called httpd, short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon.

The first Web site built was at: http://info.cern.ch/ and was first put online on August 6, 1991. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994. Tim also created the Virtual Web library which is the oldest catalogue of the web. The history of the search engine is a fascinating story.

About the Author: Jeff Casmer is an internet marketing consultant and work at home business owner. For more information on search engines optimization please visit his "Top Ranked" Improve Search Engine Rankings Directory gives you all the information you need to Work at Home in the 21st century.

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