Swivel through your photos

Posted by Jason Holt, Software Engineer for Street View

Ever marveled at the way many retail sites create 360 views of products? Now you can bring your own photo albums to life by clicking and dragging left and right on a photo in full screen mode. This works especially well if you put an object on a turntable, but even if you're not looking to create a 3-D effect, it also provides a unique browsing experience for albums in general, like our featured shots from the 2010 Winter games.



This feature is available in our embedded album viewer, or if you prefer to host a viewer and images on your own site, check out the Swivel Viewer site at code.google.com, where you'll find an Open Source embeddable album viewer that also supports zooming and panning.

Through the Looking Glass: How to Brush Up on BGP

As someone who himself is looking for employment, I can't stress the importance of keeping your skill set sharp. Of course, unless you are working for a Tier-1 service provider, it may not be possible to keep skills such as BGP as sharp as they need to be for today's job market.

Fortunately, as is usually the case, there is a solution in looking-glass and route servers.

Just do a search for "looking-glass server" and you will come across sites such as traceroute.org, which will provide you with a list of servers to which you can connect.

For example, choosing the route server CerfNet Route Server (AS1838) will open a Terminal session on a Mac (on a PC, however, it will open whatever telnet program you are using). Once you click on the link to open the route server, Terminal (or your telnet program) will open with the following prompt:

route-server>

From this prompt, you can now begin to look at the BGP configuration of this device:

route-server>sho ip bgp summ
BGP router identifier 12.129.193.235, local AS number 1838
BGP table version is 1, main routing table version 1

Neighbor        V    AS MsgRcvd MsgSent   TblVer  InQ OutQ Up/Down  State/PfxRcd
12.129.192.1    4 17233       0       0        0    0    0 never    Active
12.129.192.2    4 17233       0       0        0    0    0 never    Active
134.24.13.2     4 64512 1287988 1287776        1    0    0 11w1d           0
134.24.13.3     4 64512 1287990 1287784        1    0    0 16w4d           0
route-server>

You can try different commands, either from the route servers or the looking glass servers and KEEP YOUR BGP SKILLS SHARP!

Dominic Nahr: Travels Through Islam

Photo © Dominic Nahr-Courtesy TIME

With good reason, I've become skeptical of mainstream Western magazines abilities or interest to present non-stereotypical (and non-judgmental) features dealing with Islam, but I found TIME International's Travel Through Islam five-part series in its Summer Journey issue, to be interesting and insightful.

In this first installment, photographer Dominic Nahr followed the footsteps of famed 14th century explorer and traveler Ibn Battuta into sub-Saharan Africa. In February 1352, Ibn Battuta set off from the city of Sijilmasa at the edge of the Sahara to journey with a camel caravan to lands far to the south.

A few years ago, I was fascinated by Ibn Battuta (whose full name is Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battuta), and read anything I could find about his life and his travels, to the point that I went to the New York Public Library to read some older manuscripts.

Ibn Battuta's journeys took almost thirty years and covered almost the entire known Islamic world and beyond, extending from North Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, to the Middle East, Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East, a distance far surpassing that of his predecessors and his near-contemporary Marco Polo.

For an interesting book on Ibn Battuta and his exploits, Tim Mackintosh-Smith followed the traveler's footsteps as well, and wrote Travels With A Tangerine. Not to be confused with the fruit, Tangerine is a resident of Tangiers...as Ibn Battuta was.