Julia meets HTML 5

Today, we launched Julia Map on Google Labs, a fractal renderer in HTML 5. Julia sets are fractals that were studied by the French mathematician Gaston Julia in the early 1920s. Fifty years later, Benoît Mandelbrot studied the set z2 − c and popularized it by generating the first computer visualisation. Generating these images requires heavy computation resources. Modern browsers have optimized JavaScript execution up to the point where it is now possible to render in a browser fractals like Julia sets almost instantly.

Julia Map uses the Google Maps API to zoom and pan into the fractals. The images are computed with HTML 5 canvas. Each image generally requires millions of floating point operations. Web workers spread the heavy calculations on all cores of the machine.

We hope you will enjoy exploring the different Julia sets, and share the URLs of the most artistic images you discovered. See what others have posted on Twitter under hashtag #juliamap. Click on the images below to dive in to infinity! (Supported on Chrome 8, Firefox 3.6, Safari 5 and above).

Posted by Daniel Wolf, Software Engineer

Last Public Comment About Reviews From Google

It has been 83 days 21 hours 33 minutes 5 seconds, since Google last publicly commented on their losing of business reviews.

Since that time, reports of Google losing business reviews continue to come in. From both personal experience and reports that flow into the forums, it is clear the Google has yet to solve the lost review problems. It is clearly not one problem but several.

For SMB’s, the only thing worse than Google not fighting review spam, is losing good reviews. Not only do SMBs deserve to have these reviews found, they deserve communication while Google is hunting for them.

Related posts:

  1. When Will Google Places Fix Reviews?
  2. Google Places Reviews Being Lost – Houston We have a Problem!
  3. Google Maps missing reviews returned to rightful owners

Go Daddy Makes The Web Faster by enabling mod_pagespeed

As part of our Make The Web Faster initiative, Google announced the availability of mod_pagespeed, an open-source module for Apache webservers to automatically accelerate the sites they serve. Go Daddy, the top web hosting provider and world’s largest domain name registrar, announced that they would roll out the mod_pagespeed feature for their Linux Web hosting customers. The feature is now available and is in use by Go Daddy customers who have already started to report faster webpage load times.

“Who on the Internet wouldn’t want a faster website?” asked Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. “The benefits of mod_pagespeed are really a slam dunk. It’s built to boost users’ web performance, and ultimately, the bottom line for their business.”

By using several filters that implement web performance best practices, mod_pagespeed rewrites web page resources to automatically optimize their content. The filters improve performance for JavaScript, HTML and CSS, as well as JPEG and PNG images.

Mike Bender, co-creator of photo-blog AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com and Go Daddy customer, detected a 48% decrease, slicing the load time for his image-rich website from 12.8 to 6.6 seconds. mod_pagespeed speeds up the first visit of the site by reducing the payload size and improving compression. Repeat visits are accelerated by making caching more efficient and decreasing the size of resources such as CSS and HTML on the page as demonstrated in this chart (where smaller is faster):

“From the moment we enabled mod_pagespeed, the difference was noticeable,” said Bender. “It was a simple ‘flick of the switch,’ and the site started loading faster.”

For Go Daddy customers currently using the Linux 4GH web hosting platform, find out how to enable mod_pagespeed for your own website here. Other webmasters can install mod_pagespeed binaries or build directly from source.