This article from Fire Protection UK suggests that:

The positioning of your fire extinguishers is extremely important as every second counts in an emergency situation and you have to remember that the person trying to find them may be a first time visitor to your premises.

This makes good sense to me.  Additionally Essential Fire Safety add that:

if you can see the whole extinguisher from top to bottom, you probably have good access to it.

County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service offer that extinguishers should be:

in conspicuous positions where persons following an escape route can easily see them

The Fire Safety Advice Centre observe that extinguishers:

should be fixed where they can be easily seen, fixing them inside cupboards or behind doors will only waste valuable time if a fire breaks out.

Much of this advice appears to be based on BS 5306-8:2012, but that costs £68, so I’m not buying that on the basis of being a mildly concerned citizen.

So, given that this appears to be all common sense stuff, why do so many places hide their fire extinguishers?  For example, here’s my local supermarket.  Can you see the whole of the extinguisher from top to bottom?  Is it easily seen and in a conspicuous position so it will be noticed by a first time visitor to the premesis?

Hint: There’s two, nestled behind the blue drag-baskets, next to the stacked charcoal.

Fun times with the ever awesome SREs on reddit answering your questions:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/177267/we_are_the_google_site_reliability_team_we_make/

We are the Google Site Reliability team. We make Google’s websites work. Ask us Anything! : IAmA

Hello, reddit! We are the Google Site Reliability (SRE) team. We’re responsible for the 24×7 operation of Google.com, as well as the technical infras…

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For example, today I got an MS Word document (and I don't have word on any of my 3 machines).  The document was emailed to 20 researchers, saying "here is your new website" please send any modifications by return.

I suppose it's progress… they could have sent it hard copy.

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#apple #bose #appletv

* smashed screen / no backlight – everything else works fine

SomaFM: Christmas Lounge: Chilled holiday grooves and classic winter lounge tracks. (Kid and Parent safe!) Commercial-free, Listener-supported Radio

Christmas Lounge. Chilled holiday grooves and classic winter lounge tracks. (Kid and Parent safe!) Listen: MP3: 128k 56k 32k Firewall/Proxy MP3 Windows Media: 128k 32k Popup Player; Listeners: 2310; N…

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Web browser support for HTML5 Input types, attributes and elements + CSS & JavaScript support:
http://www.wufoo.com/html5/

Wufoo · The Current State of HTML5 Forms

Many browsers are supporting features of HTML5 including much related to forms. This is research on what browsers are doing what with those new features.

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/me starts a some background reading and checks out the potential of using our SCIAMA supercomputer.

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+Dropbox #marketing team: have a gold star and take the rest of the day off.

Dropbox – Great Space Race! – Simplify your life

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!

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Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database

I and many others have been working for the last few years on building a large-scale storage system that can manage data across all of Google's datacenters.  This system underlies Google's advertising system, among other products.  We'll be presenting a paper describing the system (with 26 co-authors!) at OSDI 2012 next month.  We've now put up a web page with a link to the PDF of the final version of the paper.

Feedback is welcome, of course.

Here's the abstract of the paper:

Spanner is Google's scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This paper describes how Spanner is structured, its feature set, the rationale underlying various design decisions, and a novel time API that exposes clock uncertainty. This API and its implementation are critical to supporting external consistency and a variety of powerful features: non-blocking reads in the past, lock-free read-only transactions, and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner.

Google Research Publication: Spanner

Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database James C. Corbett, Jeffrey Dean, Michael Epstein, Andrew Fikes, Christopher Frost, JJ Furman, Sanjay Ghemawat, Andrey Gubarev, Christopher Heiser, Peter …

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JSBooks – free javascript books

JSBooks is a showcase of the bests free ebooks about Javascript. Find here the best publications about your favourite programming langage without spending any bucks !

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textmate

textmate – TextMate is a graphical text editor for OS X 10.7+

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Addy Osmani originally shared this post:

Leak Finder: Memory Leak Detection For JavaScript

If you regularly work on JavaScript web apps, you'll know that we're unlikely to run into memory leaks in the traditional sense, but it is possible to have objects that are unintentionally kept alive and in turn keep others alive (like big parts of the DOM). 

To help discover these leaks, two of my fellow Googlers (+Marja Hölttä and +Jochen Eisinger) have developed a tool that works with the Chrome Developer Tools (specifically, the remote inspection protocol) and retrieves heap snapshots and detects what objects are causing leaks. 

There's more information (and a whole post on how to use the tool) over at http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2012/08/leak-finder-new-tool-for-javascript.html and I encourage you to check it out. The project page for the leak finder can be found at http://code.google.com/p/leak-finder-for-javascript/.

Some more info: In case you're wondering why a tool like this isn't already integrated with our Developer Tools, the reason is two fold. It was originally developed to help us catch some specific memory scenarios in the Closure Library and it makes more sense as an external tool (or maybe even an extension if we get a heap profiling extension API in place).

Leak Finder: a new tool for JavaScript – Google Open Source Blog

News about Google"s Open Source projects and programs

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I'm trying out Google Plus for some lazy web-publishing and seeing continued file-permission strangeness.  Here's an example in case others are experiencing similar and it's reproducible…

Before I begin, the remote machine looks like this:

rjb@buck-16~/Google Drive/xyz/words $ ls -la
total 48
drwxrwxrwx   7 rjb  staff   238  8 Aug 15:45 .
drwxrwxrwx+ 22 rjb  staff   748  8 Aug 15:45 ..
-rwxrwxrwx   1 rjb  staff   341  7 Jun 10:58 404.html
-rwxr-xr-x   1 rjb  staff   321  8 Aug 15:34 defaults.php
-rwxrwxrwx   1 rjb  staff  6462  8 Aug 15:42 index.html
-rwxrwxrwx   1 rjb  staff  3031  6 Jun 22:25 js.html
-rwxrwxrwx   1 rjb  staff   115  6 Jun 20:21 menu.html

I then locally edit `js.html`.  Note the timestamp and permissions:

rjb-mbp:words rjb$ ls -la
total 48
drwxr-xr-x   7 rjb  staff   238  8 Aug 15:41 .
drwxr-xr-x  22 rjb  staff   748  8 Aug 15:42 ..
-rwxr-xr-x   1 rjb  staff   341  7 Jun 10:58 404.html
-rwxr-xr-x   1 rjb  staff   321  8 Aug 15:34 defaults.php
-rwxr-xr-x   1 rjb  staff  6462  8 Aug 15:42 index.html
-rwxr-xr-x   1 rjb  staff  3119  8 Aug 15:50 js.html
-rwxr-xr-x   1 rjb  staff   115  6 Jun 20:21 menu.html

Shortly afterwards on the remote machine it appears thus – note how the modification time is updated (and indeed the file is updated) but neither the original permission, nor those on the machine where the file was edited, are used):

rjb@buck-16~/Google Drive/xyz/words $ ls -la
total 48
drwxrwxrwx   7 rjb  staff   238  8 Aug 15:54 .
drwxrwxrwx+ 22 rjb  staff   748  8 Aug 15:45 ..
-rwxrwxrwx   1 rjb  staff   341  7 Jun 10:58 404.html
-rwxr-xr-x   1 rjb  staff   321  8 Aug 15:34 defaults.php
-rwxrwxrwx   1 rjb  staff  6462  8 Aug 15:42 index.html
-rw——-   1 rjb  staff  3119  8 Aug 15:50 js.html
-rwxrwxrwx   1 rjb  staff   115  6 Jun 20:21 menu.html

This is syncing between a two OS X Mountain Lion machines.
#googledrive   #apple   #osx

_P.S. I'm using 777 to illustrate the point, that's not normal_ :-)

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SpreadsheetDB-For-Google_Apps_Script

SpreadsheetDB-For-Google_Apps_Script – Google Spreadsheet as a DB for Google Apps Script.

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That is all.

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NASA – NASA Offers Condolences on the Passing of Pioneering Astronaut Sally Ride

NASA.gov brings you images, videos and interactive features from the unique perspective of America’s space agency. Get the latest updates on NASA missions, subscribe to blogs, RSS feeds and podcasts,…

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Thomas Steiner originally shared this post:

Essentially Google's solution to callback hell in asynchronous programming ported to #nodeJS

// Thinking in composers…

(via +Malte Ubl)

composers

Composers: An asynchronous programming framework. Contribute to composers development by creating an account on GitHub.

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List of common misconceptions – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This incomplete list is not intended to be exhaustive. This is a list of current, widely held, erroneous ideas and beliefs about notable topics which have been reported by reliable sources from around…

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