Buy that garage!

CNN reports today that Google has purchased the garage where the company got started. Google bought the property from one of its employees, Susan Wojcicki, the vice president of product management who originally rented the garage to cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for five months to help her pay her California-sized mortgage.

The CNN report also includes this gem:

The busloads of people that show up to take pictures of the house and garage have become such an annoyance that Google asked The Associated Press not to publish the property's address, although it can easily be found on the Internet using the company's search engine.

I wonder how long it will take before someone uses Google's Sketchup to put a 3D model of the garage on Google Maps.

Programmatically asking Windows how much memory you've got

If you want to know how much memory is installed in a Windows box, you can open up Task Manager and inspect the Performance tab. But what if you want your program to know how much is installed? Chances are you know what your computer has, but your program running on someone else's computer may also care to know.

Since it took just a little bit of digging, I wanted to briefly mention how to find this. The short answer is to use the GlobalMemoryStatus function.

This helpful tip is from the Win32::SystemInfo Perl module source code, the I'm Feeling Lucky link to the Google search "finding amount physical memory windows programmatically".

This is one of those things I want to put in the Software Provenance Database, a repository of information about how to find out things about your computing environment, both manually and programmatically.