Caffeine The Killer
There is a cool site out there named energyfiend , which has a calculator to count - how much of your favorite energy drink, soda, or caffeinated food would it take to kill you?. Take the quick test for yourself and find out.
See a complete list of caffeine in drinks or caffeine in food.
Windows 7 - Sneak Peek..
So Microsoft’s Sinofsky had a pretty good dance with CNET about Windows 7, really not saying much of anything. But a picture’s worth a thousand words, right? Howzabout a ton of pics?
We can confirm these are indeed screen shots of the current build of Windows 7 as it will be introduced in 2010, but keep in mind that’s three years away and many changes might be made. We’re hoping it’s better than Vista.
Click the jump for lots of screen grab goodness.
[UPDATE] A Microsoft rep has pointed out that these are older versions of the concept renderings for Windows 7 and, as stated above, not likely what we’ll see when it’s released in 2010. In other Windows 7 UI news, the latest version will be demoed later tonight at the All Things D conference. It’ll be interesting to see how close to these older renderings it turns out to be.
via Crunch Gear
Celebrating 100+ posts
Regards to all,
Today I am celebrating my blogging century as the posts count reach 100.
Although this blog had started in October 2004, but for some reasons it had been hibernating. Until it woke up once again this May. In the end of May - within a month - i have reached the 100 mark.
Hope the readers are Happy with the Posts too - Keep Reading.
Thankyou Readers,
Gmail In Indian Languages... WoW
You’ve seen Gmail in Hindi but now this popular email program from Google is available in all major languages of India including اردو (Urdu) , मराठी (Marathi), हिन्दी (Hindi), বাংলা (Bangla), ગુજરાતી (Gujarati), ଓଡିଆ (Oriya), தமிà®´் (Tamil), à°¤ెà°²ుà°—ు (Telugu), ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada) and മലയാà´³ം (Malayalam).
I think this would cover 90% of the 1 billion strong population of India.
To switch to a different language in Gmail, go to the Settings tab and selection a different languages from the Gmail display language drop down. Don’t forget to save your changes.
First Post via IMified
Know your ATM Machine
If you are ever forced by a thief or someone to take money out of an ATM machine, enter your pin number reversed.
So if your number is 1254 mark 4521.
The ATM machine will give you your money, but will automatically recognize this as a plea for help and will alert the police unknown to the thief.
This option is in all ATM machines, but not many people know this.
Please pass this information on to others. No harm in keeping this in mind!!
View Google Videos Uninterrupted
Favicon change in Google
This is one of the smaller changes to Google – at least if measured in pixels! Google changed their “Favicon.ico”, the 16x16 image file that usually shows in the browser address bar or in bookmarks. The old icon used a square with red, green and blue edges, wrapping an upper-case “G”. The new logo is a bit more open, showing just the lower-case blue “g” from the Google logo, without borders, and a bit of shadow. To see this, visit Google.com (or images.google.com, Google Product Search and so on), empty your browser cache and reload the page.
Tony Ruscoe in the forum wonders, “Is Google undergoing a rebranding exercise...?” and adds, “Maybe they’re going to be known as ’the little g’ rather than ’The Big G’ from now on...”. Google continues to grow and grow, but one of their self-proclaimed core values is “Think and act like an underdog”.
LaTeX now in Zoho
As we announced yesterday, Equation Editor (with LaTeX support) is the latest feature in Zoho Writer. This one has deep personal relevance to me. My first “programming language”, in the sense that I wrote a lot of code, was actually LaTeX. It is a programming langauge for accurate typesetting of documents, that in many ways anticipated developments like HTML/CSS.
As a graduate student at Princeton, I spent countless hours writing and rewriting papers for publication using LaTeX, first with inputs from my advisor, and later from anonymous reviewers at publications like The IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Of course, my entire PhD thesis was written in LaTeX as well. The most important aspect of LaTeX I loved was its easy facility with equations. You would type in something like (Ampere’s Law - thank you Wikipedia!)
\Delta \times \mathbf {B} = \mu_0 \mathbf {J} + \mu_0 \epsilon_0 \frac{\partial \mathbf {E}}{\partial t}
and the LaTeX compiler would generate
Or the integral form of Ampere’s Law:
\oint_{\partial S} \mathbf {B} . d \mathbf {l} = \mu_0 I_S + \mu_0 \epsilon_0 \frac{d {\Phi}_{E,S}}{dt}
It was pure magic to see the compiler generate such beautiful forms. I spent four years of life with equations like that - pretty much every section, every page in my thesis had them. As a graduate student, I used to wonder if such equations could be generated via a friendly user interface - keep in mind that MS-DOS still ruled the world at that time and graduate students like me had Sun workstations. I myself had little interest in software at that time (I was going to prove theorems, so I looked down on programming as a lowly activity!) so never pursued that thought further. If someone had predicted at that time that I would end up founding a software company one of whose key products is a word processor, and LaTeX would play a role in it, I would have just laughed the idea off as absurd or in technical terms, “of vanishingly small probability”, a phrase that sticks in mind after seeing those epsilons and deltas (or \epsilon’s \ and \ \delta’s in LaTeX terminology!). I used to practically dream in epsilons and deltas during that period - so many of the mathematical proofs depended on them being close to but not quite zero.
I am very happy to see the Equation Editor in Zoho Writer give shape to that user interface idea. There is a lot more potential in typesetting using LaTeX like ideas, and you will see us pursue them in due course.
Thinking back, what is surprising to me now is how little of my PhD I remember. I retrieved my PhD thesis from its long-forgotten closet, dusted it off, and it is all Greek to me. I can scarcely even believe it is my own work I am staring at. I used to be really, really passionate about proving theorems, so it seems even stranger that I would just completely abandon it. The only thing I would have gotten right with all my PhD training was to recognize that vanishingly small probability events can still happen.
via Zoho Blogs
Good Bye to the Printed Edition of Oxford English Dictionary
Call it the end of an era. The NYT says that Oxford University Press has no official plans to publish a new print edition of the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary often considered as the authority on the usage and meaning of English words and phrases.
Visit BBC and Wikipedia to learn more about the interesting history of Oxford Dictionary the first edition of which took nearly 70 years to complete. If you have never seen the print edition dictionary before, check this sample page from the dictionary. The dictionary weighs 62.6 kilos or 137.72 lbs.
Oxford University Press will instead focus on the online and CD-ROM edition of the Oxford English dictionary. The planned Third Edition of the OED is expected to finish sometime around 2018 but will only be available electronically.
The first edition of Oxford English Dictionary was published under James Murray seen here at work.
Orkut Gets Themes
When orkut doesn't borrow features from Facebook, it gets inspired by other Google services. This time, orkut added themes, but not all the users can see the new option. The themes should be familiar, since most of them were created for iGoogle. When you select a theme, only you and your friends can see it in your profile page.
The unofficial Orkut Plus blog has some Greasemonkey scripts that could be used to see the new themes if the feature is not yet enabled in your account. If you notice a link in the header that lets you "change themes", then you have the new feature.
Since iGoogle's themes are really appreciated by users, maybe it makes sense to add themes to all Google services and change them from a central location.
via Google Operating System
New Gmail - Gmail Labs
Google pre-announced a mysterious new feature for Gmail. "On Thursday, June 5th we're going to be launching a new Gmail feature that we like to think of as a next evolution of 20% time. It's a change in our development process and in the way users will be able to influence Gmail's design."
20% time is one of the many peculiar things about Google. "The 20 percent time is a well-known part of our philosophy here, enabling engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren't necessarily in our job descriptions. You can use the time to develop something new, or if you see something that's broken, you can use the time to fix it."
Google's engineers may work on many side-projects related to Gmail and this could be an opportunity for users to try them, send feedback or influence which features should be further developed and added to Gmail. It's not clear if that's the right interpretation for Google's intentionally-ambiguous text, but we'll find out next Thursday.
It might even match one of my predictions for this year: "Gmail will launch a Google Labs-like site with experimental features that could be added by those who are curious to see the next features before they are officially launched." Instead of releasing entirely new applications on Google Labs, it's more practical for Google to create mini-labs for each important service and expose experimental features that could be added or removed, like in Google Experimental Search.
via Google Operating System
Birds Eye meets Mt. Rushmore
A couple of weeks ago I was commenting to our imagery team that the area around Mt Rushmore would be a great addition to our Birds Eye library; its one of the most recognizable landmarks in the US, but because of its remote location i guessed that only a small percent of folks had visited in person to see it and explore the area. now just a couple of weeks later I see it pop up in Birds Eye. I didn't realize i had that kind of influence with the imagery team :-)
The West view is pretty amazing. South is OK too, for seeing some of the behind the scenes goop on the mountain.
Early Adoption of Google Earth Plugin
The new Google Earth Plugin API has been adopted quickly by both Google Maps mashup developers and Google Earth developers. Given that Google Maps has long had limitations on the number of placemarks or other KML features it can show, the Earth plugin immediately enables more KML data to be viewed. That's just one of many reasons why developers would want to quickly adopt the new plugin (besides the "show off" factor). I think this new plugin will be a huge hit and will be quickly adopted by many applications - especially once Google pushes out broader support on Mac and Linux as well. Right now, since the plugin is only working on Windows, developers should check what operating system people are using before presenting them with the plugin. No need to cause a plugin load error if a person is using Mac OS X. (See Gmap-Track below for the first example I've seen which addresses this.) In the 24 hours or so since it was released, at least 2 dozen apps have been released using the new API (probably many more than that just haven't reached my attention yet). Below are just a few examples I've noticed, and there are links to more in other posts listed at the bottom. (NOTE: if you aren't on Windows or using a browser supported by the new plugin - you won't get to try all the links without a load error):
The Next-Gen Web
The next-gen web is starting to gather pace, as this week MySpace integrated Google Gears, Yahoo! announced their new BrowserPlus product and Google launched a browser-based edition of their 3D Earth product. Technologies and formats such as AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX, Gears, XUL, Web Applications 1.0 (DOM5, HTML5 etc.) allow developers to accelerate beyond AJAX and towards a new generation of web applications with better performance, more functionality and tighter desktop integration.
Developers and users are now presented with more web technology choice then ever before; “DLL hell” has been succeeded by “plug-in hell”, as a variety of companies present their versions of what the next-gen web will look like. But on the web, such choice can come at a cost to both users and developers. More than a decade has passed since the first battle over web formats, back then it was Microsoft, Netscape, Apple, AOL and others laying different foundations in the form of browsers, scripting languages, web servers and more. The legacy of that battle is still being felt today, as Javascript developers rely on whole libraries to assist them in developing cross-browser code and CSS developers depend on a catalog of hacks so that their sites can look consistent across different browsers.
With the new rich web application technologies still in the development phase, there is an opportunity to not repeat the mistakes of the past and instead take a standards-based approach. Thankfully during the course of the previous decade companies such as Microsoft became more receptive to open standards, data portability and cross-platform support. Having broad support for open standards simplifies technology for both users and developers, but it is obvious that not all of the currently announced technologies, such as those listed above, will succeed or survive.
via TechCrunch
Backup All Your Google Docs Documents Locally with Zoho
While you can download documents from Google Docs one-by-one, there’s no "export all" like feature that will let you backup all online documents to your hard drive in one go.
A possible solution is that you select multiple files inside Google Docs browser and export them as a zip but the problem is that files get saved as HTML web pages and not in the standard .doc format.
Zoho has added an Import feature inside Zoho Writer that lets you bring all Google Docs documents into Zoho for editing. The Zoho-Google Docs importer can read .zip files created by Google Docs and hence it can serve as an alternate backup for all your Google documents.
The more exciting part is that they soon will include have a "mass export" feature in Zoho Writer that will let you take away all your documents out of the Zoho system in a click.
Now this should immediately appeal to Google Docs users who have never even tried Zoho yet because you indirectly get to backup all Google Docs documents in three steps:
1. Export all Google Docs documents as an HTML file.
2. Login to Zoho Writer using your existing Google Account credentials and import the zip file created in step 1.
3. Use the Mass Export function of Zoho writer to save these documents as .doc files on to your hard drive or anywhere else.
The export feature in Zoho Writer is not live yet but keep watching this space.
Zoho Writer Updates
Today’s Zoho Writer update introduces three key functionalities
1. Import Documents from Google Docs to Zoho Writer
After we accepted Google and Yahoo! sign-in to Zoho (and Google Apps accounts sign-in), we were asked to implement import capability to Zoho. We have added this feature in this update. And now you can import your Google Docs into Zoho Writer. Here are the steps :
We certainly don’t want to trap your information in Zoho. We will soon provide a mass Export option to take your documents to other services.
2. Equation Editor
As you may know, a significant % of our users are students. We got a lot of requests from this user segment to build an Equation Editor into Zoho Writer. And Zoho Writer has it now.
You’ll see a new Equation Editor icon (last one in the second row of the toolbar) which brings up a simple UI to create your equations. If you are a LaTeX guru, type your equation away and we automatically generate an image of the equation on the right. If you are not a LaTeX expert (like me), you can simply select the equation symbols with your mouse and we automatically build the equation for you. Once done, the equation image is inserted into your document.
After you insert your equation, if you want to make any changes to it, right click on the image and select Edit Equation.
3. LaTeX Export
As you see in the above slide show, we support LaTeX, the document markup language widely used by mathematicians, scientists, engineers and scholars in academia. We have a new option in Zoho Writer under Export, to save such files involving equations in LaTeX format as well.
Try the new features in Zoho Writer now & we will be glad knowing your comments.
via Zoho Blogs
Related Posts:
Login to Zoho with Google Apps Account
Zoho Writer Updates with Page Setup & Page View Options.
Public Presentations in Zoho Show
Zoho Show for your Remote Presentations
Font from a Logo - WhatTheFont.com
WhatTheFont is a site that lets you upload a logo or any other image that contains text and shows you a list of fonts that are likely to be used in that image. WhatTheFont supports some common image formats like GIF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, but you can't upload images bigger than 360 x 275 pixels.
After uploading an image, you may need to enter the corresponding letters from the text, since the system can't always detect them accurately. In the example below, the site recognized the font used in Google's logo: Catull.
The site seems to be pretty old, but I couldn't find a similar online font recognition system. Identifont asks you some question about the font's appearance, so it's more difficult to use, while FontExpert only handles individual characters.
Google Spreadsheets - Latest Features
It seems a bunch of new functionality might be coming to the Google Docs spreadsheets application. By accessing one of Google’s experimental sites (like the one where I found offline access would be coming to Google Docs) I was able to get a sneaky look at some of this functionality, including the ability to record, edit and run macros, edit a shared spreadsheet in something called “List mode” and a few new functions for use in spreadsheet formulas.
For those unfamiliar with advanced features offered by desktop office applications, a macro is a set of instructions that can be used to automate a series of actions in a program. You can usually record the actions as you carry them out in real-time or edit the macro code directly. Here’s a screenshot showing what macro recording in Google Spreadsheets currently looks like:
Since I’ve opted to display the macro code being created, anyone who knows a bit of JavaScript should be able to work out that I’ve basically highlighted a column, made the contents bold and set the background color to green. For more advanced users, there’s the option to edit the code for all the macros directly, giving each one a different function name:
Once again, it’s quite obvious that this functionality is still in the very early stages of development. During my tests, I was unable to actually get any of my saved macros to run! (Each time I selected “Run Macro...” from the menu, I got a “macroNameNotFound” error popping up.)
A new option found under the Share tab currently offers Googlers the ability to allow other Googlers to edit a spreadsheet in List mode, which also allows for filtering and sorting. Since many people only use spreadsheets for storing simple lists, I guess this makes a lot of sense.
Although this feature hasn’t officially been made available in the live version of Google Spreadsheets, it seems the experimental functionality is already there. Try editing this spreadsheet in list mode for an advanced preview of the feature. (This feature does seem a bit temperamental at the moment, so if the spreadsheet doesn’t load, try again in a new browser window.)
Other new additions include a set of Engineering functions – some of which are already available in Microsoft Excel – to allow for conversions between different numeral systems (i.e. binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal) and a new GoogleGeocode function (which was actually spotted about 8 months ago in the live version) that will presumably allow you to do a geo-code lookup on a location, for example:
=GoogleGeocode("Sheffield", "Lat")
=GoogleGeocode("Stuttgart", "Long")
Unfortunately, I keep receiving a “Data temporarily unavailable” error when trying to test this function though.
Embed Google Earth on a website - EarthNC tool
Just a few hours after the Google Earth browser plugin went live, enabling Javascript-savvy developers to host instances of 3D Google Maps on their websites (in Windows browsers), Virgil Zetterlind of EarthNC has gone and made it possible for us plebs to turn any KML/KMZ URL and Google MyMaps URL into an embeddable map for any website using the iframe tag — no developer API key required!
Instructions are here, and the actual tool itself is called the the TakItWithMe.com Google Earth Embedded Map Tool. Considering what it does, Virgil can call it anything he likes:-)
Here's an example using a previously created Google Mymap (in a separate window, as it generates a plugin warning popup for Mac users).
via Ogle Earth
Web Pages Start getting Google Earth Mashups
Exciting news! Today Google is releasing a Google Earth plug-in which will let developers make Google Earth 3D applications run in your browser. In addition, a Google Earth API (Application Program Interface) is being released for developers based on Javascript. This API will allow developers to control many features of the 3D plug-in and add KML features and interfaces to their web applications. It is something many developers have wanted to see made available for Google Earth for a long time. It's a way to add Google Earth's fantastic 3D views and KML presentation capabilities in a browser and on a web page. You will soon see Google Earth mashups on the web with many more applications than ever before. It's appropriate the release is happening at the opening of the Google I/O developer conference.
Today's release is NOT converting the entire Google Earth application, complete with UI, into a browser. In fact, the Google Earth application will not have to be present for the plug-in to run. Developers will have to create applications, and enable UI features, that take advantage of the plug-in before users will see the greater benefits. I will post demos here as soon as the plug-in and demos are available.
A plug-in binary will be available today (Windows only so far). The plug-in reportedly will run in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and other Mozilla-derivative browsers. In addition, the Google Earth API is designed so developers can easily develop applications using the new plug-in. Current Google Maps mashups can offer the 3D option to their applications by adding a single line of code. So now many cool Maps mashups can be 3D-enabled very easily. This should also enable new Google Earth mashups to take advantage of many Google Maps API features which have been introduced in recent months. And, it should get rapid support from Google Maps mashup developers.
The new plug-in is NOT Google Earth in a wrapper. It is a subset of the Google Earth 3D graphics rendering engine and interfaces with KML support. It DOES include support for the recently added Day/Night mode, 3D models, layers, and even supports the Sky mode. Users will not have to have the full Google Earth application installed to use web applications based on the new API and plug-in. However, the new plug-in will not have all the same features as the full Google Earth client. But, developers will be able to use the API to turn on many features and content (like the nav gadgets, 3D models, add lines and polygons, and turn on/off layers) and enable new kinds of features not seen in the full application.
Google appropriately targeted this release for the Google I/O developer conference. They plan to support the other platforms (Mac OS X, and Linux) in future releases. There will be sessions today at Google I/O which will provide details to developers about the new API. And I'm sure there will be online documentation as well. Soon GE mashup developers will know how to create applications for the new plug-in. Look for more posts today on these topics.
One of the key designers behind the new Google Earth plug-in and API is Paul Rademacher who was the guy who first developed a Google Maps mashup before Google released an API. It's somehow fitting that the first Maps mashup developer is the designer for the new Google Earth mashup generation.
Google Earth - Browser Plugin.
When Google Maps was launched in 2005, few could have guessed the way map mashups would permeate the online world. Online maps had been just something you used to get directions or to find the ten nearest grocery stores. Google Maps and the Google Maps API proved that an online map was actually a rich canvas on which entire new applications could be built. Likewise, when Google Earth was launched, it revolutionized our view of the world, letting people fly around the planet at lightning speed and zoom in on rich high-resolution imagery, mountain ranges, and even 3D buildings. Yet there was a missing piece: there's never been a way to build your own 3D web applications using Google Earth, the way you can with Google Maps... until now.
Today, I'm happy to announce the release of the new Google Earth Browser Plug-in, which brings the full power of Google Earth to the web, embeddable within your own web site. Driven by an extensive JavaScript API, you can control the camera; create lines, markers, and polygons; import 3D models from the web and overlay them anywhere on the planet. In fact, you can even overlay your content over different planets, stars, and galaxies by toggling Sky mode, letting you build 3D Google Sky mashups. You can also enable 3D buildings with a single line of JavaScript, attach JavaScript callbacks to mouse events, fetch KML data from the web, and more. Our goal is to open up the entire core of Google Earth to developers in the hopes that you'll build the next great geo-based 3D application, and change (yet again) how we view the world.
Google Gears turns 1. Happy birthday !
It has been a year since the launch of Google Gears, and we wanted to offer a glimpse into what's changing, and what's ahead.
First of all, to better reflect the open nature of this project, we've decided to rename ourselves. Henceforth, the project will be simply "Gears." We want to make it clear that Gears isn't just a Google thing. We see Gears as a way for everyone to get involved with upgrading the web platform.
Our first year focused on offline-enabling applications, but that was only the beginning. Our broader goal has always been to close the gap between web apps and native apps by giving the browser new capabilities. There is no shortage of web application pain points to be addressed! In its second year, Gears will begin to tackle some of these problems.
On the applications front, there have been a number of exciting developments. Today, MySpace is launching enhanced functionality for MySpace mail using Gears. They are using the original Gears Database API with Full Text Search to enable fast and easy search and sort capabilities. The latest build of WordPress also integrates Gears, to improve performance, and to let users manage their blogs offline. And as many of you know, the Google Docs team added offline capabilities just a few weeks ago.
Gears remains a completely open source project. We strongly support web standards, and we continue to work with the W3C and WHATWG committees to help define standards for browsers.
Finally, we want Gears to be available to everyone, regardless of platform or browser. To that end, we are currently adding Firefox 3 and Safari support. And Opera is working to support Gears on both desktop and mobile. These new platforms will nicely complement our current set: Internet Explorer and Firefox, across Windows, Mac, Linux, and even Windows Mobile.
We're very excited about our progress this past year, and we have even bigger plans for 2008. All of you are welcome to jump in and join our fledgling community -- we're helping to push the web forward, and it's a lot of fun! :)
Firefox 3 Download Day 2008
The New York Times ad…Firefox Flicks…the Firefox crop circle…Operation Firefox…you name it! The Firefox community is always up to some cool, collaborative way to declare their passion for Firefox. What better way to do this than band together to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours?!
It’s a whole lot easier and safer than donning a beard of bees or underwater jump roping. All you have to do is download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day — some time in June. In the meantime check out Download Day Headquarters and pledge to download Firefox 3. We’ll let you know when Firefox 3 goes out the door, kicking off our 24-hour attempt.
Here are some other ways you can help in the run up to Download Day:
* Get the word out; tell your friends, your neighbors, your grandma, anyone and everyone to participate in Download Day.
* Host a party to download Firefox; you provide the people and we’ll provide the party favors.
* Put a Download Day badge on your blog, profile or website.
With your help the Firefox community can go down in history! If you have any questions or ideas please drop us a line at worldrecord @ mozilla.com.
Blog title changes to Googlified Web
Regards to all,
Due to high ratio of Google and its products and services related news and updates compared to other information, i have decided to change the blog's title to Googlified Web.
Better GReader gets Favicons
Better GReader script has recently included favicons for your feed subscriptions.
isnt it cool... you can get it here..
Add-on Compatibility Report - Firefox 3
The hard-working developers over at Mozilla issue a status update on which popular Firefox extensions still need to get updated for Firefox 3. Here's 20 add-ons that are Firefox 3-compatible, and seven that aren't yet. If you're testing the Firefox 3 Release Candidate, you can force Firefox to use incompatible extensions with a configuration tweak, but to avoid possible wonkiness, it's better to wait for officially-compatible releases. In other Firefox 3 news, a second release candidate is slated for early June.
via Lifehacker
Orkut Indian Edition with Themes - from Google
Some updates for Orkut - the most popular social networking site in India.
Sasidhar informs that Google has officially launched the Indian edition of Orkut while Thilak discovers themes inside his Orkut account. You may not see them as Orkut themes are not enabled for everyone yet.
The orkut.com site now redirects you to orkut.co.in if you visit this website from India. Orkut.in however remains a parked domain serving AdSense ads.
Google Mini - Updates.
The Google Mini has been making its way across the globe, reaching thousands of businesses that have taken to our little blue box, and along the way picking up suggestions for improvement from devoted users. As a result we've just introduced to the Mini three greatly requested features that can make search inside businesses even more powerful. Finding the most up-to-date and authoritative document within your company has never been easier now that you can search for documents filed in shared drives and weight documents by date or value. We've also added support for six new languages (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, and Polish).
We're listening, so keep those suggestions coming.
Read more about the new Mini features on the Google Enterprise Blog.
from Official Google Blog
Google Street View Conquering more territories
The Spanish newspaper El Mundo (English translation) reports that Google's Street View cars have been spotted in many Spanish cities, including Madrid and Barcelona. Apparently, the local police wasn't very impressed and Google was fined for parking in a restricted area.
There's even a custom Google Map that includes many locations where Google's cars were spotted in Spain and Google Blogoscoped points to a video that shows a Street View car on the streets of Seville.
Google Street View Cars on Video
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According to the descriptions on YouTube, the first video is a Google Street View car in Seville, Spain, and the second is one around Palm Springs, California, US. These cars from the Google fleet have a camera mounted on top to photograph the panorama views that are later added to Google Maps. It’s like the first Googlebots spotted in the wild, and perhaps signs of a future to come in which devices of different shapes and functionality roam the streets to collect information (compare with this fiction).
Rendering all that information back to us in the many of Google’s services may hold much fascinating use; at the same time, considering that Google’s technology may advance and they say they may hand over their collected data of public or private nature to governments if required by law (and they also say they may not always disclose when that happens)*, this is a future that may also get some worried... if ever a government turns against its citizens.
In other related news, according to German Focus, Google also wants to bring Street View cars to Germany, as they are doing for other European countries. Both faces and car license plates would be blurred, Google’s Peter Fleischer argued.
*Google’s privacy policy says that Google may share “personal information with other companies or individuals outside of Google” when they have “good faith belief” that it satisfies “any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request”. Furthermore, a clause in the US Patriot Act, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, contains a bit prohibiting anyone who receives a National Security Letter from “disclos[ing] to any person that the [FBI] has sought or obtained access to information or records.” Google in a PDF FAQ (which I can’t access anymore at the moment) on the question “How many subpoenas for server log data does Google receive each year?” answered, “As a matter of policy, we don’t provide specifics on law enforcement requests to Google.”
Google Earth Search Tip
Google Earth Tip - An interesting tip for Google Earth. While viewing a location you are interested in, you can search for "*" in the "Fly-To" search field and it will return all known results from their Geo Search index for that location (10 at a time).
Related Posts:
Discover the world's news in Google Earth
Google Earth Gets Google News Layer
Asfaar Burhaniyah 2.0
Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 - Public Beta Download
Adobe today released the first public beta of Dreamweaver CS4, the popular WYSIWYG editor from Macromedia that later replaced Adobe’s own GoLive software.
To download Dreamweaver CS4, you need a serial number of either Dreamweaver CS3 or any of the Adobe Creative Suite editions. If you don’t have a licensed copy, you only get a 2-day free trial.
This is an intelligent strategy from Adobe. They invite all existing customers into the beta cycle, some of them may get used to the new features and will therefore upgrade when the product gets released.
Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 can be installed alongside Dreamweaver CS3 though you may run only one product at a time. The software is available for both Mac and Windows.
Available at Adobe Labs. For new features, check these screencast videos at Adobe TV.
Other than DW, Fireworks CS4 is also available on Adobe Labs and Photoshop CS4 is expected to make an appearance soon. Thanks Scott Fegette.
Open Source Facebook Platform
Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.
Bebo already licenses the Facebook Platform, which allows third parties to make their Facebook applications work on Bebo, too. With the new announcement, social networks won’t need to go through the hassle of doing a deal with Facebook. They’ll simply map their existing APIs to Facebook Platform (which isn’t trivial) and go. Expect to see the four major technical pieces of Facebook Platform - FMBL (markup language), FQL (query language), FJS (Javascript library) and the Facebook API to be open sourced and made available to anyone.
If they mirror the Open Social approach, third parties will be free to change the Facebook Platform components for their own use and deploy them on their own sites. To have those changes be incorporated into the official versions of Facebook Platform, however, would require Facebook’s approval.
This is a nearly inevitable response to Open Social, which is backed by Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Open Social is also an open source platform, run the the Open Social Foundation. Facebook has been looking more and more like a walled garden of late, and they are being regularly out maneuvered by competitors.
Download Multiple Web Videos Stitched Into a Single Movie or MP3
While
there are tons of tools that let you download web videos with ease,
MovAVI offers one unique feature - it can join multiple videos from
YouTube, Metacafe, Break.com, etc. into one single file all by itself
that you can later download in any format.
Using Movavi is simple - just add the different video URLs (5 is the
limit) and select an output format. You can either request the combined
video clip as an MP3 audio file (great for music videos) or in regular
formats like iPod MP4, AVI, Flash Video & Quicktime.
Movavi will not join your videos instantly - it sends out an email
when the video to ready for download. If you are looking for instant
conversion, check this Flash Video Guide. MovAVI can also be used to join video files that reside on your local hard drive.
Google Video's Player Detached from Search Results
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