Synchronize Google Calendar With Your Phone

GCalSync is a Java application that can be installed on your mobile phone and allows you to synchronize your phone's calendar with Google Calendar.

Supported phones: BlackBerry, Nokia (6230i, 6680, N70 and others), Motorola (A780, A45, E1000), Sony Ericsson (K750, W800, Z520 and others).

I tried it with my Sony Ericsson K750i, but it couldn't connect to google.com. Does it work on your mobile phone?

Update: There's a new version of GCalSync and the application is now open-source.

Random Files

Google indexes not just web pages and documents, but also interesting file types like executables, databases or source code files. To search for a file with a specific extension, you need to use the operator filetype.

1. Find applications.
If you search for [winamp filetype:exe], the first result is a direct link to Winamp 5.08. Searching for [python filetype:msi] brings many direct links to Python 2.4 setup. It's interesting to see that Google actually indexes the files and gets some metadata from them.

2. Find source code.
There's a lot of code available on Google: some on governmental sites, other useful for educational purposes. You can even restrict your search to a certain type of license.

3. Find databases.
You can find CSV files, SQL scripts, DBF files, MDB files.

4. Find feeds.
Get a list of great feeds to import to your favorite feed reader. This way you can search for the feed address of your favorite site, without looking in the source code.

5. Other interesting files.
Registry files, configuration files and, my favorite, Inno Setup scripts.

So the next type you need a file to test an application or to use it as an example, try Google.

Return To Innocence

In 1999, Google didn't sign any deal with Dell, did not censor the search engine results in China, wasn't sued for promoting child pornography or for click fraud. In 1999, Google could say it's not a portal and it didn't have problems with financial reports because there wasn't too much to report.

But what did Google do in 1999?

"I won't say we won't add services, but we wouldn't put free email on our site unless we thought we could do a much better job," Larry Page said in July 1999. "Google is about high quality products. If we add random services, we don't think that adds value."

In September 21, Google got out of beta and upgraded its index to 200 million web pages.

Google moved to Googleplex, won Technical Excellence Award for Innovation in Web Application Development from PC Magazine and let people wonder how it will make money. "I don't know exactly how they're going to do it," said Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Marc Ewing. "They're not idiots over there. They must have some sort of plan. They're just not sharing it."

Backup Your Firefox Extensions

If you use Firefox, there's a big chance you've installed extensions. There are some extensions that change your browsing habits, so you'd like to have them with you at work, on your new computer or on just about any computer you use.

There's an easy way to backup your Firefox extensions: Firefox Extension Backup Extension. I know it has a funny name, so you can just call it FEBE. You can backup your extensions, your themes, your bookmarks and settings to a folder. Copy that folder to a CD, send it by email in an archive or just put it on an USB flash drive.


How to restore extensions?
* Open Tools/Extensions from the menu
* Drag and drop the extensions from the backup folder to the extension dialog.

You can also restore extensions one by one from Tools/FEBE/Restore Extensions.

But what about the settings for each extension? If you backup your Firefox settings, you'll also have them.

Related:
Reduce memory usage in Firefox
Portable Firefox

Google News To Include Videos

Marissa Mayer said last month that "later this year, Google will integrate video into Google News". If you go to About Feeds page on Google Video, you'll see this text:

"How do I use Google Video feeds?
To access Google Video feeds, look for the Feed links on any Google News page. This link will generate a feed of up-to-date videos related to the page that you're looking at."

For the moment, Google News doesn't include this link, but it will appear soon. It will be interesting to see how many related videos can Google find on Google Videos, unless it includes videos from content providers like CNN or BBC.

Meanwhile, you can add "&output=rss" to the address of a search results page to obtain a RSS feed.

Happy Birthday, Philipp!

Today is Philipp Lenssen's birthday. He has the best blog about Google, Google Blogoscoped, that inspired me to create this blog.

Picasa For Linux

Google released a version of Picasa for Linux, using a version of Wine modified by CodeWeaver.

The page where you can download the software is http://picasa.google.com/linux (for the moment, the page gives a 404 error outside United States, but you can access it through a proxy).

Google said that Picasa should work on any Linux system with Intel 386-compatible processor, glibc 2.3 or greater, and a working X11 display system.

There is a group about Picasa on Linux and there is a link on Google Labs visible only for US.

Direct links: RPM | DEB | BIN.

This version of Picasa lacks CD Burning, export to TiVo, Hello instant messenger and has A LOT of limitations:
* no motion-compressing codec => huge movies
* no MP3 code => no sound in slideshows
* no video indexing
* weak browser and email integration
* the opening Picasa dialog has a spin loop and consumes a lot of CPU

Hi-Q Videos

Welcome to our great high-quality video site. Here you'll find high-quality music videos, trailers and viral videos.

You're currently using Firefox. Our site supports only Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP SP2.

[Linux, Mac audiences leave. A part of the Windows XP SP2 audience opens Internet Explorer 6...]

Welcome to our great high-quality video site. Here you'll find high-quality music videos, trailers and viral videos.

You can select a video from our huge collection of videos.

[Selecting a Shakira video from their 20 hi-q videos.]

To download this video, you need an ActiveX. Would you like to install it?

[Clicking OK three times on different warnings and strange dialogs. The ActiveX installs, along with a desktop icon, a Start Menu icon, a system tray icon and probably many other shortcuts.]

The video is now downloading. Please wait until our software downloads 100 MB of high-quality video.

[Waiting to download the video. Fortunately, I have a broadband connection, so I have to wait only 7-8 minutes. The player opens.]

Upgrading Windows Media... You need a new component for Windows Media Player. Please upgrade...

[I click on upgrade.]

The component could not be upgraded.

[A brief ad begins.]



Any connection with AOL Hi-Q Video is coincidental.

Remove Ads from Yahoo Messenger

Last update: Sept. 27, 2008

If you install Yahoo Messenger 8.0 or 9.0, you'll notice a very annoying animated ad at the bottom of the main window.

How to get rid of the ads?

1. Close Yahoo Messenger.

2. Save this .bat file and execute it.

Please note that if you run Yahoo Messenger from a FAT32 disk, this fix disables some features from Yahoo Messenger, like chat rooms and the plug-in manager. NTFS is the standard file system used in Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, so it's likely that you won't see these limitations if you use a recent version of windows.

The .bat file you've just downloaded edits most registry values related to the ads in Yahoo Messenger from HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ Yahoo\pager\YUrl, replacing the data with a dummy asterisk. Here's the list of string values:

Messenger Ad
Webcam Upload Ad
Webcam Viewer Ad
Webcam Viewer Ad Big
Webcam Viewer Ad Medium
Change Room Banner
Conf Adurl
Chat Adurl


The patch also makes the file C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\Cache\urls.xml read-only and it revokes all the permissions for the file, but only for NTFS disks.

If you install new versions of Yahoo Messenger, you'll have to repeat the steps above, as Yahoo setup rewrites the registry entries. New versions will most likely make removing the ads more difficult or even impossible.

Google OS On Top Of Dell PCs

Reuters reports that Google and Dell have reached a three-year agreement in which Dell PCs will preinstall Google software (Google Toolbar, Google Desktop) and will set Internet Explorer homepage to http://google.com/ig/dell for $1 billion.

"A large-scale agreement with the world's largest PC maker would be a major inroad for Google. A decade ago, Microsoft used its leverage over PC makers to gain control over which software came installed in new computers, betting that customers rarely bother to replace many of those programs."

Google didn't want to use the power of default applications, but probably saw this as an opportunity to increase its number of users. Most people use toolbars to access search engines and Internet Explorer 6 has a big hole in this area. Besides, more than 50% of Yahoo Search users search from Yahoo Toolbar.

MSN Spaces Has Beaten Blogger

Microsoft has reasons to be proud today:

"MSN Spaces is the most widely used blogging service worldwide with more than 100 million unique visitors, according to data released today by comScore Networks Inc. of Reston, Va., an independent Internet audience measurement and consulting company.

comScore World Metrix’s proprietary audience report for April 2006 showed the total number of unique visitors to MSN Spaces has more than doubled in the past 12 months, from 41.65 million to 101 million. Figures compiled by comScore Media Metrix indicate that during April 2006, nearly one in seven Internet users worldwide had visited MSN Spaces."

MSN Spaces supports trackbacks, categories, statistics, layout customization, modules, contact cards. The site was launched in December 2004 and it will be renamed to Windows Live Spaces soon.

Google May Power MySpace Search

Google and Microsoft are in talks with MySpace to power MySpace's internal search, according to Financial Times.

A senior executive of one of the companies told: "They are looking for a partner and trying to figure it out. They have a good opportunity to increase the revenue on that property."

"Search engines need to encourage more searching [to build revenue] and youth audiences are spending increasing amounts of time on social sites," says Julian Smith, online advertising analyst at Jupiter Research. "So whoever provides the search facility to MySpace will generate a lot of traffic, search results and, ultimately, revenue."

For now, MySpace sends 8.2% of its traffic to Google, according to HitWise.

Office 2007 Beta 2 Review

I installed Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Beta 2 on Windows XP SP2. It was very easy: the setup had about 450 MB and took about 10 minutes to install. After installing, Office had to register, otherwise I could've used it only for 50 times. You can upgrade your existing Office version or you can keep your old Office.

When I opened Microsoft Word, I couldn't believe my eyes. I mean I've seen some screenshots, but what's this? Where is my menu? And why this new toolbar (ribbon) occupies so much space? The ribbon replaces the menu with a list of icons, comboboxes grouped in sections. For example, there is a font section that includes font selection, font size, bold, italic, underline, font color.

The Styles section from the ribbon takes almost half the space of the ribbon and when you hover on one of the styles (heading, normal, title) you preview how the selected text will look if you apply that style. That's all very nice, but I think find and replace is more important than style choosing.

Now instead of trying to find the menu that contains a certain command, you'll try to find the ribbon section that includes it. It's a more visual and a more task-oriented approach. Microsoft dropped menus from most of its products, but it didn't replace them with something as comprehensive as in Microsoft Office.

When you insert a table, you won't see the dialog that asks you how many row and columns would you like to include. Instead you'll choose them using a small rectangle. Office 2007 tries to avoid dialogs and replaces them with contextual menus where possible. Instead of manually selecting margings of the page, Word lets you choose from 6 options (normal, narrow, wide, mirrored, Office 2003 default). If you want to specify the values, you can do that using a classic dialog.

You can even create posts for blogs at Blogger and MSN Spaces, manage multiple accounts and take advantage of the great spell checker and the easiness of inserting tables or equations.



There aren't many new features in Microsoft Office 2007, but the existing ones are better organized, you can preview every setting you make, there are many preformatted elements and less confusing choices to make. Unfortunately, it will take some time to get used to the new interface.

Some more screenshots from Microsoft Office 2007
Review and Visual Tour: Microsoft's 2007 Office Beta 2

Start Menu Replacement

Forget about Start Menu. If you like how Google Desktop lets you open programs from Start Menu, but you don't like its high memory usage, you can try Launchy, a skinnable tool that appears only when you enter a keyboard shortcut (by default, Alt+Space).

You can use it too open all kinds of files from your computer. You can select what kind of files you want to index and their location. Although it won't index the text of the files or their metadata, Launchy is very fast and sexy.

Where to use Launchy?
* launch applications
* start different tools from Control Panel
* open music files
* view pictures

The Brilliant Niniane Wang

... works on a confidential Google project

Google ran a full-page ad in Wired with this text:

"Google is looking for engineers with great aspirations. Take Niniane Wang, for example. A co-inventor of 19 patents in various patents of filing, Niniane skipped three grades, learned the Lisp programming language at 10, and started college math classes at 11. At 18, Niniane graduated with a degree in computer science from Caltech (where she also designed a VLSI chip, built an audio recorder out of chips, and discovered she loved writing software).

We're privileged to have Niniane at Google, but we need more engineers like her - people with passion and ideals and a strong work ethic.

Check out www.google.com/aspireniniane for a list of current openings. If you see something that seems perfect for you, send us your resume, we'd love to hear from you. Cute childhood pictures optional."

Meanwhile, Niniane writes in her blog:

This morning Joby sent out an email to our team:


i realized today during the meeting that...

- if we're working on the best project at google, and
- we're working at the best company on the planet, then

we're working on the Best Project in the World.

Her resume shows that she worked for Microsoft Flight Simulator, movie onebox, Google Desktop Search, Gmail and a confidential project.

But what did she do for this great project?

* Envisioned and chartered a confidential project in the social application space. Spec'ed out vision and got buy-in from execs.

* Led a team of engineers through technical design and implementation of client (C++) and server (Java).

* Convinced artists, PM, UI designer, and engineers around the company to join the team or contribute 20% time.

So the best project still unlaunched at Google is a social network? Maybe a MySpace killer?

Free Password Recovery Software

Last week I found an archive with some important documents on my hard disk, but it was password protected. Unfortunately, I didn't remember the password, so I tried to find a good software to recover the password even if that meant brute-force attack.

Elcomsoft has many programs for password recovery that have many great features and are free for personal (non-commercial) use.

* For ZIP, brute-force attack speed is up to fifteen million passwords per second. The brute force attack is the slowest method of password attack, but can often be successful on short and simple passwords.

* Dictionary-based attack (with word mutations) is available. That's the most effective way to recover a password. English, French, German, Japanese (and many others) dictionaries with hundreds of thousands of words, as well as specialist, technical and foreign language dictionaries are available.

* Fast known-plaintext attack (it takes 10-15 minutes).

* The programs can work in the background, using the CPU only when it is in idle state.

There is no guarantee that the password will be recovered, but most people use short and/or easy to remember passwords. My password had only 6 characters so it was found in less than 2 minutes.

You can recover passwords for archives (ZIP, RAR, ACE), Office documents, instant messangers, files encrypted on NTFS (EFS) partitions. Although they say the free versions are available as 30 days trials, they can be used after this period (with some limitations).

Related:
How to reset Windows password
How to recover data from hard drive

Google's Not Done With Search

Larry Page talked about the future of Google at Google Zeitgeist Europe 2006 conference. Some interesting tidbits:

"People always make the assumption that we're done with search. That's very far from the case. We're probably only 5 per cent of the way there. We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything ... some people could call that artificial intelligence." (From The Independent)

View the Q&A session.

How To Use Gmail Efficiently

Follow this order when composing emails:

* First think if you have to attach files to your email. Select the attachments so they will be already uploaded by the time you finish your mail. If you have many small files to attach or text documents, put all the files in an archive. It's faster and easier to download.

* Then type the text of your email. For compatibility reasons, stay with plain text. Most of the time HTML emails will create problems or will be useless.

* Check the spelling of your text. Gmail has a very cool spell checker with support for 38 languages.

* Then summarize the content of your email and type a meaningful title ("Check this!" or "Hi" aren't good examples of meaningful titles).

* Insert the recipient's email address. If you have more recipients, don't forget to include them in the BCC section.

* Send your mail. This should happen instantly.

Inspired by Google Blogoscoped.

Also see:
5 fast ways to check Gmail

Video AdSense

As reported in February, Google will start to deliver video ads through Google Adsense this week.

"A certain segment of advertisers have told us that they want richer and more engaging messaging capability," said Gokul Rajaram, product management director of Google's AdSense program.

AP says that the ad will show an image that when clicked will start to play a video of up to two minutes.

Hopefully Google will not include the video ads in the same category as image ads to push them to a wide number of publisher that sticked with the default settings. They did this with animated ads, that were animated Gifs.

You can see an example at Google Adwords blog.

Google World Cup Live Results

Google will show live results from FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany, informs an anonymous blogger.

Google will show information about the matches (when it starts, the teams, who scored) and videos for each goal. The information wasn't confirmed by Google, but it's backed up by some screenshots from Google Translation program.

More: the results are now live.

How Do You Recognize A Google Software?

What sets apart Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Earth, Picasa, Google Talk, Google Deskbar from other software?

Most of the time, a Google software:
* it's free
* it self-updates
* it updates fast
* it has a small installer (maybe except Google Earth)
* it asks you to set Google as default search in Internet Explorer
* it doesn't have a local help
* lately it asks you to sign in to your Google Account to get more options
* it has a search box
* it does one thing (maybe except Google Desktop)
* it's simple to use
* most of the time, you'll find it in beta

If Google Made A Media Player

If Google made a media player, how it would be different?

* The media player would be small and dockable. It would have four buttons: play, pause, stop, shuffle and a search box.

* Google Media Player would find lyrics for your songs using Google search engine.

* It would fill the tags with the artist, the song, the album and the genre of each song.

* Each song would have a mood (like sad, happy, romantic, sleepy).

* Google Media Player's equalizer would adjust according to song's genre.

* You would be able to share your media library, playlists or stats with your Gmail contacts or the whole world.

* Google Media Player would suggest what other songs to listen.

* Google Media Player could play contextual music: let's say you read a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez on your computer. Feed Google Media Player a fragment from the novel and let it find the most appropriate songs from your computer or from online streams.

* Google Media Player would show the latest news from the artist that plays the current song, images from Google Images or what other people think about this song.

* Google Media Player's search functionality would be complex. If you search for "Bjork", you'll also find artists with similar music or artists influenced by her music.

Related:
Google Music Store?
Windows Media Player 11
Google Music Box

Googler's List

Haochi from Googlified has created a list of more than 200 Googlers, with websites for some of them.

Wikipedia has a list of at least 40 Google employees with biographical details.

An easy to digest list of the latest posts from Googler's blogs can be found at Google Blogoscoped.

On one of the best posts you can read there is written by Matt Cutts and gives a couple of corporate rules of thumb like this one:
"It can be difficult to keep a secret on the web. If you are working on some innovative, amazing product that no one has ever seen before, strip your referrers. Also, sanitize any PowerPoint you make available. You probably shouldn’t change how you handle new subdomains or urls either. Remember, if a url is supposed to be private but anyone can access it on the web by visiting the url, someone will stumble across the url; use an .htaccess file to provide password protection on Apache servers. Because if people are interested enough, they will dig through your source code, monitor your robots.txt, and study which domains you buy, even if you buy them through another company. Plan according to how much scrutiny you expect."

Yahoo Mail Beta In IE7

If you use Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 and you are accepted in Yahoo Mail Beta, you noticed that Yahoo blocks every browser that isn't IE 5.5, IE 6.0, Firefox or Netscape. And that includes
Internet Explorer 7, although Yahoo says they support "Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher". If you want to use Yahoo Mail Beta in IE7, there's an easy fix: spoofing the user-agent.

First close Internet Explorer. Copy this text to a file ie6.reg :

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent]
"Compatible"=""
"Version"="MSIE 6.0"
"Platform"="Windows NT 5.1"

... and double-click on the file to modify the registry. Now you can use Yahoo Mail Beta and other sites that block any browser they didn't hear about, even if that browser name starts with "Internet Explorer".

Related:
Test IE7 without installing it
Get Yahoo Mail Beta

Play And Convert Any Multimedia File

In this post I will list some problems many people have with multimedia formats and one solution. But let's start with the problems:

* I have a video file and I want to extract the audio part.
* I have an AVI video and I want to put it on my web page in a format optimized for the web.
* How can I transfer videos from my PC to my mobile phone that supports only 3gp format?
* I have an AVI/MOV/ MP4/WMV file and I want to convert it to AVI/MOV/ MP4/WMV.
* How can I save on my disk MMS and RTSP streams?
* Ok, I downloaded a file from YouTube as a flv file, but how can I encode it in a format that can be viewed in any player?
* I got a file in a strange format: 3gp/amr/mp4/ogg/mpc. Does anyone know how can I view it?

There's only one answer to these frustrations and many others: SUPER.

SUPER is a free program that lets you view and convert almost any multimedia format you've ever heard. And you don't have to have any fancy codecs or player, because SUPER includes MPlayer, the best Unix media player, and a lot of codecs, including FFDShow.

Let's see how easy is to save a YouTube video as an AVI file.

Step 1. Go to a video.
Step 2. Select the URL value from the "About this video" box in the right.
Step 3. Paste the value at keepvid.com and save the file as a flv video.
Step 4. Drag and drop the file to SUPER and select the AVI container. Press Encode button.

Although SUPER has a very basic interface, it's very powerful. You just select the format of the output file, drag-and-drop the input file and click Encode. Using the same simple steps, you can convert a MOV file to MP3, an AVI to a 3gp file, an MP3 to a Flash file or any video to a format supported by iPod, PSP or PocketPC. Or you can just play a file in one of these formats.

The package at a glance:
* contains ffmpeg, mencoder, mplayer, ffmpeg2theora
* supported formats: 3gp (Nokia, Siemens, Sony, Ericson) asf, avi (DivX, Xvid, MPEG4, MSmpeg4), fli, flc, flv (used in Flash), mpg (Mpeg I or Mpeg II), mov, mp4, ogg, qt, rm, str (Play Station), swf (Flash), viv, vob, wmv, ac3, amr, mp2, mp3, mp4, ogg, ra, wma
* download size: 25 MB
* freeware

Update. It's pretty hard to find the download links on SUPER's site, so here's a tip: download the software from third-party sites like AfterDawn or Softpedia.