New In Gmail: Apply Filters To Old Emails

Until now, Gmail allowed users to set filters only for the future emails. Now when you create a filter or update one, Gmail allows you to apply it to old emails (see Also apply filter to 160 conversations below in the screenshot). That's a very useful feature. How could you use it?

1. You change your mail account and you want to send all your emails from the Gmail account to your new one. Set a filter without any restriction and forward all the emails. That might also be useful to backup your emails.

2. Forward more emails at once to a friend. Create a temporary label, set the label to the emails you want to forward, create a temporary filter that forwards the emails to your friend. And that's it. Don't forget to delete the filter after that.

3. You want to archive all your emails.

4. Delete all the emails from your ex-girlfriend.

5. Set the label "jobs" to all the emails that contain job in the subject.

6. Merge two labels (A, B). Set the label B to all the emails that have label A. Just type "label:A" in the "Has the words" input box and choose "apply the label B".

7. Filter your sent emails. Include "label:sent" in the "Has the words" input box.

You can think of many other nifty applications for this new feature.

Like the Delete All Spam link, this feature is not yet available to all the Gmail users.

More Gmail:
5 fast ways to check your Gmail account
Check multiple Gmail accounts

Dig Deeper Into The Sites You Visit

Every site is a part of a big network of similar sites, every site has its fans and detractors, its rise and fall. If you read an article, you may want to know different perspectives.

I've selected 5 sites that provide an interesting background for web pages and I've created a multi-bookmarklet you can use while browsing the web.


The links give you information from:
Sphere - finds blog posts that relate to what you're reading
StumbleUpon - the greatest site-discovery tool on the web collects reviews
Similicio.us - finds similar sites based on people's bookmarks on del.icio.us
Netcraft - information about site domains, uptime and hosting
Alexa - traffic estimation based on Alexa Toolbar data

Here are the bookmarklets:

More about the subject

Site reviews

Similar sites

Site information

Traffic estimation

How to add the bookmarklets:

Firefox
* Go to Bookmars/ Organize Bookmarks.
* Select "Bookmarks Toolbar" from the left tree.
* Create a new folder called "Dig deeper".
* Go to View/ Toolbars and make sure Bookmarks Toolbar is checked.
* Drag and drop the links to the URL folder from the toolbar.

Opera
* Go to Bookmars/ Manage Bookmarks.
* Create a new folder called "Dig deeper" and select "Show on personal toolbar".
* Go to View/ Toolbars and make sure Personal toolbar is checked.
* For each link, right-click and select "Bookmark this link" and choose the URL folder as a target.

Internet Explorer
* Go to Favorites/ Organize Favorites.
* Select the folder "Links" (or "Favorites" in IE7) from the right tree.
* Create a new folder called "Dig deeper".
* Go to View/ Toolbars and make sure Links is checked.
* Drag and drop the links to the URL folder from the toolbar.

How Google Works

A must-read article from Baseline talks about a lecture of Google's Douglas Merrill given to a crowd of chief information officers.

Some tidbits:

"We're about not ever accepting that the way something has been done in the past is necessarily the best way to do it today," Merrill says.

Among other things, that means that Google often doesn't deploy standard business applications on standard hardware. Instead, it may use the same text parsing technology that drives its search engine to extract application input from an e-mail, rather than a conventional user interface based on data entry forms. Instead of deploying an application to a conventional server, Merrill may deploy it to a proprietary server-clustering infrastructure that runs across its worldwide data centers.

"We say our mission is to organize information and make it universally accessible and useful," Merrill says. "We had to figure out how to apply that internally as well."

Consider how Google handles project management. Every week, every Google technologist receives an automatically generated e-mail message asking, essentially, what did you do this week and what do you plan to do next week? This homegrown project management system parses the answer it gets back and extracts information to be used for follow-up. So, next week, Merrill explains, the system will ask, "Last week, you said you would do these six things. Did you get them done?"

Google Medical Scrapbook - The Real Google Health?

VC Ratings has information about a new Google service, Google Medical Scrapbook, a health vertical that will manage medical information.

"The plan, as it stands now, calls for there to be four different directories for each different type of user. The prospect of listing a separate directory for medical devices seems to have been scrapped. Users will be able to log in with their own account information and do things such as add a new medical provider, check their medical records or pay their bills.

The product would also provide information about hospitals such as the frequency that a hospital performs a specific type of procedure or which hospitals perform which procedures most often."

Google has already launched Google Co-op, a service that lets you add refinements for search queries. People can label web pages relevant to their areas of expertise, like health or travel. If you search for [AIDS], you'll find some links at the top of the page that let make your query more specific.

Google Medical Scrapbook seems to be more useful, but also more difficult to develop.

Here's the login for the service, that doesn't work, for the moment.

{ Via Inside Google. }

Google Was Initially An Annotation System

Here are some great quotes from 2003 in which Larry Page explains a little about his original intentions, why it was important to become a profitable business and how Google made hardware acquisitions. If you look back, it seems difficult to believe that Google had a hard time finding investors.

"Google has been profitable since the first quarter of 2001. Why did we make becoming profitable such a priority? It's good that we did, because we might well be gone if we hadn't. The real reason is that we became profitable in the first quarter of 2001 because Sergey Brin made it a priority. You see, Sergey would try to go out on dates. He would call up women. And to impress them he would say, 'I'm the president of a money-losing dot-com.' But in Palo Alto in 2000, a huge number of people were presidents of money-losing dot-coms. And so they would not call him back. And he thought, 'If only I were president of a money-making dot-com, things would be very different...'"

"It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web - build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.

"Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."

"Our original hardware acquisition strategy was non-standard. We would go out and wait on the loading dock and beg for computers. When new computers arrived at Stanford we would go up to the people taking delivery and say, 'Surely you don't need all ten of these computers. Surely you can give us one. We have a really interesting research project..'"

Quotes from Semi-Daily Journal (ignore the spam).

Google Checkout Not Allowed On eBay

AuctionBytes discovered that eBay bans sellers from using Google Checkout to request payment. One of their official reasons is that Google Checkout doesn't have a "substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services." Google says they had a lot of experience from AdWords and Video Store payments. It's interesting to note that eBay accepts "PayPal, credit cards including MasterCard/Visa /Amex/Discover, debit cards and bank electronic payments online for eBay purchases". Google Checkout is just like using the credit card, but through a Google proxy (that removes personal information and helps you if you don't trust an online store).

In a related note, Reuters reports that PayPal President Jeff Jordan will leave the company in the following months "to spend more time with his family". He must've come with a better reason than that.

While eBay tries to face the increasing competition with anti-competitive practices, Google has a much more relaxed attitude and says "We want to work with everybody".

Related:
Google Checkout review
Former PayPal engineer predicts Google's end

5 Different Stories About Google's Name

Now that google is an English word, we can't help wondering where does the spelling come from. There are many explanations, but here are 5 of the most credible versions.

1. "We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol."

[ Anatomy of a Search Engine, the paper that describes PageRank. ]


2. "Googol is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. Google's play on the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web."

[ Google's Corporate site now ]


3. " 10^100 (a gigantic number) is a googol, but we liked the spelling "Google" better. We picked the name "Google" because our goal is to make huge quantities of information available to everyone. And it sounds cool and has only six letters. "

[ Google's Corporate page in 1999 ]


4. As Larry Page, the co-founder of Google.com narrates:
"Lucas Pereira: 'You idiots, you spelled [Googol] wrong!' But this was good, because google.com was available and googol.com was not. Now most people spell 'Googol' 'Google', so it worked out OK in the end."

[ Probably the correct version. ]


5. "The original founders were going for 'Googol', but ended up with 'Google' due to a spelling mistake on a check that investors wrote to the founders."

[ Wikipedia's opinion ]

{ Inspired by a discourteous commentary. }

TrueCrypt - Create Encrypted Volumes Easily

TrueCrypt is a free software that creates on-th-fly encrypted volumes. You can create a file and mount it to a disk drive or you can create a partition. TrueCrypt encrypts and decrypts data without your intervention. The data is stored encrypted and the files are decrypted in RAM.

When you boot your operating system, TrueCrypt will ask you the password, in order to mount the volume and use it. If your encrypted container is a file, you can burn it on a CD or copy it to an USB drive, along with TrueCrypt, to use it on another computer (note that you need admin privileges).

The software uses many encryption algorithms, including AES, Blowfish, Triple DES, Twofish and various combinations, but you can stick to AES.

So why is this useful? If you deal with sensitive documents, confidential information or you just need to hide some files from unauthorized access, TrueCrypt is handy. Even if someone has direct access to your disk, he can't tell the file or partition is encrypted and if he knows the volume is encrypted, he can't access it without knowing the password (if the password is strong, it may take years or even centuries until the code is found).

The software is available for Windows 2000/ XP and Linux and it's open source.

I Do Not Wish To Search The Web

Where do you go when you don't want to search the web? Let's ask Google about that. I'm sure it can find a great site to spend your evening in a fun way.


So the first result is Google UK, "the local version of this pre-eminent search engine". Quite humble, isn't it?

{ From the useless-but-funny department. }

Google Is Officially An English Word

Oxford English Dictionary, the most comprehensive dictionary of the English language, has added "google" to its latest revision. You can find the entry by searching for "google" in this page. The verb "google" has been used in the recent years with the meaning "search (something) on the web", even though you use other search engine than Google.

Google comes from the word googol, which means 10¹⁰⁰, and was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't know the proper spelling of the word, so they've used Google to illustrate the huge quantity of information available, but not yet searchable.

Probably the first reference to Google was a cartoon called "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith" that was first published in 1919 by Billy DeBeck.

Update: Google is also listed in the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The Age speculates that Google will have a hard time defending its trademark. "If you can bring evidence to show that such a word has general currency, then anyone can use it," says Susan Butle, an Australian publisher.

The Utopian Google Offices

The architecture magazin Metropolis takes a look at Googleplex redesign, how architect Clive Wilkinson managed to create a friendly atmosphere using glass and open space, and how the new design reflects Google's culture.

"Corin Anderson does not work like most of the world: his office is a glass tent, which he shares with two other people. His desk hides behind a complex Rube Goldberg-esque maze, built by Anderson out of a toy called the Chaos Tower, a sort of theme park for marbles. Each day he sits in the midst of figurines, Legos, and stuffed animals, eyes fixed on his computer screen and earphones strapped on, for hours at a stretch."

Designing the building wasn't an easy task, as the designers and the engineers had different ideas. Larry and Sergey were more preoccupied about air flow than the aesthetics.

"The architects came up with a list of 13 different zones and arranged them from hot ("clubhouse": pool table and lounge area) to cold (closed workrooms), depending on the level of interaction they encourage. Each floor of the building was divided into five or six flexible neighborhoods separated by "landmarks," the shared public spaces that are the center of Google life. There are kitchens full of snacks, lounges with pool tables and comfortable seating, and libraries of stacked plywood box shelves filled with books and games that Googlers have brought in from home and based on, Wilkinson says, the idea of the village library as the repository of thought."

The article ends with an interesting conclusion about Google's future:

"Google may not be able to keep information entirely free, but it can still try to create a workplace utopia - a world beyond worlds where everyone is smart, and invention and necessity coexist. The impulse is both beautiful and endlessly arrogant, an adolescent's willful dream. Any utopia in the end is a form of benevolent dictatorship. [...] But the company is being forced into maturity - by the IPO, by the fact that Web pages that don't appear on Google might as well not exist, and by its sheer size, power, and influence."

If a utopia becomes the dictatorship of our dreams, it ends by destroying itself. So the more you allow a utopia to morph into something real, the more you give it the chance to survive, even in an altered form. And that means compromise.

Related:
More about Google campus

Using the mouse

When using a Java Frame to hold the JOGL GLCanvas, interaction with the frame, using the mouse, can be done in the usual way by using a Listener. The listener event handler class (the class which is to receive the events), must implement the MouseListener, MouseMotionListener interfaces. One of the nice things about Eclipse is that the moment you add these interfaces to the class it will ask you if you want to add the corresponding functions.

public class joglpbuffer implements 
  GLEventListener, 
  MouseListener, 
  MouseMotionListener  {

  public void init(GLAutoDrawable drawable) {
    drawable.addMouseListener(this);
    drawable.addMouseMotionListener(this);
  }
}

The event functions themselves are self explanatory. They are all passed a MouseEvent argument which can be used to determine the location of the mouse or the button that was just pressed.

  public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e) {}
  public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent e) {}
  public void mouseExited(MouseEvent e) {}
  public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent e) {} 
  public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) {
    prevMouseX = e.getX();
    prevMouseY = e.getY();
    if ((e.getModifiers() & e.BUTTON3_MASK) != 0) {
      mouseRButtonDown = true;
    }
  }
  public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent e) {
    if ((e.getModifiers() & e.BUTTON3_MASK) != 0) {
      mouseRButtonDown = false;
    }
  }
  public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent e) {
    int x = e.getX();
    int y = e.getY();
  }

Hello, I'm A Windows XP OSX

I've always had a secret desire to own a Mac. Of course, I didn't do anything to get one, but today I've made my first step: I've installed FlyakiteOSX (mirror), which is an application that transforms Windows XP in a Mac OSX. Like magic. The package is more than a simple skin, it makes subtle changes:

* Command Console looks like the Terminal
* every folder can have a different color
* Spotlight clone with Google Desktop
* new effects for icons and folders
* shadows for windows and taskbar
* new cursors, screen savers, boot screen, wallpaper, Jaguar sounds
* new look for Internet Explorer, Outlook Explorer, Office

If you go to the site, you'll see a small version of an online Mac OSX desktop. The setup has about 30MB, but the result is a beautiful new operating system that makes your work on your computer more enjoyable.

{ If you didn't get the title, these ads will help you. }

eBay Uses Google Checkout

They don't use it because they like Google Checkout or they want to promote it, but eBay probably felt their AdWords ads would be less competitive if they don't use it. And, besides, Buy.com has the funny logo. eBay continues to have meaningless ads that use templates. If you search for [ebay buy.com] on Google, the first result has this description:

Buy Buy.com, Vintage Sports Memorabilia items on eBay.

Related:
Everything for sale on eBay
Google Checkout

SEO for Firefox - More Data About Search Results

Here's a Firefox extension that does something really useful: it gives information about each result in a Google search or a Yahoo search. SEO for Firefox lists for each result: site's PageRank, the number of del.icio.us bookmarks, the number of backlinks, Alexa rank, domain age and other interesting data. The extension can be customized to show only some of the values. Although the information is valuable, if not for individual values, at least as a whole - the extension can slow down the page load.

Search History Trends

There's a new module for Google Personalized Homepage - Search History Trends that shows the same information you could've find in the Trends section of Search History, but it's more accessible. What you can see: top searches, most visited sites (from Google searches), top gaining queries related to your searches, your daily search activity.

This module it's useful because it allows you to visit your favorite sites or search your favorite queries without looking in your huge list of bookmarks. And you can find what's new in your community just by looking at the related searches.

The trends are also available for the last week, last month and last year. A chart that shows the trends for each query would be a nice addition.

Related:
Google Trends competition
Google uses community to improve the quality of search

10 Powerful Uses For Google Suggest

Google Suggest is a Google experiment that autocompletes your search with popular queries as you type. Use the arrow keys to navigate the results.

Where can you find Google Suggest?

1. At Google Suggest site.

2. You can install Customize Google extension to use this site instead of the standard Google.

3. In Google Toolbar 4 (IE) and Google Toolbar 2 for Firefox.

4. In Firefox 2.0 (Bon Echo).

Other flavours of Google Suggest

1. News Suggest

2. Financial Suggest (enabled by default)

Why would you use it?

1. Use Google Suggest to get the correct spelling for a word. Type the first letters of a word or write the whole word and if you see it in the list of suggestions, then your spelling is OK. Otherwise, delete some letters from the end of the word.

2. Use Google Suggest to find words you don't remember. You know it starts with "exq" and it means "extremely beautiful", but you don't know the word. It's exquisite.

3. Find popular songs of an artist or band. Type [name of the artist] lyrics and you'll see a list of songs, with the most popular at the top.

4. Find the greatest mobile phones. Just type [mobile phone manufacturer] and a list of models pops in. If you type Nokia, you'll find: 6230, 6600, 6260, 6630, 7610 and others. This is useful when buying a new phone.

5. Find popular car models. Do the same as above: type [car brand] and you'll get a list of models. For Porsche, the most popular models are: 911, Cayenne and Carrera GT.

6. Find popular movies. Most people that want to find a movie review go to IMDB. To do that, search for imdb + title of the movie. To find popular movies, just type imdb and optionally a letter or two. If you type [imdb m], the first title will be "Million Dollar Baby".

7. Find if your site is popular. No one knows why, but many people type URL addresses in the search box. So if your site is download.com or linux.org, you'll find in the Suggest list.

8. You have a commercial software. But is it so good that people try to find cracks to use it for free? If you type [photoshop c], you'll see "photoshop cs crack".

9. Want to go back in time? Type a year in the search box and find popular events from that year, great cars, TV shows. In 1949 film noir was popular.

10. Autocomplete code. It's useful if you use a simple text editor that doesn't autocomplete standard values. If you don't remember the values of the display attribute in CSS, type [css display] and you'll get your answer. It may be display:none, display:inline or display:block. You get the answer instantly without reading a manual or even searching with Google.

Google Fights For Net Neutrality

Reuters reports that "Google warned on Tuesday it will not hesitate to file anti-trust complaints in the United States if high-speed Internet providers abuse the market power they could receive from U.S. legislators."

"My company, along with many others believes that the Internet should stay open and accessible to everyone equally," Google's Vint Cerf said.

"The days of unfettered, unlimited and free access to any site on the world wide web, what I call net neutrality, are being threatened," said Senator Ron Wyden. "Those who own the pipes, the giant cable and phone companies, want to discriminate on which sites you can access."

So what is net neutrality? The idea that no one owns the Internet, there is no centralization, no fast lanes. Broadband carriers want to control what sites are better served to get money from the site owners. Carriers want content providers who have bandwidth-intensive Internet traffic to pay a premium fee. Here is a video that illustrates the concept:

Google Shows Debug Parameters

Someone at DigitalPoint forum has found a mysterious data dump in the Google cache of a page. You can see a lot of interesting parameters and values about the processing time, latency, number of queries, supplemental results. We can think at the server-side Google like a command-line utility that has adjustable parameters (resolve unreachable server, use the new anti-spam algorithm, don't use the new PageRank called IndyRank). Google has a debugging version of the client interface that probably came up by accident:

pacemaker-alarm-delay-in-ms-overall-sum 2341989
pacemaker-alarm-delay-in-ms-total-count 7776761
cpu-utilization 1.28
cpu-speed 2800000000
timedout-queries_total 14227
num-docinfo_total 10680907
avg-latency-ms_total 3545152552
num-docinfo_total 10680907
num-docinfo-disk_total 2200918
queries_total 1229799558
e_supplemental=150000
–pagerank_cutoff_decrease_per_round=100
–pagerank_cutoff_increase_per_round=500
–parents=12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23
–pass_country_to_leaves –phil_max_doc_activation=0.5
–port_base=32311 –production –rewrite_noncompositional_compounds –rpc_resolve_unreachable_servers –scale_prvec4_to_prvec –sections_to_retrieve=body+url+compactanchors –servlets=ascorer –supplemental_tier_section=body+url+compactanchors –threaded_logging –nouse_compressed_urls –use_domain_match –nouse_experimental_indyrank –use_experimental_spamscore –use_gwd
–use_query_classifier –use_spamscore –using_borg

World In The News

What countries make the news? What's the relation between different locations of the world? Buzztracker watches Google News, tries to geotarget each news and creates a top. You can find a very well organized archive from 2004 to the present. You'll see that very few locations are featured in the news every day: Washington, Baghdad, Gaza.

Azstarnet offers another service that puts world news on the map and also shows some information about each country.

Newsmap is a mashup between Google Maps and Yahoo News that shows realtime news for each country in the world. Just click on a country, and preview the news. You can also get local news.

Tour de France 2006

The 93rd edition of Tour de France has started last Saturday and it's fun to watch even if you're not in France or you don't like cycling events.

View Tour de France's program in Google Calendar
Enjoy a virtual Tour de France in Google Earth
If you don't have Google Earth, you can watch the videos.
Live stream of a Dutch TV.
Overall standings and information about the teams on Wikipedia.

Google Video Presents Wimbledon 2006

Wimbledon, the oldest tennis championship, is featured on Google Video. You can view match highlights, press conferences and comments from this year's tournament and also moments from classic Wimbledon matches that include Pete Sampras, Goran Ivanisevic, Bjorn Borg, Steffi Graf and John McEnroe. Most classic videos are not free.

Everything For Sale On eBay

Here's a selection of great eBay ads that used to be seen on Google.com a couple of years ago. As you can see there's nothing you can't find on eBay. No matter how fancy was your query, eBay ad just copied it in its template.

5. Dead people, carefully selected by eBay.


4. Brains. Maybe they'll come up with better ads.


3. What would you pay for happiness?


2. For difficult problems that require professional help.


1. Nothing's pure on eBay. Even nuns are for sale.



Also see:
Top 10 funny Google News
Google News Has "Ads By Google"

If Google Didn't Exist...

* our mail account would still have 2MB or 4MB of storage and we would be happy about that.

* we would find a mail by manually reviewing each subject and sender.

* we would pay for software like Picasa, Keyhole (now Google Earth), Sketchup.

* many startups would not exist without Google AdSense, so there would be less innovation.

* Opera would still be shareware and ad-supported.

* our homepage would be a portal, or about:blank.

* our search engines would be cluttered, would mix ads with organic results and wouldn't care about the users.

* we wouldn't look for a search bar in every site.

* we would think beta software is just for the testers and it's dangerous.

* technology news would be less exciting.

How To Deal With External Links

Webmasters use different tactics to link to external sources. Some do everything they can to keep visitors hostages (like Netscape), others want to send them as fast as possible to the right external link (like Google). Here are some of the ways to deal with external links:

Approach #1: The web is mine.

Open the link in a frame that contains a link to your site (or a back button) and ads. Users will thank you for the half of the screen where they can still browse the external site.

Approach #2: You can always go back.

Open external links in a new window (Firefox may open them in a new tab). When the user closes the new window, he'll see your site and will happily continue to browse it.

Approach #3: What are external links?

Don't put any external links. People should stay on your site. They don't need to know your news source and if they really want to know, there's always Google search.

Approach #4: Internet works without hyperlinks.

Include the external site, but without linking it. Visitors can always copy the link and paste it in their address bar, especially if the URL occupies multiple lines.

Approach #5: Nothing lasts forever.

If I find a news on cnn.com, I'll link just to the homepage, not to the article. If people visit my site tomorrow, when the news won't be on CNN's homepage anymore, they can always use search to find it. There's a word "permalink" invented for blogs... But who cares about blogs?

Approach #6: External links are dangerous.

Let's put a big disclaimer that says: "external links may contain viruses, trojan horses and worms, factual errors and we can't guarantee the validity of the information provided". Let's mark the links with "nofollow" so we don't decrease our PageRank.

Of course, you can also use normal links, without "nofollow", and let your visitors learn more information about the subject of your article.

Google - Cheap Is Better Than Expensive

New York Times has an article about Google's innovations in hardware and software that deals with a large number of computers. Google uses cheap computers, that have a high rate of disk failure, so they had to use data redundancy and make multiple copies of the data. They had to build a reliable software to overcome the unreliability of their hardware.

"Google is as much about infrastructure as it is about the search engine," said Martin Reynolds, an analyst from Gartner Group. "They are building an enormous computing resource on a scale that is almost unimaginable." Google is the world's fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.

"We don't think our competitors can deploy systems cheaper, faster or at scale," said Alan Eustace, Google's vice president for research and systems engineering. "That will give us a two-, three-, five-year lead."

Google has created some powerful tools for their servers:

* MapReduce, that divides a problem to be handled by thousands of processors simultaneously

* Google File System, a scalable distributed file system for large distributed data-intensive applications, that keeps back-up copies of data in several places. Google File System stores data efficiently.

* Google Work Queue, a job scheduling tool for servers.

Google uses servers with Opteron chip from AMD as they are more power-efficient, but it wants more. "Google's next step is to build high-performance silicon," said Mark Stahlman, an independent technology analyst.

Related:
Google's secret data center
Google's strengths
Infinite bandwidth, storage and CPU power

AdSense Audio: Advertising For Radios

Zachary Applegate made a visit to Google's Irvine California office and discovered some new things about the upcoming AdSense Audio for radio advertising.

"They demonstrated the product and gave an overview of how they are able to dynamically generate and change commercial content according to demographic and what is currently going on in the geographic area of radio stations.

Google AdSense Audio would enable people with a $200 budget to break into radio advertising, making targeted and area advertising via radio, IPTV and podcast more effective and viable for smaller businesses."

It will be interesting to watch if Google's plunge into traditional media advertising is successful. After the failure of Google AdSense for Print, Google will try to create a better offer for radios. This way, we'll hear a greater variety of ads that are better targeted and more useful. Like the online AdSense, this would be very helpful for local / small businesses.

Related:
GPS Google ads on radio
Google Interactive TV

Google Desktop May Break Your Internet Connection

Google Desktop is a particular case of Google software: it has a lot of bugs and unresolved issues. I renamed once a file from the subdirectory of Application Data and Windows failed to boot. Google Desktop has another problem: it sometimes breaks your network connection. Here's Google's fix for that:

If your internet connection breaks after you uninstall Google Desktop, there are several steps you can take to solve the problem:

1. Open your C:\Program Files\ Google\Google Desktop folder.
2. In this folder, you'll see a small program called "Troubleshoot Network." Double-click the icon to run this program.
3. Follow the instructions to restore your network connection.

If this folder doesn't exist on your computer, or if this doesn't solve the problem, please try the following:

1. Reboot your computer.
2. Run the lspfix.zip program offered at http://www.cexx.org/lspfix.htm

The situation is not rare, since they have an application that deals with that. It's interesting to see they ask you to download a file when your Internet connection doesn't work.

{ Via Digg. }

Related:
Thank your for downloading Gmail Notifier. Please uninstall it
How do you recognize a Google software?
Google Desktop is Google Operating System's kernel

Vibe Streamer - Create Your MP3 Server

Vibe Streamer is a fun way to share your music with your friends. Although it's basically a file server, you don't have to spend too much time with configurations.

You can add groups to have different settings and other kind of shared music for each group: your co-workers, your friends, your family. After adding groups, you should create usernames and passwords for each person who will listen to your music. If you create an account that will be used by more than one person, change "Max number of users" in settings. Then add your shared directories, select your IP address and start the server. You can now invite your friends to visit http://your-ip-address:8081, replacing your-ip-address with your IP. They can browser the directories, choose the music they like and play it as a stream.

Vibe Streamer's client is a web page that works with any browser, but the server is only available for Windows. Another limitation is that you can share only MP3 files. As all you do is stream the content of the files, your friends won't get the raw MP3s, so you're not doing anything illegal.

Remember to keep the server functioning in order to let your friends listen to the music.

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