Peter's Blog

A comment made to this blog led me to finding some gems for my new phone:

Google Mobile Maps

A java application that does google maps! I don't have a sat-nav as I would only need it about twice a year and it's cheaper to get lost. I usually print a google map before I leave home and make sure I have memorised enough to understand what I am doing.

I'll probably still do that but having google maps in my pocket will put my mind at ease when venturing into unfamiliar territory. I always get panicky when my fuel gets low and I have to find a diesel outlet. These days they tend to be hidden away at the nearest backstreet Tesco rather than being on the main roads.

The application includes a primitive (accurate to about 1km) location finder! And it can show satellite photos(!).

Opera Mini

A much nicer browser than the built in browser. It shows the whole page and you can move around it easily and zoom into the bit you want to read. This terse description doesn't do it justice. Very nice, especially in landscape mode.

I'm hoping the novely of my phone will wear off soon as otherwise I will need a data plan. I've spent £3.60 so far and each google map page is 80k of data.

Google Notebook

Not a java app but a link to the mobile version of Google Notebook. Post notes from your mobile and access them from your desktop without messing with syncing/email.

The mobile internet on my new phone seems much faster and more usable than it did on my old phone. The main thing that helps is that the phone goes straight to a google search page whereas on my old phone I had to wade through a load of vodafone branding. I am finding it handy to be able to google whereever I happen to be rather than have to remember to do it later.

I think the last time I used the internet on my old mobile was when I had sold my car and needed a taxi home from the wilds of Thurrock, alien territory. I went through the vodafone crap and found a search page and searched for local taxis. I got about three references, one didn't answer, another was limosine hire and the third was a bus company. I walked for miles that day.

I think (the phone doesn't make it obvious) I am using plain old WAP for browsing. I don't think any gprs is set up and I've turned off the 3G search as I have read that trying (and continually failing) to scan for a 3G network is a waste of battery power. The performance on plain old WAP is ok.

At work one of my chores is to set up the email on the managers new smartphones. That job has put me off the hassle of having one of those and the speed that the email downloads at isn't wonderful. I have installed the gmail reader on my mobile and that was much easier than trying to set up imap on a nokia. Oh, if only the company used google apps...

I received an email from google asking me to confirm I wanted to reset the password on one of my gmail accounts. It's as if some swine is after one of my three gmail addresses. The one in question is my main personal account and has 6136 messages in it, consuming 388Mb of my 6440Mb allowance (I only delete spam). My two other gmail accounts (petersblog and one with a sensible name for 'business') feed into this account.

I love gmail and don't want to mess around with any desktop email applications. That was until now. Do I trust google security? Do I want to have to archive it myself? Another job for my slice?

I can't resist posting this. The mail headers check out and I don't think it is a wind-up. There are no non-disclosure terms so here it goes:

Hi Peter-

My name is {snip}; I'm a talent scout for the engineering team here at Google. I came across some of your work and your writing on the Web and was impressed with your development experience - particularly your background in Linux and your work in Python.

I actually recruit for the Google.com engineering team here, which is the group of engineers that's essentially the mission control of Google. They're responsible for the design and development of the infrastructure for all our web applications and internal services. You'd be able to tackle some of the most unique scalability problems in the world and work on the newest products we have. It's a mission-critical role that involves a lot of coding and requires a high degree of creativity and troubleshooting expertise, so we're looking for Unix experts and great coders with broad skill sets (like yourself)! We have several positions within the Google.com department that I feel would be a good match for your skills and qualifications. The positions are currently available in: Mountain View, CA Santa Monica, CA New York, NY Kirkland/Seattle, WA Dublin, Ireland Zurich, Switzerland Sydney, Australia

I'm not asking you to quit what you're doing now - just seeing if you might be interested in exploring opportunities with Google. If you're at all interested in the department or in Google in general, I'd love to speak with you about the opportunities we have here - and of course, if any of your talented colleagues would be interested, feel free to forward my name and contact information to them as well.

You also may have noticed that a couple of weeks ago we were named the #1 company to work for by Fortune Magazine: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2007/snapshots/1.html

Thanks for your time, and I hope to hear from you soon!

Best regards,

-{snip}

Top Ten Reasons to Work at Google: http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/reasons.html

What It's Like to Be an Engineer at Google: http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=about.html

I would LOVE to work for google but even I think I lack credibility.

This is an interesting tip for finding old versions of files you may have knocking about on your hard disk. Assuming you have Google Desktop up and running, if you run a search and select the option to 'See nnn desktop results in a browser' (where nnn is the number of results) you see a typical set of google search results, all the files found, ok that's to be expected and nothing special. However, if you then look at the number of 'cached' entries for each listing you may find that google desktop has kept copies of older versions of your favourite files. If it says '57 cached' then there are 57 older versions and you can click on this number and get a timeline of all the various versions of the file.

Ok, your fancy formatting may be lost but if you just decided that maybe it wasn't a good idea to rewrite your memoirs from the perspective of your cat then the previous version may still be there somewhere.

Someone at work had a nice bird's eye aerial view of the company building, He got it from Microsoft's ripoff of Google Maps which was my route-finding site of choice. The Microsoft version has much better aerial photo's of my town than Google, showing cars where on googles you cannot make out houses.

But it got better: there is a 3D view that somehow manages to show pictures from a choice of the four compass points. The pictures of my house are amazing, you can see the whole estate and compare the size of your garden to everybody else's. I'd like to do some printouts to hang on the wall but am scared of copyright police. The bird's eye shots seem to date from 1999 and my house is shown as woodland. The 3D shots are from last year, 2006, as a couple of houses at the end of the estate are still being built.

What is odd is the consistant lighting level over the whole town. Is it one big picture or do they do some processing on many pictures and stitch them together?

What is it about Barclays Bank customers that makes the phishers target them more than any other bank (according to my gmail spam list)?

• Are they particularly gullible?
• particularly rich and worth swindling?
• is the barclays web site easy to copy?
• are there more than enough profits from barclays that it's not worth copying more sites?
• do the other banks (including mine) hire hit men?

What could it be?

Spam on gmail is definitely getting worse, 30-50 messages a day. I've given up checking the list for false positives beyond a quick scan for subjects that make sense (why would I open an email with the subject 'Re: ceiling banana'?).

I've mentioned before how the current Google Desktop has the nice ctrl-ctrl thing to open the quick search box where you bang in a query term and the results appear in a list. You then select one of the results from the list for further perusal and things freeze for 30 seconds before the results appear in Firefox. The computer is still usable, you just have to wait for the results to appear.

I've found someone else moaning about this in the google forums, it appears to be a Windows 2000/firefox 2.0 problem. No resolution yet but I have found that it is possible to use CTRL-ALT-G to select the google query box on the sidebar and then type your query. This is pretty much the same just not quite as quick to invoke. However, when you choose a result from the list it appears pretty much instantly in firefox, as you would expect.

Another workaround is to use IE as your default browser. The third, more pausible workaround is to buy a Mac and use spotlight.

I've given up on using the google desktop scratch pad and todo widgets to try to synchronise across desktops as it doesn't work at all reliably: better to use email.

So I made some space for more widgets. I install the google video widget out of curiosity and it offers to show me Steve Irwin's death video. Yes, tasteless voyeuristic pleasure always there on your desktop!

I removed it.

The weather globe widget is pretty but my computer room has two windows.

My new monitor has an abundance of screen space that was begging to be used. When apps are maximised they are just too big, there is ample space to have widgets down the side.

I contemplated the widget options:

• Google Desktop Search
• Yahoo Widgets/Konfabulator
• Stardock ObjectBar or DesktopX

I decided it was time to give Google Desktop Search another try. In addition to search it gives me a desktop bar down the right of the screen showing pending email, family photo's etc. It has a number of features that I hadn't tried out before:

• press ctrl button twice for a quick search dialog. Bang in the first three letters or so of a program name and you can launch an obscure program in seconds whichout resorting to the mouse and start menu.
• the widgets include a scratchpad and a todo list. It is possible to store the notes and todo's on google's servers such that they appear at every pc you use. Ok this relies on trusting google so better not put your evil plans in the todo list. UPDATE: it takes a minute or two for notes to appear after booting up.
• Google Calendar widget integrated with google's online calendar.
• they have prettied up the widgets with transparent backgrounds etc. You can drag them off the desk and put them where you like.

I was previously happy with Microsoft's MSN Desktop Search apart from it persistantly failing to stop when I shut down the computer. I'll give google another try but I don't rule out vacillating back.