Hashemian Blog Web Tools, Financial Markets, Technology Thursday, October 29, 2009 Chrome Wishes  For a creature of habit like me it was a difficult move, but I have finally migrated from Internet Explorer v6 (IE6), and not just to v7 or v8. As long as I was making a leap, I went out on a limb and started using Google's browser, Chrome. While occasionally I find myself back on IE6 for a few sites, Chrome has become my default surfing window into the world wide web. Chrome comes in 3 flavors, known as channels, Stable, Beta, and Dev. I took the middle ground and settled on the Beta channel, what I would call the Goldilocks version, not too safe but not too risky. For the most part I like this browser and as new versions go online and are automatically downloaded, it just keeps growing on me. Chrome is fast and clean. It launches much quicker than IE or Firefox and it has an impressive response time, specially for the Web 2.0'ish pages that seem to be everywhere these days. And the so-called omnibox (combined search and URL bar) is an ingenious feature. But for all of its goodness, there are still a few areas that it falls short. Here are my top 3 pet peeves with Chrome: • View source - Like other browsers, Chrome does allow one to view the HTML source of a page but not correctly after a form is submitted. This still stymies me at times, until I realize that when viewing page source, Chrome appears to make a fresh request to the URL rather than just display the current content. This results in displaying source code that is inconsistent with the page that's resulted from a POST operation, such as a form submission. This bug needs to be fixed. • Image properties – Just about all browsers allow users to get the properties of an image (URL, size, dimensions, etc.), generally via a right-click and selecting "Properties". There's no such capability in Chrome. The "Inspect Element" menu item just loads the page source and positions the cursor at the declaration of the image tag. Hardly helpful for obtaining image properties. • Referrer settings – This one can be generalized into allowing users to tweak low-level browser features. Chrome has a number of nice commands like about:memory and about:dns, but where is about:config, as in Firefox? One of the browser features I like to disable is the Referrer. I know this could lead to some usability issues on some sites, but I despise giving sites any information about myself including where I'm arriving from. Chrome doesn't allow any such tweaks, but it should. Ok, I know Chrome's source code is out there and I could edit and recompile, but really I'm not that desperate :) chrome,browsers,google,ie,firefox Labels: browsers, google, internet <Chrome Wishes> // posted by rh 0 comments Friday, July 03, 2009 Google Translate, Persian  Google Translate has been around for some time. you paste in a block of text or a URL, set the source and target languages and off it goes, translating. Aside from the omnipresent Spanish, German, and French translations, Google had been steadily adding other languages to its list, save one, Persian (known as Farsi in Persian language,) until now. It's a well-known fact that Iranians are one of the most active Internet users in the world, certainly far and above the others in Middle East. That is more noteworthy given the censorship and restrictions by the government. I wonder what the activity level would be if people are given complete freedom of expression. Then again, it may just be the political situation that has given rise to the Internet-savvy generation who has been pushed into harnessing technology for its causes, but I digress. It seems that the interest surrounding the post-election turmoil in Iran finally pushed Google into adding Persian to the list of their languages. They should have done it a long time ago, but better late than never. The Persian translation page is in alpha mode (read, crude), but it's a good start. Being fluent in Persian, I tried the translator for a number of sites and text-passages, and I give it a barely passing grade translating to and from English. In most cases it was coherent enough to get the main concepts across. Of course, translation technologies as a whole still have a long way to go, and they may never reach human proficiency. As an example, this Persian sentence: با گوگل ترجمه فارسی در حال حاضر ، شما دیگر باید با دوستانم تماس فارسی تبلیغ خود را به دولت ایران را برای شما ترجمه :) is translated from: With Google translating Persian now, you no longer need to call your Persian friends to translate Iranian government propaganda for you :) Not exactly a perfect translation. Here's the Persian translation of this blog's home page. google,translation,google translate,persian,farsi,iran,language translation Labels: google, technology <Google Translate, Persian> // posted by rh 0 comments Monday, June 08, 2009 Google or Bing  Microsoft is nothing if not persistent. Last week the company unveiled the latest incarnation of its search engine called Bing. I don't know, but this is probably the 5th iteration of the company's attempt to force itself onto the psyche of the net searchers. You've got to give Microsoft credit for trying. Squeezed by the champion, Google, on one side and the runner-up, Yahoo, on the other, Microsoft keeps on trying and trying and trying. So far they have yet to chip away at the search market share in a meaningful way and this latest salvo, as far as I can tell, is far from impressive. Bing looks sleek for sure but it's so obvious that the underlying engine is the same old algorithm as before. Adding a nice graphic and a bunch of bells and whistles is well and good, but winning converts is another story. To be fair, I tried Bing for a little while, only to slide right back into Google's arms. Don't blame me for being faithful to Google. You did it too. But it's not blind faith. Google still produces much more relevant results without the Web 2.0 trickery, and at the end of day the one that produces higher quality at the same price wins the eyeballs. What really surprised me was when I plugged the terms "search engine" into Google. Google's own site was nowhere to be found in the results page. The top 3 results were AltaVista, Dogpile, and Ask.com. Does anyone really use these search engines anymore? Over on the right-hand side where Google displays sponsored ads, Bing was at the top of the list. It appears that even Google is excited about Microsoft's new search engine, if only to charge them a premium for a top sponsorship spot. It's almost like Google is saying, "who, me worry?" google,microsoft,bing,search engines,yahoo Labels: google, Microsoft, web <Google or Bing> // posted by rh 0 comments Monday, December 29, 2008 Google's Missing News  One of the things I like about the Google news site is the fact that it's mostly an orderly aggregation of news from other outlets. Add to that the legendary Google search technology and one can find just about any news release about any item in any period. That is unless you search for a term and a range of dates when there were no news published. Of course it's hard to believe that there were no news items referring to Google in the nearly 3-week period shown below. In fact for that period there are no news on Microsoft, Iraq, or even Thanksgiving - nothing. Well, if Google says there were no news, who am I to argue? Google can't possibly be wrong. There must have been no news whatsoever during that span of time :) google,google news Labels: google <Google's Missing News> // posted by rh 0 comments Saturday, September 13, 2008 Windows XP Service Pack 3 Error  Last week I stumbled upon this Gmail Blog post mentioning that IE6 (Internet Explorer version 6) now supports some of the GUI enhancements offered by Gmail. But in order to exploit these enhancements, one had to apply a critical update to IE6 from Microsoft. An interesting point cited by this post was that Google and Microsoft developers had worked together to address the issue. I didn't think these guys even talked to each other, let alone cooperate to release an update for the IE6 browser. I had always wondered why Gmail appeared less fancy in IE6 than in other browser like IE7 or Firefox, and this post finally resolved that mystery. Now I'm not the type to jump on a patch or a service pack as soon as Microsoft releases them. I still use IE6 on Windows XP at work and at home alongside Firefox 3, and I have no desire to upgrade to Windows Vista or IE7. The prospect of better Gmail experience however was tempting enough for me to pay a visit to the Windows Update site and apply the IE6 patch. I have automatic updates disabled on my machine and apparently I was missing a lot of them as I was suddenly greeted with a long list of security and critical patches once I got the process rolling. Among the list were two notable items, IE7 and Windows XP Service Pack 3. I promptly opted out of IE7, but decided to give SP3 a green light. Little did I know that I'd be wasting the next 3 hours of my life over this inane service pack. The process started our smooth enough. a number of patches were applied, followed by the obligatory reboot. Then came the SP3 update from hell. The sluggish process would run almost to the end at which time an error dialog box would pop up with a simple message: "Service Pack 3 setup error. Access is denied." Huh? Access to what is denied? Acknowledging the message would commence a rollback process as sluggish as the installation itself, followed by an automatic reboot. Not acceding defeat, I ran a Web search on the error and found this KB article from Microsoft Support. Apparently I wasn't the first person having this issue. Following the advice of the article, I exited my antivirus program (AVG) and tried once more, but again I got the same error. Perhaps Windows Defender was the culprit, but stopping that process didn't help either. After a few more tries shutting down various programs like Diskeeper and Symantec's Backup agent, I was still getting nowhere. Finally I fired up Process Explorer and slaughtered every process in sight until only the basic ones remained. And yet, SP3 defiantly refused to be installed. It was the same old snail-pace install-error-rollback-reboot that I was getting well acquainted with. There comes a time when a person must cut his losses and move on and my time was then. Most likely the trouble was a registry permission issue which is also mentioned in the KB article and a solution is offered. But by then my patience had already run out and by that final reboot I decided that SP2 was good enough for me. In the end it turns out that SP3 doesn't really offer anything substantial over SP2. A few security fixes and optimizations but nothing so crucial that’s worth this kind of hassle. Happily, the IE6 update had been applied (possibly among the first set of patches) and that wiped away any modicum of temptation I might have had to give SP3 one more shot. The computer is working as before (even after the multiple upgrade onslaught), Gmail enhancements now appear fine on IE6, and my only regret is not stopping after the first SP3 update attempt went awry. Sorry SP3, we just weren't meant to be together. windows xp,gmail,windows service pack,internet explorer,firefox,microsoft,google Labels: google, Microsoft <Windows XP Service Pack 3 Error> // posted by rh 0 comments Sunday, May 04, 2008 Yahoo's Fate After Microsoft  While many are preparing for a dark day for Yahoo's share when the market opens on Monday, I don't think the shares will get battered too roughly, although there will be volatility. Microsoft's withdrawing of its offer isn't good news to many, but speculation on what Yahoo may have up its sleeve might keep the stock from slipping too far. It's possible that Yahoo overplayed its hand, but it's also possible that Yahoo may have had other plans, yet to be revealed. The plans could involve Google, or private equity, or even something far-fetched like Oracle. And in the end, nothing says they can't get back to negotiating with Microsoft. Only this time, they would probably keep it quiet, until a final deal is stuck. Yahoo,microsoft,google,oracle,finance Labels: business-finance, google, Microsoft, yahoo <Yahoo's Fate After Microsoft> // posted by rh 0 comments Thursday, May 01, 2008 Google Image Labeler  Here comes Google with yet another Beta version of a product. Only this one is like a game with a fun twist and could get quite addictive. The object of the program is to use human intelligence to label images. As powerful and ubiquitous as computers have become, there are still many tasks that us humans are still more skilled at. In this case, identifying a photo or an image (especially a blurry or a vague one) is a task best left to the human brain. Amazon has capitalized on the same concept with its Mechanical Turk site. In that site people create tasks, called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) and invite others to respond. They could be research quizzes, surveys, categorizing web sites, or writing articles. Responders are paid for successfully finishing the tasks and Amazon keeps a commission. In Google Image Labeler, Google harnesses its vast visitor pool to assign labels to images. Two people are paired at random for each round and for 2 minutes are shown random images in sequence. Participants are tasked with coming up with as many labels as they can for each image. One side doesn't see the other side's suggestions. If one of the labels match, the participants are given a score and they move on to the next image. Or they can skip the image. What's in it for the participants? A journey into the psyches of 2 randomly connected people for 2 minutes at a time, and accumulating scores, perhaps for bragging rights. And for Google? A cost-free experiment to more accurately identify the images in its vast database. Since participants don't know each other and time is short, they are motivated to quickly suggest the most appropriate labels based on their visceral reactions. If you get a chance, give Google Image Labeler a shot. Just be warned that it could get addictive. I had to stop myself after a few rounds, lest I waste hours in oblivion. Speaking of Google, the stock climbed another 19 points or 3.25% percent today to $593. Since its low of $413 on March 10 (barely 7 weeks ago), it has risen nearly 37%. Could've, should've, would've. google,amazon,images,human intelligence,mechanical turk,psychology Labels: amazon, google, web <Google Image Labeler> // posted by rh 0 comments Tuesday, April 29, 2008 Google Toolbar 5 Beta  Google toolbar is out with a new version 5 in beta. While I find myself using Firefox more often than before everyday, I’m still on Internet Explorer the majority of the time, perhaps due to force of habit, or the fact that some sites display better on IE. I have refused to upgrade IE 7 however. Version 6 runs just fine for me. Ironically, what keeps IE a viable browser for me is Google toolbar. There are plenty of useful and time-saving utilities in the toolbar from quick access to Google search to spell checking, to auto-filling forms. The new toolbar is similar to the last version, but there is one feature that I stumbled on by accident that really made this version worth the upgrade. The toolbar hooks itself into the search function (Edit-Find…Ctrl+F) of IE and displays a Firefox-style search bar at the bottom of the page with similar functionality as that of Firefox. The web page document is searched and the first match is highlighted as the search term is being typed. It's a giant improvement over IE's stodgy pop-up search box. I'm not sure if the Beta version is available for Firefox yet, but if you want to try the toolbar out on IE, pick it up here: http://toolbar.google.com/T5/ google,google toolbar,internet explorer,Firefox,ie Labels: google, web <Google Toolbar 5 Beta> // posted by rh 0 comments Tuesday, April 22, 2008 Yahoo Beats, Microsoft Next  As I had expected, Yahoo reported good earnings, but nothing spectacular. The stock has received a slight dent in after-hours, most likely the effect of selling into the good news. Chances are, barring any big news, it'll stay relatively flat tomorrow. The question still is whether Yahoo can maintain the earnings going forward. I believe most people don't have much faith in that. One quarter is hardly an indication of a trend. The bigger question, however, is the status of Microsoft's offer. A better indication might arrive on Thursday when Microsoft reports its own quarterly earnings. Even with Vista's slow uptake, my feeling is that it will show healthy earnings. Microsoft has a long history of under-promising and over-delivering on earnings. The weak dollar will probably help its bottom-line considerably as well. Many U.S. companies have gotten a boost from the weak dollar, offsetting their weaker domestic intake with higher overseas revenues. While many believe that Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo is inevitable, there is still plenty of twists and turns left in this saga, including piercing the defenses of some heavy-weights such as Google, News Corp., and Time Warner, who would want to see this takeover derailed. microsoft,yahoo,google,earnings,weak dollar,vista Labels: financial, google, Microsoft, yahoo <Yahoo Beats, Microsoft Next> // posted by rh 0 comments Monday, April 21, 2008 Yahoo's Earnings  Yahoo is slated to report its earning tomorrow after the market close. If it can pull off what Google did last week, the stock should rise to about $35. Then again, that was Google and there was plenty of pent-up demand from buyers. The stock had been pounded so bad that there was nowhere for it to go but up. The good earnings news only gave it the additional momentum it needed to explode way up. Yahoo's stock probably won't see a 20% rise on Wednesday no matter how good its earnings. Given Yahoo's snobby attitude towards Microsoft's advances, one has to surmise that it's feeling pretty comfortable with its earnings. A good report will validate its position in resisting Microsoft and holding out for a higher offer while giving it much bigger bargaining power. On the flip side, if the earnings are dowdy, little doubt will remain that Microsoft would prevail in its takeover efforts. It's ironic, but I'm sure Google is rooting for Yahoo to report stellar earnings and fend off Microsoft. I've already seen Yahoo ads on Google's network and Yahoo is probably getting a good deal on these. If early indications have any value, my bet is on Yahoo reporting decent earnings. If nothing, that would be another signal of strength in the Internet market. Of course, if I were so sure, I would have picked up a few call options myself, which I haven't. The May 08, $30 call strikes saw plenty of activity today. No doubt, more of the same tomorrow. Then again a lot of it could be from traders protecting short stock positions. stocks,options,yahoo,google,microsoft,earnings Labels: business-finance, google, Microsoft, yahoo <Yahoo's Earnings> // posted by rh 0 comments Wednesday, March 26, 2008 eBay Bids Commission Junction and ValueClick Well  It was bound to happen. A few days ago I (and surely many other eBay affiliates) received an email from eBay announcing the unveiling of their very own affiliate site (dubbed eBay Partner Network) and their April 1st departure from Commission Junction, a ValueClick company. May 1st is the final cut-off date for the affiliates to complete the migration. That means many sites like this one will be busy porting their application over to the new eBay platform. That is specially true of sites (again, like this one) that leverage eBay Developer API's to search and display relevant eBay items on their pages. While I'm sure this is sad news for Commission Junction and ValueClick, I wonder what took eBay so long. This is a company with vast resources and talent and hardly in need of a middle-man company to handle their affiliate transactions. While eBay has been lurching, companies like Google and Amazon have gone on to produce numerous services geared towards affiliates and developers and have reaped the rewards. As for the affiliates both offer solid in-house products in the forms of Adsesne (Google) and Amazon Associates. Perhaps eBay's stalling is indicative of some internal synergy problems coupled with some recent high profile departures. Thankfully for eBay, their core auction business seems to have remained intact and it would provide a solid platform to launch some of these new initiatives. We'll see if eBay can finally catch up with the rest of the titans. Meanwhile many of us will be busy migrating our little affiliate sections to this new platform. More info on affiliates.ebay.com. ebay,amazon,google,adsense,affiliate programs,commission junction Labels: adsense, amazon, ebay, google <eBay Bids Commission Junction and ValueClick Well> // posted by rh 1 comments Wednesday, March 19, 2008 Google, Blogger in German?  Here's a head-scratcher for tonight. When I got home one of my kids was trying show me something on blogger.com and suddenly everything was in Deutsch, as in German. At first I though that it was a mix-up. Some programmer at Google (which owns Blogger) had screwed up and suddenly everything had gone Teutonic. Now we have a German-speaking household, so then I assumed that the kids had changed some setting to German language and Google was happily obliging. Hoping to unravel the mystery, I logged in to my own account on the XP machine and headed to google.com. no luck, it kept switching over to google.de. What was happening here? I checked the regional settings on the XP machine and everything was as expected, en-US. Then I headed to the whoami page to see if my IE browser was specifying a wrong "Accept-Language" header (i.e. de-DE) prompting Google to redirect to its German site based on the CultureInfo. Nope, that wasn't the problem either. Then I launched Firefox and surfed onto google.com. Same behavior, I landed on Google's German site again. Somehow Google was convinced that I was German and it was trying to help me, more like coerce me, to their German site. Is it possible that they had an algorithm tracking web sites visited from my house and deciding that the "most appropriate" site for us was their German version? I can't say for sure, but apparently Google had decided that we should use their German site. A quick fix was to click on the English link on Google's homepage. That deposited a cookie in the browser indicating that I was interested in the standard google.com site and it fixed the immediate problem, but not entirely. Blogger was (and still is) coming up in German and deleting cookies, as I often do, would bring things back to the annoying redirect. Was Google erroneously identifying my IP address as one from Germany? Feeling frustrated, I searched the newsgroups for an answer and I found this thread that confirmed my suspicion. One of the posters who was experiencing the same problem had written to Google and had received this response: Google has recently started using IP-address detection to help our users find our foreign destination sites. Unfortunately, our IP-address detection is not perfect and you are being inappropriately redirected. We are working on the problem. In the interim, you can regain your old Google.com experience by simply clicking on the 'Google.com [English]' link in the footer of the page. By clicking on this, Google will note that you have opted out of the foreign domain site and you will no longer experience redirects. So it was an IP address mis-identification after all. This is the most ridiculous scheme I have heard of, and to have it come out of Google, it is almost inconceivable. No doubt the folks at Google are padding themselves on their backs for their ingenuity. Meanwhile they apparently have disregarded the basic rules of IP addresses on the Internet and the proper way of serving visitors. First off, please don't help me along when I haven't asked for it. That is so Microsoft to try to be helpful in all the wrong places. If I want the German site, I'll ask for it myself. Second, the correct way of determining a user's preferred CultureInfo is checking the browser header. The browser will tell you what language the user is likely interested in. Third, the IP address is an unreliable way of determining the user's preferred language. The user could be an American connecting his laptop from his hotel room in Germany. Or a Parisian employee of an American company using a corporate proxy server in the U.S. Fourth, if you must persist in this IP detection insanity, at least make sure your databases are not flawed. I'm connected over an AT&T DSL circuit in Connecticut, yet Google apparently believes I'm in Germany or Lichtenstein. And finally don't give the visitor some half-baked solution of clicking on a link, when it doesn't help with your other sites and reverts to the original problem when cookies are deleted. Not to mention that it wouldn't even work if the user has opted to block cookies. For a company that prides itself in its technical prowess and its service, Google sure astounded me with this one. Or, is this just a ploy to throw some traffic to their foreign sites? Google,German,ip addresses,internet,web browsers,Firefox,cultureinfo Labels: google, internet, web <Google, Blogger in German?> // posted by rh 1 comments Sunday, February 03, 2008 Microsoft + Yahoo > Google?  For those of us who might have thought that Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo was an ace in the hole, this blog post from a Google bigwig might give a pause. Could Google be joining the likes of IBM, SUN, RealNetworks, Borland, Novell and Netscape who've lodged anti-trust complaints in various regulatory bodies around the world against Microsoft? Alright, no tears for Microsoft here. We all know this company is predatory and brutal when it wants to subjugate competitors. But can Google with a 75% share in their market (online search) really have a valid complaint here? Apparently so, and I'm actually surprised that Google has even addressed this acquisition rather than giving its characteristic aloof response. With Google's market value markedly below its 52-week high and facing slowdown or saturation in some of its markets, I can understand why the giant is suddenly feeling worried about its prospects. Can this acquisition finally give Microsoft the needed ammunition to meaningfully challenge Google? Only time will tell, but the fact that Google is feeling uneasy about it promises some interesting jousting and parrying ahead. Whatever the case, I hope Google doesn't lose its grip and mire itself in a long battle with Microsoft. Instead it should just stick to its guns, do no evil, and continue to innovate around Microsoft. In the end Google may still get run over by the behemoth, but I really hope Microsoft doesn't win this match, with or without yahoo. It will be a dark day on the Internet if Microsoft strips Google of its status just by its monopolistic tactics. google,microsoft,yahoo,search engines,anti-trust,acquisition,hostile takeover Labels: business-finance, google, Microsoft, web, yahoo <Microsoft + Yahoo > Google?> // posted by rh 0 comments Thursday, January 10, 2008 The Demise of IT? So What.  Here we go again with Nick Carr spraying his anti-IT bile around. This time it's in the form of a new book, arguing that IT departments and software developers will be extinct soon. Why does he matter? Because he's a so-called pundit, a Harvard-educated writer, who in 2003 wrote a scathing article in Harvard Business Review titled, "IT Doesn't Matter". It ruffled a few feathers back then, just as the industry was pulling itself out of the imploded tech fiasco. So he's back again, trumpeting his negativism about the software and the IT industry in general. Read a viewpoint here. I don't understand what Mr. Carr's point is? I mean besides creating controversy and pushing a few books in the process. He argues that IT and the software industry will go down the same road as the electric generation business went a century ago. Back then many factories had their own generators. Then the utility companies became efficient enough and the economies of scale replaced self-generation with buying service from a large utility company. First of all, is that a good thing? Today we are at the mercy of the monopolistic utility companies. They charge whatever they want, they ignore consumer pleas when their meters are faulty and they take their time restoring power when it goes out. So is this in the cards for the companies' IT infrastructure? Google or Amazon taking the helm and treat us as they please? Secondly, how much foresight does it take to predict big shifts in the IT industry? Every industry goes through changes, not just IT. So the PC might be dead in 20 years, big deal. Cars and clothes and MRI machines won't be the same either. Given long enough time, even Earth will look different than it does today. It's easy to prognosticate about the future. No one really knows how things will shake out 20 years from now. There are a million possibilities and we all know the future will be different than the present. If Mr. Carr had predicted the rise of Google, Amazon, and Facebook 20 years ago, I might have been impressed. But just looking at a slice of time today and extrapolating it into the future, a 9-year old could do it, and he'll probably be just as wrong as Mr. Carr is. Disclaimer: My opinions are based on material available in the media and Mr. Carr's Web site. I have not read nor am I planning to read his book. But if you want to buy it, be my guest. information technology,nick carr,software development,google,amazon Labels: amazon, google, technology <The Demise of IT? So What.> // posted by rh 0 comments Wednesday, December 12, 2007 Google Lifeblood  Like most people who have a Web site I check my site's ranking on Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) from time to time. It's striking how much of a Website's life depends on Google. That's particularly true with smaller sites whose lifeblood is the traffic Google sends their way. But even bigger sites would suffer severely if their pages suddenly lost ranking in Google. Sure there are other search engines like Yahoo and MSN, but enough about those. And so when a couple of days ago I noticed that my site's traffic had a noticeable drop in traffic, the first place I looked for diagnosis was Google. Sure enough, my site's pages where either non-existent or had dropped considerably in ranking. I know that compared to other sites, my traffic is but a drop in a proverbial bucket, but even so the realization of lost ranking made me concerned. I can only imagine how those people, whose living is tied to their traffic, may feel when Google starts to snub their sites. the results could be devastating. Had I violated any one of Google's quality guidelines? Had I engaged in any activity that might have blacklisted my site? I was stumped. I hadn't made any design changes to the site that I could recall. I even tested my site for unintended search engine spamming using a couple of different online tools. One claimed I had hidden text on my pages. They were light-colored timestamps on a colored background. Just for insurance I changed them to a darker color. It also caught what it regarded as keyword stuffing. The culprit turned out to be whitespace characters (&nbsp;) with missing trailing semi-colons. So at least I got to fix this error on my site, and then I just moved on. Today, inexplicably my site's ranking in Google SERPs seems to be back where it used to be. Could this have been the result of those minor changes? I don't think so. Most likely, the drop was due to some temporary event in Google's algorithm. What's alarming is that Google is not just influential, but it's vital to so many. Where can one go to if they are unfairly treated? Who will listen? This is not a paid service, there are no SLAs (Service Level Agreements), contracts, or even tenuous promises. Mine is just a hobby site. Being present in Google is great, but I'd still be doing this even if my site wasn't included. I don't think my attitude would be the same if I were making a living off my site. I can appreciate that Google has the enormous task of separating the good sites from the bad. But with that much power and reach, it is inevitable that many innocent sites will be inadvertently punished. Consider how things would be if there were only one powerful and unregulated credit agency with two marginal ones, instead of the three with equal standings today. google,search engines,seo,serp,spam,page ranking Labels: google, seo, spam, web <Google Lifeblood> // posted by rh 0 comments Monday, September 03, 2007 Google's GrandCentral  The other day I received an email from GrandCentral with the subject line: Invitation to sign up for GrandCentral. Like everyone else I receive plenty of bogus invitations to sign up for this or register for that. It smelled like spam. "Who the hell is GrandCentral?", I thought. But before clicking the spam button, I decided to check the email. It started: Good news! We are excited to announce that we are opening the GrandCentral private beta to some additional users and would like to extend you an invitation to sign up. Then I realized that back in June when the news of Google purchasing GrandCentral had hit the wires, I had added myself to their waiting list. So I proceeded with the registration and got my own number. This is a pretty neat concept. You get to choose a phone number and you can link it to several physical numbers. Then, depending on your choice, an incoming call will ring all or some or none of the numbers. It comes with voicemail, Caller ID, email forwarding and a number of other features. Most activities can be done online as well as over the phone. It's presence, call forwarding, and messaging all wrapped in one package. Best of all it's free, and you can keep the number for life. As things are with Google products, GrandCentral is in Beta and probably will be for years. It remains to be seen how Google will fully monetize GrandCentral. There are some paid features, I believe, but I assume the majority of users, myself included, will only use the free services. So I presume, like most Google properties, GrandCentral will come to rely on advertising for a big portion of its revenues. That will probably include text ads on the site, voice ads inserted before or after playing voicemails, or ad links included in notification emails. I wonder if GrandCentral future plans include free fax service. That would be a natural progression and it would position them against some long-established services like jConnect that offer free fax numbers and whom I have been a satisfied user for a number of years. grandcentral,google,fax,phone service,fax service,presence,voicemail,grand central,call forwarding,messaging Labels: google, technology, web <Google's GrandCentral> // posted by rh 2 comments Tuesday, August 14, 2007 Internet Network Storage  We've got hard drives in our desktops and laptops. Then there are NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network) that we use at work. There are USB thumb/flash drives, SD and microSD memory cards that we use at home. And there are the myriad access protocols, whether local or network, such as SCSI, IDE, SATA, RAID, SMB, CIFS, NFS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc. Storage seems to be everywhere and it’s dirt cheap, at around 20 cents a GB these days, and always dropping. The one area that's still being developed is hosted storage. Remote storage is a tricky matter. Unlike local or even LAN storage, there are a number of things that can go wrong, chiefly circuit outages and bandwidth limitations. Imagine clicking on a drive letter and having to wait 5 minutes for the content to show. You get the picture. Still there is no denying that the trend is pointing to remote storage. I know, this whole thin computing thing got a little ahead of itself, but I still think Sun's slogan still holds true, the network is the computer, or more appropriately, it will be the computer. Rumors of Gdrive, Google's hosted storage have been circling for a couple of years now. While Gdrive rumors continue to persist, Google has begun to offer additional storage for some of its existing services like Gmail and Picasa. The additional storage comes in several sizes with annual fees, like $250/year for 100 GB. Gdrive might indeed be in the offing. The front-runner in remote storage is Amazon.com who has had a hosted storage service for a couple of years now. Known as S3, it can be used to store anything and the interface schemes are the familiar SO (Service Oriented) protocols such as REST and SOAP. The cost is measured by capacity and bandwidth in 1 GB increments. $0.15/GB for storage, $0.10/GB for upload, and $0.18/GB for download. These are good starts, but don't quite aspire to be simple drive letters on one's PC. The question now is when will the king of desktops, Microsoft, come up with such a service and tie it up to Windows? Monopoly concerns aside, one has to believe they are working on something. It could prove to be a lucrative venture. It's a win for consumers too. Imagine never having to worry about crashed drives, backups, running out of room, or being able to use your drive from anywhere. It may be closer to reality than we think. network storage,shared drive,nas,san,network drive,gdrive,google,gmail,picasa,amazon,s3 Labels: amazon, gmail, google <Internet Network Storage> // posted by rh 1 comments Sunday, July 29, 2007 Gmail Inbox Changes  Beginning about 3 or 4 days ago I've noticed a change in the way Gmail groups emails together. It seems to be a subtle algorithm change but it appears that the glue has been watered down a bit. Email messages definitely don’t hang together the way they used to. Now many come In as separate items. Back when Google introduced the free email service, Gmail, it also introduced a relatively radical shift in the way emails are displayed to the users. There are no folders, instead one can use filters to apply labels to emails which sort of mimics the folder functionality of organizing and categorizing messages. There was also a new approach in displaying emails in that conversations within a thread are grouped together in a thread-like format (much like a forum) and a counter is applied to show the number of messages in a particular group. It took some getting used to Gmail's way of displaying messages, but I have grown accustomed to it. I don't consider it revolutionary though, it's just different. I'm fine with the traditional way used in Outlook or Yahoo mail. The difference with Gmail, at least at the time it was introduced, was their superior search capability. One could easily recall past messages given a keyword or two. I'm not sure what the exact grouping algorithm of Gmail is, but I suspect it has to do with the timestamps, senders and receivers, titles and contents of the messages. At any rate, that algorithm has now been tweaked to loosen the condition by which messages are grouped together. This became evident to me a few days ago when I noticed that my inbox suddenly had a large influx of messages. My Gmail inbox receives a number of automated messages that used to be grouped together, perhaps based on their titles. A closer look revealed that those messages that used to clump together, are now presented as separate items. I assume the change was introduced to make the inbox more usable for most people who were unaware of new messages arriving and getting filed under existing messages with similar titles. In my case it meant adapting to the new methodology and creating new filters to keep my inbox from getting too unwieldy. I suspect many others won't even notice the subtle alteration. gmail,google,email Labels: email, gmail, google <Gmail Inbox Changes> // posted by rh 0 comments Wednesday, May 09, 2007 End of the Road for Old Blogger  When Google bought blogger.com from Pyra Labs over 4 years ago, there was a lot of head-scratching. Blogosphere wasn't new but it was a fraction of what it is today. Google wasn't new either, but it was just search engine site, a really good one. And it still was just a private company. Today, blogger.com is just a part of Google's public empire and it has become a popular site for the myriad blogging enthusiasts. Count me in as one of the enthusiasts. I have been a pretty satisfied user of blogger.com since I started blogging on this site. About 2 years ago Google set out to revamp blogger.com by adding new features, improving some of the existing ones and, most prominently, migrating the accounts to its own login infrastructure. I converted this blog to the new version a few months ago. The process was relatively smooth with a few minor glitches. Today blogger.com finally retired its old version for good, hailing: "Old Blogger is dead! Long live Blogger!". What tipped me off was the missing blogger image button at the bottom of my blog pages. According to blogger.com's terms of service users are (or were) required to display this button on their pages. I am not sure if the terms of service still require displaying this button. Right now it seems flaky (look to the right). Sometimes it loads, other times it fails. For now I'm going to leave it, but if it continues to remain missing, I'll assume that it's now a relic of the past and its presence is no longer required. Then perhaps it's time to toss it. google,blogs,blogger,blogger.com,pyra labs Labels: google, web <End of the Road for Old Blogger> // posted by rh 0 comments Sunday, March 25, 2007 Wikipedia via Google  The other day, after reading this article about factual errors on Wikipedia, it dawned on me how often my family and I uses Wikipedia to find information. It's an amazing tool and while the warnings about mistakes and misinformation have dogged it for years, it continues to be one of the most popular sites on the Web. I have seen comments from people who've claimed to have stopped using Google in favor of Wikipedia. It's hard to believe that at first, but even I have started doing the same thing, albeit in a more indirect way. When I need to look up something I start by searching Google, and generally Wikipedia is one of the top of results. In fact in most cases, that's the link I'm looking for. Why not search Wikipedia on Wikipedia site? Two reasons: I want to see other the other unbiased search results, and, Google search is way faster and better than Wikipedia's. Most of my searches are of no consequence. For example, when Syd Barrett died, I went to Wikipedia to learn more about the life of this Pink Floyd's founding member. I also used Wikipedia to find out more about the relatively new rock band, My Chemical Romance. In both case, Google was the point of entry for me. And if there were factual errors for those Wikipedia entries, it wouldn’t matter much. But suppose I was researching lung cancer or lymphoma, both of which have Wikipedia pages appearing high on Google results. Factual errors in those cases could result in catastrophic decisions being made by a potential patient, or even a health care provider in a third-world country who supplements Internet research with his own knowledge and judgment. I would have preferred a site like WebMD to upstage Wikipedia for those terms. Wikipedia has the vaunted position of dominating Google's best search results for many terms. I can imagine that a large portion of its traffic originates from Google. If the site wasn't not-for-profit, it might have been a formidable competitor to Google itself. But perhaps it is its non-profit status that gets it the favorable treatment from Google. That's just speculation on my part as Google always claims to be unbiased about its search results, using mainly popularity as a criteria. Whatever the case, the Google, Wikipedia virtual duopoly seems to be receiving some backlash, at least in the academic circles. For instance, my children's teachers, on a number of occasions, have forbidden their classes from consulting either site for their homework. I applaud them for that, as that sends a message to the youth that relying on a single source for information is not always wise. google,wikipedia Labels: google <Wikipedia via Google> // posted by rh 0 comments Wednesday, March 14, 2007 YouTube Copyright Trouble  When Google bought the fledging, but popular video sharing site, YouTube, for $1.6 billion in early October of 2006, it created a firestorm of controversy surrounding the transaction. It seemed like we were back again in 1999, the height of the Internet bubble. Google itself had actually launched its own video sharing site months prior to the acquisition. I had actually never visited the YouTube site, but had begun to check out some of the Google videos, mostly motorcycle stunt and race clips. Some praised Google for its quick action in grabbing a popular site instead of pouring cash and resources in its own service. But many were convinced that Google had overpaid. The acquisition translated to instant wealth for the YouTube executives and employees. Even the administrative assistant there became an over-night millionaire. Then began the task of integrating YouTube into the Google roster of products, the way it had been done a few years earlier with Blogger. But it wasn't too long before the copyright monster started to rear its ugly head. Only a few days after the buyout announcement, YouTube acceded to the Japanese media's complaints by removing some 30,000 of their clips from its site. Obviously media companies weren't sanguine about having their work pirated and put on display on YouTube to begin with, but YouTube was a startup with little money. There was little to be gained by dragging a cash-poor company to court. But this was a different matter, Google was a titan, flushed with money and a rich valuation and the media was smelling blood. The next big copyright news came on early February 2007 when Viacom demanded the removal of 100,000 clips from YouTube that it claimed to have had copyrights to. Finally the hammer fell today as Viacom came out swinging with a $1 billion lawsuit claiming that YouTube and its parent, Google, had failed to protect Viacom's copyright interests in regards to 160,000 videos on its site. There is speculation that the lawsuit is sour grapes, stemming from the fact that the two companies had failed to reach a licensing pact. It's difficult to predict the outcome of this litigation, but for its part YouTube maintains that it has and continues to make all reasonable efforts in protecting owners' rights on its site. All this has some people questioning Google's initial decision to acquire YouTube and therefore find itself mired in the legal mess. But if Google had succeeded with its own video sharing site, it would have found itself in the same situation today, albeit at a lesser cost than the YouTube's purchase price. What I wonder is what effect all this distraction will have on nurturing and growing YouTube. I, as a user, have been on YouTube a few times now. The user-generated clips of practical jokes and humorous situations were amusing at first, but the novelty quickly wore off. What I have generally been viewing consists of bits and pieces of news, educational material (mostly technology related), music videos, and nostalgic clips of old Persian TV. I assume most of these videos are copyrighted, and if complaints and subsequent removals continue, YouTube would soon have nothing for me to watch. I admit, some user-created material there have redeeming quality. I found this one very thought provoking, for example. But I even wonder if at some point this video will be axed as it plays a Pink Floyd tune in its introductory portion. I have to admit that there was one genre of videos on YouTube I would watch for which I was labeled (deservedly) immature and childish by my family. These were clips of a popular 80's televangelist, Robert Tilton, embellished with audible flatulence perfectly synchronized with his contorted facial expressions. Guess what, those clips have also been removed, replaced by the following note: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Reverend Robert Tilton." If the good Pastor succeeded in having YouTube delete these comedic but otherwise useless clips, I wonder if YouTube is on the proverbial slippery slope of losing the majority of its assets and thus its audience. youtube,google,copyright laws,viacom,online videos,robert tilton,pink floyd,hubble Labels: google, law, music, space <YouTube Copyright Trouble> // posted by rh 2 comments Monday, December 11, 2006 Gmail Mail Fetcher  A colleague of mine sent me a note today regarding a new addition to Gmail, Google's free email account. It's called mail fetcher and it allows a person to import mail from other email accounts using the POP protocol. It's a trivial feature which other services such as Yahoo and Hotmail have had for years, but it gives Gmail another advantage to attract new users who might have needed that excuse to join, while holding on to their current base of users who might have defected to other services if Gmail didn't have this feature. Not all users have this option yet (including myself), but I assume it will be rolled out to all Gmail users soon. This is indeed a convenient service for those who have multiple accounts and would like to have all their emails flow into one inbox. The catch is that those external accounts would need to provide the POP service for this to work and not all services do. This is specially true of other free services like Yahoo and Hotmail who block POP access as some users might opt to import their emails elsewhere and that would mean fewer page views (thus fewer banner views) on their respective sites. Ironically in a show of goodwill, Gmail has provided its users with a POP download service to allow them to view their emails from other locations. If all services provided a two-sided POP access, it will be up to the users to choose the service that best suits them for viewing their messages. That would mean that the site with the superior interface and features would claim a bigger slice of the much coveted eyeballs. Personally, I don’t have a need for a POP service. I converted to Gmail years ago when they blew away the competition with their giant 2 Gigabyte storage, and I have been a faithful user ever since. What concerns me however is the old adage of putting all my eggs in one basket. And this is a free basket with no guarantees. What would happen if Gmail suddenly decided to cut off my access? Of course they wouldn't just block access to their users willy-nilly, but suppose they decided to pull the plug on some of their users for whatever reason? Perhaps you unknowingly violate an obscure term of service; off with your head. What would be the recourse? Who can you complain to? How or where would you defend your case? You can write to Gmail support, but who knows if they will answer, or how long it will take before they restore your service, if ever? It's a free service after all, and I suppose they have every right to terminate whoever for whatever reason. Meanwhile all your incoming emails, all your existing emails, all your calendar appointments, and all your contact lists will be out of reach. What would happen to your business, that solely relied on Gmail for customer contacts, now that your access has been cut off? I wonder if people ever consider the downside of this arrangement. It's easy to forget that when the service has been working flawlessly for years. I do wonder about that sometimes. When I enter my account and password and wait for the screen to reload, I wonder if this will be the time when I will be greeted with the message: Sorry, your account has been disabled. For more information about Google Accounts, please consult our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/accounts/. gmail,mail fetcher,google,pop,yahoo,hotmail,email Labels: email, gmail, google, yahoo <Gmail Mail Fetcher> // posted by rh 0 comments

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