Things U Might Like: March 2010

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Google Search Shows IMDb Ratings

Google Search Shows IMDb Ratings:
"Here's a feature I've been expecting ever since Google started to test rich snippets for pages that include reviews: showing movie ratings in IMDb's snippets.

Now you can see the ratings without having to click on the search results, which is useful if you browse the web using a mobile phone or you want to check the ratings for a lot of movies.

'Google tries to present users with the most useful and informative search results. The more information a search result snippet can provide, the easier it is for users to decide whether that page is relevant to their search. With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—for example, review sites or business listings—can label their content to make it clear that each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating,' explains Google.

To quickly see the IMDb ratings for a list of movies, you can start with an empty Google Square, add the column 'IMDb rating' and start entering movie titles.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Send Files in Google Chat

Send Files in Google Chat: "One of the few features that are available in Google Talk's desktop client, but couldn't be used in the web-based gadgets from Gmail, iGoogle and orkut, is file sharing. The missing feature is now available in iGoogle and orkut, but not yet in Gmail.

'Starting today, you can share photos, documents, and other files while chatting in iGoogle and orkut. To give it a try, just click Send a file... in the Actions menu while chatting with a friend (no download required). This feature is also compatible with the file transfer functionality in the Google Talk downloadable software, so you can share files directly from the web with folks who use the desktop version,' explains Google.

You can send multiple files at the same time, but you can't select multiple files from the file picker dialog. Google Chat doesn't support transferring files larger than 100 MB.

Google Talk's desktop client is no longer updated, as Google focused on improving the chat feature from Gmail and adding similar features to iGoogle and orkut. Google Talk's homepage still links to the Windows client, but the first option is a plug-in for video chat.

{ Thanks, Niranjan. }

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Now you can easily add images to your scraps!

Now you can easily add images to your scraps!: "

We're always listening to what users have to say about orkut, and we're constantly working to improve your orkut experience. One of the suggestions we've received many times is to bring back to the ability to add photos to your scraps to the new orkut. We're happy to announce that this feature is now available!

To add images to your scraps, first click the text box to write and edit a message. You'll then see customization options, such as font color and emoticons. Click the image icon to add an image to your your scrap:

You can upload images from your computer, add from your Picasa Web Albums, or search for them in Google Images.

As we like to say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So, hopefully this feature will improve the way you share things with your friends on orkut!

Posted by Marco Domingues, orkut operations team

Friday, March 26, 2010

StopGlobalWarming.org: Take Action

Motorola Replaces Google With Bing in China

Motorola Replaces Google With Bing in China: "

India Times reports:

Motorola Inc, the handset maker that’s rebuilding its mobile-phone business around Google Inc’s Android software, has dropped the US Internet company’s search engine from one of its Android phones in China.

Motorola no longer includes Google’s search engine in its Zhishang device shipped to China Telecom Corp (...)

Google’s decision to stop censoring its Chinese service may lead some companies to switch to rivals (...)

“If you were partnering with Google in China, your business plans have just fallen apart,” said Bertram Lai, head of research at CIMB-GK Securities in Hong Kong. “You need to scramble and find new partners.”

In related news, Chinese authorities have allegedly given instructions to sites to not report favorably on Google’s move. One instruction supposedly reads, “All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy.”

[Thanks Juha-Matti and George!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Motorola Replaces Google With Bing in China | Comments]

Import your photos from Picasa Web Albums to orkut

Import your photos from Picasa Web Albums to orkut: "

For many of us, the best part about taking photos is sharing them with friends and family online.

That's why we've integrated Picasa Web Albums (Google's free photo hosting and sharing service) with orkut, so that you can directly copy your favorite Picasa photos onto orkut with just a few clicks and easily share them with your orkut friends.

Look for the 'import from Picasa' link when you create an orkut album from the orkut photos page or when adding photos within an existing album.

When you click on it, a photo picker will show up where you can access all of your Picasa Web Albums. Choose an album to see all the photos in it:

Next, just select the photos you want to upload to orkut. Be assured, the photos will not be erased from your Picasa account. A copy of the photos will become available on orkut once you complete the upload.

The cool convenience with this feature is that you don't have to download the photos to your computer and then re-upload them to orkut again from your computer.

While the photos you have chosen from your Picasa Web Album are being uploaded to orkut, you can drag and drop the photos to reorder them, caption them, rotate them, select an album cover and also select friends you want to share the photos with. To save your time, we also import all the photo captions from Picasa Web Albums if they already exist.

And to make your life even easier, we've integrated a face detection feature for the photos uploaded from Picasa. You can quickly add names for people whose faces are detected without having to identify them manually.

You can now look forward to many more comments and conversations around your photos on orkut. Wait no more! Head to your orkut photos page, browse through your Picasa Web Albums and exhibit your fabulous photos to your orkut friends. And don't forget to let us know what you think of this feature.

Posted by Megha Gupta, software engineer

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

New Purple Nokia E72 Phone

New Purple Nokia E72 Phone: "

Purple Nokia E72 phone 3-281x300 The Nokia E72 will soon come with the new color casing, purple. Its trendy designed is really suitable for female. This phone is equipped with a 2.36-inch display with 320×240 pixels (QVGA) resolutions and a MicroSD memory card slot with hot swap and up to 16GB.

New Purple Nokia E72 is not special edition, but seems that it will be available worldwide. As mentions, it also features 5MP autofocus camera with Carl Zeiss optics, flash, Bluetooth version 2.0 + EDR, a Micro-USB connector (High-Speed USB 2.0), a 3.5mm audio jack, Integrated GPS with A-GPS, Compass and Nokia Maps 3.0.

VIA: GADGET FOLDER

A gold bar-shaped USB flash memory

A gold bar-shaped USB flash memory: "

20100319214009363

GOLD NOBLE is preparing the release of its gold bar-shaped USB flash memory in Korea market. It is planned to be stored on March 26. This USB memory is made of pure gold or is plated with 24K gold. The price for 8GB gold bar-shaped USB flash memory is 120,000(KRW).

VIA: AVING USA

Detecting suspicious account activity

Detecting suspicious account activity: "(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog)

Posted by Pavni Diwanji, Engineering Director

A few weeks ago, I got an email presumably from a friend stuck in London asking for some money to help him out. It turned out that the email was sent by a scammer who had hijacked my friend's account. By reading his email, the scammer had figured out my friend's whereabouts and was emailing all of his contacts. Here at Google, we work hard to protect Gmail accounts against this kind of abuse. Today we're introducing a new feature to notify you when we detect suspicious login activity on your account.

You may remember that a while back we launched remote sign out and information about recent account activity to help you understand and manage your account usage. This information is still at the bottom of your inbox. Now, if it looks like something unusual is going on with your account, we’ll also alert you by posting a warning message saying, 'Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…' along with the geographic region that we can best associate with the access.

To determine when to display this message, our automated system matches the relevant IP address, logged per the Gmail privacy policy, to a broad geographical location. While we don't have the capability to determine the specific location from which an account is accessed, a login appearing to come from one country and occurring a few hours after a login from another country may trigger an alert.

By clicking on the 'Details' link next to the message, you'll see the last account activity window that you're used to, along with the most recent access points.

If you think your account has been compromised, you can change your password from the same window. Or, if you know it was legitimate access (e.g. you were traveling, your husband/wife who accesses the account was also traveling, etc.), you can click 'Dismiss' to remove the message.

Keep in mind that these notifications are meant to alert you of suspicious activity but are not a replacement for account security best practices. If you'd like more information on account security, read these tips on keeping your information secure or visit the Google Online Security Blog.

Finally, we know that security is also a top priority for businesses and schools, and we look forward to offering this feature to Google Apps customers once we have gathered and incorporated their feedback.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Express yourself with the Blogger Template Designer

Express yourself with the Blogger Template Designer: "In Blogger’s more than 10 years, we’ve learned that blogging is a powerful way for people to express themselves. More than 350,000 words are written on Blogger every minute of every day and over the years we’ve added a bunch of features to ensure that writing those words is as easy, fun and rewarding as possible. Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of the Blogger Template Designer on Blogger in Draft, our experimental playground where you can try out the latest features Blogger has to offer. Instead of creating a lot of new templates that will grow stale over time, we decided to go beyond static templates and reinvent the whole process of designing your blog, making it even easier to express yourself online.

The Blogger Template Designer is our big first step in improving not just our template designs, but all the ways that you can customize the look and layout of your blog. If you try out the Blogger Template Designer, you’ll find:

Fifteen new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
Hundreds of free professional background images from iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace
Customizable colors, fonts and more

Check out this video for a peek at what you can do with the Blogger Template Designer:

For more info, check out our post on the Blogger in draft blog. Give the Blogger Template Designer a test drive, and then let us know what you think!

Posted by Pete Hopkins, Tech Lead, Blogger

Google is hiring SETs

Google is hiring SETs: "

Drop me a resume and a brief note if you're interested in joining Google as an SET. email: test.eng.hiring@gmail.com. Thanks -- Patrick Copeland

When we hire people we look for folks with a 'testing DNA.' These are people who are great computer scientists at their core, but also are very curious, love software, and are passionate about test engineering. People who have those characteristics tend to pursue challenges and continue to learn. Are you one of us? We have positions all over the US and the world.

What is a SET?

At Google, Software Engineers in Test (SET) develop test frameworks and build robust, scalable, and effective tests. SETs spend a majority of their time coding in either C++, Java, or scripting in Python. A SET is a software engineer, a core developer, who has a passion for test engineering.

How is testing done differently at Google?

Literally within milliseconds of a code check-in, our build process will automatically select the appropriate tests to run based on dependency analysis, run those tests and report the results.
By reducing the window of opportunity for bad code to go unnoticed, overall debugging and bug isolation time is radically reduced. The net result is that the engineering teams no longer sink hours into debugging build problems and test failures.
Development teams write good tests because they care about the products, but also because they want more time to spend writing features and less on debugging.
Testing teams focus on higher abstractions, like identifying latencies, system or customer focused testing, and enabling the process with tools.
SETs avoid becoming codependents within this system and generally do not write unit tests or other activities that are best done by the developer.

More about SETs

Our SET’s spend time developing code to prevent bugs. Google has a strong cultural emphasis on developers improving quality (i.e. unit tests, code reviews, design reviews, root cause analysis). We want our engineers to spend their time innovating - not fixing bugs.
SETs enable products to launch faster. They have great influence over internal processes and how developers write code.
One of Google's less understood capabilities is our massive distributed computing environment. The testing groups exploit this infrastructure to do huge amounts of work very quickly and elegantly.
For someone who wants to learn and grow as an engineer, the uninhibited access to the entire code base is a unique opportunity.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Free Selenium Book

Free Selenium Book
Only 69 page preview
Rest can be bought from here

Apps Script Gallery for Google spreadsheets

Apps Script Gallery for Google spreadsheets: "Every week, the Google Apps gang here in New York organizes a movie night. It’s always a lot of fun, but organizing it is chaotic! Naturally, we use a spreadsheet to keep a list of movies we’d like to see (that’s the easy part!), and then on Tuesday evening there’s a storm of email as we try to pick a winner.

Always fans of logic and the democratic process, the team wrote a script — to first collate a list of movie showtimes, then invite everyone to vote. The script automates the process, eliminating the drudgery and leaving us more time to canvas and cajole support for our favorite films.

Google Apps Script has been available to Google Apps customers since January, and today we’re excited to bring it to all Google spreadsheets, along with a new Apps Script Gallery that let’s everyone — not just those who are JavaScript-savvy — reap the benefits of Apps Script. You can see just how easy it is to make use of a script in the video below:

To kick things off in the gallery, we put together some wacky demos showing what’s possible with a script: you’ll find games of hangman and sudoku, some fractal art and a very practical unit conversion script.

You can find these scripts, and more, in the Apps Script gallery by going to Insert and then selecting Script... in any Google spreadsheet.

For more details on the Movie Night script, and to get started writing your own scripts, be sure to check out today’s Google Apps Script announcement on the Google Apps Developer Blog.

Posted by: Evin Levey, Product Manager, Google Apps

31 Stunning Black and White Subject Study Photos on Imagekind

31 Stunning Black and White Subject Study Photos on Imagekind: "

Black and White photography is among one of the most striking forms. Photos sans color require an enhanced use of lighting, shadows, and subject focus. Black and white photography brings out details usually overlooked in standard color photos. Subject studies is the discipline of concentration on one particular subject. Not quite still-lifes, though they share some similar qualities, subject studies focus on one particular object in view.

Take a look below for 31 stunning black and white subject study photos on Imagekind.