For anybody that didn’t notice, the World Cup has gotten underway in Germany. (For those that haven’t heard – every 4 years there’s a world football championship (here in the US we call it soccer).) The US National team is scheduled to play the Czech Republic Monday (the US side is in a tough group this time around.) Anyway, currently Germany/Costa Rica are tied 1-1 and I just tried out Google’s World cup results search. Just searching for world cup at Google yields current match scores and gives info on what match is up next. I was impressed that the update was within about a minute of Costa Rica’s equalizer goal….
Category: Google
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Firefox Sync plugin
Google has released a new plugin for firefox that synchronizes various settings from one pc to another making use of a google account. Essentially, it saves certain preferences from your browser to your Google account, then when the browser is launched again it retrieves any changes from the Google Account. This sounds like a great solution for people trying to keep bookmarks synced across multiple pcs. I wonder if it could track what extensions are installed and make sure you have the same set of extensions on all pcs?
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Google Spreadsheet…
If you haven’t heard of this yet, I’m not quite sure how you’ve missed it since last night… There have been article, after article telling of Google’s intention to release a limited trial of their new online spreadsheet at a screenshot tour. Also, this will be a limited trial (so they don’t do an analytics type launch I suspect.) So, there is a form to submit your email address to be considered for the limited trial.
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Realtime weather data integrated with Google Earth
This looks neat…. Noaa has started releasing kml files which are compatible of course, with Google Earth, to mesh the satellite imagery of Google earth with real-time weather information. It’s covered a few places…. The Map Room… and Google Earth Blog… Now you have the graphics necessary to do your own local weather report…
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Konqueror and Google Maps
After I did my “Kiosk” upgrade to KDE 3.5.2 I was really interested to see if Konqueror would finally work with Google Maps, of course, the problem isn’t with Konqueror it’s with the browser detection. Konqueror uses something called khtml to render web pages. It’s really a fairly good/standards compliant ACID test passing engine. So much so that Apple thought they would base Safari on it. The problem is that some websites recognize “Safari” in the User agent and say, “sorry, we don’t support you” if the browser user agent claims Konqueror….
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Google Wins Bidding War for Dell Desktop Placement
Google has apparently won a pricey bidding war in the race to have their software bundled with new Dell PC’s over the next 3 years. Essentially, I suspect this means, Google Desktop (perhaps Google Pack?) will be preinstalled, as well as browser settings adjusted to make a Google-ified search page the default and probably Google as the default search provider for the browser. They apparently dug in their heels and were determined to win the bidding after seeing the built in search box in IE7 which is in Beta….
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Google Picasa for Linux
One of the big stories out today… Google has released an “early beta” version of Picasa for linux. I first saw the news from the ZDNet Googling Google blog. There are deb, rpm and bin downloads available. The Official Google blog gives a few more details, for instance… this “magic” is made possible by a “carefully tested version of wine”. Also, they solicit feedback in the Google Labs Picasa for Linux group. I think this is very good news for linux users.
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Google Site: search issues
This is interesting…. there’s been a lot of frustration among some (myself included) with the current state of Googles site indexing. For a good while I’ve been able to consistently find ANY post on my site using google if I quote a certain amount of text that I know is on the page. Currently, such quoted text searches for pages that show up as “supplemental” in a site:averyjparker.com search… turn up nothing. In theory, the supplemental results SHOULD turn up when there are no others. (If I understand correctly…) I’ve been able to duplicate this with other site’s supplemental results as well, so it doesn’t JUST affect this site. Well, there’s an update at the official sitemaps blog that tells of some interesting issues with the site: search operator. It sounds like there might be a connection….
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Late afternoon test run of Google Notebook
So, I finally got down to about 5 tabs left in my firefox window and decided I could kill it off and restart it without really losing my place so I could get a good look at the Google Notebook plugin. First impression is that it’s fairly unobtrusive and is in the notification bar with the rest of my plugins (google mail notifier, google calendar notifier, noscript, adsense notifier and adblock…) Clicking on it gives the chance to create a new notebook and then loads a little Web 2.0 looking box complete with resize/close widgets and an Add note button and Actions menu.
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The Google Problem Part 2
If you know me…. you know I have a HARD time putting down a problem that’s unsolved. Even if it’s a problem that really doesn’t have a solution (in my control at least)… I have a tendency to look and analyze, turn it over and try and find out as much as I can about it. Maybe it’s because I’m so used to being able to find solutions to problems, or at least workarounds by gathering enough information… Anyway, after saying I was tired of trying to figure out why google doesn’t like a site and tired of trying to fix things “for google”….. well, I’ve spent more time “investigating”… or should I say “wasted” more time… I’m not sure which, but I did discover a couple interesting things.