I had a frustrating morning last week. I had setup a new pc, transferred data and gotten everything in fairly nice shape. I had got the old printer attached and setup (HP Deskjet 5550). In fact I had done a test page through the printers software at the end of the install process (Some sort of deskjet toolbox software, not Windows test page pattern.) Then we were making sure everything worked and they went to print out a UPS label from Worldship. The printer had come unplugged in the last rearrange, so I plugged power back in and the printer loaded a page, ran the head back and forth twice and spit out a blank page. Oh, we were using a parallel cable – I’ve seen some parallel cable based printers get “flustered” when power is lost and back on (especially if it was in the midst of a job when the power was pulled) – so reboot…
Tag: Google
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Google Coupons and improving Picasa
There are a couple of stories on the “Google front” today. First up Coupons tied into Google location searching (maps.) More details at the Adwords blog. (BTW, this is open to US businesses, an Adwords account is not a requirement.) It looks like they’ll put up printable coupons for businesses. There seem to be quite a few possibilities for extending this idea. (More coverage here.) The next item puts to rest a rumor from some time back. It seems as though at one point in time, Google was interested in Riya, who specializes in image recognition (hey – that’s Bob in that picture.)
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Real time Global strategy game using Google Maps?
Some time back, there was a Risk clone using Google maps which was interesting, but taken offline due to a legal letter. Well, I have had a long interest in strategy games…. (Risk/Axis&Allies and variants as well as the civilization/freeciv variety and Age of Empires/etc….) Anyway… saw this last week… Online strategy game using Google Maps. Upon visiting, I found out the site has moved under heavy load to a new location…. Here’s the new site gmworldwar.com. I don’t know, I’m not terribly eager to strategize world war right now – it seems a bit too much like reality seem to be shaping up for right now… Anyway – it’s called Endgame and uses Google Maps as the back end. It’s currently limited to beta testers due to high demand so, the general public will have to wait.
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Yahoo Site Explorer Update
Yahoo has launched an update to their siteexplorer. Site Explorer is an interface for website operators/designers to log in to yahoo and authenticate their “ownership” over the site sot hat you can find more information over and control the ways the site is indexed. It’s fairly analogous to the Google Sitemaps feature that’s available in Google’s webmaster tools area. It’s good to see search companies letting users “peek behind the curtain” a bit, although I’m still wondering how effective these tools are.
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Google search results catching up…
Some time back I complained about the Google indexing of the site after the Big Daddy upgrade. For a good while before Big Daddy, there was usually about a week delay between me posting and there being a full crawl of the posted page which was fairly impressive. Post Big-Daddy the coverage of even previously indexed articles was lousy for a good while. As recent as a week or two ago there were only 900-1100 pages (including feeds which are of arguable value for google to index (maybe I should block those to googlebot?…hmm…) Anyway, I just noticed that they’re up to 1600 pages (still including those rss feeds.) It seems spotty still, but they’ve finally got a post-big daddy article. The inurl feature is still annoyingly buggy though.
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Google trying to warn about dangerous pages
SunbeltBlog is talking about a new sign that Google is stepping up to try to protect users against potentially malicious sites. They have a screenshot, which I was able to verify, that gives a warning before allowing a user to proceed to a page that “Warning – the site you are about to visit may harm your computer!”. Very good, I suspect they’re either tagging sites based on certain keywords or perhaps even binary blobs found?
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Google Toolbar evil?
Boy, that would bring in comments…. Googling Google highlighted some behaviour of the Google toolbar that seems a bit fishy. It appears that it blocks attempts to modify the default search provider in Internet Explorer. This was first reported over at Google blogoscoped and appears to be a bug (after the toolbar process is closed it fails to close completely.) Google says they’re working on a fix.
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Google news – infinite storage????
Well after a bit of a roundup of some of the security news items the last week, it’s time to sum up the Google front…. Googling Google tells us that Infinite storage is on the horizon…. they cite a translator that has done work for google. He has been asked to translate “The result?… from today we are starting our infinite storage plan” Now, they surmise that this could be related to the “platypus” project which has been known as gdrive which appears to be an online file synchronization/backup solution. It could be and would certainly be interesting. However, it could be a gmail upgrade for that matter.
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Google search for malware accessible to all…
The metasploit project is now hosting a malware search that uses Google. It essentially uses a binary google search technique that was referenced last week to find malicious files hosted on the web. Of course, this will be partly limited by Google’s indexing which recently has not been quite as thorough as before, but… all you have to do is search by a virus name and find matches. I can see where this is useful for research. What I DON’T understand is why Google doesn’t integrate scanning of content into the googlebot indexing. It would take a lot of processor power. Well…. I think Google would come close to having enough to take a stab at this. I think they should AT LEAST…
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The Spam fight turns to blogs….
I’ve detailed some of the struggles I had for a bit with FLOODS of comment spam. Details of the issue and a fix which has been rock solid for WordPress can be found in the following posts (reverse chronological order): Update on comment spam storms, trackback spam countermeasures such as akismet and trackback validation, another trackback storm, botnets spreading trackback spam?, Initial trackback storm. To sum up though, I’ve found 2 plugins to make for a rock solid combination here in wordpress. Akismet (which caught 99% or so of trackback spam) and The trackback validator plugin which caught everything else. (99% sounds good, but when you’re getting thousands of attempts a day?)