Google maps on mobile

I just learned the other day at java.com that there is a J2ME version of google maps for you mobile; works pretty well, actually, including maps and satellite

Google babysteps

Significant Babysteps at Google:

• Writely and Spreadsheets can now export to PDF.


• Writely now uses gmail/google account.


• Writely is now part of "My Google services"

ProxyButton on Thunderbird

Just found out (by trying, of course) that the ProxyButton extension I'm using on Firefox also works on Thunderbird.

technorati tags:firefox, mozilla, proxy

Innovation looking for application

Today's episode: Thumper.
Sun's "hybrid server", i.e. with both, lots of CPUs (AMD in that case) and lots of storage.
If you know what to do with it, tell sun here with a YouTube video and win one of them.

Finally some DSL speed

My ADSL provider seems to have upgraded my line (and others, I guess) to about 3Mbps... without telling me.

Cool (since I still pay the same price).

Search plugin along the way

Lot of stuff today :-)
Just did a nother Firefox search plugin (this time for Sun internal use), while updating iTunes to version 7 and having my iPod nano updated to the lastest SW release.
I guess I'll continue all that during the confcall which is about to start ... :-)

technorati tags:firefox, mozilla, search, mycroft

Firefox search help

Just noticed (i.e. read in the online help), that you can select the search-engine within the search-bar in Firefox with Ctrl-Up and Ctrl-Down, (when the search-bar is focused) i.e. you walk through the various search-engines.

Cool.

Btw: updated the falter.at search plugin to support side-bar results - ready to test here.

technorati tags:firefox, mozilla, search, mycroft, falter

Google spreadsheets support opendocument format

Finally; Google added ODF (.ods) support to Google Spreadsheets.

technorati tags:google, openoffice

My first Firefox search plugin

Just created my first Firefox search plugin for searching the best restaurant guide for Vienna: "Wien, wie es isst" at falter.at.

You can find the plugin at the mycroft page.

technorati tags:firefox, mozilla, search, mycroft, falter

NetBeans and JBoss

The JBoss Application Server and NetBeans IDE have been bundled together to provide NetBeans IDE users with a well integrated out of the box experience to build Java EE 5 applications on the JBoss Application Server.

JBoss.com - JBoss NetBeans IDE

technorati tags:JBoss, netbeans, java, j2ee

Blogs as a mirror to society

I just noticed how blogs (or their statistics, rather) mirror our society:
Check out todays top searches on technorati:
#1 Steve Irwin , the crocodile hunter, who so tragically died being pierced by a stingray.

Check out the blogging statistics for his name (and note that the guy was of quite some fame when he was still alive):

Nothing until Sep 4 (the day he died) and then 20.000+ postings a day !!!

Scoble?

Just noticed that since Scoble left Microsoft, I subscribed to his new feed, but I never read it...
So it really was more about Microsoft internals, than about Scoble.

Excellent service

The power adapter of my thinkpad gave up on me the other day; so I called IBM/lenovo support, because the thing is still under warranty; they just had a replacement part sent to me next morning... no walk-in, no hassle, nothing; just a 5min phone conversation, where the guy checked my serial number against their warranty database, double checked my problem, and told me that it would be sent and should be there (i.e. at my home) next morning.

And it really was.
Great... execllent service (hate to say this about competition, but it nevertheless feels good).

BlogTalk in Vienna, Oct 2-3,2006

BlogTalk Reloaded - the conference is scheduled for Oct 2–3, 2006.It will be held in Vienna, Austria.

Writely

Finally Writely (recently bought by google) opened up for registration again a couple of days ago. So now I got my writely account and tried a view documents (all .swx or .odt). And those were quite complex.

Apart from a 500KB limit (boy, that's really low) it worked perfectly.

Even found some hidden/invisible anchors etc that I did not see in StarOffice.

It also comes with an RSS feed on the document revisions... great for people collaboratively working on documents.

Now if only they would enable to directly same from google mail... that would be something.

technorati tags: google, writely, staroffice, openoffice, odt

Kim Cameron on federation vs user-centric

Theres a very interesting series of comments on Kim Cameron's identityblog on the difference between user-centric identities (infocard) and federation (liberty) - and/or whether there is a difference at all.

Find the details at Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog » Federation and user-centricity

technorati tags:identity, liberty, federation

Caches, parte deux

Well, I guess I know the reason for the Google Desktop caching issue:

The website sends the following headers (and only those)

 HTTP/1.0 200 O
 Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 17:51:07 GMT
 Server: Apache
 Content-Type: text/html


Wow, thats bad, ... really bad...

technorati tags:google, cache, http

Roman vs Caches

I'm struggling with caches now;

1. Flock doesn't seem to pick up feed-changes (which with other readers work) - even if I force it to reload
2. Google Desktop seems to cache XmlHttpRequest results, without me being able to control it (setting headers like pragma, cache-control, etc)

Good thing I finally found my snoop equivalent for windows: Ethereal. So at least I have some aid for debugging...

technorati tags:flock, google, snoop, cache

Web Stuff I don't get...

e.g. MySpace or Digg ...

I can't even say what I dislike about them, I just don't get the hype around them... Take digg: it's nice, but why vote on articles? The "wisdom of crowds" quality it seems to get by it, is - IMHO - spoiled or rather lost, because it's always the same little crowdette that votes anyway - oligarchy rather then democracy...

technorati tags:digg, web, myspace

Google Desktop Gadget - revisited

Adding timer-support was a lot easier than doing the HTML parsing (see My First Google Desktop Gadget ).

Just init with

setInterval(OnTimer, 1000 * 3600 ); // check once every hour

And in function OnTimer() you we just call what we created before.

Same goes for menus; add a refresh menu item like this

plugin.onAddCustomMenuItems = AddCustomMenuItems

function AddCustomMenuItems(menu)
{
  menu.AddItem(strMenuRefresh, 0, OnMenuRefresh);
}
function OnMenuRefresh(item_text)
{
  OnTimer()
}

Easy, isn't it ?

technorati tags:google, javascript,