DuckDuckGo - A Search Engine That Can Be An Alternative To Google Search

A few days back while using Google search, I was a bit overwhelmed by the deluge of useless links I was getting in my search results. This set me thinking - Is there an alternative to Google search ? Can I get what I wanted easily without plowing through hundreds of useless links ?
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Would You Use A Chromebook If You Got One For Free ?

Google has unveiled the Chromebook - a laptop that runs on Chrome OS. The Chrome OS is a cloud based operating system which means that all your data (or most of it) will be stored on a remote server rather than on the local hard drive. Another way of saying it is you can literally rip apart and destroy your Chromebook (assuming you have deep pockets) and still get a good night's sleep because your data is safely backed up somewhere on the net.

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Google Launches Open Source YouTube Channel

Google has launched an open source channel on YouTube. The aim is to collect and organize all the videos related to Google and open source projects in one location.

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Google Unveils Chrome OS - A Browser Based Operating System

Google unwraps its much awaited Chrome OS - a browser based operating system, which the Google CEO Eric Schmidt has termed "a viable third choice" over the popular traditional OSes Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X.

Chrome OS which runs on a customized Linux kernel banks heavily on the concept of Cloud computing. All your data and the applications reside on a remote server and not on your machine.

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Google Releases A Free, Interactive Book On Browsers and The Web

Google, in its pursuit of bringing awareness about Internet among the masses has executed a unique project in the form of an interactive book on web browsers and the Internet.
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Play Pac-Man on Google's Home Page - Just for Today

Google has replaced it's logo on it's search home page by the Pac-Man game. This is in celebration of the Pac-Man game crossing 30 years since it's inception. Pac-Man is truly a classic game. I grew up playing Pac-Man and many of its clones such as MS PAC.

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Adding Google Analytics Tracking Code to JIRA

Some posts ago I described how you can easily add the Google Analytics Tracking Code to your Confluence instance.

In the case of JIRA it's just as easy although it might not be intutiive: the quickest place where you can put the Google Analytics Code is in the "Announcement Banner." As of JIRA 4.1, Pasting your Analytics code there won't have any side-effect in the way the JIRA user interface appears in your browser. And yes, you will still be able to add an announcement banner text.

What Can I Do To Get An Interview At Google ?

Ever wanted to work at Google ? You bet. So what do you do to get yourself hired by Google ? The following tips provided by Google engineers shows you the way.
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Run Google Android on an Apple iPhone

Do you own an Apple iPhone? If yes, have you wished you could run a Linux flavour on your iPhone perhaps via dual booting ? Then your wish is answered. "Linux on the iPhone" blog team has successfully installed Google Android (which runs a Linux kernel) on Apple iPhone.

Watch the following video and gauge for yourselves how well Google Android performs on an Apple iPhone.
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Adding Google Analytics tracking code to Confluence

If you're using Atlassian Confluence as your content management system and you'd like to collect statistical information about its web traffic, Google Analytics is probably the tool you're looking for.

Google Analytics is an extremely powerful and flexible tool: I'm using it to monitor the web traffic to the sites I own and I'm very happy with it. Getting started with Analytics is very simple: just install the tracking code in the pages whose web traffic you want to monitor.

If you're using Confluence it's pretty easy to do: Confluence uses a flexible templating engine and modifying a page layout for a given space is straightforward indeed.

If you want to monitor all of the web traffic to your Confluence instance, though, the best option is using the Custom HTML option in Confluence Administration Console. Custom HTML lets you define fragments of HTML code to be inserted in the following positions in the generated page:

• At the end of the HEAD tag.
• At the beginning of the BODY tag.
• At the end of the BODY tag.

Just insert your Google Analytics tracking code in the appropriate place, which is usually at the end of the BODY tag and you're done! Your Confluence web traffic statistics are now being collected by Analytics.

If you're willing to experiment, Google has recently launched an asynchronous version of its Analytics tracking code which improves load times and accuracy, amongst other benefits. More information can be found here.

All you want to know about Google Chrome OS in a Nutshell

Google recently lifted the curtains on its soon to be flagship product Google Chrome OS - a heavily customized Operating system which runs on top of the Linux kernel. Google did this with great panache by releasing the source code of the operating system under an open source license. The open source part of the operating system is known as Google Chromium OS.

Since a lot has already been written about the Google Chrome OS, I thought of doing something different. I collected the details of the project and created a mind map providing a birds eye view of Google Chrome OS.

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Free Online Book : Google Wave - Learn How to Use it.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave is book authored by Gina Trapani (Lifehacker fame) and Adam Pash. This book is freely available for reading online. The book is divided into 8 comprehensive chapters and 2 appendices. A very good book on Google Wave indeed.

Bookmark the link for future reference and read the free online book to get to know Google Wave inside-out. "The Complete Guide to Google Wave" book will be available in PDF and print sometime next year.

Now if only someone will send me a Google Wave invite.....

Google Search will now include Twitter Tweets

Google has reached an agreement with Twitter to include real time tweets from Twitter in Google search results. All the more reason to take tweeting and tweets seriously.
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How to make your website mobile friendly

Do you run a website or blog ? If yes, how accessible is it on a mobile device ? Now a days, with more and more people browsing the net straight from their mobile devices like cell phones, it is very important to make your website as accessible to this group of users. Google teaches you how.
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Google Wave Explained in Plain English

I was raring to try out Google Wave but havin't received an invite yet. So I did the next best thing which is to scrounge the Net for more info on Google Wave. Thus I chanced upon this wonderfully made video explaining in plain English what Google Wave is all about. Read more »

Googlle?

As I'm a customary animal, everyday I open my browser and go along the same Internet path. As I'm a faithful Google user, one of the pages I often open is iGoogle. Today I thought my eyes were failing when I realized I was seeing the simplest and oddest Google doodle I've ever seen. Who can I ask about it? Google, of course. The first thing I did was saving that doodle to the disk and its very name gave the answer:
11th_birthday.gif.

Happy birthday Google!

Pushing gmail to your iPhone (without GPush)

As I told you some posts ago I bought GPush and struggled to make it work. At the end I started to be notified about incoming mail, although with some glitches from time to time. Now, very shortly after GPush was released, you don't need it anymore: Google Sync is now pushing mail to your iPhone.

This is really good news because now you can sync your mail, your calendar and your contacts with your iPhone. As I was already using Google Sync for contacts and calendars, setting up GMail push was really easy: just the flip of a switch!

If you haven't set up your Google Sync account on your iPhone, just follow the instructions on the Google Sync web site.

As far as I can tell, mail is pushed to the iPhone almost instantaneously. Nonetheless, there's a thing I'm not really happy about. I miss is a notification popup: no one is ever shown and the counter on the mail icon is the only information you're given when a mail is pushed:

I would expect a mail to be managed just like an SMS or even a phone call: checking periodically sort of defies the purpose of a push notification...

An update about GPush: it finally seems to work

If you're part of the club that wanted Google mail pushed onto your iPhone, the release of the GPush application did sound like good news. Unfortunately the application hasn't worked that well after its release and people started to complain. I was one of them: in this blog and directly to Tiverias Apps.

It was probably a scalability problem: they never tested an application with such a great number of users and GPush wasn't exactly the kind of application that passes unobserved. We were waiting for it! On its website support page Tiverias Apps has been constantly giving feedback to the users about the problems that we were experiencing. Finally I'm glad to state the following: GPush is working flawlessly for me since a couple of days.

There's some glitch, still, but I'm confident they will be resolved in a GPush application update. Specifically, I still can't change my account settings without uninstalling and reinstalling the application. It just ignores the change.

It was worth what I paid for it.

Update: You don't need GPush anymore if you want to have your google mail pushed to your iPhone.

Don't buy GPush (yet): it's not working

So happy was I, yesterday: I thought my emails were going to be pushed to my iPhone, thanks to GPush, something many users were waiting for.

Yesterday I bought the application and I had no problem configuring it. It's a pity that, since then, I just receive one (yes: one...) notification. After that, silence.

Tiverias Apps, GPush producers, states that they're experiencing problems with their servers and that their developers should have isolated the code paths which are causing the problems that we're experiencing. Just hope it's not a scalability issue: sending push notifications to a great number of GMail users seems no easy job to me.

If you feel like buying the app, please wait for these problems to be solved.

Update: GPush has started to work.

Install Google Chrome web browser in Linux

Google has provided a pre-release version of its famed browser Google Chrome for Linux and Mac. However it is still very much in the development stage. You can download the latest builds of Google Chrome for Linux and Mac here.

All the same, if you want a stable Chrome web browser to work in Linux, then there is a work around. Codeweavers has released Crossover Chromium for Linux and Mac. Read more »