Google released the Google Quick Search Box or QSB for short. It is in most aspects the same as products like Launchy for the PC and ofcourse, Quicksilver for the Apple.
You open it by pressing CTRL-Space at the same time, which is nice- it didnt’ hyjack my launchy combination.
One of the nicer features is that it is supposed to be a learning app. It would learn from my past interactions so it would give you results as quickly as possible
As you use the Google Quick Search Box more, it will learn which results you are likely to want. The goal here is that we get you to what you’re looking for as quickly as possible. In the above example, if you chose Google Calendar, the next time you search for “cal”, Google QSB will reorder the results so that you don’t have to arrow down to your desired choice. Instead, you can just type “cal” and press enter.
Scripting is available, but only for the Mac as I understand it. Or olso for Windows users, but just not that Twitter plugin they mention. Which would be abit odd I suppose.
You do need to install the Google Desktop, as it’s part of it.
Earlier today- Altavista, website for ’security professionals’ (read: mostly scriptkiddies) Has been targeted and hacked, well- not only were they hacked, all exploits and details are made public on their site. http://astalavista.com and they were torn apart. I suspect it will not remain up for long so i’ve included the log of the hack at the bottom.
It is as an thrilling read as any good suspence novell. As gmazzola commented on hackernews : ”It’s rather similar to the urge to rubberneck at a car crash: it’s both horrific and exciting at the same time.”
From the log;
Why has Astalavista been targeted? Other than the fact that they are not doing any of this for the “community” but for the money, they spread exploits for kids, claim to be a security community (with no real sense of security on their own servers), and they charge you $6.66 per months to access a dead forum with a directory filled with public releases and outdated / broken services.
Google just launched another entry in their Labs section called Google Squared. Google describes its function as
“constructs a table of facts about any search category you specify”
Google Squared is a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify.
Facts about your topic are organized as a table of items and attributes (we call them “Squares” for fun).
Customize these Squares to see just the items and attributes you’re interested in.
See the websites that served as sources for the information in your Square.
Save and share Squares with others.
It sounds an aweful lot like Socrata. Where (essentially) you can share datasets. Granted- the functionality of Socrate is now still far superiour to Google’s. But it’s in essence I believe the same thing. Or atleast on the same field (no pun…) However, we are talking about Google here who sits on one of the largest unmined (well….) dataset on the planet. It will make that data available at some point. And eventhough I was impressed by the concept- (Of Socrata) Google is in my opionion just an API away from blowing Socrata out of the water. Sorry to say. I like Socrata alot…
Google presented Google Wave yesterday at Google I/O. It’s their view on how communication for the next web should be like. It is hard to grasp by looking at screenshots- so here’s the video of the presentation.
What is a wave?
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
So, finally after much wait and incredible anticipation WolframAlpha soft launched yesterday evening.
My first impressions are ‘This is incredible’ and ‘Wolfram|Alpha FTW’. I am not going to describe Wolfram Alpha for you, there are a gabillion other sites that do that already like here and here.
I am going to refer to the API though. And here it is. The Wolfram Alpha API . Get it while it’s fresh.
Many a year ago. I think it was 1997. I read a poem on a site I used to follow called userfriendly.org. It’s abit outdated, but I found it again while scouring through my cdrom collection…Here it it.
Here i sit, broken-hearted
a lonely geek in lands uncharted
I look for love and wish for laughter
happily living ever after
But fate would have me sad an bitter
my friends complain ‘you’re alway’s sulkin’
I get so little I should be vulcan
but then the net in strenght was born
and offered geeks a sea of porn
I once was lonely
it may soud corny
but nowadays
I’m just way ……
I had 2 proud moments in 2008. I had more, but not as nerdy as this. I had 2 articles of mine published on IBM’s Developerworks.
How to speed up webpages and Twitter and FriendFeed from the commandline.
Here’s the excerpt from “Speeding up webpages”
Not everyone is blessed with a high-speed Internet connection. Even if everyone were, there can be hundreds of reasons why your Web application seems slow and sluggish. In this age of ever-increasing broadband speed, don’t think that you shouldn’t pay attention to page load times. Shave off valuable seconds of your page load times and even more valuable milliseconds of your request and response times. You’ll create a better experience for your visitors.
After reading this article, you will have a better understanding of the basics of Web page load time optimization. You’ll also have the tools and knowledge to better identify and judge slow-loading page segments and bottlenecks.
And here’s is one from “Twitter and Friendfeed from the commandline”
This article puts two such tools—GNU Wget and cURL—in the spotlight. You learn how to use these two tools to send status updates to the social networking site Twitter without the use of a Twitter desktop application, and how to follow feeds from both Twitter and FriendFeed right from the command line.
Need API details? This article does not delve into the specifics of API use. Both Twitter and FriendFeed have such an API, which is easily accessible through a Representational State Transfer (REST)-ful interface.
I am incredibly proud to announce that Twiplist has been released into the wild.
Twiplist is a Twitter user directory where you can control your position on the list. The ‘problem’ with most Twitter directories- although useful is that they tend to be incredibly biased towards Tweeps that already have a huge following, and as a person who likes to let the world know he is out there- it’s incredibly hard to get seen.
With Twiplist -that is mostly the case as well, although it’s ordered by who comes to the site first, and there is a rudementary tagging support- if you decide that you would like to find out what happens if you are high up in the list, you can add payment to your Twip (Your profile).
What that does is that it takes what other people have paid into concideration. If person A has paid 0.10 dollar a day, and you pay 0.11 dollar a day (maybe for less days) then you will be put in front of the other person’s Twip.
So. I will update this blog from time to time now to report on progress.
Yesterday’s southpark episode was hilarious. The Coon.
During times of great woe and despair, one young person in South Park takes it upon himself to keep order. “The Coon” rises from the gutter and becomes South Park’s sole vigilante..until a rival superhero, “Mysterion” shows up on the scene and challenges “The Coon”’s right to be a beacon for the townsfolk.
So, who is this Mysterion. Well, take a look and find out.
Information Architecture is the art and science of making sure that what needs to be communicated has got the chance of beeing communicated. http://twitter.com/kotrotsos
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