The Google Planet

Creators of Google Page Creator

2006-02-25T08:55:00.000-08:00

One of the authors of the Google Page Creator has been identified.

As Lilly Irani, Google user interface designer and a software engineer writes in her blog, Google Pages has been her 20% project for a year and a half. Good work and yet another proof of the 20% rule usefulness!

Google Tech Talks

2006-02-02T22:23:00.000-08:00

If you ever wondered how they actually work at Google, now you have a chance to sneak a little. Several internal tech talks are now available on Google Video.

Original news by Ovidiu Predescu

Google Toolbar 4 is out (in Beta)

2006-01-30T03:49:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts just blogged about the new Google Toolbar Google Toolbar 4

It looks like they are going to eat the del.icio.us food with new server side bookmarks
Another nice features are suggestions as you type and great ability to add custom buttons with the custom functionality

Link to the Toolbar itself

Hints about interviews at Google

2006-01-29T23:19:00.000-08:00

Some hints about what are the job interviews like at Google

Via Mihai Parparita

Results may vary

2006-01-27T02:56:00.000-08:00

A brilliant cartoon found by Doctor Awesome. That's exactly what recent Palestinian elections look like to me either.

Googlers' Blogs Syndicated

2005-12-15T22:41:00.000-08:00

All the Googlers' Blogs syndicated on a single page

I will have a Winter vacation starting from today and till the 7th of January. It is quite unlikely, that I would be able to maintain the posting rate. So I opened the Googlers' Blogs - simply all the Googlers' blogs on a single page. At the moment there are only blogs listed by Philipp Lenssen, but that's already a lot and I'll add a few more from my own collection as soon as possible.

Enjoy having all the Googlers in your reader!

Read more at www.googlersblogs.com/

SEO Mistakes: crappy doorway pages

2005-12-14T12:51:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts discusses an example of spam web page and how is it treated by Google

Okay, spam-reading posse, ready to roll? This time, I’m going to cover two spammer mistakes in one post. Take a look at www.rosaevelien.com in Internet Explorer. Looks fine, right? Something like this:

No problems? Okay, now load the page in Firefox 1.0.7 or so. Interesting, huh? The page looks like this:

So why do you see a spammy doorway page in Firefox, but not in IE? Because the SEO company messed up the doorway pages, and their sneaky redirects only work in IE! The page loads some external JavaScript from http://www.rosaevelien.com/Principal.js, which looks like this

document.URL=’Html/main.asp?res=’ + screen.width + “x” + screen.height;

In Internet Explorer, this does an immediate redirect away from the spammy doorway page–the user never sees the keyword-stuffed page. But Firefox doesn’t parse that code, so 5-10% of visitors are left staring at a crappy doorway page!

Okay, that’s mistake #1. Mistake #2 is shorter. Look at the bottom of the page. See this text:

That’s right, the SEO that couldn’t even get a sneaky redirect right was *also* adding links to itself from the client’s pages. I see this all the time: clients who didn’t know what their SEO was doing can actually get their PageRank sucked away to the SEO or the SEO’s other clients. Classy, huh? That’s why our SEO guidelines tell you that you need to understand what your SEO is doing on your domain. To the SEO that did this to a mom and pop florist site: after your site is removed from Google’s index, your reinclusion process is going to be.. difficult.

Here’s my takeaway points:
1) Do not hire an assclown SEO that makes doorway pages with sneaky redirects.
2) If you do hire an assclown SEO, make sure they don’t half-ass your sneaky redirects so they only work in one browser.
3) If you’re staring at broken doorway pages that your lazy-ass SEO made, go ahead and check if they were hiding links back to themselves or to their other clients.

Original post by Matt Cutts

Review: Spam Kings

2005-12-12T22:37:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts posts a review on a book about spam

Ah, happiness is a day without meetings. This was a good day. If you’re looking for an interesting read this holiday season, I highly recommend Spam Kings. It’s about email spam, not webspam, but if you are an SEO you’ll probably like this book. There’s even a blog for the book.

If you’re an SEO, you’ll get an extra dimension of fun out of this book. When it mentions nonsense domains, you’ll be curious and check them out. When they mention XBL, you’ll be interested to hear more about blacklisted proxies. It’s a completely different but equally fascinating subculture.

I’ve often wondered what the overlap between SEO and email spam is. I don’t think I’ve ever met an SEO who copped to doing email spam. Then again, I’ve never met an SEO who admitted to trying to rank porn pages for innocent phrases like [disney cartoons] or peoples’ names, but I know that some folks try to do that because we see the attempts. Anyway, I hope no one recognizes a friend or even themselves in this book. :)

Original post by Matt Cutts

How to find people who listen to the same music. Seamlessly

2005-12-12T14:05:00.000-08:00

Kimbalina posts about the service, that can track the music you listen to in your Winamp, iTunes or whatever and then proposes you a similar music and even helps with findng people with similar interests in music.

last.fm tracks the music you listen to, let's you create your own music profile, find people who like the same type of music as you, and see what your friends are listening to. It also creates a personalized radio station with the type of music it thinks you might like.

I love it.

So often, a song can describe how I'm feeling so much better than I could ever put into words. Wondering how I'm feeling today?

What I'm listening to.

Original post by Kimbalina

Sometimes Internet evolution is too fast even for Googlers

2005-12-11T15:39:00.000-08:00

Social networks is one of the "new things people talk about". I know several friends just 5-10 years younger who actively use those and for about two or three years already I am going to try it. Well, I was going. Eventually I decided not to try things I don't really need unless I anticipate some fun or I need it for work. I guess Nelson Minar "was also going to try" these social networks and stopped at the similar point :)

I just went to myspace for the first time. I've still never been to facebook. I don't know anyone who has pages on either site. I normally pride myself on being hip to Internet culture, but I think the lowest on the age curve I go is LiveJournal. I wonder what the natural generational groupings on the Internet are? I naïvely thought there wouldn't be any, but of course the net is all about community and culture and, therefore, generation.

Original post by Nelson Minar

How to get personal contacts with Google employees

2005-12-11T12:02:00.000-08:00

Quite simple, just be a person interested in the same things they are interested in. For example, you can meet some googlers in the specific IT-related mailing lists.

P2P-hackers is a well-regarded mailing list frequented by p2p developers and researchers. It brings together academics, industry developers, and gray hats, and hosts topics ranging from DHTs to error-correcting codes to punching through NATs.
I've happily subscribed since college, so when David Barrett suggested a meetup for the bay area members, I jumped at the chance. We met at Ryoko for sushi, which was a lot of fun. Any place that has a grand piano with two turntables on top of it gets my vote!
Over 20 people turned out, and the conversation was lively and far-reaching. We chatted about food, gadgets, games, movies, and of course, p2p. Lots of well-regarded universities and companies were represented, including Amicima, Berkeley,CivicSpace, Limewire, Gnutella, Gnuterra (Morpheus), NYU, Red Swoosh, andStanford.
Sure, we talk about p2p and distributed systems on list all the time. Still, it was fun to shoot the breeze about the latest developments in person, and especially to meet so many people in the community face to face.

Original post by Ryan Barrett

How Google decided to stay with MySQL

2005-12-10T16:10:00.000-08:00

Ron Garret posts his memories on how Google tried to switch from MySQL to a commerical product, but failed and remained loyal to the GPL product.

After AdWords launched, Jane, the ads group manager, decided that now would be a good time to switch over to a "real" database. "Real" is one of those words that Doug ought to add to his list of words. It means "expensive". Many managers seem to have this idea that it is invariably true that you get what you pay for, and that therefore nothing that is available for free can possibly be any good. Using MySQL was acceptable as an expedient to get things up and running quickly and with a minimal of capital outlay, but now that things were settling down it was time to recognize that this was really, fundamentally, a mistake, and it should be fixed sooner rather than later.

The flip side of this philosophy is the one more commonly espoused by engineers, which is nicely summed up by the old aphorism, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Yes, MySQL was missing some features, but it wasn't broke(n). We had spirited debates in ads group meetings over what to do.

We finally decided to go with a commercial database (I won't say which one) over the objections of a number of engineers, including myself. To ease the transition it was decided to convert AdWords over to the new system first, and to do the main ads system later. It was a project on a par with the internationalzation effort in terms of the tedious work required to comb over nearly all of the AdWords code and change all of the database queries. (Databases are supposed to all be compatible with one another, but in reality they pretty much aren't.)

To make a long story short, it was an unmitigated disaster. The new system was slower than molasses in February. Some heroic optimization efforts eventually produced acceptable performance, but it was never as good as the old MySQL-based system had been. For a long time we were stuck with the worst of all possible worlds, with the two ads systems running on two different databases. It was still that way when I left Google in October of 2001, but I have heard through the grapevine that they eventually went back to MySQL. (Since then, MySQL has added many of the features that had been missing at the time.)

The moral of the story is that sometimes, and in particular with free software, you get more than what you pay for. There are a lot of companies out there paying dearly for commercial databases (and operating systems for that matter). As far as I'm concerned they might as well be flushing that money down the toilet. Actually, they might be better off. We certainly would have been.

Original post by ex-googler Ron Garret

Random things about the first month at Google

2005-12-09T23:26:00.000-08:00

Doug Edwards posts about things he remembers about his first month at Google

“Wow. That’s a really cool roller coaster. How many sets of K’Nex did you have to use to make that?”

“No. I’ve never made cappuccino before. How does it work?”

“Um, is it okay that all these bikes are blocking the fire exit?”

“Okay, so there are eight shelves full of HTML and Linux reference books. Where do we keep the dictionary and thesaurus? Yeah, I know I can find stuff online, but I’d still like a hard copy. No, I can’t just print out the words when I look them up.”

“Hi Larry. Hi Sergey. What happened to your office? Well, it’s just… uh, nothing. Hey, which one of these remotes works with the VW Beetle? No, that other one. There, under the couch between your hockey jersey and the LEGO Mindstorms...”

“So… you really notice a difference when you build your own rollerblade wheels like that?”

“Oh sorry. Didn’t realize anyone was napping in here.”

“They’re laying the carpet tomorrow? I kinda like it open and industrial like this. Cubicles? You really think we’ll need that many workplaces?”

“See, you can knock down more of the garbage cans if you bounce the ball instead of just rolling it straight at them.”

“How long does it take the sauna to get hot? You think it’s okay to go in the women’s locker room to get some towels since we’re out in here?

Original post by ex-googler Doug Edwards

Googlers on audiobooks

2005-12-09T15:56:00.000-08:00

Graham Waldon posts an opinion on the recent changes of the Audible.com

I logged in to Audible.com for the first time in a while last night, and they've changed up a bunch of stuff since I saw it last. I haven't done an exhaustive investigation yet, but I like what I've seen so far. In particular, several old pet peeves are now (finally) solved:
Links have been unjavascriptified, so you can do normal link things with them, like open them in new windows/tabs, etc.
It might be possible to link directly to particular books now (try it out on one of my favorites). I've been having mixed luck with it though, and I think my browser cookies are confusing the issue, so I'm not sure. Try it. It's kind of sad when something like that would be an improvement, rather than taken for granted, but oh well.
The ridiculous session timeout (which didn't even require you to sign in again, but just screwed up your navigation) doesn't seem to happen anymore.
Sound samples now open in a little flash player in a new window, rather than making me download a RealAudio file and play it in another app.

Original post by Graham Waldon

Ads in GMail

2005-12-08T23:14:00.000-08:00

Natala Menezes posts about the progress in the GMail ads

So i've been noticing lately that the ads in gmail are getting really good -- and by good i mean useful, relevant and things i just want to click on for more information.

This may in part be to seasonality - right now a lot of my e-mails deal with shopping (gifts for the holidays, my mother's birthday) and travel (i'm going to thailand and my sister and I are writing back and forth about where to stay and what to do)....

The other thing I've noticed is that the number of ads changes. Sometimes I get 3, sometimes 4, sometimes 3 on the rail and one in the web-clip. Sometimes I get a search link. Sometimes not. Hmm. Those google kids are definitely getting crafty!

There are of course those really, really irrelevent links...like the link to buy sushi at Target:
Sushi
Sushi online Shop Target.com
www.Target.com

Sushi? at Target? I love target but not for fresh fish.

I'm curious, are others finding the links to be better? More useful?

Original post by Natala Menezes

Who authorizes software? Not you

2005-12-07T13:00:00.000-08:00

Nelson Minar thinks of XBox 360 as of a the first step in the new definition of "trust" or more exactly "trusted computing". Computer programs are supposed to be safer, but you have no control on the one who decides what is safe and what's not. I wonder what is the Google position on certifying every program a user can get.

The Xbox 360 is a dry run for "Trusted Computing". The new console has a slew of anti-modder technology to make it impossible to run unauthorized software. Who authorizes Xbox 360 software? Microsoft.

Intel, Microsoft, IBM, etc are colluding to bring the same sort of technology to PCs to prevent you from unauthorized software. Who authorizes software? Not you.

It's a sure bet "Trusted Computing" is going to bring us a new level of digital rights management hell. Sony won't have to do something stupid to stop you from legally copying music; the operating system and processor will do it for them. Your monitor will collaborate. Dell is about to ship LCDs with HDCP so that your screen won't display unauthorized video. Who authorizes video? Not you.

Original post by Nelson Minar

Search engine from a googler

2005-12-06T21:56:00.000-08:00

Nelson Minar, a San Francisco Google engineer, released his very own search engine for e-mail. It might sound unbelievable, but it is exactly what it sounds like: a Google employee made his own tool [somewhat] competitive to its employer's Google Desktop Search.

The released Funes search engine indexes mbox e-mail archives (that's a Thunderbird native format, most of the other e-mail clients can at least export into the mbox format) and is used from the command line.
I have eight years of email archives. These archives are my memory. But my memory is awkward, it is hard for me to find things in it. When did I last write my old friend? What all have I thought about Jorge Luis Borges? Who wrote me email in early April, 2001?

Funes is a Java program that enables you to search your memories. At its core is a search engine: Funes indexes all of your email into a quickly-searchable database and then lets you query that database. The search engine itself is implemented with Lucene. Funes adds the glue to parse mailboxes and interact with you via a command line interface.

There are other search tools out there for email, for example grepmail or mg. I wrote Funes because I wanted my own tool to work my own way, because I needed something to keep out of trouble while I was looking for work, and because Lucene was so cool. Mostly, I wrote it because my memory is important to me.

Funes is currently minimally usable and has much work to go. I am not likely to work on it in the near future. It is available as free software according to the GNU Public License. If you try it, please let me know.

I will give it a try and let you know how it works.

Talk on user interfaces at Google

2005-12-06T02:26:00.000-08:00

Chris DiBona posts on the attractiveness of the good user interface

Edward Tufte visited Google today to give a talk. He talked about Sparklines and the famous Minard Russian Invasion graphic among other topics. Great stuff. I've been a great admirer of Tufte since I first got my greasy fingers on his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. and I only hope that one day I can present information as wonderfully as he. This is one of the reasons I love working at Google: The interfaces are almost all pretty fantastic.

Original post by Chris DiBona

Meet googlers in New York

2005-12-05T11:14:00.000-08:00

Chris DiBona, open source program manager from Google will be speaking in New York on the 14th of December.

if you'd like to find me, I'll be speaking at Interop in New York on the 14th. I hope to visit Peter Luger and Barney Greengrasswhile I'm there.

I like New York, a lot. Hotels are kind of spendy though.

Original post by Chris DiBona

How Google banned the whole France one day

2005-12-04T22:03:00.000-08:00

Ron Garret shares his memories on how much power and responsibility was (and is?) given to the technical engineers at Google. It looks like guys there worry more about not doing something useful, than about the occasionally doing something bad. Well, over-analyzing consequences can take hell a lot of time, while the potential error can just be fixed. I wonder if France will agree..

Ray took unauthorized automated queries very personally. If he could figure out the spammer's email address, he would send a terse cease and desist warning to them. If he couldn't, he might block their IP address from accessing Google altogether. In an extreme case, he might request that a spammer's ISP kick them off of their service. And, if the ISP wasn't responsive enough, he might block all of the ISP's other IP addresses, too. That's how Ray turned off access to Google for most of France one day. It got the ISP’s attention, all the more so because it happened to be one of Google’s larger customers at the time.

One engineer holding that kind of power speaks to the assumptions inherent in Google’s culture. Individuals were considered capable of weighing the effects of their actions and presumed to have the best interests of the company (and Google’s users) at heart.
...
Google emphasized acting over deciding.

Of all the elements of “big-company thinking” I had to unlearn, that was one of the hardest. I constantly sought reassurance that I was empowered to move to the next step, only to be asked, “Why haven’t you done that already?”

The upside of this philosophy is that Google did many things quickly, most of which turned out to be positive. The downside is that Google sometimes did things with unforeseen effects and individuals occasionally misinterpreted exactly how much power they possessed. The tradeoff appears to have been worth it.

Original post by the ex-googler Ron Garret

Top six games googlers play

2005-12-04T07:53:00.000-08:00

Top six computer games that a googler plays. Well, not any googler, but just one particular googler - Nelson Minar. In fact, I have already gathered some statistics on the games, googlers play. Would anybody be interested in seeing the "global" Google stats? :)
Between being in Switzerland for three months and all the new games out for the Christmas season I have a giant backlog of interesting computer games to play. Should last me for six months! If you're thinking of a gift for the gamer geek in your life, maybe this list will help you.


Shadow of the Colossus (PS/2): Poetic and innovative platform game for the PS/2. I've played a bit and it's really beautiful.
Civilization IV (PC): Empire building and wargames, many hours time sink.
Burnout: Revenge (Xbox): Arcade racer; not clear it add much to last year's standout Takedown, but it's fun.
Battlefield 2: Special Forces (PC): BF2 is the only online FPS worth playing. This expansion pack is getting mixed reviews, but it's sort of unavoidable.
The Warriors (Xbox): Cheesy 70s gang movie made into a Rockstar ultraviolence game. On a quick play it's pretty damn silly, but amusing.
Puzzle Pirates (PC, Mac): I actually got into this while still in Zürich. It's a very innovative game, a cross between an MMOG and a bunch of Tetris-like puzzle games. Pleasant diversion.
Sniper Elite (PC, Xbox, PS/2): Sniper simulation. The reviews are pretty poor, but I'm a sucker for this kind of gameplay.
Rag Doll Kung Fu (PC): Indie game excitement of the year, distributed online via Steam. I haven't seen a review yet, not sure if it's worth my time.

Original post by Nelson Minar

Free WiFi is coming to the whole US. Step by step

2005-12-04T03:22:00.000-08:00

I am looking forward to the day, when all the US and European cities will have the free WiFi access. And yes, I am ready to see the advertisements if it is the price I have to pay if I want to post something right away.

Free WiFi coming in Sunnyvale! It's about time! Mountain View is getting it from Google, but Sunnyvale should definitely be right up there in terms of tech savvy Silicon Valley residents as well. The ads are a small price to pay for free access everywhere. I'm excited.

Original post by Piaw Na

Why high taxes don't make people work less hard

2005-12-03T03:56:00.000-08:00

Douwe Osinga argues that higher taxes can in fact make people work harder.

In the end people don't care about taxes and all that. They only care about how much money they make. And when it comes to money, it is just like anything else. The more you have of it, the less extra happy another dollar will make you. If you are starving then you'll gladly work long long hours to make enough not to starve. If you are quite affluent already, you need quite big incentive to start working more (luckily enough are society comes build in with all kinds of tricks to make us work harder anyway).

So what happens if we increase taxes to say 90%? It just means that people have only one tenth of the money, so they are a lot poorer and will suddenly have to work again for a car instead of getting one anyway.

The problem of course is with the other side of equation; governments have a tendency to spend money more wasteful than average people. If you raise taxes you put more money in the hand of the government and if then that money is wasted, the economy suffers. But it is not the low taxes for the rich that make the rich work so much harder that in the end everybody profits.

Original post by Douwe Osinga

Player created content in online games

2005-12-02T17:06:00.000-08:00

Neslon Minar posts on how ability to change the world changes the massive multiplayer games

I wish today's MMOGs lived up to the promise of player created content that was in the earliest online games. LambdaMOO set the pace. Pavel Curtis had a fanatical devotion to player-generated content. The whole world was player created. Players could build rooms and program new behaviours in MOO. Players even came up with their own government.
The first commercial MMOGs continued to let players shape the world. Ultima Online in particular had a significant amount of effort devoted to a player created economy and players building their own houses. But contemporary games like World of Warcraft and City of Heroes are essentially stateless worlds. Players can't make permanent changes. Players can't create a building, or modify a sign, or even leave a hat in the middle of the desert. And there's nothing at all like being able to write code to run in-game.
The one shining example of player created content in the commercial world now is Second Life. While not quite a mainstream MMOG, it's interesting for its devoted player-creators, impressive authoring tools, and successful player created games. Even the problems are interesting. Let's hope the business works out.
Player created content is hard. The gameplay and quality issues significant, it's hard to build server technology that scales when you don't know what the content will be, and it's hard to build good creation tools. But player created content is the interesting thing possible for an MMOG, both for the creators and the consumers.

Original post by Nelson Minar

Firetitle extension for the Firefox browser

2005-12-01T22:19:00.000-08:00

Cedric points out the Firetitle extension for Firefox. It allows you to prepend every tab in the same browser window with the same string. This way, you could have a window of "e-mail", a window of "blogs" and a window of "work". You'll need it for fast switching via the Alt-Tab.

FireTitle was written by Jon Nowitz, a Google colleague, and it lets you name your FireFox windows in very flexible ways. If you do a lot of tab browsing, it's nice to be able to keep a consistent title for one window regardless of which tab it is currently displaying (e.g. "weblogs", "email"). Press Ctrl-; and you can name the current window (which will be preserved for future FireFox invocations). The version on mozilla.org is still for pre-1.5 FireFox but Jon already has updated it to 1.5 (I'm running it as we speak) and it will be uploaded there very soon.

Original post by Cedric

Saved searches folders for GMail

2005-12-01T12:03:00.000-08:00

Mihai Parparita, a Google employee, created a Firefox extension, that was included into the "Greasymonkey hacks" book. Greasymonkey is an extensible Firefox extension. The extension is for adding "saved searches" folder to Gmail.

I finally received my complimentary copy of Greasemonkey Hacks. I'm also glad to see that my saved searches user script was selected as one of the sample ones. Reading the contributors section was somewhat amusing due to the homogeneity of the entries (e.g. more than half mentioned blogs). The book is also already out of date, with Greasemonkey and Firefox both having undergone major releases. I also doubt the wisdom of printing the full code behind each hack - especially some of the longer ones that were already online. Commentary attached to interesting snippets might have worked better. However, as a whole the book seems very well put together and it brought to attention some scripts I hadn't heard of before.

Original post by Mihai Parparita

Games googlers play: Civilization IV

2005-11-30T21:51:00.000-08:00

Nelson Minar talks about the Civilization IV and how the religion is handled there. Personally I didn't play Civilizations II-III a lot, but the first one was one of my favourite, I played it day and night whenever I could. Maybe I should try the last one - it looks like Firaxis guys managed to create a really good game.

The newest entry in the Civilization franchise is out. The new UI is great, nice use of 3d and lots of info packed on the main screen. Gameplay is improved but familiar, with one major addition: religion.
Religion is a fun twist on the culture system. Cities occasionally found new religions. Religions spread to other cities along trade routes. You can hurry the process along by sending out missionaries. Cities get bonuses for being part of your state religion; you also collect tithes. And religion affects your diplomacy with other civs.

I can't think of another mainstream game that's significantly touched the topic of religion. There's no Sims Church, is there? The developers were quite cautious, including this charming disclaimer in the manual:
..
The religion implementation is fun, a nice complement to fighting army men and growing culture blobs. And the implementation is as realistic and tasteful as the rest of Civilization's concepts. I just find it striking how gingerly they're moving. Maybe in a few years religion in games will mature and Rockstar will offend everyone with "Crusades: Fist of Righteousness

Original post by Nelson Minar

Journals googlers read

2005-11-30T14:10:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts a Google SEO specialist tells which IT -related journals he reads. Looks like he prefers the European Linux editions.

Lately I’ve been playing with magazine subscriptions. There’s stuff like Maximum PC, CPU, and Wired, and I’ve also enjoyed Make, the new magazine/book from O’Reilly. But the most fun to read lately are Linux magazines. For some reason, I don’t enjoy the U.S. magazines (Linux Journal and Linux Magazine) quite as much, although they’re quite good. My favorite are the magazines from Europe, which often come with a DVD or CD. They’re just a lot of fun. They range from sassy to opinionated as all hell, and have great features like “software projects on the move” or descriptions of Linux kernel controversies. I’ve subscribed to Linux Pro magazine, Linux Format, and just recently I added Linux User and Developer. Highly recommended.

One magazine has an article on building your own Linux distro. You want to get links? Making your own Linux distribution is a great way to get links.

Original post by Matt Cutts

Google Base - blog

2005-11-30T11:57:00.000-08:00

David Krane points out, that Google opened yet another blog. This time about the Google Base

This time, devoted to Google Base.

Original post by David Krane

Bugs at Google

2005-11-29T22:28:00.000-08:00

Every software contains bugs and the Google software is not nesessarily that better that it has no. Ron Garret shares his memories about a huge AdWords bug, that hit the advertisers.

The AdWords launch went fairly smoothly, and I spent most of the next two weeks just monitoring the system, fixing miscellaneous bugs, and answering emails from users. (Yes, I was front-line AdWords support for the first month or so.)
...

I pulled up the biller window and saw that a whole bunch of credit card charges were being declined one after another. The reason was immediately obvious: the amounts being charged were outrageous, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. Basically random numbers, most of which no doubt exceeded people's credit limits by orders of magnitude.

But a few didn't. Some charges, for hundreds or thousands of dollars, were getting through. Either way it was bad. For the charges that weren't getting through the biller was automatically shutting down the accounts, suspending all their ads, and sending out nasty emails telling people that their credit cards had been rejected.

I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, killed the biller, and started trying to figure out what the fsck was going on. (For you non-programmers out there, that's a little geek insider joke. Fsck is a unix command. It's short for File System ChecK.)

It quickly became evident that the root cause of the problem was some database corruption. The ad servers which actually served up the the ads would keep track of how many times a particular ad had been served and periodically dump those counts into a database. The biller would then come along and periodically collect all those counts, roll them up into an invoice, and bill the credit cards. The database was filled with entries containing essentially random numbers. No one had a clue how they got there.
...

Now, it's a complete no-brainer that when something like that happens you add some code to detect the problem if it ever happens again, especially when you don't know why the problem happened in the first place. But I didn't. It's probably the single biggest professional mistake I've ever made. In my defense I can only say that I was under a lot of stress (more than I even realized at the time), but that's no excuse. I dropped the ball. And it was just pure dumb luck that the consequences were not more severe. If the problem had waited a year to crop up instead of a couple of weeks, or if I hadn't just happened to be there watching the biller window (both times!) when the problem cropped up Google could have had a serious public relations problem on its hands. As it happened, only a few dozen people were affected and we were able to undo the damage fairly easily.

You can probably guess what happened next. Yep. One week later. Same problem. This time I added a sanity check to the billing code and kicked myself black and blue for not thinking to do it earlier. At least the cleanup went a little faster this time because by now I had a lot of practice in what to do.

Stress.

And we still didn't know where the random numbers were coming from despite the fact that everyone on the ads team was trying to figure it out.

Original post by ex-Googler Ron Garret

Job at Google for a tech blogger

2005-11-28T12:26:00.000-08:00

Chris de Bona announces the position of Developer Relations Specialist at Google. Basically it is about speaking to developers and promoting the Google APIs. Sounds like a job for a blogger who knows the site scripting, doesn't it? ;)

Qualifications:

BS in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
Experience with scripting languages including Python, Java and PHP.
Experience interacting with and creating large developer communities.
A basic understanding of issues surrounding source code licensing.
Technical speaking experience.
Experience working with the technology press, online journalists and bloggers.
Strong interpersonal communication and project management skills.
Ability to create effectively written communications in support of project goals.

How Google hunts for people

2005-11-28T10:47:00.000-08:00

It is not that easy to become a googler, but if Google is interested in you, they will do really a lot to get you. Even invite your wife to the Googleplex.

...
Of all the random shit that has affected my life surely none has had more impact than the fact that Google would not take no for an answer. They asked if they could fly me up again to try to change my mind. And they wanted me to bring my wife along as well. Well, heck, a free dinner for two, how could I turn that down?

The person assigned to win me over was Urs Hoelzle, at the time VP of Engineering. Three things impressed me about him. First, he told a really good story about how Google was planning to make money (one that turned out to be pretty much right on the money, so to speak). Second, his technical background was in programming languges, which was a big plus for me for reasons that I will explain shortly. And third, he had a really huge dog that he brought to work with him. (Yoshka, the Leonberger, has since become the stuff of legend.)

(Another interesting bit of trivia about Urs: he always wore red socks. Something to do with him being Swiss, I believe, but I never fully grokked it.)
...

Original post by the ex-googler Ron Garret

How Google benefits from NON-snobbery

2005-11-28T05:13:00.000-08:00

I believe, every major corporation states, that they benefit from the diversity of their multicultural employees, from the diversity of their experience, that from the very beginning the employees can have a real input to the process. Well, see how Google brings the use of the clever juniors to another level. Though I should say it is not that easy to hire such juniors, that actually can argue with a big and clever both using the arguments of real value.

One of the things I admired about Google was its lack of intellectual snobbery. That will sound like absolute bullshit to a lot of people, who are sick of hearing about how smart Googlers are and how hard it is to get a job there unless you've evolved into some sort of higher level human with a brain the size of Beldar. So let me clarify: there was no intellectual snobbery at Google -- toward other Googlers.
...
I remember a meeting in Larry and Sergey's office attended by a half dozen Googlers from engineering and marketing. One of the people there was a new assistant product manager who I suspect hadn't even returned his Stanford graduation gown yet. When the meeting broke up, I hung around to harass Sergey about some marketing question he had been avoiding. Time like this was precious because it was often the only way to force a decision on issues that weren't key to keeping the site up and running.

As the group filed out, I started making my case to Sergey, expecting to have five minutes mano-a-mano in which to persuade him. I was surprised when he looked over my shoulder at Nikhil, whose curiosity had caused him to linger, and asked him his opinion of my argument, then listened carefully as Nikhil laid out a cogent, well-argued response.

I confess, I wasn't happy that this... this... whippersnapper with no experience at Google was being asked to sit in judgment of my proposal. Didn't he realize he was a junior staff member and shouldn't be hanging around this conversation to begin with? This would never have happened at the Good ol' Merc, where proprieties of rank were carefully observed and it would be unseemly, impolitic and career-threatening to blatantly refute a manager in front of the company's top executive. And dammit, he was poking holes in my idea left, right and center, which Sergey duly noted.

After mainlining my blood pressure medication and walking a few times around Mountain View, I came to realize that Nikhil had some valid points. I also came to realize that I shouldn't have been surprised. It didn't matter that he'd only been on the job a short while. He was incredibly smart and he required no long experience in the Google milieu to construct a logical argument when asked to do so.Original

Original post by ex-googler Doug Edwards

How people came to Google

2005-11-27T21:51:00.000-08:00

Ron Garret, a new ex-googler an Xooglers, shares his story of coming to Google. I'd like to note, that one of his points is exactly what periodically makes me think about moving to US and applying to Google. It must be so exciting to work at the plcae where finally, eventually, at last all the usual clever guys are in the bottom 25%. I am not sure if I can qualify for the Google position, but if I lived in a Google country I would definetely try. It is so exciting to work with a clever people, with those who just understand the geek thoughts about perfectizing the software.

Please, don't get it wrong. I am happy to work with clever people at my current workplace. But if I lived in a Google country instead of a mobile phone country, I'd try entering Google.

A very brief summary to set the stage: I worked as a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher at the Jet Propulsion Lab from 1988 until 2000 when I went to work for Google as a software engineer. I was there for just over a year. I worked on two main projects, the first release of AdWords, and a little known widget called the Translation Console. If you go to Google's preferences page you will see that Google is available in well over 100 languages, including Klingon and Elmer Fudd. (There used to be a Swedish Chef option, but that seems to have succumbed to political correctness.) All those translations are provided by volunteers around the world. The interface they use to do the translating is the translation console (officially called the Google In Your Language Program). As far as I can tell it hasn't changed much since I wrote it. I'm pretty proud of that.

I guess the #1 FAQ for people who have left Google is why did you leave. My main reason for leaving was that I was commuting from Los Angeles. I'd fly up on Southwest early Monday morning, fly back on Thursday evening, and telecommute on Fridays and weekends. That regimen was pretty stressful even under the best of circumstances, but when 9/11 happened it became completely untenable. I had already given my notice before 9/11, but I don't think I could have stayed on after that even if I had wanted to. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

As I've said, my story is not entirely rosy, so I want to make a sort of blanket disclaimer, and to do that I have to indulge in a little bit of tooting of my own horn. I have a Ph.D. in computer science. I was a senior scientist at JPL when I went to Google, and when I returned to JPL I was promoted to Principal, the highest rung on their technical career ladder. (Actually, it turns out there are higher rungs, but their existence in not publicly known.) I am generally considered to be a pretty bright guy.

I am tooting my horn to put the following assessment in perspective: at Googe, if I were to rate people on general smartness I would have put myself in the bottom 25%. It was pretty much the first time in my life that I found myself not at the top of the intellectual pecking order. It was not an easy adjustment for me.

Original post by Ron Garrret

Funny e-mail spam

2005-11-27T14:43:00.000-08:00

Funny e-mail spam from google@yahoo.com :)

Does anyone believe an email like this? Someone I know got this email recently:

From: Google Info [mailto:google@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2005 6:19 PM
To: xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.com
Subject: News - You’ve just been Googled

All search engines cracked.

We can send your web site to the top of Google legitimately before Christmas and keep it there.

Yes I mean the top.

Give me up to 20 keywords and the URL of your site and we will switch Google on and another 40 top engines to deliver immeasurable keyword targeted surfers to your web site to join and buy from you.

This works for replica sites, affid, php and asp and also joining and opt>in pages belonging to programs.

For each of your 20 keywords your site is guaranteed to appear at the top of Google.
…

Oh, okay. Let’s see. I’ll take the top keywords in porn, pills, and casinos (also known as the other acronym for “P.P.C.”). Also, how about Google, viagra, krankenversicherung, britney spears, matt cutts (no wait, I’m doing okay for that one), search engine optimization, and maybe just for fun, how about making me #1 for the phrase: “you would have to be on crack to believe all guarantees in spam emails about SEO.”

Original post by Matt Cutts

Beautiful spam

2005-11-27T09:45:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts, the Google SEO specialist finds beauty in keyword spamming. Well, probably one need to work very extensively with spam to start finding something nice in it :)

If you’re going to hide text, doing “#EEEEEE” instead of solid white isn’t really an improvement. In fact, it can look worse, as if you’re trying to choose a text color that won’t be exactly the same as the background color, but still won’t be noticed. Check out this entertaining hidden text spam from a gift frame site. The interesting thing is that the phrases aren’t sorted alphabetically, but by keyphrase length. If you view-source, the net effect is some very artistic looking spam. I’ll abridge the number of phrases and just pull out a representative set:

home furnishing and decorating wedding reception centerpieces homemade christmas gift ideas personalized christmas gifts promotional business product wedding reception decoration personalized gifts for girls custom promotional products personalized picture frames personalized picture frame personalized wedding gifts home made christmas gifts personalized wedding gift bridal shower gift ideas discount picture frames gifts for teenage girls unique valentine gifts unique gifts for women valentines gift ideas wedding picture frame wholesale gift boxes valentines gift idea valentines day gifts wedding centerpieces unique wedding gifts wedding centerpiece cheap wedding gifts wedding decorations bridal shower ideas unique wedding gift bedroom decoration dog picture frames bridal shower idea acrylic aquariums wedding gift idea small fish tanks wedding pictures engagement gifts wedding presents homemade crafts gifts for women gifts for girls aquarium tanks picture frames gift for woman simple crafts gifts for her western craft angel crafts cheap gifts texas gifts irish gifts betta fish fish tank petlovers shadowbox petlover

Kinda pretty, huh?

Original post by Matt Cutts

Would you like spyware with that?

2005-11-27T05:00:00.000-08:00

Cedric criticizes the highly irritating "upgrade now" banners without the "Don't propose upgrade anymore" option.

I don't get irritated easily but I have observed a growing trend recently that is driving me absolutely nuts: upgrade nags.

Well, to be precise: upgrade nags without any possibility to turn them off.

You know, these dialog boxes that pop up whenever you launch the application and that let you know that a new version of the application is available. The arrogance of the authors of these programs is absolutely baffling, and they should know by now that you don't get mindshare by forcing products down users' throats.

Here are the worst offenders as of today:

Yahoo Messenger. It didn't used to be the case, but their recent "Yahoo Messenger with Voice" is obviously so important to them that they absolutely want you to install it, whether you have a microphone or not (or whether you want it or not). Look, Yahoo, I like your client and you are welcome to let me know a new version is available, but how about a checkbox to allow me to pass on this great offer, uh? Because right now, I am migrating away from Yahoo Messenger and urging my friends to do the same.

Acrobat Reader. A veteran in the art of irritating users, and it's only getting worse as time goes by. The most disturbing part is that the recent versions are actually worse than the previous ones: longer start-up (do I really need all these plug-ins? And why would I care about all these patents you filed?), pathetic scrolling and window management, miserably slow searching. They must have seen that their users were reluctant upgrading, so they found the best way to make you: a forced upgrade nag. Keep up the good work, guys.

iTunes. Probably the worst offender. Why? Because it suffers from the same problems as Acrobat Reader plus the fact that every new version seems to restrict your rights on your own songs further. When you upgrade iTunes, you can never really be sure that your iPod is not going to be wiped clean of songs or whether some of the songs you didn't buy through the iTunes store won't mysteriously stop playing. Of course, it doesn't exactly help either that the Apple forums opted out of Google, so searching for answers to your iPod problems will typically not yield anything. And finally, here is the latest offense to date.

Any other?

Original post by Cedric

Where AdWords name came from

2005-11-27T01:33:00.000-08:00

If you ever wondered how they invented AdWords brand name at Google, Doug Edwards shares his memories about the process

Speaking of Google advertising, the branding of the program in 2000 was an interesting challenge. We debated a number of names, with "BuyWords" and "AdsDirect" rising to the top among a list that included "PrestoAds" and "AdsToo." The keyword-targeting concept was still relatively new and we wanted a name that would give people some idea of how it worked.

As the email debated waged on, I threw out "AdWords," as a compromise. It seemed to meet the requirements and, as I pointed out to the ads team, it had a comforting familiarity about it. "AdWords." "Edwards." Hmmm...

We checked with the owner of the BuyWords domain and he wouldn't sell and we agreed that AdsDirect was too much like direct mail. So, AdWords it was.

And that's how my name came to be enshrined in Google's revenue stream.Original

Original post by ex-googler Doug Edwards

Xooglers stand for ex-Googlers

2005-11-26T03:20:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts points out a blog by the ex-googler and not just an ordinary googler. It is a blog by Doug Edwards, Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management for Google from 1999 to 2005. That guy decided to go the Google way in writing a book about his experience. To me it looks like he is trying to gather the ex-googlers' thoughts in a blog. I am posting the most interesting (to me) thoughts of the current google employees. It is a great idea to have an opinion also of those, who quit. I am going to watch for Xooglers and report the most interesting (again to me) stuff here.

While you’re waiting for me to get my posting gusto back, check out Xooglers. It’s a blog that Doug Edwards started to reminisce about his experiences at Google (other ex-Googlers may join in at some point). Doug’s a great guy and he helped shape Google culture in many ways. If you’ve read the copy on the spam report page, you’ve seen some of his polishing work.

Original post by MattCutts.

Donate to the warped sayings collection

2005-11-25T06:49:00.000-08:00

Everybody has his own ways of entertaining himself. Some people prefere collecting of the warped phrases. If you like the idea, take part in creating the warped phrases dictionary.

I like saying something slightly different from what people ordinarily expect and seeing if they notice the difference. A sort-of example is when, as a kid, I asked my mother if chocolate milk came from brown chickens, and she replied, no, they come from regular chickens.

Here are some sayings from my (nominally) adult household:

Cleaner than a baby's bottom
I feel like a needle between two haystacks.
More fun than a bowel full of monkeys

I welcome additions.

Original post byEllen Spertus

Happy Thanksgiving and now a word from our sponsor...

2005-11-25T03:49:00.000-08:00

As a consumer product web is still a very new thing. At least in its size category. And while it maturizes, it becomes more and more like the usual consumerist junk. Is it bad? Not really - after all I really prefer buying things on the web. Web is so big, that you can see it from whatever perspective you like. If only consumerist perpective wouldn't push itself (via spam) in the every other place..

I remember a few years ago around Christmas or during the Superbowl when a url was presented under a TV ad, almost beaming with pride that someone was using the internet as a way to publish and get the word out about their product. Today as I sit watching some Turkey day television most advertisements have some web component. I have collected for your browsing pleasure five such sites pulled from their cathode ray tube endorsements. I almost feel bad for Tim Berners-Lee. On with the show:

Itsagizmo.com a Black and Decker mini-site promoting can-openers and whatnot.
Musicspace.com the best place to pick up that Brian Setzer X-Mas CD you've been longing for.
Bowflexdirect.com c'mon you lazy lump buy a Bowflex to put next to your Ab machine.
Spacebag.com for people who like their clothes vacuum pack fresh.
Selectcomfort.com for people who buy beds based on the Bionic Woman's recommendation

Happy Thanksgiving and Black Friday everyone!

Original post by Jason Shellen

E-mail is obsolete

2005-11-24T21:50:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, when I check my inbox after 3 days vacation, I find it so full of useless spam, that I have a temptation of closing my e-mail account forever. Apparently, I am not alone:

According to an article in the November 11 Chronicle of Higher Education, today's college "students favor connecting with others via cellphones instead of e-mail, which they view as an obsolete technology used 'to communicate with old people.'"

Original post by Ellen Spertus

How googlers can be times more productive, than the average engineers

2005-11-23T22:30:00.000-08:00

Most of the readers of these blog are probably aware, that best software engineers, programmers , analysts, testers (and the best means such as are hired by Google) are by the order of magnitude more productive, than the average person. Piaw Na presents an intersting evidence, that this fact is not unique to the software development industry, that in every field there is this kind of professionals.

I personally believe that so big difference in prodactivity is possible, because our brain is not a fixed structure, it evolves during the lifetime. If you (and your parents) helped it to evolve well, the results will be similar to fine-tuning the car from fifties to make it as fast as today's Ferraris :)

Watching the Chosen Collection, I come across a segment where Joss Whedon is talking to the other writers on the show...

Writer 1: "Then Joss told me that he was writing a musical. I asked him, so who's writing the music! He said, I'm doing it! My response: yes, we know you're going to write the lyrics, but who's going to write the music? He said, I am! I'm teaching myself to play to piano, and I'm going to write the music."

Writer 2: "So he shows up after his vacation and gives us the manuscript and a CD. We grabbed it, assigned roles to each other, and read through the script. Every time we hit a song, we'd push play on the CD. After it was over I wanted to go back to my office and burn the place down. This was what he did in his down-time!"

Most of us know that the best software engineers are more than 300 times more productive than the median software engineer (in any organization). But we don't frequently stop to think that this applies across all creative/technical professions! It just boggles my mind that someone could teach himself to play the piano (in his downtime) just to write a musical, and then compose music. I am in awe. Piano lessons for me were incredibly painful, and I can't imagine being able to pick it up like that.

Original post by Piaw Na

Googlers against republicans

2005-11-23T05:25:00.000-08:00

Google is all about individuals, isn't it? It looks like dislike for the big corporations is built into Googlers. And of course they don't consider Google being a usual corporation. Even republican googlers are against the backbone of the republicans - against the big companies and their ideas

Consider two groups of people, both of whom call themselves "conservatives." One is the Republicans of Bush, Frist, DeLay, Enron, and the oil companies. They believe that unregulated business and low taxes are the cures for all ills. They also claim to believe in small government, but they really believe in big government that gives subsidies, handouts, and favors to their friends.

The second group are true believers in the tenets of conservatism written over the last 30 years. At the risk of mischaracterizing their beliefs, these people want to restore life as it was in the 50s. They long for the days when families were strong and communities were close-knit, when crime was low and the economy was such that two parents didn't have to work.

I can respect the second group. I can't respect the first. Fortunately, the second group can't respect the first, either. And the Republicans I respect are generally in the second group. More than that, I agree with many of their core principles, if not their end policy goals. They and I part company on social issues, like choice and same-sex marriage - I don't think abortions or gays have anything to do with the decline of America's communities - and it's easy to forget that life back then was completely different for the poor and minorities.

For the Bush crowd, the privatization of the public space is great. It makes it easier for a small oligopoly to hold power and increases the dependence of the American people on consumerism to fill the void in their lives. Runaway copyright, too, is about privatizing the public spaces, in this case creative spaces, to the same detrimental effect. Whether in art or physical layout, it's not good for America.

Original post by David Alpert

Google in Comics

2005-11-22T21:55:00.000-08:00

David Krane advertises the fact that one of his favourite comics introduced a story about Google.

What a pleasant surprise ...I've always loved this comic.

Doctor Awesome name

2005-11-22T11:34:00.000-08:00

The story of how Doctor Awesome got his name:

I don't know if I ever told the story of the name of this blog. During the Summer of 2004, I was living with Pete (and eight other people) in a house on Saint James Court in Madison. Being that we didn't have air conditioning, the lot of us would frequently spend summer evenings with each other and a case of beer out on the front porch, playing cards or chatting.

One night, the conversation turned to good band names. I made up a story about how, some day, I will have a band called "Doctor Awesome and the Awesomenauts" (I'd imagine my subconscious thought process there was based on Béla Fleck and the Flecktones). The name was the hit of the night. It became an infrequently used alternative moniker for me and eventually made its way to becoming the name of my blog (which, incidentally, was named "My Blog" at the time). This is the third home of that blog, which started life as SERFing in what's coming up as two years now, though I blogged sporadically before that.

Original post

Five things about San Francisco to miss

2005-11-21T10:40:00.000-08:00

You could never guess the top five things googlers can miss about San Francisco

Five things about San Francisco I missed while in Zürich

Morning bathrobe, coffee, newspaper
Speaking English without guilt
Seedless grapes
Campy salesmen at Nordstroms
The smell of urine in the streets

Original post by Nelson Minar

Google shirts are dangerous

2005-11-20T21:53:00.000-08:00

Piaw Na shares his concerns on how the Google popularity can be annoying for regular googlers.

Last year, while waiting to ride with John and Pamela Blayley, I wore a Google jersey (so I would be distinguishable) and waited at the corner of Canada Road and Woodside Road. There, some other cyclist recognized the jersey, rolled up to me, and said, "Can I borrow a million bucks?"

Then this summer, while Touring the French Alps, Mike Samuel and I wore almost nothing but Google jerseys, but only one person even bothered to comment on it, so I thought Google-mania was over.

Then this weekend I made the mistake of wearing a Google sweatshirt to Las Vegas (to attend a wedding). The guy at the Thrifty Rental Car counter spotted it (and asked me about it --- I was quick to say that I got the sweatshirt as a result of a favor I did for someone), and my orbitz negotiated rate went up immediately. (Not by a lot, or so much that I wanted to immediately shop for car rental prices, but enough to annoy me) I don't know whether it was just standard practice for them to bait and switch customers like this, or whether it was the guy behind the counter, but...

Original story by Piaw Na

The cost of fun: Computer games are at least five times cheaper, than movies

2005-11-20T11:34:00.000-08:00

Cedric analyzes how much money do different types of entertainment cost per hour.

Surprisingly computer games, especially MMORPGs are 5 to 15 times cheaper, than going to the movies. And it is the cost without taking into account the pop-cord an Coke! This analysis means, that Cedric spends a lot of time in the virtual worlds, but it also explains why computer games are that popular. They are just cheaper!

Or is there anything wrong? Should we take into account the cost of a gaming station? Some day, I will do the calculations for myself and will post them here.
What about you, what is the most costly entertainment in your life?

I must have spent easily that much in my first week of World of Warcraft. And probably just as much in all the weeks following, for a period of several months. Which led me to wonder about the cost of entertainment, and how each type compares to each other.

Here is a quick breakdown:

Name Upfront cost Cost per hour Explanation

World of Warcraft $50 + $15 / month = $185 18.5 cents per hour $185 / 1000

Quake IV $50 $1.02 per hour $50 / 40 hours

TV Show $30 per month (basic cable subscription) $2.70 per hour $30 / 12, assuming you watch 3 series, each showing 4 episodes per month

Movie (rental) $5 $1.7 per hour $5 / 3 hours (movie + extras)

Movie (theater) $10 $5 per hour $10 / 2 hours

Of course, there are plenty of other activities we could add, such as sport (mostly free: basket, volleyball, etc... and not so free: golf, scuba diving, horse riding. etc...) and other ways to pass the time (hiking, walking, running, reading, etc...).

...the general idea is this: World of Warcraft, and massively online games in general, have often been chastised for not only the monthly fee they charge but also for charging for the game in the first place. In light of these numbers, one might actually wonder why they don't charge more...

Name	Upfront cost	Cost per hour	Explanation
World of Warcraft	$50 + $15 / month = $185	18.5 cents per hour	$185 / 1000
Quake IV	$50	$1.02 per hour	$50 / 40 hours
TV Show	$30 per month (basic cable subscription)	$2.70 per hour	$30 / 12, assuming you watch 3 series, each showing 4 episodes per month
Movie (rental)	$5	$1.7 per hour	$5 / 3 hours (movie + extras)
Movie (theater)	$10	$5 per hour	$10 / 2 hours

Amazon Prime

2005-11-20T03:10:00.000-08:00

Doctor Awesome posts his thoughts about the Amazon Prime mechanics and targets. For those who haven't heard about the Amazon Prime, it is a US-only membership program. You pay $80 in a year and get all the order shipped fast and cheap, even free for the "two-day shipping".

Anyway, while checking out, something about my history and information triggered the Amazon system to offer me four free months of Amazon Prime (normally, it's $79 a year for free two-day shipping). A bit of Google blog searching seems to indicate that some people, but not all people are getting this offer. I theorize I got the offer for two reasons. First, I'm a fairly frequent user of Amazon, so they probably see me as somebody might get hooked on Amazon Prime. Second, I bet my location in the Bay Area (I have most of my packages sent to the Googleplex) is probably rather cheap to ship to, as I bet there's a distribution center nearby. This makes providing the Amazon Prime service much cheaper for them than if I was living in northern Wisconsin, so they'll make more money off of me. Geography has a lot to do in this business. Barnes and Noble still does the same-day delivery in Manhattan. Distribution centers are like Akamai for real stuff.

In Amazon's case, Amazon Prime is a way to "sink" the shipping costs for the consumer up front. I'm sure they believe this should increase the amount Prime customers end up purchasing--it encourages loyalty. Even if you abuse the system and order massive amounts of stuff, it's still doesn't hurt Amazon very much--that's all business they wouldn't have gotten others. Additionally, it makes all the prices on Amazon that much more attractive as compared to other merchants, as shipping costs (though paid) are zero for every additional item you buy (the marginal shipping cost to the consumer is zero, and the average cost keeps on dropping).

Amazon is smart to do this. For me, it now makes Amazon more convenient than Target (consider the additional time and opportunity costs involved with driving to Target, parking, shopping, checking out, and driving back home). I'm not sure if I'll be paying the $79 in four months, but, of course, I haven't made a decision, and Amazon's doing this to try to change my mind.

Democratcs against innovation

2005-11-19T02:26:00.000-08:00

David Alpert criticizes the intentions to force the whole world follow the American copyright laws.

"Protect the intellectual property of American innovators worldwide, strengthen the patent system, and end the diversion of patent fees."

I don't have any problem with ending diversion of patent fees, but "protect the intellectual property of American innovators worldwide" is code for creating more and more draconian copyright penalties in trade agreements with other countries, which further stifles innovation around the world and comes back to bite American innovators when the content companies then push for "harmonizing" US law with the very laws that the US itself has pushed for internationally. And if anything, the patent system in many industries is too strong right now

Blog buttons effect

2005-11-18T15:02:00.000-08:00

Here they are. Buttons have been added to the Google Planet sidebar. Now you can subscribe to the feed or add it to your Bloglines in one click. You can also see all the Google Planet posts on del.icio.us. Well, at the moment only the last ten posts, but every new post will automatically be tagged on del.icio.us. Just search for the googleplanet tag

How do you like the buttons? Do they look nice? Will they assist the readers? I am a little bit unsure about the del.icio.us button. It uses somewhat different color scheme. Does it make it unusable?

Blog buttons

2005-11-18T11:14:00.000-08:00

Update: Buttons have been added.

Even though I started HTML and JavaScript programming in old good 1998, I am quite a new person to blogging and I am still learning the basic things here. Today is the day to simplify access to this blog. I am going to add graphical buttons to the sidebar column. I decided to have a short list of buttons: link to the feed, link to Bloglines subscription and to all the posts on the del.icio.us. The buttons have been created with the help of the Brilliant Button Maker.

How do you like these buttons. Do they look standard enough to be understood in less, than 0.1 second? Or do you think there should be more buttons? Please, comment. I am a rookie blogger and the audience opinion is extremely important to me.

P.S.
No Google Planet post is tagged on del.ici.us at the moment. I am going to tag some in an our. Updates will follow

Yahoo! customer service. Quite poor

2005-11-17T22:18:00.000-08:00

David Krane criticizes the Yahoo customer service. About 6 months ago I also had a problem with their customer service. I was confused about the conditions of the extending one of my domains - the bill came from Yahoo subcontractor, not from Yahoo itself. It was rather difficult to discuss situation by e-mail. However, I was lucky to solve the problem after.. a couple of phone calls. That's too complex to just confirm, that it was ok to tell the credit card details to their subcontractors.

This site has been dark for a number of days. Most of you that have stopped by recently were likely greeted with this image, and not my mug. Details to follow in a longer post...it was yet another exasperating experience dealing with Yahoo! customer service. Thankfully, service has been restored...but not without ~ 10 e-mails, and 2+ hours on the phone (with lots of hold time). Thanks to Lisa for digging up a support phone #...otherwise, I'd still likely be down. More soon...

Matt Cutts live. Interview

2005-11-17T11:42:00.000-08:00

Philipp Lenssen caught Matt Cutts for a big interview. Check it out, very interesting conversation with one of the most "public" googlers.

For those interested in search engine news, your blog has become a great resource. To my knowledge, it’s the first in which someone from Google actually talks about Google in-depth. How has the blog worked for you so far?

It’s been wild, and I’ve enjoyed it. It’s a really good way to get the word out about some things and answer questions. I didn’t expect it would attract as many comments on the posts though. I wish I had more time to answer every single question, but I have to eke out posts at night and in my spare time already. Overall, it’s good that it provides another channel of communication with webmasters, and I have a better feel for webmasters’ questions and priorities.

So is your Google gadgets blog the “20%” Google gives you for your own projects?

I haven’t done a 20% project since... hmm. That phonetic “soundslike" search demo was a few years ago. I haven’t been using my 20% for the last couple years, but my regular job is pretty interesting, so that’s fine. The blog has mostly happened in my not-so-copious free time: nights and weekends. I’ve been getting less sleep the last 2-3 months. :)

Technorati tags: Google googler Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts at PubCon

2005-11-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts reports on the WebmasterWorld Pubcon

I’m here at WebmasterWorld Pubcon. Jumbled bunch of thoughts so far:

The timing worked out to announce a new webmaster console on Google Sitemaps. I signed up today and it’s pretty sweet. For example, you can now see crawl errors, timeouts on pages, robots.txt errors, unreachable urls, etc. Just really useful hard data that tells you if you have crawl problems and what they are. And you do not need a sitemap to use this functionality. You just create an empty file to verify that you own the domain. Check it out.
Yahoo! knows how to throw a party. They threw a fun shindig at Pure last night with good food and free drinks. I stuck to Sprite, but several webmasters were drinking with both hands.
Lots of people liked the price of Google Analytics (free). More to post on Analytics later.
I finally got to hear Jeremy Zawodny speak (we always seem to be on different panels at the same time). He’s making hundreds of dollars a month from AdSense, and he hasn’t gotten around to using YPN yet. He’s said he’s gotten a “talking to” three times over the last three years. I haven’t gotten a “talking to” from my company yet, and would prefer not to.
The conference went pretty smoothly, or at least the talks I was on. The coffee talk Q&A was full of juicy questions that I’ll try to recap later. Lots of people have said hello today, which is nice. I’ll be at pubcon tomorrow, so please come up and say hi if you see me.

I’m heading downstairs to the hotel lobby to hang with webmasters for a few hours; catcha later..

Technorati tags: Google googler PubCon

Google It You Moron

2005-11-16T22:27:00.000-08:00

Doctor Awesome reposts somebody's funny picture

Someone at work forwarded this to me:

Google It You Moron.

Ironically, this will be incredibly useful for some of the questions I get at work (from other Googlers).

Technorati tags: Google googler fun

See if Blogger autosave feature is not working

2005-11-16T13:19:00.000-08:00

Sometimes Blogger autosaving doesn't work for some time. It can happen due of poor internet connection or just because of some Blogger problems. Anyway now you can see if autosave is working or not.

We briefly lost internet connectivity here at work while I was writing my last post. Fortunately, Pete's new outage notifier let me know! That rocks.

(Note this was a "my internet at work wasn't working" outage, not a "Blogger's down" outage.)

Technorati tags: Google googler Blogger

Google hires people to work on Firefox

2005-11-15T22:29:00.000-08:00

Google eventually starts devoting full time programmers to Firefox. Does this mean that from now on Google is "official" Microsoft competitor?
Chris de Bona, Open source program manager at Google announces the Firefox Software Engineer position. The unusual point is in that you can contact Chris directly if you are interested. I know that direct contact is important for many qualified job seekers in IT.

If you are a solid developer, check out this req: Google Jobs - Software Engineer, Firefox. Email me if you like.

Technorati tags: Google recruiting Firefox

MIT will give every Chinese kid a laptop. US kids are not eligible

2005-11-15T12:49:00.000-08:00

Bob Lee considers that though helping poor countries get Internet is a decent goal for a US university, there is a lot of people to help in the US itself.

From the F.A.Q.:

How will these be marketed?
The idea is to distribute the machines through those ministries of education willing to adopt a policy of "One Laptop per Child." Initial discussions have been held with China, Brazil, Thailand, and Egypt. Additional countries will be selected for beta testing. Initial orders will be limited to a minimum of one million units (with appropriate financing).
China, Brazil, Thailand, and Egypt... Let's not forget about the 12.9 million children living in poverty in the United States. Can you believe that a mere $1.3 billion could equip every poor child in the U.S. with a laptop? Think how much we could save in text book costs. Who is working on this? Are we really going to sell laptops to countries half way around the world without giving one to the kid down the street?

Technorati tags: Google googler internet access poor countries

Europe is getting older

2005-11-15T09:44:00.000-08:00

Douwe Orsiga blogs on the fact, that old europeans are moving out of their countries, while immigrants go in. In particular there are more people moving from Netherlands, than moving into it:

Moving out the grey masses

The old Europe is getting older. Not only the old, apparently the New Europe isn’t quite that fresh anymore either. The simplest solution to do something about the coming lack of young people in Europe would obviously be to import more young people from countries where they have rather too much of them. Unfortunately the popularity of this solution has decreased quite a bit the last years, making for example the Netherlands for the first time since the years just after World War II a country where more people emigrate from than emigrate too (how that reflects well on the current government is another question of course). If we can’t import young foreigners, the other solution to stabilize the population pyramid is of course exporting the old locals.

It should be simple enough. There might be a pension crisis, but the total of pensions and private savings should surely be enough to make for a comfortable old age in a cheapish Third World Country, shouldn’t it? Right now it seems a lot of doctors educated in the Third World don’t stay around due to lack of career opportunities; moving millions of European pensioners around should create a nice market for these guys. And these poorer countries tend to have warmer climates, which is nice if you have a lot of free time on your hand. Sure, they’d want to see their children and children’s children, but in these days of cheap telecommunications and air tickets that shouldn’t be that much of an issue anymore.

And while the old enjoy their well deserved rest on the beaches from Ghana to Sri Lanka, their old home countries can focus their energies on keeping up the wealth that allowed them to send their retired oversees. I’d like a place in Goa, I think.

Technorati tags: Google googler Europe

US Googlers in London

2005-11-14T22:43:00.000-08:00

US-based Cedric (sorry, don't know his real name) comments on visiting Europe:

I was in Paris and London this past week, here are a few random thoughts...

I tamed jet lag. I have traveled internationally so many times that by now, I have it down to an art. Here are a few simple rules:

* Start shifting your time before leaving your country. Stay up late (very late) and don't sleep in too much. Note that the point is not really to make yourself tired so you will sleep on the plane (which doesn't help at all with jet lag) but just to start adjusting to your new time in your own environment.

* On your first day in the new country, don't nap, don't sit (especially on comfortable couches), and don't go to bed before 10pm.

Also, try not to abuse coffee: the more you confuse your stomach with unusual quantities of drinks and meals taken at odd times, the harder it will be for your body to get used to your new schedule. Ideally, you simply want your metabolism to believe that instead of a 24-hour day, you are just going through a 33-hour day and that your sleep pattern doesn't need to be altered to handle it.

That's it. Follow these simple instructions and even a nine hour time difference will have absolutely no effect on your body.

I flew on one of Virgin Atlantic's latest aircrafts on the way back, and it featured the best entertainment system I have seen on an international flight by far: about fifty movies to choose from, entire seasons of TV series, news, games, etc... It's all there. You can also pause, rewind and fast forward everything at leisure. Absolutely fantastic if you're not the reading type on planes.

Cell phone interoperability has come a long way and works close to perfectly now. My trusted 6630 (which took the pictures above) worked beautifully and never lost GSM connectivity. I actually travel with two phones and interestingly, they picked two different roaming carriers while in France (Orange and Bouygtel). This is quite puzzling since both are Cingular, but it was a good opportunity to experiment. No surprise there: both phone calls and SMS worked seamlessly, the only glitch being that one of the two carriers refused to give me caller ID. Not a big deal.

I also experimented with sending SMS messages back to the US and between England and France, and everything worked fine. Better: even EDGE performed beautifully and allowed me to connect to the Internet through the Bluetooth modem while riding the Eurostar on my way to London (except in the tunnel, of course, but my phone quickly regained coverage when we came out and latched on O2 on the British territory).

Maybe we really live in a connected world after all.

Technorati tags: Google googler London

Matt Cutts on Pubcon

2005-11-14T14:16:00.000-08:00

Googlers have no business cards. Well, actually if they don't bother to get them :)

I’m getting stuff together for Pubcon. I’ve got a USB drive, a long-ass ethernet cable for Wi-Fi unfriendly hotel rooms, cell phone charger, breath mints, a bitchin’ laser pointer, and plenty of mini notebooks for writing down feedback. I have Bejeweled on my cell phone for wasting time in airport lines. You’d think I’m 100% ready, but I’m not.

The one thing I don’t have is business cards; lately, I never have business cards at conferences. My initial batch ran out a year or two ago, and I never bothered getting more. Googlers can order them with almost any job title, and I’ve been struck with business card writer’s block. Should I just go with the tried-and-true but generic title of Software Engineer? Or I could put something more out there, like “The guy who knows the spam you made last summer” or “Whitehat.” I’ll figure it out, but what do you think I should put on my business cards? And am I missing anything important for my travels in the next couple weeks?

Technorati tags: Google googler Pubcon

Google talk on SEO in Las Vegas

2005-11-14T12:25:00.000-08:00

If you happen to visit Las Vegas this Tuesday (Nov 15), don't miss a chance to meet Matt Cutt, Google SEO specialist

I’m heading to the WebmasterWorld PubCon on Tuesday, and the week after that I’m in Kentucky for Thanksgiving, so it might take me a while to approve first-time commenters. I’ll be on a panel with other search engine reps on Wednesday afternoon.

Most SEOs should enjoy the Coffee Talk session where Brett will lob questions at me for an hour on Wednesday morning. It will be at 9 a.m., which is early (especially for PubCon), but I’m expecting lots of fun questions.

Finally, I often prowl around the lobby of the conference hotel late at night looking for webmasters/SEOs to talk to. Don’t be shy about introducing yourself. If you’re at PubCon, please come up and say hello, tell me what industry you work in, and give me any Google feedback you want.

Technorati tags: Google SEO Pubcon

Google are about to put the entire web statistics and analysis industry out of business

2005-11-14T09:56:00.000-08:00

Google released it's free web-statistics tool. Free and damn powerful. A must-have. What else could you add? Oh, yeah, it's not Beta :)

Matt Cutt:

Sweet, it pays to be a night owl. I just noticed that Google Analytics is live. This is a result of Urchin joining Google. I tried it out and here’s what I’ve noticed so far:

It’s free. Technically it’s free for sites with 5 million pageviews/month or less. If you have more than 5M pageviews, you need to sign up for an AdWords account, but it sounds like there’s no minimum spend once you sign up. In other words, it’s free.
It’s quick to sign up. It took me five minutes to sign up (I already had a Google account for Gmail, so add 1-2 minutes if you don’t have a Google account). That includes filling out 2-3 forms, getting the JavaScript to include on pages, ssh’ing to my webhost, and dropping the JavaScript in my templates.
If you’re using WordPress with a theme like almost-spring, you would edit your header.php file, e.g. wp-content/themes/almost-spring/header.php and put the JS just above the tag. That’s it. Do a view-source on this page and search for “urchin” to see where to drop the code.
The help pages are pretty good, and it looks like the system is available in 16 languages. If you use weird tricks like reloading the same url with different params as someone submits information, you can add virtual stages so that you can track the progress of users on that url.
You can track all sorts of things like Flash events, JavaScript events, and PDF downloads.
They’ve done a very nice job of emphasizing that conversion data is well-protected. Take this quote from the benefits page, for example:

Google takes the trust people place in us very seriously, and is pledged to safeguard the privacy of your corporate data. We understand that web analytics data is sensitive information, so we accord it the ironclad protection it deserves. Read our industry leading privacy policy.

ZDNet also has a good quote from Paul Muret, one of the Urchin founders who is now a director at Google:

Though in theory people who are using Google Analytics and competitive services to monitor their ad campaigns could be exposing information to Google on how those rival services work, Muret said Google would not get any competitive advantage from that.

“We have very strict controls on the data. It is only used to provide reporting to customers and people using the analytics,” he said.

Blackhat SEOs may be leery of using Google for analytics, but regular site owners should be reassured.

The timing on this is great for me. I often advise site owners to check out their server logs, but I hadn’t done much rooting around on my own logs since I started my blog. In fact, the first webhost I signed up for didn’t include access to server logs! To be fair, I did sign up for the “I am a cheap bastard” plan though. I only got error logs, so I had to estimate visitor levels by looking for misses when browsers tried to load a favicon from my site and failed. My current web host gives me server logs and offers a couple packages for reporting (Analog and something else), but they’re not set up by default and it looked like a hassle, so I never bothered. I guess being lazy paid off this time.

I feel a little guilty using a massively powerful analytics package to track visitors to my halloween costume, but hey: it’s free. Swatting a fly with a Buick may feel like overkill, but if the Buick is free, I’m not complaining. The only downside so far is that you have to wait 6-12 hours for the first report to show up. I’ll head to bed and let you know how it looks when I get some reports. Or, you know, try it yourself and see what you think.

Overall, Google Analytics should be a hot topic at the WebmasterWorld conference this week. Some people will care a lot about the AdWords features, but plenty of people will want to use it just for tracking. Now, I wonder who I’d talk to on the Analytics team to get them to offer a web counter service.

Technorati tags: Google Analyitics web statistics

SEO feed from the Google SEO specialist

2005-11-13T22:06:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts, a known Google SEO person provides the feed (RSS link) to his SEO-related posts:

Huvet writes:

Hello Matt,
thanks for keeping up with supplying us with important info.

I have a simple request though, would it be possible to get a Google/SEO only RSS-feed? Not that I dislike your movie reviews or anything it’s just that internet is a big place, you got to select what you read.

I absolutely agree, Huvet. This site leans toward SEO/Google issues right now, but I want to be able to post gadget stuff or whatever without wasting people’s time. My main feed is

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/feed/

but you can limit yourself to a feed of the “Google/SEO” category with this url:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/feed/

People who only want to get SEO-related stuff should use that url instead of the main feed.

Technorati tags: Google googler SEO

Googlers bowling team

2005-11-12T00:45:00.000-08:00

You can propose a name for the Google bowling team! Don't miss the chance!

I probably think this blog is about me.

I've been posting a lot of photos of myself lately. On one hand, it looks pretty egotistical. On the other, I'm pretty awesome.

Anyway, I dragged some Google coworkers bowling yesterday. Most of them came willingly to the Palo Alto Bowl with me. I really enjoyed myself. I reminded me of late nights bowling at Evergreen Lanes in Nekoosa during high school.

Between the seven of us, I won two of the three games. Of course, my highest game was a 118. We weren't exactly pros.

I'm thinking it'll become a near-weekly event for me. Maybe I'll join a league. Wouldn't a Google team be the coolest thing ever? Four-person teams means we could get bowling shirts: red, yellow, green, and blue.

America rules. Wherever you go, there's a bowling alley that looks like it was built (and decorated) in 1976.

Exercise for the reader: what would be a good name for a Google bowling team?

Technorati tags: Google googler bowling

Recruiting email

2005-11-12T00:42:00.000-08:00

Somebody from Yahoo! almost tried hiring Matt Cutts, the Goohle anti-seo specialist (or pro-seo, depending on the point of view).

I’m taking a stab at clearing out my inbox tonight. I got a recruiting email from Yahoo yesterday, but they were trying to reach a different Matt:

Hello Mr. XXXXXXXXXX,

I found your name on XXXXXXXXX.com and I wanted to reach out to you to see
if you would be interested in exploring opportunities with Yahoo in New York
(or Chicago). I am working on a couple of roles that you may be a fit for
and I would like to know if you are interested in learning about the
opportunities.

How should I reply?

Hi, you have the wrong Matt. No offense, but I don’t think I’ll refer you to the right one.

or maybe

Jeff, shall we discuss this over lunch sometime to talk? You can meet me at the plex.

Hmm. There’s the tried and true

I nofollow you!

Maybe I’ll just delete it and get back to clearing out the ol’ inbox.

Technorati tags: Google googler recruiting

Google job interview

2005-11-11T23:55:00.000-08:00

Did you ever wonder what kind of studies should you get to start working for Google?
Piew Na sheds the light on this questions. And even provides you two text books. If you pass them easily, most probably you are qualified :)

Questions from someone looking for an engineering job @ Google

How soon I can apply for other positions at Google if am rejected for a particular position?

There's no limitation. However, Google has a long institutional memory. If you did badly for reasons of cultural fit, it is unlikely that any subsequent application will be successful. If your first set of interviewers are credible, it will take an extremely strong referral notice from an employee who was a previous colleague to give you another chance.

What's the total interview duration in general?

45 minutes each, 5-8 interviewers (including phone interviews)

I am not a spontanious person in nature and hence chances are likely that I don't do good in interviews. But am really excellent on the job. What's your advice in my situation during interview?

Practice, practice, practice. Get a few friends to do mock interviews. Or try an alternate way of getting into google, through one of the many programming contests we sponsor, for instance.

What's the good reference you recommend to get the basics of computer science(I may not know all the fundamentals that I learn thro' my job).

Two classic textbooks:
Introduction to Algorithms
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
If you can read both books and do the exercises easily, then you are probably qualified. (If you click through and read the reviews, you'll notice that the first SICP reviewer is Peter Norvig, a Google director)

Technorati tags: Google recruiting job interview

Anti-Internet Explorer ads

2005-11-11T23:39:00.000-08:00

Jason Shellen comments on the Explorer Destroyer - a small piece of javascript, that will earn you money by showing "Get Firefox" banners to the IE users only.

Jason also proposes his own "lighter" solution:

If you haven't seen ExplorerDestroyer yet, it's a site that offers some fancy ways to either encourage, push or insist that visitors to your site download Firefox. The code will not display a promo if you are already one of the Firefox enlightened and it's a good idea but perhaps a little heavier than I wanted for my own blog. Not to mention a bit violent sounding for people like me who just want to advocate a faster web experience.

If you are viewing this site in IE then you see the advert on the right urging you to give Firefox a whirl. I used a conditional comment called If IE to only display a Firefox enhanced with Google Toolbar promo box by pasting the below code into my blog template. Feel free to copy to your own blog. You may want to change the Adsense ad client id to your own (if you have one) so you get credited with the $1 bounty currently paid for helping folks switch over to Firefox. Enjoy.
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
<![endif]-->

Technorati tags: Google Firefox ad

Piaw Na on the iPod headphones

2005-11-11T10:28:00.000-08:00

Piaw's reviews of headphones for the ipod

First of all, forget the earbuds that come with the ipod. They are terrible, and not at all what I would consider either comfortable or practical. Note that despite my mention of helmet compatibility in these headphones I neither endorse nor encourage the use of headphones while riding your bicycle in traffic!!

Sennheiser PX 100 Headphones

I paid about $38 for these when they went on sale a while back on Amazon.com, and they are great! Plugged directly into the ipod, the sound is neutral, and almost as good as my Sennheiser 600s with an Airhead amplifier. They fold up neatly into a box the size of a spectacle case, and are very comfortable to wear on hikes as long as 4 hours or so. These are my favorite headphones for hiking or general walking around.

Koss KSC 75

These are the ones to get if you can't stand having a headband over your head, or have to wear a helmet while listening to your music. They fit nicely on the helmet exterior, and despite the loose feeling connection, don't fall off easily. They sound great for $14, and while not as nice as the PX 100s, are cheap enough that if you destroy them you won't feel guilty about them. The plug is also a very ipod friendly 90-degree plug, which isn't true for the Sennheiser.

Koss Sport Pro

At $22, these are disappointing. I bought them when I gave my mom my KSC 75s, and they do work under your helmet, but the headband isn't super-comfortable under the helmet. (You can tilt the headband backwards so it doesn't interfere with the helmet) They do fold up neatly into a nice compact package and clamp nicely to your head so they don't allow as much road noise as the KSC 75s, but despite that they still do not sound as nice as the KSC 75s and are a far cry from the Sennheiser PX 100s. I only recommend these if you've already tried the KSCs and found that they don't fit your ears for one reason or another.

Technorati tags: Google googler iPod

Questions on the job interview at Google

2005-11-10T22:39:00.000-08:00

Chris Wetherel posted few of his favourite job intervuew questions. Rather funny. And very much in line with Joel's The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

So did you know...? All engineers at Google interview candidates as often as possible and like many of my co-workers I've pared down what was a previously substantial body of stumper questions to a shorter, more incisive, and significantly more powerful query set. And I'd like to share that (shh).

Please don't try and study these before coming in for an interview. I'll know. I just will.

If you were a flower - particularly one that had nearly infinite scalable indexing of the internet - what kind of flower would you be?

If Yahoo were Ashlee Simpson and Google were Jessica Simpson whose album would you be less likely to download illegally?

For the block and a chance to win ONE MILLION hours of overtime (work, not pay) who asked where "the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?"

Technorati tags: Google job interview

Games googlers play

2005-11-08T13:28:00.000-08:00

GregStein on the XBox 360 launch:

I've been tracking a lot of stuff around the Xbox 360 launch: the supply, what games will be available (and what is delayed! woe is me...), good/bad games, and whatnot. Lots of details to pull together.

That said, I found a good article that summarizes all these bits into a coherent, short piece on the launch of the Xbox 360. The article fits right in with everything else that I've seen, so I consider it a good read for seeing what's going on

The high cost of free education

2005-11-08T13:09:00.000-08:00

Douwe Osinga wrote a beautiful post about why the University eduction should not be free. The statement is very arguable, but Douwe's argument have good reasoning and are worth a discussion.
here's the thing. There is no such thing as a free lunch and there is no free university education either. Note, that there is a vote in the Douwe's post

I mean this in two senses. First of all, it might be free to the student, but somebody is paying, because it costs money. That somebody is Joe Taxpayer of course and all things the same, he'd like to keep his money. Or to put it in a more liberal/left wing formulation, the same money could be spend on other things. Lower education for example. Lower education is for everybody, university education tends to end up with the people that will have lots of money later anyway.
The other sense I mean it in is that the whole thing distorts demand and supply for university graduates. We end up with too many people studying English because they like it and not enough engineers, because people tend not to like it

Technorati tags: Google googler education

Shame on America

2005-11-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

Nelson Minar comments on the fact, that EU started an investigation to check whether any of its member nations was hosting the recently disclosed secret American prisons.

I was thinking "good for the EU!" when I realized, wait, I'm American. And my country is holding people in secret jails and torturing them. And there's no response, no outrage, no investigations and resignations and arrests. The only one doing anything is the EU, making sure they aren't participating in the gross violation of human rights. What else can they do? What else can I do?

What has happened to America? Despite my criticisms of US politics, I'm proud and happy to be American. Except for the torture part. And the imperialistic wars. It has to stop.

Technorati tags: Google googler prison America

Googlers from the moon

2005-11-05T14:28:00.000-08:00

Doctor Awesome got a really nice costume for the Hallowing

Technorati tags: Google googler Halloween

Googler's jewelry

2005-11-04T11:52:00.000-08:00

For some people, new cool tech stuff is like jewelry. They call such people "geeks" :)

Today, I told my husband that I would love to get a new flat screen Apple monitor for our office, along with a new Powerbook to use it with, and a new video iPod so I can watch shows whenever I want.

I am almost as excited thinking about it as I would be about getting jewelry.

Technorati tags: geek google kimbalina

GMail vs. Outlook

2005-11-03T10:36:00.000-08:00

Cedric published an interesting comparison of GMail vs Microsoft Outlook. What I personally value in GMail is "archiving, not deleting" and really good spam filter.

The first thing I noticed in my various labels and filters is that I seemed to receive a lot less email. For example, where certain mailing-lists used to receive more than fifty messages a day, GMail showed me less than ten on a daily basis. The answer was obvious, of course: GMail displays the number of conversations, not messages, which makes me feel like I'm less overwhelmed. Of course, it's just perception, but perception is important when you are trying to keep up with the deluge of emails that hits you every day.
...
Conversations, conversations, conversations. This is a direct follow-up to the point above, but no mailer has come close to successfully capturing the meaning of an email conversation. GMail really nailed it, and compared to Outlook's abysmal conversation approach (no indentation in the threads and you can't even fold an entire thread, only the unread messages), it's a breath of fresh air.
GMail's spam filter is working very well. I tried many spam filters over the years and while there are some really good solutions for Outlook and Thunderbird, GMail's spam filter seems to be the best I've encountered so far, and I know quite a few people who are using their GMail account as a pure spam filter (and eventually switched completely over). ...

GMail's phishing detection is also very good, and is the reason why recommending GMail around me (especially to beginners such as my Mom) is a no-brainer.

Yahoo doesn't like those who search for Google

2005-11-02T10:16:00.000-08:00

Matt Cuts points out, that some Yahoo sites have hard coded results for special searches. Especially for searches for "Google" the Competitor.

This reminds me of similar incidents from other search engines in the past. Remember when Inktomi hand-coded the result for [dumb motherfucker] so that the #1 result was a Google page about its executives? Boy, I do. That was motivating. Or when AllTheWeb hand-coded the results for [google] to return the phrase “Google — The Inferior Search Engine” at the top of the search results? I showed that one to Stephen Baker at FAST, and it was gone by the next day. Will Yahoo decide to keep this hand-coded behavior when someone does the search [google]? I have no idea.

Free link checker for your site

2005-11-01T11:51:00.000-08:00

Kimbalina published the link to Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM) - free yet powerful link checker for your site.

Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.
Additional features:

Simple, no-frills user-interface
Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors)
Simple report format, can also be e-mailed
Executable file smaller than 1MB
Supports SSL websites ("https:// ")
Partial testing of ftp and gopher sites
Detects and reports redirected URLs
Site Map

David Krane: The Best on Google Video

2005-11-01T11:33:00.000-08:00

David Krane draws attention to the blog, devoted to the best Google Video uploads:

Not familiar w/Google Video? Here's a good starting point...(plus this: more "Numa Numa"remakes than you can imagine!)

The last googler without the iPod

2005-10-31T13:05:00.000-08:00

Shuman Ghosemajumder eventually got his own iPod. iPod Mini to be specific. As each and every iPodder he is very happy about his new device and praises Apple design over the design of any other gadget in the Universe.

..overall I was impressed and very happy with my new toy. And did I mention it looks great? I suspect this reason alone fuels the majority of iPod Mini sales. I’m amazed that Apple’s competitors can produce devices which are comparable or superior on nearly every engineering metric, but fall down flat when it comes to making something aesthetically pleasing and easy to use. Has Apple hired all of the world’s best interface designers, leaving other high tech companies with the design sensibilities of 1970's auto manufacturers? Competing products from Sony and Creative resemble a cassette player and a Fisher Price toy respectively. And Dell's Digital Jukebox looks less like a competing product and more like an iPod storage container. Whatever their malfunction is, they need to rectify it soon, because Apple is rapidly becoming the only name in electronics that people associate with beautiful products.

Matt, the Iron Blade

2005-10-31T13:01:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts is extremely well prepared for the Halloween! I dream, that someday, I manage to organize a similar thing for myself. And for kids when I have them :)

I decided to have fun for Halloween. This time, my name is Inigo. Hallo! My name is Inigo Montoya. You spam my index. Prepare to die!

Horror stories for feminists

2005-10-30T12:31:00.000-08:00

Ellen Spertus noticed an interesting contradiction between theoretically higher chances of marriage for high-IQ men and the practical situation at Google, where "many brilliant men have been unsuccessful at finding partners, while almost all of the women who want to be appear happiliy partnered."

Hard recruiting at Google

2005-10-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

At Google, they seem to be really serious about recruiting. Some hardworking enthusiasts can sleep few hours a day, just because the recruiting is of the top importance.
From Christine Davis:

...i've been traveling like crazy lately, and sick before besides. :( i was sick through thursday (of last week), and then left monday to go recruiting on the east coast. that flight was the most, err, interesting flight i bet (hope!) i'll ever had. suffice it to say that my illness hadn't quite passed.
...
basically i was recruiting and interviewing from then until mid-day thursday afternoon. at which point we took a cab to t.f. green, and i flew to LAX, getting ready for more recruiting and interviewing on friday (yesterday). on thursday i was up for 21 hours if you adjust for time zones. yikes!

Larry Page riding his Segway

2005-10-27T10:55:00.000-07:00

Eric Case posted a photo of Larry Page riding his Segway in the Google premises

2005-10-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

Matt Cutt presents an interesting example of the Google News customization. It is amazing how much you can get from Google News by clicking a few buttons.

That’s the danger of personalized news–you get a great view of the bark on the trees, but you can lose the forest.
But if you want to look at the bark on my trees, click this link to see how I’ve personalized Google News. I’ve got sections for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, plus a section for Search Engine Optimization.
Although for the SEO section, I had to add “-mets -jae” to the query; evidently there’s some baseball pitcher with the name “Seo.” Baseball again, geez; when will people learn that basketball and maybe soccer are where the action is?