a blog by António Farinha
The image above is part of the satellite imagery that Google recently released of the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) - commonly known as The Boneyard. It's a collection of over 4,000 retired aircraft including nearly every plane the US armed forces have flown since World War II.
Get more info at BBC News, or just explore the whole thing in Google Maps.
(via Gizmodo)
Just like they did on Samuel Morse's birthday and Louis Braille's birthday, today, on the 57th birthday of the Barcode, Google presented its logo as vertical black bars on a white background.
Now if, for some bizarre reason, you want to generate a similar Barcode for your name, just head over to morovia.com, and select "Code 128" as the Barcode Format. This is how my name looks like:
And what good would an encoder be without a decoder? Use ZXing.org to uncover the hidden messages in barcodes.
Blind Search is a very simple website that does just one thing. Given a search query it presents the search results returned by Bing, Google and Yahoo and displays them side by side in 3 different columns, presenting them with the same styling, to remove any identifiable properties. The user chooses which results are the best, votes for that search engine by clicking the corresponding button and then the source is revealed.
At the time of writing, the page that shows the voting results has been taken down because some “douche is gaming the system”, but while it was up there were a lot of changes in the classification, which indeed suggests some kind of manipulation.
So far my results have been spread around the 3 engines, with Google and Bing very close and Yahoo bit behind the other 2. But, as the author (Michael Kordahi, a Microsoft employee, although he claims Microsoft has nothing to do with it) points out, the site is still an experiment, and very limited, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt:
The system has many flaws that I know about already, the primary one of interest is the lack of localisation. So, all searches are going through the US as US searches. The other deficiency worth noting is that there is much missing from the actual experience of using these search engines eg, image thumbnails, suggestions, refine queries etc.
Anyway, it’s interesting to see how search engine branding has an impact on the perceived quality of results. I would expect my choice to be Google most of the times, but it seems the search results from both Bing and Yahoo are not very different. But still, Google was the only one to return this blog when I searched for “Flour Power”, so they still have my loyalty.
Try it yourself and let me know what you think.
After being involved with computers and the web for quite a few years now, I hardly ever get too excited about new products that are said to be completely innovative and capable of changing the way we'll do things from now on. That's because they end up being just small improvements to what we already have been using. And now Google Wave is approaching...
On the 2nd day of the Google I/O Developer Conference, Lars and Jens Rasmussen (the creators of Google Maps) unveiled what they've been working since 2007, after asking themselves the question "What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?". The result is Google Wave, which could be described as something that mixes the functionality of email, instant messaging, social networking, wikis and blogging (and I might have forgotten something...) into one single protocol. Sounds confusing and messy? Well, it isn't, and that's the beauty of it: it just makes so much sense! Just watch the demo to see everything in action. It's a bit long, but well worth it:
Impressed? I know I am, and I just wish we could start using it right now! The question on my mind now is how this will tie with email, because we can't expect everyone in the world to immediately dump it to start using Wave.
To make it even better, Wave won't be just another Google product. It's also a protocol and a platform:
The Google Wave product is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).
Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.
And now all we can do is wait...
For more information:
Google Wave - The product home page, and where you can sign up to be notified when it becomes available.
Google Wave API - The API, documentation and code samples.
Google Wave Federation Protocol - The protocol, whitepapers and discussion forum.
I did it. I managed to get a post to be the first Google result for a couple of search terms. And I did it 3 times, for 3 different posts, in 3 different days.
At first this sounds something really hard to do. And I guess it is, in normal situations. But on this occasion a couple of factors contributed to make it possible. And quite easy. Here's what happened.
It started when I received a Facebook message urging me to visit some website. The message had no description of the site, and the website address was a bit obfuscated. I immediately knew it was a scam, and deleted it promptly. Later that day I got another such message and thought I might as well post it here on my blog as a way to warn people to not visit that website. To my surprise, this is what I saw just a few hours later:
At first I was convinced it was some kind of bug, but upon looking at the most visited pages I saw which one was the "culprit". I noticed a huge amount of visitors coming from Facebook and Google and went on to confirm that post was the first Google result if you searched for the contents of the Facebook message.
So, what happened? Apparently Google's crawlers can be really fast sometimes and my post was indexed almost as soon as it was posted. With the Facebook scam in full throttle, thousands of people were receiving the same message. A lot of them probably did like me and deleted it immediately, but many others googled it (some before and some after entering their Facebook credentials on the site). At the same time the link to the blog post was being passed around on Facebook, meaning even more visitors. With a lot links for it from Facebook, the page became the #1 Google result, and that resulted in a lot of visitors, and eventually some more links to it, making the position even stronger.
Now, guess what I did when, 2 days later, I received a similar message? Yes, I posted it as well, and lo and behold, the visitors started pouring in again.
By the time I got a third message, just 1 day later this time, I knew that I could do it again. This time I took a slightly different approach and instead did a list of the pages that are conducting this Facebook phishing scam. Sure enough, the post got another wave of visitors.
At the time of writing of this post, the avalanche is dying down, but I'm still getting way more visitors than normal. And the original post is still the most visited, although it's not #1 in Google anymore.
In my opinion, there were a few very important factors that made this possible. First, and maybe the most important, was the fact that I was probably one of the first to post about it (lucky me for having technologically gullible friends). How Google found it so fast I don't know, but when people searched for it, this blog was the only one talking about it and so it showed up right at the top. Second, the Facebook message hit a huge amount of people in a short span of time. As I saw someone commenting, it must have been because it was weekend and there were less Facebook employees "policing" the site, and it took some time until such messages started being blocked.
The results? About 6500 visitors in the first hour and a total of 35.221 unique views on that first post until now. The whole thing (the 3 posts) produced almost 50.000 page views during the last 5 days. The number of RSS subscribers shot up from 28 to 120 on that first day, and has now come down to about 50, which is still a good improvement. The revenue from the ads is enough to buy a couple of pints.
Now I hope I can do it again sometime soon. Will try to get myself prepared so that I can get a higher visitor retention rate, and better clickthrough rates on the ads.
A few days ago, when the responsibles for The Pirate Bay were found guilty, I hinted at a way to search for BitTorrent files using Google. Well, someone actually went and created a wrapper using Google Custom Search that uses that trick, and The Pirate Google was born!
Please Note: This site is not affiliated with Google, it simply makes use of Google Custom Search to restrict your searches to Torrent files. You can do this with any regular Google search by appending your query with filetype:torrent. This technique can be used for any type of file supported by Google.
The intention of this site is to demonstrate the double standard that was exemplified in the recent Pirate Bay Trial. Sites such as Google offer much the same functionality as The Pirate Bay and other Bit Torrent sites but are not targeted by media conglomerates such as the IFPI as they have the political and legal clout to defend themselves unlike these small independent sites.
This site is created in support of an open, neutral internet accessible and equitable to all regardless of political or financial standing.
Kudos to them!
Also, I love the logo.
On related news, it seems that we might have a retrial of the Pirate Bay case. One of the lawyers representing the Pirates has "called for a retrial after reports that the judge was a member of the same copyright protection organisations as several of the main entertainment industry representatives".
One of the groups of which Norström [the judge] is a signed up member is Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt ('the Swedish Copyright Association'), where he is joined by Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted, all of whom represented the entertainment industry in the case against file sharing site The Pirate Bay.
The judge also sits on the board of Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property), a group actively advocating for more stringent copyright laws.
Norström argues that he was not however swayed in his judgement by involvement with copyright protection groups.
Ah! I mean Ahrrrr!
UPDATE: It seems that Google has been disabling these kinds of sites, but you can still use the filetype:torrent attribute in regular google searches (via Inquisitr).
The "Doodle 4 Google" competition to choose the Google logo for St. Patrick's Day has come to an end. The winner is Evan O'Sullivan Glynn from St. Munchin's College, with his doodle entitled "My Irish Roots":
On St.Patrick's day Irish people around the world celebrate their connection to Ireland "The Emerald Isle". "My Irish Roots" represents this connection with how shamrocks trace back to their roots in the same way that Irish people throughout the world trace back to Ireland, their Ireland, my Ireland.
The winning logo will be displayed on the Google homepage in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and Ireland on St. Patrick's Day (17th of March).
The other 3 national finalists were Louise Gilmore from S.N Muire na nGael, Marcela Ponikova from St. Clare's NS and Orla Gartland from Dominican College.
I was checking the Google Webmaster Tools statistics for this blog today and noticed that the Google web crawler picked up a few broken links. That was weird, since I'm using Wordpress and I haven't messed around in a way that could cause this kind of behavior, so everything should be neat and tidy.
Further analysis showed that there where two pages that the crawler couldn't get to. 404 errors were being thrown instead.
One of them is a category page that's being linked from the homepage. It's being linked using a query string with the category id in it, which is something that's no longer being used. The categories link now have the category name in it. Apparently this error was detected on the 17th of January (about 1 month and a half ago), and it's weird that the homepage hasn't been crawled since. I'll have to look into that later.
The other problematic page (and the reason for this post) had 6 links to it, and when I checked the post that had those links I realised that this was a case of a post that, to put it simply, had vanished! How? I have no idea. But I do remember writing it, posting it, and linking to it. So it had to be somewhere. It wasn't in the list of all posts. It wasn't in Windows Live Writer. I was just about to check the database backups when I decided to try my luck with Google. I knew they keep a cache of the indexed pages, so I could get lucky and find it there. All it took was a search for a term I knew was in the title of the post:
I instantly recognised what I was looking for from the tidbit on the first result. Clicking the "Cached" link I was taken to the page as it was on the 25th of January, 5 days after the post was written, and there I found the post exactly like I remembered it. A few minutes for copying and pasting to a new post, with the same name and URL, and it's now live again. When the crawlers come back, the crawling errors should go away.
I still don't know how the post vanished, though...
Last Tuesday Gmail had a 3 hours outage and it seemed like the world was going to end, considering all the Twitter and Facebook cries of panic. It's clear that a lot of people rely on Gmail as a work tool, and the possibility of such "glitches" happening is something to worry about. But there are a few things you can do when it seems you can't access your Gmail account properly:
So the next time Gmail seems to be down, don't panic. First try the items above. And if none of them works, then you can panic 
