I’m on a mailing list for a 
newsgroup, so I receive a digest of new postings a couple of times a day. I was skimming through the new messages in my Gmail inbox a few moments ago when some of the Google-placed ads and helpful links, which I usually ignore into invisibility, caught my eye. Check it out:
Click for larger view
I’m actually kind of amused by the listing. It’s one of those times where you really wish Google’s search API would actually take case-sensitivity into account. I think they got it closer to correct with the ‘More About…’ links, but still, I’m scared to click on anything since I don’t actually know where they go.
Tags: google, Humor, latex
I’m tickled pink. I used to use a Greasemonkey script with Gmail that added colors to labels. Later, I changed to the Better Gmail addon that simply made every label a bright red. Easy to see, served the purpose. Trouble was, that was one script that made loading Gmail take longer than it probably ought.
So, I pleasantly surprised to discover a couple of days ago that Google had added the option to color your labels. And even better they’ve provided a limited (24) but stylish set of colors that blend well, rather than clashing with everything else on the page. Suddenly my inbox is dressing a little flashier than before, and it’s become easy again to find specific emails of note.
Fabulous.
Tags: better gmail, gmail, google, greasemonkey
I think Google changed something in relation to Gmail yesterday evening. I use two Firefox addons to make managing my email a little more efficient – Better Gmail and Gmail Manager – and as of yesterday, both addons now seem to be broken. I first noticed a problem when Gmail tried to refresh and issued a ‘Could not build contacts’ error and subsequently logged me out. No amount of cajoling or urging could get me logged back in. Initially I thought it was a Gmail problem, but when I tested it out, I found I could still login normally from IE7 and Safari. My next thought, then, was that maybe somehow the Better Gmail addon I use with Firefox to restyle Gmail and add a few convenient functions might have broken. I disabled it and restarted Firefox, and sure enough, I was logged back in just fine. I’m a little annoyed now that some of the features that Better Gmail added are currently unavailable, but I’d much rather not have them than not have access to my email at all.
The other plugin that no longer functions is Gmail Manager. This little addon puts a little module on Firefox’s status bar that allows to check and manage multiple Gmail accounts quickly and easily. Well, Gmail Manager no longer works, showing all emails accounts as having no email, despite there being mail in most of those inboxes.
My guess is that Google changed something in their Gmail API that has caused most, if not all, Firefox addons for the service to break. I haven’t had a chance to do much in the way of research into the issue yet, so I don’t know how widespread this issue is and if it’s affecting everyone or if it’s just something screwed up with my particular instance of Firefox.
If anyone knows anything about this, do please let me know. I’ll try to keep you posted in the meantime.
Update: Turns out this is a known issue. There is a comment from the Better Gmail developer that Google rolled out a new version of Gmail recently. They are currently working on developing a new version of the addon to be compatible with Gmail. No word yet on whether Gmail Manager is being updated.
Tags: addons, better gmail, firefox, gmail, gmail manager, google
I’ve changed my mind – I don’t like Google Browser Sync after all. I’ve been using it for several days now, except that ‘using’ is a bit of an overstatement. It’s more like it’s using me, and laughing about it. The add-on for Firefox worked the very first time, when I installed it, and it hasn’t worked since. I’ve messed with it quite a bit, trying to figure out if I did something wrong in the setup or configuration; I even double-checked my PIN to make sure I’d entered it correctly (I had). No dice.
So, I’m not really sure what happened, why it won’t work. The odd thing is, occasionally, when I go to leave a comment on a Blogger site, one of the ones that is configured to pop-up a new window for comments, then it’ll ask if I want to restore the session from my other computer – and that’s exactly the sort of window I don’t want to restore the session into. Why it won’t ask me when I initially re-open my main browsing window I don’t know.
So, Google Browser Sync has gone bye-bye. If they build a new upgrade with some bug fixes, I’d be willing to give it another shot – but not until then.
Tags: firefox, google, plugins, software
Google has made me a very happy camper recently. It started about the time I finally landed one of those much coveted Gmail beta-tester accounts – I’ve never been happier with email. Then, I discovered how powerful the Google search engine really is – Google Search is now the only search engine I’ll ever use.
Recently, I switched my RSS feed reader over to Google Reader. I’d been looking for a suitable replacement for Mozilla Thunderbird – much as I love Thunderbird, it was just a little bit too difficult for me to use it on multiple computers, even as a portable app. My computer at home is actually a bit too slow to handle running any applications from a flash drive (I really need to upgrade to USB 2.0 one of these days). I’d started using a server-side feed reader, but it didn’t automatically update the way I wanted. Then, I’d heard about Google Reader updating their services, so I decided to give them a second try (the first time around I was less than impressed). Now, I’m very satisfied with this program, and it fits very nicely into my Firefox browser, making it very easy to add new interesting feeds as I stumble across. It updates automatically and organizes everything in a logical manner.
Add to that one more service I think I like – Google Sync. This is a slick little add-on for Firefox that allows you to use Firefox on several different computers but keep your browsing session in sync on all of them. This includes history and saved passwords (encryped, of course), bookmarks, history, and tabs and windows. I’ve been using it for about 24 hours now, and so far I like what I see. Eventually, I’d like to simply run Firefox Portable from my flash drive everywhere I go, but again, that requires USB 2.0 to be really effective. So in the meantime, this is an effective solution I can live with.
I’ve also been keeping my eye on Apple recently. This is one company that continues to dish out some really neat products. My wife has had her eye on a G5 for quite some time now – she has a background in multimedia and video work and would love to be able to set up at home. I’ve had my eye on either an iPod or an iPod Nano. Now I come to find out that Apple has produced the iPhone. I’ve kind of kvetched recently about combining too many digital devices into one thing, but I have to say that this iPhone idea holds a bit of a glamour for me. This one looks like it might actually be usable. Of course, I don’t really have much interest in owning a cell phone, so the iPod solution is still probably the best one for me. But if I were to get a cell phone, the iPhone would certainly be one I’d be interested in.
Tags: apple, firefox, gmail, google, iphone, plugins, software, Technology
I think I picked just the right name for Flashes of Speculation. When I chose the name for Writer’s Blog, I had intended it as a clever play on words. Here I thought it was a somewhat original idea. Turns out, I was half so clever as I thought. For the longest time, whenever I Googled “Writer’s Blog”, I had to click through three or four pages to find my site. Now, it still sits in the fifth position.
With Flashes, however, just a week since it went live, when you search Google it shows up as the first option, which says to me that it’s fairly unique. I only noticed this because there have already been three searches for “Flashes of Speculation” that have brought people right to me. I couldn’t be happier.
Tags: flashes-of-speculation, google, writers-blog
My wife and I are shopping for real estate to move us a little closer to my new job. We have a piece of property that we have fallen in love with that has the option to buy any part of an additional 40 acres. We definitely want to buy a chunk of that land and have been pondering a way to figure exactly where around the initial 2.5 acres we want to lay claim to our additional 8. Turns out that Google maps can help us in this respect. My wife got curious this morning and managed to locate the plot we want on Google’s satellite imaging. Suddenly, we have a bird’s-eye view of the 2.5 acres and the 40 around it. We’ll be spending some time this evening figuring out from the satellite images what shape we want our new property to take and from where to carve our land (provided everything goes smoothly with the house inspection).
Think anyone realized 20 years ago that great big cameras up in the sky would prove to be valuable assets in shopping for real estate?
Tags: google, life
With the weather outside the way it is, one would think it was Christmas vacation this week, rather than Thanksgiving. It is beautiful out there, though, and it was a pleasure to walk in it this morning. Snow is definitely preferable at 28 degrees to rain at 36 degrees.
All this snow, however, reminded me of a little childhood wisdom—no two snowflakes are identical. Being now older, wiser, and a little more well-versed in the world of statistics, it has occurred to me to wonder a time or three over the past couple of years just how this can be. Mind you, I wouldn’t put it past an omnipotent God to actually cause every drop of moisture to crystallize into a historically and relationally unique shape once it drops below that all-important threshold of 32 degrees Farenheit (or 0 degrees Centigrade, for those of you using a different system). But by the same token, it occurred to me to wonder just how much proof was really out there on the topic.
So, I ran a Google search and this is what I came up with:
How do they know with any degree of certainty that no two snowflakes are alike? When I took statistics I was taught that to draw a valid conclusion one had to take a representative sample of the entire population. But considering the impossibly large number of flakes in a single snowfall, let alone that have ever fallen, how could snowologists have possibly taken a sample large enough to conclude that no two are alike?—Leslie B. Turner, San Pedro, California
They didn’t, of course. Chances are, in fact, that there are lots of duplicates. What the snowologists really mean is that your chance of finding duplicates is virtually zero. It’s been calculated that in a volume of snow two feet square by ten inches deep there are roughly one million flakes. Multiply that by the millions of square miles that are covered by snow each year (nearly one fourth of the earth’s land surface), and then multiply that by the billions of winters that have occurred since the dawn of time, and it’s obvious we’re talking unimaginable googols of flakes. Some of these are surely repeats.
On the other hand, a single snow crystal contains perhaps 100 million molecules, which can be arranged in a gigajillion different ways. By contrast, the number of flakes that have ever been photographed in the history of snow research amounts to a few tens of thousands. So it seems pretty safe to say nobody’s ever going to get documentary evidence of duplication. Still, it could happen, and what’s more, Leslie, it could happen to you. The way I figure, anybody who could dream up a question like this has got to have a lot of time on his hands. Get out and start looking.
There are a whole lot of other mathematical discussions on that page, but unless you’re something of a math geek like me, you’ll probably just find it mind-numbingly boring.
Tags: geek, google, math, Science, snow, Statistics, weather
