Posts for the 'Google' Category (Feed for this category)

Google has a memory loss

20th June, 2006     Google, WTF,

Looks like one of Google's Datacenters has had a brain explosion.

Click for a large version.

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Google Open House

19th May, 2006     Google, Life,

Tonight, Google held an Open House for people to go along to and help welcome in their new offices in Sydney. It was mainly a night of networking and getting to know people in Google Sydney offices.

It was a great night, and I must thank Google for opening up their doors and putting great food and drink, even if at times, it was a tad squishy :-)

I met some of the people behind Google Maps, as well as other projects, and was quite interesting to hear how passionate they are about their work. Some of the Google Desktop stuff, which I haven't played with, due to it being Windows centric mostly, looked rather impressive, and would be great if there could be Linux versions of it (However Beagle is trying to do something similar for the time being).

It is also worth noting, that it was mentioned that Google Maps now as of tonight (18th of May), has maps of Australia in it, not only satelite imagery. See this map of Sydney, for example. It doesn't yet let you do searches on landmarks tho. Coming soon I was told.

Having the ability there, to be able to quiz a Google employee on the work environment, and culture, was excellent, and really goes to prove how ultimately different the Google workplace is from elsewhere. I did also get to ask around about the news of the Google internships/university programs, and will be hoping to follow up contact with some people about that very soon.

At the end of the night, as we were leaving, everyone got a Google goodie bag, which contained, a Google flashing badge (as seen here), a pen, some advertising flyers for Jobs @ Google, a pad of Google Post-It notes. We also each got given a Google Open House T-Shirt.

So to recap:

• A fun night was had
• Met great people, google and non-google people
• Got some cool stuff

Hopefully someone will post up pictures of the night soon, and I can edit this article so have some relevant pictures ;-)

[Any typos, mistakes or things that don't make sense are because I was too-tired while typing this out :p]

Edit: I must say the shirts the google employees were wearing, were great! Basically it was the google logo, on black, with an image of a meat pie with peas, potato and gravy on it. As mentioned by one of the Google guys, it sure beats an image of a Kangaroo, Koala, Opera House or Harbour Bridge to represent Australia.

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Free Web Hosting

23rd February, 2006     Google, WWW,

Well, this blog title will surely help get a few more hits to this page now, won't it? ;)

So like, check out google's free web page hosting.

Is it good? Is it bad? Work it out for your damn self!

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Another lot of good news for the week.

18th January, 2006     Google,

2227:37 < @root> Question on JABBER connection (handle removed@kruel.org): 2227:37 < @root> The user removed@gmail.com wants to add you to their buddy list

Enough said, I reckon.

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Speaking of Google Talk

26th August, 2005     Google,

Not everyone believes Google Talk is all good news. Nugget believes that even tho Google is using the same protocol as Jabber, that Google is just again isolating IM clients, where the point of Jabber was interoperability with any number of servers, whether they be your own, or some of the public servers.

A good (long) read, and well worth the time. I for one, do agree with many of the points raised.

Unfortunately as I noted to him on IRC, Google Talk is not designed for those who actually care about the underlying protocol. The audience it is trying to attract, in most cases, would care more about the fact that Google Talk allows them to use a whole new range of Emoticons, then this fact.

Unfortunate, but true.

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Google, Talk and more.

24th August, 2005     Google, IRC, Life, Linux, WWW,

For those that have been living in a cave this week, Google has announced it's Instant Messenger client, namely 'Google Talk'. While it is in beta (is anything at google not in beta?), thanks to its use of the Jabber/XMPP protocol, it means that already there are clients for all operating systems available (well, any that supports Jabber, naturally).

This means that you don't need to download yet another IM Client, or wait for GAIM or BitlBee, to update the source, to include the protocol and functionality for it. However, BitlBee users should note, that they will need to apply this patch to order to be able to use the gmail service, due to minor account differences in gmail's set up. See www.bitlbee.org for more info. (Yes port 5223, the default Jabber port works for me, where 5222, the google talk port, doesn't).

Meanwhile, I now have another means of contact that I will never use. I do use bitlbee for my instant message conversations, as it moulds nicely into my IRC Client, but i still converse mostly thru IRC. I guess IM is just there for the people who need to contact me and are bedazzled by all the shiny parts of IM clients (fuck you emoticons).

And while I have your attention, on a side note, has anyone noticed that Google is doing similar things to what Microsoft do, in regards to how they name their applications or services. That being, naming the product simply after the task it does, in order for it to become more "easier to remember", I would imagine. To compare:

Microsoft Products: Word, Paint, Office, Messenger Google Products: Talk, Search, Desktop Search, Alerts.

The only products which seem to have a unique names, are products they have gained due to the purchase of/from other companies.

Your thoughts on google talk and the rest are welcomed.

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