Tag Archives: Google

Many updates @ mahesha.com

After a long, long while, finally got some time to update many parts of mahesha.com that were on my to-do list.

Blog Theme

Thanks to the good guys at Obox Design my blog at tech.mahesha.com (this blog) has a new, clean theme that I really like. I hope everything is setup correctly. Some broken links, etc. are expected. But I should be able to clean that up in the coming few days.

Home Page

Home page at mahesha.com is completely refreshed. I’ve been working on this for a while now. It is still kind of a work in progress, but I think it is ready enough to be made live.

Favicon

This is a minor change. The favicon that I use on most of my sites, which is also my avatar on many sites, is pretty old. I created it it many moons ago when I had a Mac, with Photoshop installed. I have, since, moved to using Linux and open source software for most of my computational needs. As such, I always wanted to recreate the image using GIMP. I finally got to doing it. And as a starting point, I am updating the favicons on the home page and the blog to use the newly created image. Soon I’ll update favicons and avatars on other sites too.

Authorship

While I am at updating the blog theme, I though I’d implement the Authorship mechanism that Google recently launched. With a excellent instructions at from various sources, I have tried to implement rel=author. I will be eager to see if the effects show in search results in the coming few days.

WordPress 3.2

It has become almost a weekly exercise, but this blog is also updated to the latest WordPress 3.2. I hope it stays current for at least some weeks.

Cheers for now!

Oh, by the way, you can find me on Google+!

What do I think of the Cr-48?

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It’s been exciting few days playing with Cr-48 – the new Google Chrome OS laptop. I’ve been playing with it, trying out various features, doing my usual browsing, some development even. I must say I have not felt very restricted yet. But it’s been only a few days.

From the past few days’ use, here’s my impression about the Cr-48.

The Hardware

Anyone interested in Cr-48 has already seen many pictures and read about its hardware. I am going to write about only the points that I thought were significant.

Pros:

The 12.1in screen is just right for casual web browsing. I find the resolution optimal.
Keyboard – even with missing function and caps-lock keys – is nice and big. Keys feel good to the fingers when typing.
Battery life is amazing! I haven’t drained it completely yet, but I won’t be surprised if I get 9+ hours
Doesn’t look like this thing heats at all. Even after many hours of use, it barely gets warm. This is so much better than the Sony Vaio VGN-T140P I use currently

Cons:

Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N455 @ 1.66GHz (1 core, 2 threads, integrated graphics) seems to fall short, in my opinion. Especially when playing videos. From what I found, YouTube does not offer HD videos (480p+) when accessed from Cr-48. If I play an HD video on Vimeo, it is choppy as hell. Intel touts HD performance of their integrated graphics, so I was a bit disappointed there
I may be still getting used to it, but the touchpad is not quite there yet. It supports 2-finger scrolling, it is big, nice and sensitive. But I think it may be a bit too big and sensitive. While typing, I invariably touch/tap it causing unintended things to happen.

Some detailed hardware info, for the curious:

If you can’t see the embedded Gist, head to GitHub

I got this from chrome://system/.

The Software

Chrome OS has evolved very well. I played with it a bit in VirtualBox when it was initially announced about a year ago. But the user experience of Chrome OS on Cr-48 is a totally different thing – it is much better.

Like I mentioned, I don’t feel restricted at all when it comes to casual browsing – news, social networking, blogging, shopping etc. Watching videos was not very pleasant, but I think it should get better with better hardware (or drivers?).

There is not a lot of scope for local development. But if you have a remote machine, where you could ssh and do some development, that is sure possible. I did not try starting an X-application on the remote host, but I did some terminal stuff – editing PHP/HTML/JS/CSS in Vim. Here’s what I found. ALT+CTRL+t takes you to a terminal – a tty. It starts a shell called crosh. If you type help it shows all the commands it supports. ssh is one of them. Once you are in the ssh session, you can do pretty much anything you do in a terminal – on the remote host. You can start multiple terminals with ALT+CTRL+t. You can circle through terminals and the browser with the next tab button.

Much More to Come

There are a lot of things I haven’t tried yet – local storage (which seems like a 16GB SSD), external memory (USB/SD card), VGA connection to the TV/monitor, other peripherals via USB, etc.

When it comes to consuming shared content, Chrome OS has not issues. But I am curious to know how easy/difficult will it be to share content with Chrome OS. I’ll find out when I share my next set of pictures.

I’ve kept my 100MBs of December data from Verizon Wireless for later in the month, when I’ll be away from home. So I am not sure how the 3G connectivity works. WiFi has been very stable and was easy to configure.

I’ll post more as I find out.

So, at the moment, I think the Cr-48 is a neat device. Will I buy it? It depends on the price point. For now the price is free, so I am loving every bit of it. In my opinion, commercial Chrome OS devices will have to be cheaper than the cheapest netbooks out there to fly. Even better, subsidized by wireless carriers like Verizon – hopefully not with service contracts.

Until later, Cheers!

Chrome OS in VirtualBox

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Ever since they made the Chromium source code public yesterday morning, I’ve been itching to build it and take it for a spin. I did not know it would take only a couple hours to do that!

Getting and Building

I am so impressed! The instructions on the Getting and Building a Chromium-Based OS page are precise, to-the-point and.. they work! I am not sure if this is brilliant scripting, great documentation, me having just right prerequisites (Ubuntu Karmic Koala), or a combination of all these. But it took me just over an hour or so to download source and build a ‘.vmdk‘ file for VirtualBox. I did not see that coming.

I’ve built other projects from source before. It always involves some figuring-out. Sometimes the documentation is not adequate – may be inadequate for my skill-set. Sometimes the prerequisites are not clearly specified/checked. Building an entire OS, I was preparing for a few days of reading up and figuring things out.

But it was none of that. I just followed the steps – mostly word-to-word – and I had a virtual disk image (.vmdk file) at the end of it all!

The only change I had to do was to BASE_FROM in ~/chromiumos/src/platform/chrome/copy_chrome_zip.sh to use build.chormium.org instead of chrome-web. I think this was because I chose not to build Chromium (browser) from source. I am sure this will be ironed out soon (may be it is already).

Using in VirtualBox

I followed the instructions to Convert the image for VMWare, which creates a .vmdk file. Instead of using VMWare workstation, I used VirtualBox to fire it up.

Impressions

I love the concept of Google Chrome OS. I think it is very relevant to how we use the computer these days. It would be even better if Chrome OS would coexist with a normal OS on any laptop. I agree that most often we only use the computer to access the web and do most of our things on the Internet. But I am not ready to give up the full-fledged OS, not quite yet. Does that remind me of SplashTop?

Here are a couple of obligatory screenshots:

Chromium OS build in VirtualBox, running Google Wave

Following is the list of Apps currently on the home page. These showed up only today. Yesterday when I was trying the OS for the first time, one could only use @google.com usernames to sign in. I am sure things are going to be changing fast in the next weeks/months.

Apps on Chromium OS home page

Next…

Next thing I am going to try is to get hold of a 4GB USB drive and see if this image works on my laptop.

Secondly, I am curious to see if the OS updates itself in the VirtualBox, like Google has mentioned. If it does, I should not be required to build another image… ever!

Back to more experiments.

Later…

Synchronizing bookmarks

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The requirement is simple:

It is desirable that when we use our browser on different computers, we want to feel at home on all of the computers. If we bookmark a website on one computer, other computers should also get it seamlessly. If we end up using a loaner computer, the bookmarks should be readily available online.

When I say feel at home, I have something very Mozilla Firefox specific in mind. I use Firefox’s smart URL bar, or what is called the AwesomeBar, extensively. When I start typing in the URL bar, I like to get suggestions based on my bookmarks and history. When I get the suggestions, I want them to be derived from the latest and the greatest of my bookmarks – bookmarks added on my current computer, or some other computer. Getting history from the other computer would be great too, but just bookmarks should be just fine.

So what are the options? From what I read, there are quite a few…

Weave

Weave from Mozilla Labs, to me, is the most promising candidate to solve the problem at hand. But it is far from ready for general consumption. Every new version (that comes out pretty frequently) seems to break something or the other – It is fixed very promptly too – but there is disruption. It is indeed in lab-mode.

Weave synchronizes variety of profile items

What I like about Weave is that it synchronizes almost your entire Firefox profile between multiple Firefox installations – Bookmarks, History, Tabs, Saved Passwords, may be even more in the future. The data is stored (by default) on Mozilla’s servers in an encrypted format, that only your can read. Privacy ~~freaks~~ concerned can setup their own servers, so their data stays with them. But then they must keep the server accessible from the internet.

All this is achieved using the UI elements that already exist in Firefox – namely, the star in the URL bar. It is very intuitive, and in most cases very seamless.

It is really neat.

The down side to weave, is that there is no web interface to the data on the server. So if I am on a loaner computer, or in an internet cafe, my bookmarks are not accessible to me. I cannot use my existing bookmarks. I cannot add a bookmark if I come across something useful.

Delicious

Delicious is one of the most widely used social bookmarking service. Delicious add-on for Firefox provides an additional bookmarking system where the bookmarks are stored on the Delicious website. The add-on provides handy buttons to manage the online bookmarks.

Delicious adds button that do things similar to Firefox’s star

Although the Delicious website says that the add-on enhances Firefox’s bookmarking system, in my opinion, it is more like an additional bookmarking system. The add-on adds UI elements to Firefox toolbar to interact with Delicious bookmarks. A tag button that functions exactly like the star in Firefox’s URL bar. A new window to add tags to the new bookmark, where you input almost the same information that you do in Firefox’s native interface. A bookmarks menu item, that is very similar to the native Firefox bookmarks menu. There’s just too much redundancy.

Since Delicious is mainly an online service, it has a very mature and efficient web interface. And because all your bookmarks are online, you can access them from any computer with an internet connection – whether it is your own or a loaner or one in an internet cafe.

Google Bookmarks

Google Bookmarks is a part of Google Web History. Like Delicious, the bookmarks are saved online and they can be accessed from any online computer.

Google Toolbar adds its own star

Google Bookmarks integrate well with the Google Toolbar for Firefox. Also like Delicious, the interface provided by the Google toolbar for bookmarking is exactly like Firefox’s own. The toolbar adds its own star, which is used to bookmark a website, or edit (add tags to) an existing bookmark.

Foxmarks A.K.A. Xmarks

Foxmarks which is now known as Xmarks is also a strong contender in this space. It has the goods of both online bookmarking services and native Firefox bookmark synchronizing. Xmarks provides an add-on for Firefox (in addition to Internet Explorer and Safari, which is an added bonus), that just synchronizes your bookmarks with an online storage on xmarks.com. They have a neat web interface to manage the online bookmarks. Any changes made online, or on any computer are automatically synchronized.

The missing link

Although Delicious and Google Bookmarks provide a usable interface with Firefox, there is one deficiency in both of them that is very significant to me (an AwesomeBar user). Bookmarks on Delicious or Google Bookmarks don’t become a part of Firefox Bookmarks, and hence are not accounted in the search algorithm used by the AwesomeBar. If I add a bookmark to either of the two services, it will not be suggested when I type something in the URL bar.

Conclusion

I love the fact that online bookmarks (Delicious/Google Bookmarks) are available from anywhere on the internet. However, no matter how much I try to get used to one of the two services, I miss that fact that online bookmark are not included in the AwesomeBar suggestions.

A web interface to manage Weave’s bookmarks online will be a welcome feature. Or If add-ons provided by online bookmark services somehow integrate their bookmarks with Firefox’s bookmarks, that would be cool too.

Until then, it will have to be an inconvenient combination of the two.

I have not used Xmarks long enough to form a solid opinion about it. I’ll just have to play around with it for a while.

Edit: Added Foxmarks/Xmarks as a viable alternative, after this post was first written.

Edit (05/12/2009): Well, looks like the Delicious add-on for Firefox just came a step closer to the way I like it. With its version 2.1.041 released yesterday (?) delicious bookmarks are now integrated with the AwesomeBar. In addition, if you start typing in the address bar with ??, AwesomeBar will show only Delicious bookmarks. If you start typing with >>, AwesomeBar will show Delicious tags. This is great! Now if it could just reuse Firefox’s native UI elements…

Happy 10th, Google!

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Looks like the Google Street-View guy is spreading some cheer on Google’s 10^th birthday!

Google Street-View guy spotted with party hat and balloons!

Happy 10^th, Google!

Google testing new “Google News”

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It bugged that over the past few days, I was seeing different Google News at work and a different looking one at home. An entry on the Google News blog explained why:

Google News Blog: Testing… testing… is this on?:

… They’ll only be visible to a small number of random Google News readers. (In case you’re wondering, experiments are selected randomly, so we can’t give you any advice for how to get in!)…

Although, what is selected randomly? Username? IP address?