Google Reader Friend's Shared Items.

Now Google reduced the effort of mailing shared items link !. It would be nice if it gets the friends from Orkut as well.

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/12/reader-and-talk-are-friends.html

Google Knol

It is quite a surprise news from google. There are lot of articles discussing about the same. I find the following two articles interesting.

http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2007/12/how-not-tospecial-knolgoogle-edition.cfm

http://www.krishworld.com/blog/open-source/open-media/wikipedia-is-safe-from-google-knol/

The advantages of Knol over Wikipedia are, it clearly defines the owner of an article and it provides a proper monetization platform. The former clearly differentiates between these two approaches. The later problem can be fixed and it should be as the current way of monetization for Wikipedia can't sustain.

It is an interesting move from Google. If you miss the recent blog post about assessment of Google-Yahoo results, you can read it here. Another goal of the project might be to collect more interests of user. I mean, as rating system is present in Knol, Google can precisely know which articles, style of writing etc hence they can better serve the ads for users as well. Google may further extend it and provides social networking functionality.

Yahoo tried to gather collective wisdom of crowd through Yahoo Answers and it replaced discussion forums, newsgroups etc and now Google have even bigger plans and trying to replace Wikipedia !!.

CNaming my Blog !

I changed my blog name from http://sairahulreddy.blogspot.com to http://blog.sairahul.com. It is very simple to do. You can find the instructions for doing it here.

step 1. Create a DNS entry for blog.sairahul.com as follows.
blog IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
step2. Go to your blog setting in blogger and then go to Settings->Publishing->Advanced Settings and enter your blog name here.

Now if you go to your new address, you can observe that all your blog entries point to the new address instead of old one. If you go to old address it will get redirect to new one.

How it works ?.

When you enter http://blog.sairahul.com in browser. The following sequence of steps will happens.
1. Browser tries to resolve the domain name of blog.sairahul.com. Since we have given blog.sairahul.com as CNAME of ghs.google.com, it will get IP address of ghs.google.com.
2. Next, browser will contact ghs.google.com (i mean IP address of ghs.google.com) and set Host field to "blog.sairahul.com"
3. Since Google knows (In step2 we added this) the alias of your blog name it will return your blog correctly.

Host name in step 2 is very important. Google differentiates domains using Host name (in other words it maintains multiple domains using same host name). You can test the above theory using nslookup and wget.
1. Get the IP using nslookup.
nslookup ghs.google.com
2. Get the page using wget.
wget --header "Host: blog.sairahul.com" http:// -o out.html

If you remove the header option in the above step it will return 404 or if you give different valid host name it will return that page !.

Firefox 3 Features in Pictures

You can download the beta version of Firefox here. You can find list of all changes in http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b1/releasenotes/#whatsnew. Here i am showing some of the important features i find interesting.

Zooming in Firefox is greatly improved. (All because of new rendering engine). Compare the yahoo home page in Firefox 2 and in Firefox 3 when the page zoomed out.

Download manager is integrated. You can now resume the download even after restarting Firefox.



















Another great improvement is in typing the URL s. Now you can just type partial keyword even the title of the page. You can find similar incremental search feature in downloads as well (refer above image)





Bookmarking now supports Google like star. You can even add tags to the bookmarks. Now the bookmarks will be well integrate with online services like del.icio.us.





You can find the summary of the bookmarks in Places.







Add-ons now shows installed plugins as well. No need of about:plugins.














You can customize the default behavior of the mime type handling.



















I used to kill Firefox to save the session :) (I know there are extensions now also. I don't want to install any). Now my little hack is gone !.







Last but not least you can find this cute warning when you go to about:config







Overall new Firefox features are great.

Yahoo Maps - Driving Directions

Yahoo released driving directions in India. It is really cool. Try

1. Bangalore to Tirupati
2. Bangalore to Hyderabad
3. Vijayawada to Badrachalam
   

The really cool thing is directions in the right hand side. It shows small small details like Take Slight 1st Left, go 9.7 km. Although there are some problems (for instance if i tried Chandragiri to Thondavada it showed route from Chandragiri to Dantewada, Chhattisgarh though Thondavada is a nearby village to Chandragiri.) overall it is very good.

found @ gopal

About Google's New Interface

Google's new interface is better than earlier versions. Especially the top bar. It would have been nice if Google would have made the following changes to its interface.

The new interface makes the themed personalized home pages (aka iGoogle) looks very ugly. It looks horrible for certain themes. Instead of the white color for all themes they can blend the color with the theme.
It is good to see links to, images, video, news etc on the bar right above the results. On the first impression i thought they were tabs. Instead they are just links pointing to various Google services. It would have been nice if they could have provide tabs. Because of this, the new interface become useless. Why i think so is, earlier also we have an option by clicking the more. I did not find any major advantage by providing the links above. Because, now, if i click on any of these links it will take to corresponding web site. Users as such do not have major advantage by just providing links. I can not compare the results simultaneously across different services because of this.

Update on Google Notebook's Infamous Delete Problem !

Surprisingly Google rectified one of the problems i mentioned in my earlier post in just 2 days. The layout looks good in Firefox under Linux. The other problem, deleting the text when we past text from the Kate editor still remains. Here the problem is not with the Google notebook, in fact the problem is with Kate editor only. What happens when we copy some of the text from the Kate is, it adds meta tag before the text as show below. (Please note here that, although we copy text only, Kate tries to preserve the formatting by putting the text within pre tag. Although it is a text, it is not actually plain text, its html code. This is the way formatting will be preserved across applications when copy paste it)

( I generated the above html code by copy pasting some text from Kate to Thunderbird compose window and i saved it as html)

After observing the above, i viewed the source code using the Firebug after pasting some text from Kate editor. (We have to see the source code before clicking on any other note. If we click on other note the copied text will get deleted) The source code looks as shown below.


Now i got little bit idea about what might happening inside. When we create a new note in Notebook, it creates an iframe and puts whatever text we put in body of the document. When we copy some text from the Kate, as i said earlier, it is putting some meta tag before the text. Because meta can't come under body, the newly added html piece of code is wrong. After pasting the code, Google Notebook validating the copied text and deleting it as it is not valid html. That's why, after pasting the text from Kate, the box becomes empty and Google Notebook always deletes the empty notes when we click on the other note. So it ultimately getting deleting. To cross check it, i deleted the meta notes from Firebug and it works beautifully after that. Because of the same reason, i guess, i can't able to paste the copied text from Kate to Microsoft's Wordpad editor (The default editor that comes with Windows !) . But i can copy it to Notepad, because it ignores the html tags. So Google Notebook have to remove the unnecessary meta information. Anyway copying meta information makes no sense. Thanks to Firebug for helping in figuring out this problem !

Google Notebook is out Of Beta ... Not yet ready ???

Today Google Notebook is out of Beta. It seems that has still some bugs. I Found couple of glitches. For instance the rendering is completely bad in Firefox in linux. See the attached image. The other problem is, it is magically deleting the items. I added new note and pasted plain text into the box. When i click on the other notebook and when i click again on the same note it is deleting the text. The interesting thing is, i observed the above in linux (FC4 with Firefox 2.0.0.3) but i did not observe the same in Windows under the same Firefox version.

About Indian Cricket Team Peformance in Worldcup

Dravid going out in Burkha, the main reason for India's failure is India Gandhi and mail forwards such as "What India Will Do After World Cup (http://www.xboard.us/bbb/showthread.php?t=132096), Jokes such as this are good to laugh but really think about the Indian Team Performance. People can argue that whats the big deal to us (i mean as an individual) if they are out of the tournament. You may think its advertisers who are loosing money not us, but finally we are one who are paying the money to those companies. Means, we are loosing money. The same is true in case of TV Channels as well (Sony). Last but not least is, Country pride. Think about a country who has 2% of our population and still plays in the World cup. Its shame to our entire nation. Again the same question, 100 crore population and we did not find damn 11 players ?. Compare the same with the Australias team. The total population of Australia is 2 crore and they have such a nice players. What is the reason for this ?. India do not have right talent ? or BCCI is not taking right people ?.

Burning effigies, going into streats and throwing stones and things like these won't work. These are not the right way to express the discontent. Doing so will not create any impact on BCCI because it is getting the profits irrespective of our Teams performance. Who will work if they get the Damn money without doing any work. The right way to create impact is, stop watching all the matches India plays both in TVs as well as going to stadiums. I am not saying not to watch Cricket but don't watch matches which India plays. What's the advantage with this ?. The viewing rate will go down. (More on measuring the TV ratings can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Ratings) and if you do not go to stadiums then their income will come down. Doing this for a period of time will definitely create a impact. Infact it will create a BIG IMPACT.

The interesting thing is, no body (I mean BCCI or Chappel or Captain) is talking about the Indian team performance. Infact they are creating cock and bull stories to divert the problem. For instance recent allegation about leaking the Chappel SMS about the Indian team selection.

Sachin and Dravid are crying, Zaheer Khan broken a stool, Sreesanth couldn't control his emotions .... all these will console any body (http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1087316) Who wants the emotions of 15 players, Who considers the emotions of 100 Crore people ??? Lets show our emotions in right way otherwise it's not going to useful anyone.