Opera 9.20 - More Homepages at Your Fingertips

The latest version Opera (a free browser from Norway) brings the speed dial from your phone to your browser. You can configure a start page with nine boxes where you can add frequently visited sites. The page shows up everytime you open a new tab, but the sites added to the start page can be opened by simply clicking on Ctrl-[number from 1 to 9].

Opera shows real-time thumbnails of the selected pages and lets you reload them at a custom interval so it's a cool way to monitor changes.

There's also a link to Opera developer tools, a list of bookmarklets that add some of the best features from Firefox's DOM Inspector and the most popular extension for developers: Web Developer Toolbar. You can inspect, edit or remove DOM nodes; view, edit or disable stylesheets; view HTTP headers and cookies. It looks pretty impressive for a JavaScript bookmarklet.

Opera finally becomes a normal browser: if you enter a query in the address bar (something that's not an URL or a single word), Opera performs a search.

Scan a File Using the Top Antivirus Software

If you get a file from a site you don't know very well (like a game or a screensaver), the first thing you should do is scan it using an antivirus. The problem is that your antivirus might not be very good or might not include the signature of the trojan included in the file you've just downloaded. So a good idea is to have a second opinion, but you can't install more than one antivirus (unless you disable the real-time protection).

VirusTotal is a site where you can upload a file smaller than 10 MB and it will be scanned by a large number of antivirus software (the current number is 31), including: Kaspersky, BitDefender, F-Secure, Panda. The file will not be scanned instantly, but you'll have to wait a short time (usually around one minute), depending on site's load. You'll get a report like:


If you see conflicting responses, look at the most trustworthy engines (some tests) and at the number of engines that report a virus. In the situation depicted in the screenshot, I can safely assume that the file is clean.

The service is available by email too: send a mail to scan@virustotal.com with the subject SCAN. If you use Gmail, you'll have to rename executable files (for example, from setup.exe to setup.ex1) to be able to send them.

A similar service is Jotti's malware scan, that has a bigger limit for the file size: 15 MB, but uses less antivirus engines.

{ Thank you, Google! }

Open-Source OCR Software, Sponsored by Google

Google sponsors the development of an open-source OCR software at the IUPR research group. "OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities."

"The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use," explains Thomas Breuel, who leads the project.

The software is partly based on Tesseract, the best open source OCR engine available for now. While the project is expected to be released at the end of next year and will be used for Google's book scanning project, the team has some interesting applications in mind:

* a web service interface
* PDF, camera, and screen OCR
* integration with desktop search tools: Beagle, Spotlight, Google Desktop

The most popular OCR software are ABBYY FineReader, Omnipage, Readiris and Presto OCR, but they're pretty expensive (starting at $100). A decent solution to perform OCR on a document is Microsoft Office Document Imaging, included in Microsoft Office XP/2007. Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 also lets you OCR imported images. A free online alternative is Scanr, a site that lets you digitize documents by sending a mobile phone photo by email.

Towards a New Google News

Agence France-Presse (AFP) filed a suit against Google in 2005 because Google News used snippets and thumbnails from AFP's stories. Last week, the two companies settled the copyright lawsuit, without disclosing the terms of the agreement.

The interesting thing here is that Google didn't pay AFP to use snippets from its news stories (which are covered by fair use), but for the full content of the articles.

Google said the deal "will enable the use of AFP's newswire content in innovative, new ways that will dramatically improve the way users experience newswire content on the Internet".

Last year, Google made a similar deal with Associated Press. "The license in this agreement provides for new uses of original AP content for features and products we will introduce in the future. We are very excited about the innovative new products we will build with full access to this content," said at that time a Google spokeswoman.

So we know that Google builds a new version of Google News that includes full content from AP and AFP. Currently, Google News automatically aggregates news stories from thousands of sources, groups related news and shows snippets and thumbnails, similar to the web search results.

We also know that there's a product called Universal Search, that could integrate news results into standard search results. Google Blog Search and Google News seem closer than ever.

Philipp Lenssen found that Google tested a prototype which allows "other news sources, and organizations and individuals mentioned in news stories to debate specific points."

So how do you think the new Google News will look like, will Google choose the Yahoo News path and what do you expect to see in an "universal search"?

AdSense for Newsletters?

Google tested a way to embed contextual ads in email newsletters, but it didn't release this feature to the public. A new patent ("Serving content-targeted ADS in e-mail, such as e-mail newsletters"), granted to Google today, describes some details about the process:

Serving content-targeted ads in e-mail newsletters is a potential source of a large number of additional quality page-views for advertisers. (...) Regardless of the system used to serve ads with e-mail, such as e-mail newsletters, it may be desirable to (i) obtain e-mail content information so that useful, content-relevant, ads may be served, and (ii) provide ads in a format that can be rendered on and supported by a wide variety of e-mail clients/readers, or at least prevalent e-mail clients/readers. This may be challenging since many, if not most, of the more popular Web-based e-mail clients strip out IFRAMEs and JavaScript. (...)

The present invention may be used to serve content-targeted ads with e-mail messages, such as HTML e-mail messages, and may do so without needing to use IFRAMEs or JavaScript. The present invention may do so by (i) having the document publisher include a unique content identifier in the content, (ii) having a client device pass the unique content identifier to a content-relevant ad server in a content-relevant ad request, and (iii) having the content-relevant ad server use the unique contend identifier to identify previously registered content for purposes of determining content-relevant ads.

So their system relies on images or dynamically-generated image maps that serve ads related to the content of the newsletter. But many mail clients and webmail apps also block embedded images (unless you explicitly allow them).

A post from Search Engine Roundtable mentioned last year that "some Google AdSense publishers are allowed to place ads within email newsletters or other emails, with permission from Google". An advertiser confirms: "We have had AdSense ads in our newsletters for over a year now. These ads come in various formats and are essentially served by an image server".

ToDo List for Google Calendar

Update (July 27 2007): As always with these Greasemonkey scripts, any minor change in a site's code can make the script stop working. The ToDo list described below doesn't work anymore, so you could try a similar one.

Google Personalized Homepage has a to-do gadget, who'd be be better suited in Google Calendar. As there's no option to add gadgets in Google Calendar, someone created an even simpler version as a Greasemonkey script.

While you can't add priorities, sort the events by date or change their order, it's handy to have a list of events next to the calendar. The ToDo list is saved in Google Calendar as fake events, so you'll be able to see it if you use other computers (you'll need to have Firefox + Greasemonkey, though).


How to add the ToDo list? First install Greasemonkey for Firefox, restart the browser and then install this script.

A Batch of Gmail Accounts, Accidentally Disabled

Next time when you can't access Gmail, be happy that Gmail is down only for a few minutes. Other people have to live days without their Gmail accounts (and you know it's hard to do that).

Last week, the Gmail team realized that a bunch of spammers found a temporary home at gmail.com. Says the Gmail team: "We have been actively investigating a batch of accounts that were accidentally disabled and are currently in the process of re-enabling these accounts. This error occurred in an effort to target a large network of spammers to keep them out of the Gmail system and keep your inbox free from spam. We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we re-enable these accounts as quickly as possible."

Collateral damages, you'll say. But not if you're one of the poor souls who had the misfortune to be the target of Gmail's team raid. While some of the accounts were disabled, others didn't have links to email attachments.

My account is readable.. like i can logon. but i can't download any of the attachments. i have two huge presentations coming up and all the files are on my account. i trust google more than a usbkey soo i always have my files on my account. now i can't even get them.. and i can't get any one to send them to me. so please please fix it soon. "lockdown on sector 6" is what i get and i abide by google's terms of use.

Benedikt ("benedictus" means "blessed" in Latin), the wise soul from Gmail's Google Group, saves the day:

I think this extremely unfortunate event shows us the danger of having all the important information in one place, a place that depends on the functionality of one large software package, such as GoogleMail. (...)

What we experience right now is such a failure and most of the posts in this topic that have been posted before this one show us the consequences that can have. So let us hope that the capable engineers of Google will succeed in restoring GoogleMail's full functionatlity as they have succeded in building up the virtual world of collaboration, information and communication that has made Google what it is today.

While Gmail is a useful web application, you shouldn't use it to store mission-critical files or information. And if you do, make sure you have backups: store your files on different storage mediums, forward your Gmail messages to other accounts or pray that Gmail team doesn't have a bad day and disables your account. If you see an error message like "Lockdown in sector 4 (or 6)", complain to Google.

Google says they promptly re-enabled the affected accounts, but there are still people who can't access Gmail. And might "move their operations" to other sites, if the Gmail team continues to treat them like that.

I've been locked out of my original email for a full 7 days come midnight. I'm also locked out of anything google associated, so I can't post new content to my blog, nor check AdSense income. I thought I would have to wait the standard 5 days and now I realize my account wasn't having password issues, this was a long standing issue that it seems they knew about.

Which makes me upset enough to move my operations from google; I hope everyone else does the same...this is the only free email service I have known with regular outages, shutdowns and no customer support. The last time I lost access to my email was 3/14/06, my birthday no less...luckily, I got it back in 24 hours. Now, it's been 7 days.

Eric Schmidt's Confessions

Photo from NY Times, CC-licensed by Jakob Lodwick.

Fred Vogelstein publishes an interview from 2005 with Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO. It's an exciting conversation that reveals a lot from Google's internal combustion, the long debates between the three key people who run Google, how decisions are made and a difficult moment when Google was very close to split-up.

"Sergey is brilliant, pulsing, right. Larry is brilliant and deep. So Sergey is -- what is it, a supernova, he's exploding his ideas. So with Sergey you listen, you know, he'll be sitting there and he'll be doing something random, right, not paying attention at all, and then all of a sudden he makes this comment that is distinctly different from everyone else and is very incisive. It is how his brain works. Larry would write a 30-page paper on his GPS idea overnight and not sleep."

In the interview, Mr. Schmidt defines himself as the "normal person" from Google's triumvirate.

"I used to give this speech about how you control risk, and the best way to control risk is to have the smartest people working on the problem, and businesses are about risk. An example would be in my first year the question had to do with the development of these advertising networks. Overture was doing well. Would we partner with them? Would we compete with them? We had some preliminary conversations partnering with them. They wanted to buy us. And there were a number of times when I frankly had no idea what to do. But the solutions didn't come as a result of me sitting in a room and inventing it. I don't think Larry and Sergey sat in a room by themselves either. It was an iteration that involved the interactions of five or ten people over a period of time. And the characteristic of such group decisions done right is enormous buy-in."

"The most acute disagreement was over the original deal with AOL (in 2002). The reason was that Google did not have enough cash to fulfill the guaranteed payout in the contract (in the future). And the actual sequence is quite interesting because you see the beginnings of the management structure. So in the first place, the deal itself was a very good idea, we all agreed to it. Because the AOL people were very smart, and because Google was a new business, they negotiated very, very cleverly. (...) And I remember one day where we argued to the point where I actually stopped the argument. I thought it would split the company. It was the closest point -- and this is now four years ago, three and a half years go -- it was the closest point I ever saw literally the company falling in two."

Batch Upload Files to Google Docs

You'd think that Google considered Docs & Spreadsheets important enough to make it easy to import files. Or to export files. You can do that one file at a time, but it becomes tiresome if you have a lot of files.

Fortunately, the latest version of Google Toolbar for Firefox has a feature that lets you drag and drop files to your browser and they are automatically uploaded to Google Docs. To upload more files at a time, go to Windows Explorer or other file manager, select your files and drag them in Firefox.

To activate the feature, to go to Google Docs & Spreadsheets after installing the toolbar. You'll get a prompt that asks you if you want to enable the feature. Alternatively, click on Settings / Options and enable "Docs & Spreadsheets".



Related:
Upload files using drag and drop in Firefox

Google, the Supercomputer

BusinessWeek had a nice collage titled "The many faces of Google" that illustrated 8 facets of Google: search engine, innovation machine, ad broker, media mogul, world's biggest computer, phone company, a provider of better Internet and an artificial intelligence system. While some of these perspectives are speculations or just future plans, it's interesting to see Google as a supercomputer you have limited access to.

Most people still think of Web sites such as Google as places to go. Wrong. That's the old media model. In reality, every click is a command for some computer somewhere in the world. (...) Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt says that Google essentially is a huge, distributed supercomputer "doing all sorts of things over a fiber-optic network that eventually are services available to end-users." Before long, Googling will mean not just searching for something, but getting ALMOST anything done online.

The New York Times estimated last year that the Googleplex and its server farms contain 450,000 servers. "The rate at which the Google computing system has grown is as remarkable as its size. In March 2001, when the company was serving about 70 million Web pages daily, it had 8,000 computers, according to a Microsoft researcher granted anonymity to talk about a detailed tour he was given at one of Google's Silicon Valley computing centers. By 2003 the number had grown to 100,000."