Google

I was on the train to Portsmouth, and listening-reading the book “In the Plex”. In the Part 2 of the book, Chapter 2 if I recall correctly, the author is talking about Google and the Ocean project, what is later on going to be know as Google Books. The part that got me thinking is when Page, Brin and Mayer are trying to work out how actually they can scan the physical books, in a scalable manner. To the Googlers, hiring a lot of human beings and a lot of scanner didn’t look like a scalable solution at all! So they decided to work on their own scanner, using the hardware building expertise that years of Google Data Center made them acquire. ...

A video that I need to watch myself (I just managed to watch 25% of it), but I thought was good to post it here: just to remind how good it is to think “out of the box”. Even in Programming Languages. Presenter: Rob Pike Presented on: 30th Oct 2009 Go is a new experimental systems programming language intended to make software development fast. Our goal is that a major Google binary should be buildable in a few seconds on a single machine. The language is concurrent, garbage-collected, and requires explicit declaration of dependencies. Simple syntax and a clean type system support a number of programming styles. For more on Go including FAQs, source code, libraries, and tutorials, please see:http://golang.org ...

Just a quick one. First day of the Google I/O 2009 in San Francisco (CA). Apart from a lot of informative and interesting topics and breakout sessions (I mainly focused on App Engine and Android), I came back at home full of: Stickers T-shirt Google Chrome comic paperback version A brand new “Google I/O device”, that is a black HTC Magic sim and firmware unlocked for developers + Android Market with Paid Apps support + Amazon Mp3 store +…!!!. How much? For FREE, of course!!! ...

For the once of you that tried “home made ways” to update their ADP1, like my previously published how-to, this news can be interesting. Google and HTC finally managed to push-out an official page on the HTC site, to explain step-by-step how to update firmware and baseband of the device. I just did it, having a very pleasant and straightforward experience. The phone seems to be way more stable, bug-free and the battery lasts for more then 50 seconds ;) ...

WOW! I mean… WOW! Look at what people are doing using the power of HTML5 + a very fast Javascript Engine! Those experiments are collected here: Chrome Experiments (note the subtitle: “Not your mother’s JavaScript” - LOL). Bear in mind: this is not only because of Chrome itself. This is the power of HTML5 Canvas element, plus, of couse, the very (very) fast V8 Javascript engine). And indeed, I ran them on my Safari 4 beta without a glitch: the Javascript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme (SFX) is pretty good too. ...

If you, like me, have a Android Dev Phone 1 (“ADP1” from now on), you are probably wondering how to take the latest version of the Android Source Code, the “GIT Master”, compile and put on your device. I googled and googled and googled, finding some sparse material. But it’s all messed up: sometimes it was incomplete or partial, sometimes it was a matter of formatting/style, it could get very difficult to read. So, this post is my way of making it organic and organized. Let’s get it started! ...

Google just introduced a new service, Latitude. I will not go in the details of explaining what it does, simply because the official web page is detailed enough, and has a nice/fancy video. What is relevant for me is the list of phone with which it will work: Will it work with my phone? Google Latitude is a feature of Google Maps for mobile on these phones: Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1 (coming soon) iPhone and iPod touch devices (coming soon) most color BlackBerry devices most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones) many Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones, such as Sony Ericsson devices (coming soon) This service is free from Google; carrier charges may apply. ...

I was sure that is was just a matter of time, before we started to see Android spreading all around into every possible flavour of Mobile (only?) piece of hardware. It started when just the first versions of the SDK were out in the wild: people were “just” recompiling the kernel, and boom! The magic was happening. That was a demonstration of really good and effective layering: just adapting the kernel to the hosting hardware was making it up and running. Now, with the source code available to everyone, the porting festival is becoming even larger, with small-medium company, as well as university guys, porting Android everywhere. ...

As I said, I’m doing some stuff with Google AppEngine. And, of course, I’m facing the usual problem of Browser Incompatibility: Browser Incompatibility ;-) =Browser Incompatibilities: the Most Common Problem= The most common problem for Web Site developers is the fact that every browser treats HTML Tags, CSS and Javascript in it’s own way. This Recipe tries to address one of the problem I faced the most: having a slightly different CSS for every Browser. =The Usual Solution= The usual solution is to load every time a different CSS depending on the Browser. But this solution has some side effects: ...