Reverberations

Microsoft, the object of hatred for a large geek pop (and wannabes), is actually far from over. They are as fierce competitor as one can be. Latest evidence - Microsoft creating a YouTube channel for promotion of Vista and Live brands. Significance of YouTube here is that YouTube belongs to its “enemy” Google. That’s atypical for an “an underdog beats the incumbent” story, so it very well might not be one.

The Google Chart API looks to be the simplest way of generating high quality dynamic chart images for Line chart, Bar chart, Pie chart, Venn diagram and Scatter Plots. You just have to pass the chart data as URL parameters e.g.


http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
cht=lc&
chs=200×100&
chd=s:ThisIsReallyReallyCool&
chxt=x,y&
chxl=0:|Apr|May|June|1:||666+KB


would produce this chart -

Gmail’s new version rolled out for me today, and first thing I noticed that it had reset my gmail chat config (basically I had switched off gmail chat), my greasemonkey scripts were broken and I had a firebug extension warning on top.

While I have no gripe about greasemonkey, resetting gmail chat setting means I’ve to check rest of my settings to be sure anything else is not broken.

New version seems quicker, with additional options in “More Actions” menu and updated “Contacts” section.

I noticed this on the very next day, when I was looking for some documentation on proxy auto configuration scripts support in the SOAP API. The replacement AJAX api not only has limited application (website only), but also it promises to show google ads beside the results.

Not that Google Search API has ever been very stable - it works almost only 80% of the time, so one has to pray and hope that it works with every call. Now even the support has been dropped and usage samples along with FAQ have been removed.

Damn! not good at all.

I need one Firefox extension/greasemonkey script to add an option to open xls/doc links directly in Google docs & spreadsheets. This is something Google itself should be providing like they do in Gmail. Perhaps, I’ll write one myself in case I can’t find it.

[Update]- Whooaa! Same day Google releases its Firefox toolbar (beta) with this exact same functionality I’m looking for and have blogged. Now, is it just one wish a day, or - I want to be king , please.

Interesting, yet inevitable move. Gmail has started suggesting to open attached XLS (Microsoft Excel) files in Google Spreadsheets.

http://www.google.com/hosted is redirecting to google.com, Google’s main page. Damn! my mails are all inaccessible.

Google has been offering its hosted email service beta for sometime now, and apparently plan to push it big. But does Google hold the right to lock out users from their account as it does with Gmail sometimes? No terms of use page exist for the service as of now. I would dread it if it does a ‘Lockdown in sector4!‘.

NYTimes : Yahoo!’s Consistency vs Google’s ‘Wow’.

Surprise of the day - even something as uninspiring as Yahoo! 360 is 17 times bigger than Google’s Orkut. Something as useful as GTalk deserves better figures.

(Graphics Source: NYTimes)

Amazing coincidence. Within one week after I blogged how we need direct permalink to the particular part of the video content, Google Video has come up with the exact same feature.

Google Video now allows you to link straight to a specific part of a video by appending e.g. #1m35s to the video URL.

This is what I wrote last week-

I have to download/stream the entire piece just to get to the interesting part somebody mentioned/linked. How about the ability to generate a permalink to particular portion of the podcast/vlog content- just like quoting text from a blog?

Damn! I should have asked for something else that day