Chrome's new New Tab Page

Edit: apparently this is just news to me. There was a blog post about the OS X Chrome App Launcher back in September. It is still interesting that the launcher promo was in a hidden div tag on the now defunct newtab page.

So the only way I could get Chrome to allow me to access the old "new tab page" was through an internal extension call. Typing chrome-internal://newtab into the address bar simply triggers a search for that term. But on that page I was looking at the source to get the internal sources for some image files to customize the iOS 7 New Tab Page extension when I noticed a hidden div that looked interesting...

<div id="app-launcher-promo" hidden>

Remove that hidden attribute and you get this little gem.

Following the "Learn more" link quietly (really no downloads or installs etc.) adds an application drawer to the OS X dock. This is all you see in the browser, and note that there are no links to download or install anything.

I am using Chrome Canary which explains why the icon is all yellow.

I still don't like that they removed the ability to disable the to disable the Instant Extended API or as I like to call it the wasted clicks page, but having the app drawer will mitigate the issues on my laptop for a while. I am not sure that this will work on my Ubuntu desktop. This does not work on Linux, and you just get redirected to the chrome web store. This is a shame since I spend a lot of time working on my Linux desktop.

On a side note the iOS 7 New Tab Page is interesting, but I am not a fan of iOS, there are some extensions that it fails to open and the bookmarks bar is missing. Also it is a little cheesy at points - the fake wifi signal and battery indicators...

Cloud Storage Solutions

My belabored attempt to break down the practicality of using cloud based backup solutions.  There are probably services out there that I have not mentioned but this is just a few that come to mind.


Edited 3/7/2011 to reflect Google Storage for Developers lower prices.

An Error on the Internet!

So google did this experiment where it looked at the frequency of words in books and websites.  There is well over a trillion words in the data set.  A subset of that data is used to power an online N-gram viewer.  I was looking at the frequency of TCP and Internet, and I saw something funny.  So then I looked at just Internet...

Frequency of the word Internet by year in published books

Notice the bump around 1900?  If we look a little closer...

Frequency of the word Internet by year in published books

And if we look into some of the books that they were searching, they erroneously identified a common abbreviation for international, internat, as Internet.  The result is what looks like someone writing about a concept that would not be invented for another 70 years.

This is another example where processing these large amounts of data may benefit from crowd sourcing.  If the algorithm were told that the Internet didn't exist in 1900 and that it is unlikely to occur in literature then it might have picked internat. instead.

I almost forgot, the obligatory xkcd cartoon ("Duty Calls" #386).

My Google Phone Interview

A researcher in networking contacted my advisor a couple weeks ago requesting any leads on possible summer interns.  My advisor recommended me for the job based on the fact that the research that was being done at Google is very similar to my recent work.  I polished my resume and sent it off.  A day later I was contacted by a recruiter who took some more information and scheduled me for two technical phone interviews.  These are not the "where do you see yourself in 5 years" type of interviews.  These are the "prove P=NP and write up a C function to solve all the NP problems while you are at it" kind of interviews.  This meant that my immediate concern was preparing for the possible onslaught of questions.  

While preparing for the interview I was also preparing for a presentation in my networking class on "why use delay based protocols?"  One of the assigned papers (the one that I spent the most time working on) was the TCP Vegas paper, written by Larry Brakmo.  I found the paper very interesting and in fact there are a lot of similar issues in the paper that I worked on most recently.  So I know this paper, and I mean I REALLY know this paper well.  Guess who was my second interviewer of the day, and guess who was so focused on the interview that he failed to make the connection?  I had the opportunity to talk about  using delays to the guy who invented the idea!  Doh!

Both of my interviewers were exceptionally sharp, and polite.  While I would be supper excited to get an internship at Google I am flattered just to have had the chance to interview.  If I am not offered a position I think I will continue to try again, because the interview was challenging in a good way.  Not to mention the fact that you just may have the opportunity to speak with someone that you otherwise would not.

So Dr. Brakmo if you ever happen to see this, just know that when I said I didn't have any questions about Google that I should have taken the opportunity to ask at least one of my questions about Vegas.  No I am not going to list them here just incase I will get the chance to talk with him again.

The bottom line on the interview is this, as far as TCP goes I know my stuff, but that does not mean I know everything there is to know about networking and I will work hard to figure out the answer.  That being said, lets just hope that makes up for me pulling Null for my programming question.

Making my mac do what I want... NOW!

So I am going to have to come back to this later and add more to it, but the basic idea is this:

I used to use a program called Quicksilver to search for things on my mac and to launch programs that I don't want to keep lying around in the dock. I noticed that it made my machine slower to login and it could hog resources...

I decided to try out the native OS X solution, the spotlight, and much to my delight it was speedy and pretty well done. Since it is already running by default, it is not using any more system resources. Then I thought, what if I could search google and the web from it... So I found this:

Google Importer 1.0.1
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight/googleimporter.html

I will try and followup on how well it works...

WELL, that was short... At least the website saved me the trouble of downloading it, becasue when I tried it informed me that it was not compatible with OS X Leopard (Tiger only). So now I have to find another way to search quickly. I have heard some negative reviews of the google desktop search... Oh well :-(

On top of the world...

Well I have now secured the top google search returns for my name :-D

IChat google Talk troubles

So I all of a sudden started having intermittent trouble logging into talk.google.com with Apple's iChat. Just before conceding I remembered a bug that I discovered in Leopard where any password with a '?' in it would be rejected. So I decided to change my very easy password to something different, when I did this I noticed that the new passwords had a minimum requirement of 8 characters. Once I changed it I no longer got the log in error! So If you are having iChat problems try updating your Google password, because I worked instantly for me.