Sunday August 30, 2009

url aliases

I mention in the last article, that url aliases/shortners make calculating an inlist sort-order harder, it's curious to me that Google don't have a url shortening service. (I suppose the domain name google doesn't lend itself well to being part of a short name.)

tags: silly google

Friday July 17, 2009

And Google's Android

In case you havn't heard, Google have ported their mobile phone OS, android to x86, and made a live- cd version and so it can run inside Virtual Box. It looks like this..

Since the hardware to make calls isn't available the functionality's a bit limited

tags: technology software virtualbox google android livecd x86

Monday July 13, 2009

The personal is the professional, using Google calendar

I have been using Google calendar and the Sun calendar for a while now, and ideally like to read them through one viewer. Today I had to upgrade one of the laptop's I use to connect to Google calendar. The best viewer I have found is Thunderbird via the Lightning add-on. This also needs a second add on, the Provider for Google Calendar. I had to reinstall these earlier today and found this blog post entitled How to integrate Google calendar into Thunderbird very helpful. The other tricky bit is how to find out the login credentials and while one should be able to remember one's Google login and password,the URL of the calendar is a bit trickier. (You need to use the web interface and examine the calendar settings, which the article above describes.)

tags: technology software google calendar thunderbird add-on howto connect

Wednesday June 24, 2009

Syncing Google Calendar with the ipodtouch

Milton Stephenson was boasting on Facebook about connecting his Google Calendar to his ipodtouch and I thought "Ooh, I want one of those.". Its not that hard. I had downloaded V3.0 of the appliance operating system a couple of days ago. First, use the ipodtouch's settings application and open the Mail, Contacts and Calendars tab, then select 'Add Account...'

The settings I used were,

1. Server = www.google.com
2. User Name = my username, which is not a gmail address
3. Password = my password

and it wrote the description and ssl parameters for me. I was advised that m.google.com works as a server parameter, but not for me. Maybe its the non gmail user thing again. This article called Google calendar speaks caldav to the iphone at http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/ was very helpful, and implies that V3 of the operating system is required. So I now have Google Mail available nomadically on the touch.

tags: technology apple ipodtouch google calendar sync "nomadic+computing"

Thursday January 31, 2008

Mashing up with Snipsnap

Having run a personal snipsnap wiki for a number of months, I have got to the stage where I want to use it as a host for a couple of mashups. Fortunately there is a user contributed macro that allows for the use of HTML within a snipsnap page. Otherwise, because the page input screen interprets a markup language, all HTML is treated as text. This macro is installed by copying it i.e. the .jar file to the directory named in the Java CLASSPATH. It really is as simple as that, and then using snipsnap's macro syntax. You can also see what I have written at my bliki.

{html}
<SPAN STYLE="color:red">This font is Red caused by a Span tag pair</SPAN>
{html}

This has allowed me to embed a google map in one of my pages, the example below is about Brussels.

and the example below shows a del.icio.us tag roll.

In both cases, I have implemented then using <IFRAME> tags; in Google's case because they suggest it and in the del.icio.us case because it is a Javascript and the CSS wasn't working. It seemed easier to escape the CSS domain by using IFRAME as I have had difficulty with this problem before. I think its to do with the anchor rules I define in the CSS files. I have had this problem with roller as well, although not with the del.icio.us tag cloud as you can see my checking out My Links page at blogs.sun.com, although it remains marked as beta. You can also see what I have written at my bliki, but again, its not much more.

tags: Technology snipsnap html css googlemaps tags wikimarkup mashup

Wednesday November 14, 2007

Look at what Google won't put in a press release

Last month, just before traveling to the West Coast, I practiced my latest presentation,"Six reasons to choose Solaris", in which I have a slide with some company logos of the users of Solaris 10. One of my audience asked why Google wasn't on the slide. I driveled on about their use of Solaris not being public and he pointed me at this job ad on their web site, for a Solaris trained systems administrator. It seems they're also using Oracle! Using Google to look for the obvious keywords, finds this google job ad for a Solaris/Oracle administrator, which isn't even on their site. Google uses Solaris is now a public domain fact.

I wonder how many of my "Six reasons" led to Google making this decision.

tags: google oracle solaris technology jobs innovation

Tuesday July 31, 2007

Is it safe to go out?

As an occasional sailor, the weather forecast is important to me and I have experimented with various ways, short of looking out the window as to how to get an accurate forecast. I have just updated my South Coast Travel public google map to include placemarks with links to the BBC and Met. Office weather reports. I am disappointed that google have no obvious weather icon and that the i icon is available in only one colour.

Also I'm grateful to Alec Muffett for showing me the current BBC local pages, which are really rather good. As usual with my blog, hover or click to view it.

I did poke around the Google maps API pages and may take this further so that I can incorporate the page into http://www.davelevy.info.

Otherwise its screen shot and link to the Google Maps URL, like this.

tags: Technology geography html maps mashups weather