Thushan Fernando Uncut

Google Image Search Options

I haven’t searched for images in quite sometime but just realised that Google has updated its image search options!

Lets say your looking for some photos on Windows 7, but you don’t want all the screenshots of the operating system, instead you want just people. Select Faces option and voilla, people images.

What about some photos of Australia? Maybe photos that show just how harsh our climate is in the dessert? Historical or artsy Black & White ones? You get the idea

Awesome and useful! If you’ve ever wondered what I look like, all you have to do is search (heheh).

I’ve been soooo busy at work (impossible deadlines as always) that I’ve been a bit silent, but alas who could not be excited to hear about Google’s venture into the netbook market just to shake things up?

It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Thats right, whilst many claimed the Google Chrome browser was infact an OS, now the company has come around with an actual OS with the Chrome moniker just to confuse the hell out of journo’s who just didn’t get the difference between a browser and an operating system.

Mind you, I do use Chrome quite a bit, especially not that I’ve switched full-time to GMail, its a great browser – just missing a few addons that Firefox has to really make it shine – like Adblock Plus, XMarks and web developer like extensions.

CNet has an interesting tidbit too. Whats important here is that it will be available for x86 and ARM processors and aims for a different breed of devices to their Android platform. Its based on a Linux Kernel with a new desktop environment (so another Gnome or KDE like desktop environment). As the Google Blog puts it:

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

The idea was mocked by many several years ago, but I guess they had the last laugh now.

Confused about the direction Google is heading? You Are Not Alone, looks like Google‘s Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ telling Microsoft that We’ve Had Enough, that They Don’t Care About Us and to just Beat It. They are Here To Change The World which will no doubt turn into one heck of a Thriller coming up.

I figure most of you would be Speechless by now, some may even be Scared Of The Moon but fear not, they’re working Day and Night to make sure you get One More Chance to get On The Line as soon as your hardware will allow it! Google, you Rock My World. Does anyone even Remember The Time without Google now a days?

RIP Michael Jackson.

Jai-ho my web 2.0 pals, its friday!

A few weeks ago saw the launch of Wolfram Research Alpha, a natural search engine which could do some funky things. Now Microsoft have stepped up from their previous attempts – Ms Dewey (Janina Gavankar, who’s quite a hottie! reminds me of Tiffany) and now we have the final release of Bing (aka codenamed Kumo) which is going to be a behemoth search engine.

Learn all about the new bling at DiscoverBing or learn the void that Bing will attempt to address, or see the video here.

Wonder why they decided on Bing?

Ding ding ding == bing bing bing?

“Just Bing It.”

“Dewd, just Bing the bastard”?

“Bing is Not Google”?

Cashing in on the Lara Bingle’s ‘where the bloody hell are you?’ campaign, which btw was one of our clients at Vividas last year.

In either case, its an interesting take on the ‘aging’ way we search for what we want and seems to go onto the concepts that came with the Wolfram Alpha. When it actually comes out – still shows as coming soon for me, we’ll have to see.

I’ve moved my entire mailbox over to Gmail now, previously I was a firm believer in IMAP and didnt move to Gmail fully sooner because of the lack of folders – unlike in real life where my life is usually a mess, I keep my mail quite organised. Whats more, the junk mail filters are second to none.

Whilst the mail trickled down via POP3 (thank god for IMAP!) I had to manually get the contacts to be updated in gmail. Here’s how to get your contacts into GMail from thunderbird – and possibly other clients.

• Open your addressbook in Thunderbird.  Tools > Addressbook or {CTRL+2}
• Goto Tools > Export menu item
• We need a CSV file, change the default file type from LDF to ‘Comma Seperated’ and save it with an appropriate filename.
• Once exported, open up the CSV file in OpenOffice or Microsoft Excel.
• Heres where we get trippy. By default, when you export you will get these headers:
  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • Display Name
  • Nickname
  • Primary Email
• We need to make sure that we have the four main columns that GMail looks for:
  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • Display Name
  • Email Address
• Remove all the other columns (so Nickname, Secondary Email etc etc)
• Save the file as something else so we can go back to it later if required.
• Goto GMail, click Contacts and click ‘Import’ from the right panel header.
• Point to the CSV file you  just saved and let it import, you will find that the Display names are automajically resolved, duplicates trimmed and others merged.

Enjoy.

It seems the latest craze in the browser market (apart from Internet Explorer) is All About The Benjamins Javascript Engines. We have Google Chrome’s V8, Fruity Safari’s Nitro, WebKit have their own Squirrel Fish Extreme which will eventually power Safari 4, Firefox’s TraceMonkey and Opera’s Futhark. The past several months there have been numerous performance tests and  stats on pure Javascript performance across these platforms.

But now, Google has released The Chrome Experiment. Essentially a showcase of the ‘cooler’ things you can do with Javascript on the browser. Checkout the Browser Ball demo or the awesome Amiga Workbench Emulator (reminds me of Omar‘s old home page that emulated Windows 2000), the rest of the demos are equally impressive.

We think JavaScript is awesome. We also think browsers are awesome. Indeed, when we talk about them, we say they are the cat’s meow – which is an American expression meaning AWESOME.

In light of these deeply held beliefs, we created this site to showcase cool experiments for both JavaScript and web browsers.

These experiments were created by designers and programmers from around the world. Their work is making the web faster, more fun, and more open – the same spirit in which we built Google Chrome.

Awesomeness indeed.

I had a friend ask me about an ASP Debugger today, so after talking for a little while I promised to email him a few things when I got back into the office. Just when I had a tick, I thought I’d google the bastard to see what results I’d find – as I havent done ‘classic ASP’ development for quite sometime – I shudder to think writing like that again.

Anyway, fired up a new window in firefoxy, CTRL+L, {TAB}, type in ‘ASP Debugger’ without the quote. What do you get?

What, you reckon I'm a virus? How dare you, just WHO do you think you are.

What the, however this only occurs searching through the firefox where as the normal google search doesnt seem to worry.

While Microsoft flaunts Windows 7, everyone’s second favourite company, Google is hard at work on Chrome 2.0. They’ve just release a pre-beta release tagged Chrome 2.0.156.1 which brings some funky new changes:

• New version of WebKit. WebKit is the open source code Google Chrome uses to render web pages (HTML and CSS). 1.0.154.36 used basically the same version of WebKit as Safari 3.1, but the WebKit team has made a lot of improvements since that was released. 156.1 uses WebKit version 528.8 or, more precisely, revision 39410 from the WebKit source tree. In addition to fixing bugs and enabling features like full-page zoom and autoscroll, the new version also enables some nifty CSS features:
  • CSS gradients
  • CSS canvas drawing
  • partial implementations of CSS reflections and CSS masks
• Form Autocomplete. Google Chrome remembers what you’ve typed into fields on web pages. If you type in the same form again, it will show any previous values that match what you’ve typed so far. You can disable Form autocomplete on the Minor Tweaks tab of the Options dialog.  (Note: this is like the basic form autocomplete available in Firefox or Internet Explorer. It is not the same as the form fill feature in Google Toolbar.)
• Full-page zoom. Previously, page zoom (Ctrl++ or Ctrl+-) increased or decreased only the text on a page. Zoom now scales everything on the page together, so pages look correct at different zoom levels.
• Spell-checking improvements. You can now enable or disable spell checking in a text field by right-clicking in the field. You can also change the spell-checking language by right clicking. To enable spell-checking in a language, add it to the list of ‘languages you use to read web sites’ in the Fonts and Languages dialog ([Wrench] > Options > Minor Tweaks > Fonts and Languages). Note that Google Chrome doesn’t have spell-checking dictionaries for every language you can add to this list.
• Autoscroll. Many users have asked for this and (thanks to our WebKit update), we now offer autoscrolling. Middle-click (click the mousewheel on most mice) on a page to turn on autoscroll, then move the mouse to scroll the page in any direction.
• Docking dragged tabs. When you drag a tab to certain positions on the monitor, a docking icon will appear.  Release the mouse over the docking icon to have the tab snap to the docking position instead of being dropped at the same size as the original window. Docking positions are:
  • Monitor top: make the dropped tab maximized.
  • Monitor left/right: make the dropped tab full-height and half-width, aligned with the monitor edge.
  • Monitor bottom: make the dropped tab full-width and half-height, aligned with the bottom of the monitor.
  • Browser-window left/right: fit the browser window and the dropped tab side-by-side across the screen.
  • Browser-window bottom: fit the browser window and the dropped tab top-to-bottom across the screen.
• Import bookmarks from Google Bookmarks. The [Wrench menu] > Import bookmarks & settings… option now has a Google Toolbar option to import Google Bookmarks. The bookmarks get imported into your Other bookmarks folder. The bookmarks are not kept in sync; the import process simply reads in the current set of online bookmarks.
• New SafeBrowsing implementation. SafeBrowsing is now faster, more reliable, and uses the disk less often.
• Use different browser profiles. You can start a new browser window that uses a different profile (different bookmarks, history, cookies, etc.). Use [Wrench menu] > New window in profile. When you create a new profile, you can name it and add a shortcut to your Desktop.
• Update the V8 Javascript engine to version 0.4.6.0 (from 0.3.9.3).
• New network code. Google Chrome now has its own implementation of the HTTP network protocol (we were using the WinHTTP library on Windows, but need common code for Mac and Linux). We fixed a few bugs in HTTP authentication and made Google Chrome more compatible with servers that reply with invalid HTTP responses. We need feedback on anything that’s currently broken, particularly with proxy servers, secure (https) sites, and sites that require log in.
• New window frames on Windows XP and Vista, supporting windows cascading and tiling, and other window-management add-in programs.
• Experimental user script support (similar to Greasemonkey). You can add a –enable-user-scripts flag to your Google Chrome shortcut to enable user scripts. See the developer documentation for details.
• A new HTTPS-only browsing mode. Add –force-https to your Google Chrome shortcut, and it will only load HTTPS sites. Sites with SSL certificate errors will not load.

Go on, try it out.

Epic news, Google has released a 1.0 release of Chrome.

We have removed the beta label as our goals for stability and performance have been met but our work is far from done. We are working to add some common browser features such as form autofill and RSS support in the near future. We are also developing an extensions platform along with support for Mac and Linux. If you are already using Google Chrome, the update system ensures that you get the latest bug fixes and security patches, so you will get the newest version automatically in the next few days.

You can download a windows version today, the Linux & Mac OS builds are still in development.

So I’ve been high on Chrome the last day or so, but alas I had to uninstalled it.

Nicely done Google.