All you want to know about Google Chrome OS in a Nutshell

Google recently lifted the curtains on its soon to be flagship product Google Chrome OS - a heavily customized Operating system which runs on top of the Linux kernel. Google did this with great panache by releasing the source code of the operating system under an open source license. The open source part of the operating system is known as Google Chromium OS.

Since a lot has already been written about the Google Chrome OS, I thought of doing something different. I collected the details of the project and created a mind map providing a birds eye view of Google Chrome OS.

Free Online Book : Google Wave - Learn How to Use it.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave is book authored by Gina Trapani (Lifehacker fame) and Adam Pash. This book is freely available for reading online. The book is divided into 8 comprehensive chapters and 2 appendices. A very good book on Google Wave indeed.

Bookmark the link for future reference and read the free online book to get to know Google Wave inside-out. "The Complete Guide to Google Wave" book will be available in PDF and print sometime next year.

Now if only someone will send me a Google Wave invite.....

Google Search will now include Twitter Tweets

Google has reached an agreement with Twitter to include real time tweets from Twitter in Google search results. All the more reason to take tweeting and tweets seriously.

How to make your website mobile friendly

Do you run a website or blog ? If yes, how accessible is it on a mobile device ? Now a days, with more and more people browsing the net straight from their mobile devices like cell phones, it is very important to make your website as accessible to this group of users. Google teaches you how.

Google Wave Explained in Plain English

I was raring to try out Google Wave but havin't received an invite yet. So I did the next best thing which is to scrounge the Net for more info on Google Wave. Thus I chanced upon this wonderfully made video explaining in plain English what Google Wave is all about.

Install Google Chrome web browser in Linux

Google has provided a pre-release version of its famed browser Google Chrome for Linux and Mac. However it is still very much in the development stage. You can download the latest builds of Google Chrome for Linux and Mac here.

All the same, if you want a stable Chrome web browser to work in Linux, then there is a work around. Codeweavers has released Crossover Chromium for Linux and Mac.

Google Chrome OS to officially make it's debut in 2010

Google has eventually come out with the announcement that it is developing a unique Operating System - called the Google Chrome OS.

It will be Open Source, light weight, speedy, simple and secure. Google says the new OS will be targeted at Netbooks and will make it's debut sometime next year (2010). As the name suggests, Google Chrome OS will in all probability be a browser centric OS; in that, most applications will be residing in the cloud. The OS will run on x86 and ARM architecture.

Really exciting news for sure.

[Source : Official Google Blog]

Musings from Search Masters 2009 Conference at Google

The Google SearchMasters' 09 conference was held in Bangalore on 28th February 2009. I was one of its attendees, rubbing shoulders with an eclectic group comprising of webmasters, SEO experts, online marketers, entrepreneurs and bloggers from across India. The conference was worth the time and effort I spent to reach the venue - The Google Office at Benniganahalli - around 11 odd kilometers from the Bangalore Kempegowda Bus Station.

The Google India team rolled out the SearchMasters 2009 conference to introduce the web masters to the various tools developed by Google which can help enhance their respective web sites and make them more friendly to search engines. The conference also included talks on best SEO practices, building mobile friendly websites and a hands on session on two select websites providing tips on how to make them more search friendly. Earlier I had written about the Google Bus aimed at bringing Internet to the masses. This was a similar event albeit targeted at webmasters, SEO experts and bloggers.

Here is a run down on the speakers and the talks they gave at the conference.

Vivaik Bharadwaaj who is manager of the Search Quality Evaluation team in India and Korea kick started the event by giving the welcome address.

Then the stage was taken over by Adam Lasnik. Adam is considered Google's first Search Evangelist. He talked on the various search engine optimization techniques that webmasters can use to make their sites more search friendly. Specifically, he mentioned ways in which you can use the freely available Google Webmaster central tools to boost your website traffic.

Then after a brief respite, Koti Ivaturi who is a Strategist at the Search Quality team at Google introduced the audience to the Google Webmaster Help Forum where, you can post queries regarding the problems you face with your website, and participate in the discussion.

Adam Lasnik later selected two websites at random from the audience and went on to give his views on what could be wrong with these websites and how to rectify their anomalies. By the time he finished the hands-on session, it was time for Lunch (Buffet). And as with all things Google, Lunch was exceptionally good with a plethora of side dishes, salads, fresh fruits, sweets and what not.

Post lunch, Dr Rajat Mukherjee introduced the audience to Google custom search. Dr Rajat is a group product manager at Google working on the Google custom search platform. An alumni of IIT madras, he has worked with Yahoo, IBM and Verity before joining Google. He talked on how Google custom search can be effectively leveraged in various ways by bloggers, web masters, non-profit websites, syndication partners, governments, application developers and search enabled applications.

Ankit Gupta - a graduate from IIT Delhi, now working at Google, conducted a really informative session on building mobile friendly websites.

The last talk was by Deepak Kumar who introduced the Google Analytics and website optimizer to the audience. He explained in some depth the different features of Google Analytics and how it can be used to track goals.

The closing note by Adam Lasnik involved a question and answer session which gave the participants a chance to win some prizes - Courtesy Google.

All in all, the day long Google SearchMasters 2009 conference was very informative and every bit enjoyable.

Google's Bus to Internet Nirvana launched in Tamil Nadu

Google India has launched what is being dubbed the Google Bus. It is a specially furnished bus with Internet connectivity, which will be touring different towns in Tamil Nadu - a state of India. The aim of the bus is to introduce, inspire and educate the general populace on the power of the Internet and how it can benefit common people.

Seeking to attract more people on the information superhighway, the bus will be touring 15 towns in Tamil Nadu over a span of 45 days. India is projected to have Internet connectivity of around 20 million by the year 2010. And perhaps, the Google bus is Google's way of ensuring it gets to garner maximum portion of this pie. Google is providing updates of the bus trip at the specially set up The Internet Bus Project web page.

Google portable device runs Debian Linux

The portable device I am talking about is the T-Mobile G1 Android cellphone. Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an Operating System, Middleware and key applications. Presumably, the T-Mobile G1 contains an ARM EABI architecture which is supported by Debian.

So a group of people (hackers) set out to install Debian on their T-Mobile G1 Android phone. The end result, at the least, is quite interesting. They have succeeded in running a full fledged Debian OS on their G1 Android cellphone at the same time, retain all the features which allow it to function as a cellphone such as receiving and making calls.

Read a detailed writeup on the steps needed to install Debian on a TMobile G1 Phone at the following website. AndroidFanatic.com has released a Debian installer script for your Android cellphone which you can download here.

Also watch the following video which shows Debian running on the Android G1 cellphone.

Business lost due to Gmail security failure

What would you do when on a fine day you wake up and find that your domain name has been grabbed by a cracker ? And you further learn that perhaps the cracker has used your Gmail account to roll out his misdeeds?

David Airey a graphics designer who had to face this very scenario explains in detail the tribulations he had to go thorough because of loss of traffic to his website.

He also lists a site which explains the Gmail hacking technique in three simple steps.

While Google has plugged this security hole in Gmail, it is always prudent to keep an eye on the filters you have set up in Gmail once in a while. Also my suggestion is never click on a link if you are suspicious about its context.

Better safe than sorry right ?

Update [29 Dec 2007] : David Airey gets back his domain name after a slew of publicity from numerous online media, which is a good thing for David. But it still doesn't clear the air of Gmail's security holes. I hope Google does something about this thing as I still believe that Google's Gmail is the best free email offering one can get in the present scenario. Nothing beats Gmail in the number of features, price and design of the interface.

Google incorporates user voting in its search results

The last time I searched for a topic in Google, the first ten results for the topic were pointing to sites with useless information and numerous ads, whose sole purpose of existence was to make money for its owners. I am not claiming that all search in Google provide the same results but spam sites which fight to the top of the heap of search results are a big nuisance for the search engines as well as users alike.

So what are the alternatives at hand ? There are directory services like dmoz.org and Yahoo directories which provide results that are constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. Then there are social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us which allow you to bookmark all the useful content you come across while browsing as well as share it with others.

Google has now embraced and extended the features of directory services and social bookmarking sites into its search results by allowing users to vote for a result and even bookmark them. Here is what Google has to say about this new experiment (And I quote) ...

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you'll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you've made.

To use this new feature, you have to be logged in to your Google account while searching for a topic in Google Search. You can vote up a search result by clicking on a "up-arrow" sign and remove it from your search by clicking on a "X" (X sign). When you vote up a result, Google will insert an orange asterix (*) besides it and for the search terms related to the sites these will filter to the top.

So start voting for your favorite articles in Google from within your personalized Google search. Now you have got the best of both social bookmarking and directory services incorporated into your Google search results.

gPC - $199 C7 powered PC at Wal-Mart running gOS

In this day and age when each and everyone of us are to be affected by the adverse effects of global warming, it definitely makes sense to bring necessary changes to our lifestyles and make it more environmentally friendly. And a good way to take a positive step towards being more green is to conserve the power or energy you consume at home.

And talking about power consumption, did you know that an average desktop PC is a major source of power consumption ? And if you consider many households now a days owning more than one PC, it definitely pays to buy energy efficient computers; those which consume less power.

This is where gPC or "Green PC" comes into the picture. Everex's TC2502 gPC is the first mass-market sub $200 PC which comes installed with gOS which is a customized version of Ubuntu Linux running Enlightenment window manager. The specifications of gPC are quite modest but acceptable. The TC2502 is powered by 1.5GHz VIA C7-D processor, 512MB DDR2 RAM, 80GB IDE hard drive and a CDRW/DVD combo drive. Apart from that it also comes bundled with a keyboard, a mouse, speakers and microphone though no monitor. The gPC consumes modest power when compared to other desktop PCs running the same operating system which gives it the name Green PC.

Fig: Sub $200 Everex gPC

Fig: gPC contains a variant of the 17cm x 17cm Mini-ITX motherboard

Now gOS the OS powering the gPC is a unique OS. While I said it is a customized version of Ubuntu, the word 'customized' is an understatement. gOS highlights and encourages users to use web applications instead of the traditional software for their day to day computing tasks. Google applications have a heavy presence in the gOS such as the Google Docs, Gmail, Gtalk, Calendar, Maps, Youtube, Blogger and so on and they can be accessed right from the desktop with the click of a button (assuming you are connected to the net). So it can be safely said that gPC aka Green PC runs gOS aka Google OS.

Fig: gOS aka Google OS

But Google applications are not all that you will find in gOS, there is Facebook, Wikipedia, Skype and many more web applications. Of course you will also find traditional software like OpenOffice.org, Gimp and so on installed with the option of installing any software you want which will run in Ubuntu which makes it pretty exciting.

Fig: gPC also can be bought with 1 GB RAM and 80GB SATA Hard disk for $100 more.

At present the gPC is marketed exclusively by Wal-Mart and can be bought from here. Those of us who live outside America need not be despondent because the gOS has been made available as a free download by the team behind this customized Ubuntu Linux distribution - Think gOS.

I think this is a very bold but positive move to eventually shift all computing to the internet thus giving a strong push to the term "Network is the computer" and in the process giving new life to energy efficient devices thus perhaps saving tons of energy.

Migrate your custom domain email to Gmail

Google is slowly but surely laying out a plethora services with the customers or end users in mind. Seriously, I will really be at a loss to list all the services that Google provides - there are that many. What really sets Google apart from the pack crowd is its obsession with simplicity and customer comfort in mind. Any day, I would rather use a clean, spartan Google interface to the ad infested slow loading mishmash of a webpage put together by its competition.

Here is yet another interesting service from Google you might be interested in. The service is called Google Apps and it allows those with their own domain to move their entire mail infrastructure to Google.

Daniel Miessler has an interesting take on how he accomplished moving all his mail from his web host to Google all the while keeping his mail id the same ie in the format mail [at] dmiessler.com.

Google provides its Google Apps in three editions depending on the number of features you need. The standard and education edition are provided for free and has pretty much all the features that a small business or an individual needs. But if you want more then they also provide a premium edition for which they charge a nominal $50 per year.

Google rolls out IMAP support for Gmail

IMAP which stands for Internet Message Access Protocol is an alternate but better method of accessing and managing your email. While this protocol has been around since ever, it was seldom implemented by any of the free web email services mainly because allowing people to access their mail using IMAP put an additional strain on the server.

But IMAP has a lot of advantages over its poorer cousins POP and POP3. For one, like with POP, people using IMAP protocol can also access and manage their mail using any of the numerous email clients such as Thunderbird and outlook express but the difference being that any changes you make to your mail in your email client is propagated to and mirrored in your email account at the server end in real time. Secondly, you can view your mail from multiple devices and still you will have access to the same structure. Mails will not be downloaded multiple times as it sometimes happen in using POP. Overall, IMAP provides a more stable experience than POP.

So the big news is Google has finally rolled out IMAP support for Gmail users. But having been using the web interface with the spify Ajax and Javascript effects, I am in two minds on whether to use IMAP or stick for the time being with the web interface of my Gmail account.

Fig: My Gmail settings show the IMAP in the Forwarding email tab section.

If you are opting for IMAP, there are a few things to keep in mind. Them being the actions you take in your email client and their effects in your Gmail account . Here is a table of what you can expect when you take certain actions in your email client.

Action on mobile device/client (e.g. iPhone/Outlook)	Result in Gmail on the web
Open a message	Mark a message as read
Flag a message	Apply a star to the message
Move a message to a folder	Apply a label to the message
Move a message to a folder within a folder	Apply a label showing folder hierarchy ('MainFolder/SubFolder')
Create a folder	Create a label
Move a message to [Gmail]/Spam	Report a message as spam
Move a message to [Gmail]/Trash	Move a message to Trash
Send a message	Store message in Sent Mail
Delete a message	Remove label from the message, or delete the message permanently if the message is already in the Spam or Trash label

[Source: Gmail FAQ]

Lastly I wonder where this puts the other major free email providers like Yahoo and Microsoft's New Hotmail which let alone do not provide IMAP but also fall short on numerous other features which are standard in Gmail. As of now Yahoo is the most used email service in the world but if Google would have its way, this is going to change in the near future.

Questions you have to answer to get hired at Google

I know, who wouldn't like to be hired by Google ? They have set a new standard in best employee retention practices by making it a fun place to work. When I think of Google, the first thing which come to my mind - apart from its obvious leadership in online search - are the free gourmet meals they provide to each of their employees. I have come across rumors of Yahoo employees sneaking into the Google cafeteria next door just so that they could sample the rich variety of food on the menu.

Now that you are visibly drooling, you must be wondering what does it takes to get hired by Google right ? Well the secret of getting hired at Google is to have a knack of thinking out of the box. Not many people can; I certainly can't - a reason I am still blogging ;-).

And Google weeds out the chaff from the wheat (so to speak) by putting the candidates through their special set of interview questions.

I came across Tihomir Nakov's list of 17 questions put to his friend when he was called for an interview at Google. Some of the gems from that set I like are as follows :

• How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
• Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?
• Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
• How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
  

The thing is, many questions do not have just one correct answer; heck some may not even have a correct answer at all, rather I guess the response of the candidate to the questions gives Google an idea about the usefulness of the candidate for the job.

Read the full list of Google interview questions collected by Tihomir Nakov.

[Via. India Uncut]

Is it possible to hack into a gmail address ? - Really scary

Who doesn't have a gmail id now a days ? In my honest opinion, I am yet to discover a more user friendly web mail host. Gmail is non-intrusive, provides all the advanced and usable features such as POP3, mail search and much more.

But recently at a Black Hat security convention, Robert Graham, the CEO of errata security, surprised attendees by hijacking a Gmail session on camera and reading the victim’s email. He went even further by demonstrating the attack by taking over another journalist’s Gmail account and then sending emails from that account. Really scary.

So how do you protect yourself from somebody sniffing your email while it is in transit and then hacking into your gmail account ? There is one way to make it much harder for sniffing your mails. That is by sending and receiving mails using Gmail's SSL feature. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is used to provide secure data transfer across the web, for instance ecommerce sites use SSL to transmit your credit card details. Google provides the SSL feature for gmail and all it takes to enable SSL in Gmail is by typing the address https://mail.google.com instead of http://mail.google.com. Make note of the 's' in 'https'. What this does is instead of encrypting only the username and password, Gmail encrypts the whole mail session and this makes it possible to transfer your mails in a secure manner.

So the next time you decide to log on to your gmail account, use https instead of http and you will be fairly safe from getting your mail sniffed in transit.

Google phone based on Linux in the making ?

After getting tired of all the iPhone hype one saw in diverse media, now the rumor is that Google is planning to roll out its own branded Phone. And one can find sneak peaks at a prototype (See photo below). No details of the specification of the phone are yet available.

The phone is supposed to be an ad-supported phone which means the consumers ie the end users can look for a free lunch by way of heavily subsidised call rates which cost next to nothing (again a rumor). And Wallstreet Journal is reporting that Google has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its cell phone project and is courting U.S. and European mobile operators.

And most obviously the Google phone (for now nicknamed GPhone) will be powered by Linux. Check out this prototype of a GPhone which is floating on the net.

Fig: A prototype of GPhone [Courtesy: VOIP blog]

Google Desktop Search - Redefining search for Linux

Till around two years back, searching for documents on ones computer was limited to finding the files based on certain criteria such as the name of the file, the date of creation and so on. But this had the handicap that if one did not remember the name of the file or when it was last saved on the machine, it was very difficult to find the data and the person was left with the choice of taking wild guesses. And this was the case with all operating systems.

But in the past two years search for the desktop has gone through a remarkable metamorphosis and has transformed into an efficient tool to find exactly what one is looking for. The magic of this efficiency is the way the ubiquitous search tool has changed from just an executable file to a service where it actively indexes all the changes made to the files saved on ones machine in real time. Put another way, now it is possible to search for and find a particular text file say, by providing a phrase or snippet contained in it as the argument to the search tool. And these search tools makes searching your own email, files, music, photos, and more as easy as searching the web.

Apple's Mac OSX has what is called 'Spotlight' and Microsoft Windows has a plethora of tools like Microsoft's own desktop search and tools provided by Yahoo and Google to name a few. Unfortunately, Linux did not have a comprehensive solution in the same lines as those for Windows and OSX. True, we have Beagle - an offering from Novell and it does work efficiently. But it is not as integrated with the desktop as we would like it to be and it is dependent on Mono which is not installed by default on most Linux distributions.

But recently things got better for Linux enthusiasts as Google released its Desktop search tool for Linux as a native build. Because I consider desktop search to be a very important must have feature in all operating systems, I decided to download the Google search tool for Linux and give it a run.

The prerequisites for installing Google Desktop on Linux is that your system should already have glibc 2.3.2+ and gtk+ 2.2.0+ libraries installed. If you are using a modern Linux distribution released within the past one year, you will already have these libraries installed. I was using Debian Etch which already had these libraries and so I was able to proceed with the installation of Google Desktop. Google has released its Desktop search tool in two package formats, them being RPM and Deb packages. And to install either of them you run the respective commands as follows :

# rpm -ivh google-desktop-linux-1.0.1.0060.rpm

... for Red Hat based Linux distributions and

# dpkg -i google-desktop-linux-1.0.1.0060.deb

... for Debian based distributions such as Ubuntu.

The files are copied to the /opt directory and a short cut is created in the Gnome/KDE menu. The first time Google desktop is started, it prompts the user to enable the advanced features (a prudent thing to do) so that non-personal usage data and crash reports may be sent to Google to improve Desktop. This includes summary information, such as the number of searches you do, the time it takes for you to see your results, and application reports that Google will use to improve the program.

Using Google Desktop Search

Now that the installation is out of the way, it is time to find out how to use Google desktop search to find the files on ones hard disk. When Google desktop search tool is started, it minimizes to the task bar on the right hand side where you can access it by clicking on its icon.

Fig: Google desktop search tool embeds in the Gnome taskbar

The first thing I did was set the preferences for searching. To access the preferences of the search tool, right-click on the icon and click on "Preferences..." and you can modify the preferences of Google desktop search tool in a web browser. Here I could set my preferences for indexing my machine. For example, I can order the search tool to skip indexing certain directories, skip indexing a particular type of file(s) such as my web history, email messages etc and even remove deleted files from the search results. Once I have made the requisite changes in the preferences, I could press the "save preferences" button to save the changes.

Fig: The preferences dialog which opens in the web browser.

While it is true that indexing files on ones hard disk is a resource intensive process, Google desktop search tool is quite intelligent. It will start indexing files only when your system is idle. And when you start using the machine, it will stop its indexing and wait till the system is idle again. So I could never detect any lag in system performance when I started using Google Desktop search tool. Another feature I really like about this useful tool is the short-cut provided for it. If you press the 'Ctrl' key twice in quick succession, it will pop up a quick search box where you can type the search phrase. And once you finish searching, the pop-up box automatically fades away.

Fig: Google Desktop quick search box

Features of Google Desktop Search for Linux

• Indexes a diverse variety of files such as PDF, PostScript, info and man pages, text files, email messages, audio and video files (Music, Movies), web history and even secure pages (HTTPS) in web history (if enabled).
• Is easy on the system resources and will start indexing only when the system is idle.
• Can be easily accessed via the hot key (Ctrl).
• Specific files are opened in their respective applications. So man pages are displayed in Gnome Yelp (documentation viewer), text files in the default text editor, web pages in the web browser and so on.
• Rudimentary versioning support for files - Google Desktop creates cached copies (snapshots) of your files and other items each time they have been changed, and stores these copies on your computer’s hard drive. As a result, you can often use Desktop to find previous versions of your files or ones you've accidentally deleted.
• It integrates quite well with the parent Desktop environment.
  

Other details ...

While Google Desktop search tool for Linux is dependent on various open source libraries, the search tool itself is a closed source product as Google has not released the source of the search tool yet.But I guess Google has pertinent reasons to keep it that way.

All in all, I find Google desktop search for Linux a very useful tool which enhances ones productivity by helping to drastically cut down the time taken to find data on ones machine.

Google Talk - Instant messaging client for Linux

Roughly one year back, Google released its popular instant messaging application called Google talk which allows one to communicate with others, similar to the ever popular Yahoo Messenger. Initially Google talk client was available for Windows users only and people using other operating system such as Linux had to do with using the window which was embedded in their Gmail account. The problem was that to use Google talk, you had to log into your Gmail account.

Google has not yet released a native build of Google Talk for Linux. But what has changed is that it has now released a flash version of Google Talk which works in the same manner that an Instant messaging client is meant to work. The convenience for the Linux end user is that now in order to send text messaging using Google talk, one need not log into ones Gmail account but can directly access the Google talk interface as shown in the images below.

Fig: Google Talk web interface (Flash version)

Fig: Google talk - main view.

Fig: View once I have logged in.