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Twitter gets hacked by Iranian Cyber Army and Google gets it all on cache

December 18, 2009

A short time ago Twitter went offline following reports that the site had been hacked by a group posting under the name Iranian Cyber Army. If you're quick you can head over to Google and get a cached copy of the page minus the graphics. This screenshot came from Google's cache a short time ago.

This may be one of the first times such a high-profile hacking incident was caught, nearly in real time, by Googlebot.

Google will OCR some PDFs

November 9, 2008

At the Reno airport catching up on some news reader backlog I came across the Uncletterer headline Google can now OCR all PDFs. Jumping out of the newsreader and to their site it was exciting news. Well it turns out the headline is misleading. Google can, and will, OCR public PDFs. It won't, however, do any OCR on the documents in private spaces including Google Docs.

I wrote some time ago about the plan for scanning documents and getting rid of our filing cabinets. Well with all that's been keeping us busy since then it hasn't happened. The scanner part of the workflow is great and I have some ideas on what I want to do with the documents once they are OCR'd but haven't taken the time to work out the workflow.

On a completely unrelated note why is it that TSA spends so much time looking at my bag of clothes and completely passes on the bag I forgot to take my ziplock of fluids out of?

College student looking for an awesome summer job? Read on...

March 12, 2008

Are you a college student looking for a cool summer job? Would you like a job that will put Google on your resume? Or would you prefer a job where you can work in the comfort of your own home while sipping coffee and ordering pizza? How about a job where you can make a big impact in a short period of time? What about a job where you can do all of the above?

iPhone, gPhone, Androids and the company you keep

November 7, 2007

So the much awaited gPhone, nee the Android OS for the open handset alliance, debuted this week. Yawn. So Google's going to hock an OS that while it has the trendy underpinnings of Linux and the Open Source code-word attached won't at the end of the day (or year rather) give us much more than we already have on our Blackberries, Treos and iPhones. (Not to even mention the plethora of Windows Mobile cell phones with these capabilities).

Summer of code and other Drupal greatness

August 21, 2007

Google's Summer of Code 2007 came to an end earlier today. The Drupal project is left with some great new innovations. And on top of interesting things like the DAST project for automating deployment and staging there is a new Autopilot module that looks promising. (Haven't tested it yet but will soon!) Many great new things to test and of course sites to build. It is also worth noting that everyone interested in Drupal should stop over and take the survey to help give some feedback about where Drupal should go in version 7 and beyond. Which reminds me it's time to get cracking on testing with Drupal 6. New file management here I come!

Of Google and Microsoft

August 18, 2007

I just finished The Google Story and it is great. The look into the way a company can run is invigorating and the focus on the Google Economy is also interesting. Following that read which ends with a look at how Microsoft is responding to the Google threat it is ironic to go back and read the Microsoft attack on Google from a few months ago. The difference in the companies becomes clear in the contrast of Google's attempt to democratize information and Microsoft's attempts to keep it contained. Or it could be more a ploy to help keep attention focused away from a failed operating system release.

Mob turns on Google

May 10, 2007

It seems the lynch mob after Google this morning over this result. It seems that if you search for "She Invented" in Google it returns "Did you mean He Invented?" at the top of the results. Of course with little research many are running off suggesting this is some kind of evil, anti-feminine plot. In reality it has far more to do with how Google spell check works. As that page points out when you search for "United Stats" it asks if you meant "United States". It isn't that "United Stats" has a mis-spelled word but rather that most people who search for "United Stats" modify their search to "United States". This brings up the question of how many searches one would have to do to game the system. Imagine what could be done with searches for "bad companies" and having "Did you mean our main competitor" pop up. Maybe that's the next step in search engine optimization/marketing -- blackhat version.

Silly limits

January 1, 2007

Google's Apps for Domains has been in beta for a while now. The service is a nice way to combine several great Google services with one's own domain. Personalized start pages, calendars and email are a few of the services available. Nevertheless, Google also makes some silly choices. For example in signing up for a new domain name today the following email arrived:

Thanks for your interest in Google Apps for Your Domain. Unfortunately, we are not able to invite your domain example.com into the beta at this time, because you have reached the maximum number of domains per administrator. If we increase this limit, we'll let you know by email.

Now I wonder how they imagine this actually works. Do they imagine that people who are astute enough to reach the "domain limit" will balk at having more than one Google account to sign up additional domains with? That domain administrators reaching this limit do not have more than one Google account already would come as a bit of a surprise.

Google Data API for Drupal

December 29, 2006

One of the projects for Google's 2006 summer of code was the GData Module in Drupal.

My thoughts on the applications of this range from a community event calendar and either a supplement or replacement for the event module that would interface to Google Calendar. Also the ability to have a Google Calendar tied into a Drupal work flow would be excellent.

Google maps adds features

April 15, 2006

Though you might draw a different conclusion from the titles of the last several posts here this hasn't become a Google cheerleader site. However, Google is simply doing cool stuff that works well. A friend pointed out how Ask.com has better maps, but they don't work on Macintosh/Safari.

However this evening as we were sitting at home a call came out for the fire service and as I usually do I typed the address into google. In addition to the map the small locator is in the bottom corner of the map. It is handy and the arrow allows you to show and hide the locator as well as using the box to navigate the thumbnail map.

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