Google Gears - Enabling the Offline Web

Google Gears a new Beta service and FireFox extension from Google allows you to create web applications that store data offline on your harddrive instead online. After installing the Add On on FireFox you can check out several demo applications on their developer page to check how it works. Every application that want to use the service needs to be aproved by the user in order to use Google Gears with a special web application.

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

I also noticed that Google Reader is now using it too. After installing Google Gears and visiting Google Reader I was able to download all data from my subscriptions to view it offline. Google Gears is storing the data somewhere - don't know where at the moment - on your local harddrive. They store the data in a fully searchable relational database which is installed on your local computer.

google gears offline web developer code day

Joost is Spamming Me!

Joost, the video streaming plattform seems not to care about it's users. I am not a Joost user - but I remember that I signed up for a beta key - some month ago - when it was called "Venice Project". From this day on, I got a lot of mails from them - to signing up for their account, entering a Joost Name, invite friends to Joost or what ever.
Two weeks ago I send an email to their support mail address with the subject "Please remove" as described in their email at the bottom line to unsubscribe from their mailinglist.
Today, I got a new email from Joost with more spam and this time it is enough Mr. Joost. We all hate spam - so why are you using your email addresses to spam users even if they don't want any email from your company? The best thing: In their latest mail they removed the correct email address to unsubscribe from their mailinglist. Instead of an email address they simply put in the url "http://support.com" - come on guys - do you think this is fair - this is bullshit!

You are receiving this email because you are a Joost beta tester
(The Venice Project). If you no longer want to be a beta tester,
please send an email to support.com with the subject line:
"Please Remove"

joost spam email unsubscribe

Hooray, no spam here! The Google Mail Experiment (Day 3)

Day 3 on my Google Mail Spam Experiment. To remember: I setup a new email adress with a very abnormal address. I chose a number of letters and numbers and form them to an address like this "asjdnf3873hfn834hf@gmail.com". Now I am waiting for my first spam in my inbox - but I don't get any spam. I am more and more sure that I never will get any spam on this email adress. I am spam free :) Keep you updated.

google mail spam

Google & Privacy

"Don't be Evil" - the credo of Google is nice - but is it true? - or can it be true in our world.? When a company like Google is collecting many forms of data minute by minute from its users - can Google survive without any bad influence?

Orli Yakuel over at Go2Web2 Blog has found a movie and a website that seems to worry about all this. I think the problem for Google in the next years will be: How to collect data to give it away for free to all users but show users that this data will not used against them in any way. For now I use Google services a lot and I don't think that I will stop it. Because every service that you need to work with - needs data from you. Otherwise you can't use a service or it is useless. When you use an accounting software on your computer - you need to type in data to see your monthly results. The only thing that make you feel save about your accounting software is that it is not online and the data is stored on your harddrive. But as you all know - your personal harddrive isn't a save place anymore! You can go either the save way and turn back into accounting on paper or you can trust companies that store your data online.

google evil privacy data

The Google Mail Experiment (Day 2)

Some days earlier I started the Google Mail Experiment to check how long it will take to get spam emails to a newly registered Google Mail account. Well, nothing special to report yet- all I can say: there is no spam in my fresh registered Google Mail inbox. Which is great but I am sure I will get some spam - soon or later - also when the mail address is not normal. Updates soon.

google+mail gmail spam experiment

Google Mail Server Certificate Trouble

Since 30 minutes I see that GMail has some problems with Server Certificates. Seems their certificate expired and now they try to renew it - I wonder why this is not going automaticly. I have login problems from Google Notifier and also FireFox showed me a Server Certificate Error during login to my GMail Account. AdSense has this problems since a year or so as well.

google+mail gmail server+certificate expired

The Google Mail Experiment (Day 1)

Did you ever ask yourself - why you get a hell lot of emails in your GMail Spam folder, even if you never gave away your email address. Well, you all know that spammers using databases with names and send out emails to all kind of word/name combinations. This is the reason why you get spam mails even if your email is something like "old_grandma_1890@....".

Day 1:
Today I start my GMail* Anti Spam Experiment. My idea: I create an email address with a bunch of random numbers and letters and create a GMail account. My email address is now looking like that "zzgd6fwttdgbds3rsfvz@gmail.com". I know this email address isn't very comfortable for giving it to your friends - but this doesn't matter now.

What I want to test is, how long will it take - til I get my first spam on GMail with this address. Will I ever get spam - I don't know. If not, this will be my new email address and I will be spam free. If I will get spam - Google is either selling email address to spammers (hey... just a joke!) or spammers have a sort of tool to create such crazy email addresses as well.

*) you can of course use any other email account to test this

Updates soon.

gmail google+mail spam email googlemail

PageRank Go Crazy

Normaly WebSquirrel has a PageRank 4 - but today I saw something strange in my Google Toolbar PageRank display. (See image) :). Also when I reload the page the PageRank is still the same. I gues it was a FireFox draw error or something, cuz after restart FireFox - my PageRank returned to the normal value.

pagerank google websquirrel firefox google+toolbar toolbar

Try this on Windows

Since two month I am working on a Mac and I must say that I feel more relaxed during my work. I don't know why but it feels different. Perhaps I don't need to be scared if anything went wrong and I loose my work - because I don't loose it - don't know.
Today I wrote some invoices and when I was finished I hit the print button - so simple.... but WAIT... the printer was not turned on and the connection of my printer to my iMac is done via an Apple Airport Express Station via LAN which was not connected as well. Now I did something that I never tried on Windows - because I think it will not work. I saw the print manager working in the dock and meanwhile I turned on the printer and pluged in my airport. It took some time for the airport and also for the printer but finaly the print manager did his job and printed my invoices without any problems. I am sure this will not work on Windows - you probably need to restart Windows and I get a hell lot of error messages. I love my iMac :)

imac mac apple windows printing airport

GMail with Bigger Attachments

I am unsure how long this new feature is up - but I am sure I didn't saw it yesterday - so it must be quite new. Googles GMail now offers larger attachments up to 20MB in size. Google doubled the attachment size and now we can send even more things via GMail. Hell, I want to see their datacenter.

There is also a funny video of the Google engineers showing all the great features of GMail.


gmail bigger+attachments storage

Google Reader Notifier for your Mac

Many of you using Google Reader to track new posts on blogs and news sites. When you come from the Windows World and did use ClipFolio to track latest posts and RSS Feeds you know there is no answer to this on a Mac - as far as I know.

Today I found a great piece of Software for my Mac. The Google Reader Notifier! It is not an official Google release but this doesn't matter. It works perfect and I can highly recommend it. Google Reader Notifier will "growl" when new posts are available in your Google Reader subscriptions. It supports Growl messages in different styles to display the latest incoming posts with the news source and the first lines of the post. A small icon in the menu bar can be activated too. If you click on the icon you can watch the latest headlines. Move your mouse over a headline to see the full text of the news in a yellow bubble. You can even mark items as read while holding down the command key.



The tool is very easy to use and you can change different settings. Take a look - you can download Google Reader Notifier over here.

google reader mac os+x apple osx googlereader

Good Bye YouTube Account!

Yesterday I closed my YouTube account and deleted all my videos upfront. I am not a heavy uploader but I sometimes fall into the YouTube mood and watch a lot of movies.
So why I did it? Well, I don't want to be sued someday for only "watching" videos that are not allowed to watch because the content is not legal in terms of copyright and IP restrictions. So you need to ask yourself - is it allowed to watch this video? When I look at the upcoming Viacom legal actions against YouTube I see there will be more coming soon!

I don't want to get letters like this :)
"Dear YouTube User, yesterday we identified activities from your account and IP that you are watching an illeagal movie on YouTube that are against copyright restrictions. Please pay $1.500 by next week. Use our user friendly payment options - you can even pay via PayPal."

youtube viacom

Google Notifier - Error 404

Since some days I try to access the Google Notifier page for checking what's new. But I always see a 404 Error - the page is not available. Are they working on a new version or whats up? I also got an error message while adding an event via the Quick Add feature. It says "401 - token expired"?

google notifier error google+calendar

Translating On A Mac!

As a full time German resident with not that good english writing/talking know how it is importand that there is some sort of software that do the job for me to translate some words every day. Some month ago, when I was working on a Windows PC, I used Babylon and were very happy with it - easy to use, small and fast. The best thing was the hotkey to translate words that are below your mouse pointer.

Since I switched to the Mac I am searching for a Babylon Tool for the Mac.... but there is no tool that is doing the same than Babylon. I really wonder why there is a lack in easy to use translating software for the Mac... I know there are several that you can buy - but all miss the function of the hotkey translation which I used so often in Babylon.

Cuz I am a developer I talked to myself "Lets code some" and contacted a well known German company that offer a great online dictionary to ask them, why there is no Mac version of their software and if there is a chance to cooperate in building a free Mac App and get access to their database - online. As I expected from this company - the answer was negativ with some strange excuses and less innovativ ... we don't talk to you damn coder.

This is a call to all companies with a dictonary database - I want to code a Mac Application - please contact me or show me your translation software with a hotkey function like Babylon! I will buy it!

translation babylon

Where are Internet Explorer 7 Users?

Today I noticed that SiteMeter has a new look and also some new options. But I don't want to write some lines about SiteMeter, my main goal was to see how many users from WebSquirrel using which browser. It is really interesting that Internet Explorer 7 is still behind IE 6 with only 12%. Over 52% uses Firefox to visit the WebSquirrel page - thats absolutly amazing - and 8% still using FireFox 1.


internet+explorer+7 ie7 firefox microsoft

TechCrunch: How Everything Started

Do you know Michael Arringtons first blog and do you want to take a look into the story behind the first days of TechCrunch, how Michael moves to the Bay Area and more. One of the first posts about TechCrunch can be found here on Mikes old blog. I really like the FeedBurner stats showing the first readers of TechCrunch.

techcrunch blog michael+arrington

Breakfast 2.0 - A Fantastic Idea

Today I took a look at the fantastic new German company called MyMuesli. On there website you can mix and create your own Cereals from 70 different sorts of types and ingredients. They say you can create up to 566 trillions of possible combinations so you need to be very hungry to test all of them :). When you mixed your Cereals they fill it in a nice box and send it to your address. At the moment they only deliver inside Germany but I am sure they will improve the service step by step. All Cereals are 100% nature-leave with no chemical or other addons. Happy mixing and good luck with this great idea! If you are familiar with the German language - read more at their website.

mymuesli cereals muesli my+muesli