I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

The Four Critical Security Flaws that Resulted in Last Friday's Hack - CloudFlare blog

Outstandingly detailed postmortem (with timeline infographic!) from Cloudflare on how their systems were compromised despite having perfectly reasonable security in place for their Google Apps accounts.

Chrome Networking: DNS Prefetch & TCP Preconnect - igvita.com

I love the relatively simple heuristics the Chrome team have come up with to speed up network connections.

If Google's Really Proud Of Google+, It Should Share Some Real User Figures

Plea to Google to stop with the horseshit Google Plus “user” numbers. To make it simpler for them to count me accurately, I deleted my Google Plus account.

Chromium builders vs Chrome builders - Chromium-dev | Google Groups

Always check what’s on your clipboard before hitting send…

Rethrick: The Mythical Man-Month

Behind-the-scenes look at Google Wave - more around the struggle of big teams than about the product itself.

“Instead of shaving one Yak, you’re shaving the entire Yak pen at the Zoo, and pretty soon traveling to Tibet to shave foreign Yaks you’ve never seen before and whose barbering you know little about.”

The most important thing I found out on the Google intranet today

GOOGLE COOKIE MONSTER T-SHIRTS!

Slide into Google

kho’s excellent piece on the Google acquisition of Slide. For the most part, I’m keeping my big mouth shut for fear of saying something I shouldn’t, so I’ll just link to this and say: “Hurrah!”

Who can accuse Silicon Valley of being too US focused?

10am: “Google Voice for everyone”

UPDATE 10.53am: “Google Voice is still limited to everyone in the U.S. for now”

"Cons: Highly dependent on Google account."

Interesting perspective from Ben Ward on Android.

“I’ve just endured a week of reading Google’s ‘opener than thou’ harping, with ever increasing levels of irritation, and all along Android is locked in to their services? What bullshit.”

As a geek who cares a bit about openness, I live with my iPhone, but wish Android was a real competitor for my affection. It’s clearly getting to a stage where HTC can produce a quality smartphone — fast enough and featured enough to keep most people happy.

But, strangely for Google, I feel that my geeky desires are being ignored. Unless you buy the single “Google phone”, you’re not buying a particularly geek-friendly device. Due to Google’s Apache licensing, the phone makers and cell companies have enough control to ensure an experience where I have *less* control than with my iPhone.

Buzz launch wasn't flawed, Google's intentions are

Really insightful post on what stinks so badly about Google Buzz. Slamming it into Gmail was just such an ugly, out-of-place, hacky move for market-share — no different than the approach that cluttered up the homepages of Yahoo, AOL, MSN, etc.

Integrating translation into Google Goggles

This is a cool prototype — Take a photo of some forrin text, and Google’s servers can OCR and translate it to English. Potentially wicked handy tool for travelling.

Chromium Blog: 40,000 More Extensions!

Hadn’t noticed this — Google Chrome has built-in support for Greasemonkey user scripts. Chrome has been my default browser for a while, so it’s great to have my favourite tweaks back.

namebench

Handy open source tool from Google to analyze DNS servers and see if it might be worth switching away from your ISP’s default.

Google Chrome Frame

Clever Google hack to inject the Chrome/WebKit rendering engine into IE on a per-site basis. If users can be convinced to install this, it could make life easier for webdevs — but the implementation would have to be pretty seamless before I’d use this on a consumer website.

What is a Browser?

Google question 50 people in Times Square. Reminder to the nerds: Users don’t know what a “browser” is.

Google's Wave of the future is genius, but will it work?

If you don’t have time to watch the Google Wave presentation video (1h20m), read this, Andy Ihnatko’s piece on why it’s got so much potential.

The extreme Google brain

A beautifully incendiary post about “Google’s Aspergerian nerds” and their complete misunderstanding of visual design.

Plaxo's Personal Card: Introducing Two-Click Signup, an initiative to improve the user experience of OpenID; first test now live with Google

This is good: The underlying goodness of OpenID, used in a way which completely hides itself from the user.

Google Code Blog: Native Client: A Technology for Running Native Code on the Web

New browser plugin from Google that runs “native” libraries in place. Lazy hacks are no doubt currently sharpening their “Flash killer” typing fingers.

Let me google that for you

Awesome — a more polite version of justfuckinggoogleit.com!

Google Flu Trends

Benevolent data-mining of Google’s search logs — but it does raise the question of what else they can predict… Does Google have “insider trading”-esque omnipotence for the whole stock market, for example?

xkcd: Youtube Audio Preview

YouTube implements a feature that featured in an xkcd comic last week. In response, current.com is looking into including velociraptor protection in our next patch release.

Google 2001

In celebration of their tenth birthday, Google have resuscitated their search index from January 2001. Ah, the good old days, when “ROD BEGBIE IN VIRGIN SNOG SHOCKER!” turned up on the second page of results for my egosurf.

Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project

Technical details from Google (in comic-book form) for their upcoming browser. Some good ideas in there (splitting out tabs as separate processes definitely makes a lot of sense), but does the world really need another web browser?

Google Translate now for iPhone

Never spend money on a foreign phrase book again — translate phrases on the fly with Google Translate.

Political videos meet Google speech-to-text technology

Google has a first stab at making video content searchable, across a selection of political speeches. Will be interesting to see how well this works.

RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS - Google Code

New Radiohead video was shot without cameras, instead using lasers to get 3D data which was visualized. Chunks of the data are available from Google, so you can have a go at processing it yourself.

Protocol Buffers: Google's Data Interchange Format

A smidgen of Google’s secret sauce — a lighter-weight-than-XML data interchange format, with heavily optimized cross-language serialization routines. Just the thing for shuttling and persisting data.

Brand new Google Reader for iPhone

Lovely AJAXy enhancements to Google Reader make it a wicked quality experience on the iPhone.

OAuth support for Google Accounts and Contacts API

Google announce alpha OAuth support, a day after Yahoo announce they’ll be rolling it out. Giving your password to an untrusted site just became even dumber. “This is our first step towards OAuth enabling all
Google Data APIs.”

A Question of Programming Ethics

Pretty much inevitable — An app that asked for your GMail username & password was harvesting them. One point to the “Why we need OAuth” party.

Android in Harvard Square

If you’re interested in developing for Google’s new cellphone platform, there’s a developer day in Cambridge in a couple of weeks. Wonder if the iPhone SDK will be out by then too? Would be interesting to compare-and-contrast.

Remember The Milk + Gmail = task management goodness

Brilliant use of Google’s newly-exposed Gmail API to seamlessly blend to-do lists into your Gmail UI.

YouTube - Authors@Google: Randall Munroe

Talk and Q&A given at Google by Randall Munroe, author of XKCD. Notable for a question from Donald Knuth about 22 minutes in!

Official Google Reader Blog: Attack of the interns: recommendations and drag-and-drop

Two “why weren’t these already implemented?” features finally added to Google Reader. Thank you Google interns!

GmailGreasemonkey10API - gmail-greasemonkey - Google Code

GMail’s new interface exposes an object with the specific intent of making it easier to write less-fragile GreaseMonkey scripts which interact with the application. Nice idea.

oink.cd - the number 1 site in the world for waffle recipes

Oink points to Google which points to a blog post which points torrent trackers which point to music.

Sorry, Google Reader users...

A bug introduced by Google is causing my feed to break their RSS reader. I’ve reported it, so hopefully it will be remedied quickly.

Google Translate: "Sarkozy is chirac"

Google’s new text translation service was created by running machine learning over UN documents. Unfortunately, its “learning” for politicians’ names is.. erm.. “interesting”. Try also “Sarkozy sarkozy sarkozy”

(Since Google will probably fix this, at the moment it translates “Sarkozy is chirac” to “Bush is classless”)

OK/Cancel : Please cancel my Google

This is ace. A random blog entry on OK/Cancel is coming up as the number one hit on Google for “cancel google”. Observe the comments thread, and fear for humanity.

“pollyanna209 wrote: help get google off my computer you have no right pushing google without permission from me i pay the bill for comcast and i want internet explorer back this is rude of you people!”

Jaiku | Google Q&A

Google have bought the Finnish Twitter-a-like Jaiku. I always liked Jaiku’s S60 cellphone software — wonder if this purchase has anything to do with Google’s cellphone ambitions? (And I hope it does better under Google’s roof than Dodgeball did)

Powerful Pointed Presentation (old copy) - Google Docs

Playing with Google Docs’s new Presentations module. This is the result of uploading a fairly complex 7Mb PPT file — the last revision of “Powerful Pointed Presentation” before I switched to Keynote. Can’t seem to find any way of having “notes” or “commentary” appear with your presentation, but the Jabber chat is pretty cool.

Google Earth Flight Simulator

Nice little easter-egg in the latest version of Google Earth.

Video with new YouTube advertising

YouTube have launched their advertising model, and it doesn’t look too bad at all. Fifteen seconds into a clip, a little transparent-ish message pops up at the bottom of the video, which you can click on for more information (pausing your video), or close if you like. Ten seconds later, it fades away again.

Official Gmail Blog: Help make a Gmail video

Fun little collaborative video project from GMail.

Dojo Offline on Google Gears

Avoiding any problems of “competing” standards, the Dojo Offline project are interfacing with Google Gears as an optional offline storage platform. Great to see.

Google Gears (BETA)

Firefox and IE extension from Google which enables offline webapps. Currently works with Google Reader, but not GMail yet.

Google Street View - 242 Powell St, San Francisco, CA 94102

Good to know — the hotel we’ll be staying at in San Francisco next week is right above a Lush store.

Google LatLong: Introducing... Street View!

Cool new street-level 360º views on Google Maps. Only a handful of cities so far.

Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History

Splendid article explaining the whats and wherefores of Google’s new “Web History” feature, so you don’t have to install it to experiment.

Official Google Blog: Your slice of the web

Somewhere between kinda-cool and terrifying: Allow Google to know Every Single Page you visit, and they’ll let you search against them. Yes, useful, but there’s no need for this to happen on Google’s servers in the sky.

gdata-python-client - Google Code

Python library for working with Google’s GData web services (Calendar, Blogger, Picasa et al)

Google Homepage introduces dynamic themes - Download Squad

The new Google personalised homepage themes are gorgeous. Updating them based upon time and local weather is just ridiculously lovely!

Google Testing Blog: Introducing "Testing on the Toilet"

Google posts flyers giving tips on automated testing inside toilet cubicles. Good god, that’s the creepiest thing I’ve heard of in a while.

Official Google Reader Blog: I like big charts and I cannot lie

Google Reader do cool personal “what have I been reading” datamining. Google Reader’s come on by leaps and bounds since its launch — If you’re still using Bloglines, it’s well worth trying out again.

Google Patents

It’s a bit wonky on its first night out, but this new Patent search from Google is pretty powerful, indexing the full text of all the patents. Only appears to hold granted patents though, not applications.

Google Mobile - GMail

Java applet for cellphones which, on my Nokia 6682 at least, provides a better email experience than the built-in mailreader.

Google Code Search

Google search for open-source code. Is there a use for this beyond doing mass-searches for vulnerabilities?

Official Google Blog: Your inbox for the web

The new Google Reader UI is a vast improvement over their initial release. Still not something I’d use, but definitely recommendable to feed-reading newbies.

Viral Video Chart

What videos on YouTube and Google Video are getting the most links from blogs. Alternatively, your guide to what the hell those strange noises are you’re hearing from neighbouring cubicles at work.

Google Music Trends

Google appear to be building their own scrobbler — The new Google Talk client lets you opt to send your Winamp/iTunes/etc playback data up to Google.

Goggles :: The Google Maps flight sim

Swoop over the world in this little flashapp powered by the Google Maps graphics.

Google Code - Project Hosting

Google offer free Subversion hosting and bug tracking for open-source projects. Missing in comparison to Sourceforge: Web Hosting, Downloads, SVN web-browsing and adverts galore.

Google Minesweeper Launches

The Windows app they *really* have to clone for the web if they want to create a GoogleOS.

Google Browser Sync

Interesting offering from the Googleplex — Sync your bookmarks, saved passwords and cookeis across your Firefox installations, via Google’s big-ass database in the sky. If there were a way to do this using my own server, I’d be all over it.

Google Notebook

Google’s new “Gather webpages and search results” tool is launched. I quite like it — It’s a different approach than del.icio.us (there’s no tagging, and you’re not limited to sorting by time), but I think it might fit in with people’s usage a lot better.

Google Trends

Google Fight Pro — Fun datamining showing search volume over time.

Drunk Men Work Here - On Bots

Visualizations on how Yahoo, Google and MSN (and comment spam bots) spider through content.

Google Calendar data API: time to starting coding!

Google Calendar has an Atompub-based API.

Google Calendar

The stuff of rumours no more. The integrated iCal search is nice — I was able to add the Red Sox schedule as an overlay to my calendar with very little thought.

Google Jobs: Engineering Director - Boston

Looks like the rumoured Boston Googleplex is pretty close to happening. “We have an exciting opportunity to expand our Engineering operations to Boston.”

Google Video: From the Googleplex

Google share some videos of various talks given at the Googleplex. Some really interesting-looking stuff here.

Joyeur: Public Betas Are a Sham

Spot-on Gruberrant.

Google Jobs - Software Engineer - Boston

I knew Google had an ad sales office in Boston, but it looks like they’re now hiring techies here too. Is a Beantown Googleplex on the cards?

The Prejudice Map

“According to Google, people in the world are known for…”

Official Google Blog: Setting trends

Google now give you some stats on your searches if you turn on Personalized Search, but the results for me were pretty dull — Turns out I rarely repeat a search.

Google Safe Browsing for Firefox

Extremely well-designed anti-phishing extension from Google.

Google: Ten Golden Rules

Some interesting notes on Google’s culture. “Nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike management practices used at some other well-known technology companies.” Snerk.

Google Analytics

Google continues their quest to consume every nibble of data on the internet — This time, site access logs.

Risk via Google Maps

Best use of a mapping API yet.

Google Adds Tagging

Tag your previous searches so you can find them again. Handy, but needs a better UI (perhaps embedded into the Toolbar?). I want to be able to specify *just after doing the search* that I want to tag the resulting site, rather than having to go back in history.

Google Reader

Google’s long-rumoured RSS-reader launched. Tagging, keyboard navigation, and server-based? If they can up the responsiveness of the server, Bloglines may well be fucked.

A lot of people have the phone number (214) 748-3647

Which, coincidentally, is the largest number that can be held in a 32-bit integer. Remember, kids: Just because it’s a number, doesn’t mean you should store it in a number database field.