jerakeen.org

created 04 January 2010 in photos tagged berlin, google, journeys and latitude.

Google Latitude Location History

http://flickr.com/photos/jerakeen/4243412535

created 17 September 2009 in links tagged android, google, podcast and software.

Huh, where did this come from? Google Labs Android app for finding, downloading and listening to podcasts. Given that 90% of all my music listening is now either through Spotify or podcasts, this is a Good Thing.

http://listen.googlelabs.com/

created 18 August 2009 in stream tagged google and train.

Liked kellan's twitter: [[ Riding the train with the guy wearing the "i have root @ google" shirt, waiting to see if back reads "kidnap me & torture for password" ]]

http://twitter.com/kellan/statuses/3383809308

created 31 July 2009 in links tagged android, google, googlereader, offline and phone.

An offline google reader client for Android / Cupcake. Looks pretty nice. Possibly not as slick as Byline (my iPhone client) but again, that might just be the speed of my device. I’ll try it for a few days.

http://newsrob.blogspot.com/

created 08 July 2009 in links tagged chrome, google and os.

Now Google have another operating system. I guess this is their plan - keep introducing new and weirder operating systems / platforms until the OS market is so fragmented that the web is the only platform that has significant market share.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google...

created 05 May 2009 in links tagged antitrust, apple and google.

The two companies increasingly compete in the cellphone and operating systems markets

Google and Apple compete in a variety of other areas. Apple makes the Safari Web browser while Google makes the competing Chrome. Apple’s iTunes and Google’s YouTube are increasingly competing as venues for distribution of music and videos.

Seriously. No-one cares about competing in the web browser market any more. Google only have a web browser because they want more people on the web. Not to mention the fact that both those browsers are webkit based..

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/technology/companies/05...

created 17 February 2009 in links tagged gdata, google, python and spreadsheet.

Writing to a google spreadsheet from python, and incidentally then using that spreadsheet to generate live embeddable graph images.

Is google spreadsheet a spreadsheet, or an API-accessible database/key-value store with a web GUI on it?

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/write-google-spreadsheet-fr...

created 12 February 2009 in stream tagged battery life, google, iphone and sync.

New twitter: Based on 2 days usage, Google iPhone sync is _destroying_ my battery life. This is annoying.

http://twitter.com/jerakeen/statuses/1202151197

created 09 February 2009 in links tagged contacts, google, iphone and sync.

What you’re seeing is artifacts of the “Preserve Address Book data” setting. Well-behaved applications shouldn’t show these characters (they’re invisible Unicode characters) but many do. Presumably the source of my contacts sync noise

http://groups.google.com/group/spanningsync/browse_thread...

created 09 February 2009 in photos tagged contacts, finsburypark, google, iphone, mobile, sync and unitedkingdom and is geotagged

Google Contact sync (http://www.google.com/mobile/default/sync.html) made my contacts ugly. (Since fixed. Spanning sync problem, documented here, and the fix works perfectly)

http://flickr.com/photos/jerakeen/3267952304

created 29 January 2009 in links tagged analytics, google, javascript and jquery.

Using jQuery to automatically mark up all outgoing links on a site so that Google Analytics can track them.

http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/2008/01/06/track-outbound-...

created 10 December 2008 in stream tagged google, lt and shock.

New twitter: Thanks for feedback on bookmarking solutions, all. I think I'll go with <shock>Google Bookmarks. Not wonderful, but does what I want..

http://twitter.com/jerakeen/statuses/1048954468

created 10 December 2008 in links tagged api, bookmarks and google.

Google bookmarks doesn’t really have an API. Which is annoying. It doesn’t even seem to obey any of the many many Google authentication systems, so to use it I have to screen-scrape the login dialog.

However, it will serve all the bookmarks as a mozilla bookmarks html file, so I can write a script that pulls the bookmarks down to the local machine and puts them somewhere predicable, so I can use Launchbar to access them quickly. And I get a backup.

All in all, it’s not a bad solution to the ‘I want to put my bookmarks in the cloud’ problem I’ve been trying to solve recently.

http://lnkr.mobi/lnkr/google_bookmarks_api/

created 10 December 2008 in links tagged api, google, reader and rss.

unofficial api access to Google Reader data. Not that I have a use for it, but it’s nice to see it

http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2005/12/google-reader-ap...

created 08 December 2008 in links tagged developer, g1, google, hardware and phone.

Google G1 developer purchase programme - you can now buy SIM-unlocked and flashable G1 phones for a mere $400 + shipping. Which isn’t too bad.

http://code.google.com/android/dev-devices.html

created 05 November 2008 in stream tagged drapes, google and languages.

Liked Aral Balkan's twitter: [[ Adding support for other languages to Google App Engine today is like sewing a new set of drapes for a house that doesn't have any walls yet ]]

http://twitter.com/aral/statuses/991827551

created 08 October 2008 in stream tagged dopplr, google, google maps, hoxton and recognise.

Liked Andy Piper's twitter: [[ Evidently both Dopplr and Google Maps don't recognise "Republic of Hoxton" as a valid location. ]]

http://twitter.com/andypiper/statuses/950991782

created 05 October 2008 in links tagged calendar, google, ical and sync.

By subscribing to remote calendars in Google Calendar, then syncing those calendars to the local computer, you can persuade MobileMe to sync them in turn to me.com, and thus over-the-air to the iPhone. Which is a lot of hops, and you still won’t be able to choose to not push certain calendars to the phone. But it’s better than the current situation. Requires buying software, though.

http://blog.busymac.com/blog/2008/09/how-to-sync-cal.html

created 02 October 2008 in stream tagged developers, google and ruby and is geotagged

I will be attending Ruby Manor on Saturday November 22

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1110036/

created 19 September 2008 in stream tagged google.

New jaiku: It seems that Jaiku will talk to Google Talk IM accounts again. hurrah!

http://jerakeen.jaiku.com/presence/44930389

created 19 September 2008 in photos tagged google, london, memorystick, minifig, unitedkingdom and usb and is geotagged

I find this vaguely unsettling.

http://flickr.com/photos/jerakeen/2869955413

created 18 September 2008 in links tagged caldav, calendar and google.

Thought I’d bookmarked this, and couldn’t find it. So I’m bookmarking it now. Setup instructions for the Google Calendar CalDAV server, which has flaws but is still pretty good.

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=e...

created 16 September 2008 in stream tagged google.

New twitter: I'm confused by gwt. Do google use it for anything? What's it -for-?

http://twitter.com/jerakeen/statuses/923152737

created 07 September 2008 in stream tagged google, leak memory and task manager.

New twitter: In the Chrome task manager, watching Google Reader leak memory at 4k/second. Scary. Also, nasty head cold. Weekend going very poorly so far.

http://twitter.com/jerakeen/statuses/912780598

created 29 August 2008 in links tagged google and maps.

Apparently , “internet maps such as Google and Multimap were good for driving but left out crucial data people need to understand a landscape”. Which is rubbish. Firstly, as blech says, “if the OS had licenced its data to Google Maps, then maybe people would use it”. But mostly I hate this old-fashioned attitude that there’s only one possible view of a map, and that it therefore has to contain everything. As Google say in the article, churches, shops, landmarks, etc, are on the map. They’re just in an information layer that’s not visible by default. The ability to see a custom map with the information relevant to me at a particular moment is great. The interface for displaying this stuff is lacking. But I’d much rather approach the problem from this direction than trying to deal with a single map for all purposes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7586789.stm

created 13 June 2008 in links tagged addon, firefox, gears and google.

Finally, Google Gears for Firefox 3.

http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/fly-gears-03.html

created 04 May 2008 in links tagged appengine, google and unicode.

the google appengine uploader isn’t unicode aware. Grrr. Easily fixable, but still an irritating oversight.

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id...

created 22 February 2008 in links tagged google, googlemaps and maps.

Google will serve static maps images. Awesome.

http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/2008/02/google-maps-wit...

created 04 February 2008 in blog tagged api, google, shelf and social.

The current trunk version of Shelf uses the Google Social Graph API to figure out who owns the web page you’re looking at. If it can’t find a person in the local address book who owns the URL, Shelf can now ask Google if there are any other pages on the internet that link to that page with a rel=”me” relation, and look for those pages in the local address book. So for instance, if I visit my linkedin profile page, Shelf will display context about me, as linkedin links to http://jerakeen.org/. Likewise, any page that I link to from jerakeen.org will be considered mine as well. This elevates Shelf’s context-finding ability to practically magical levels in some cases.

Alas, there are disadvantages. Most superficially, the context-deriving part of Shelf was never designed to make long-running network queries, and so lives in the GUI code. Calling the Google API blocks the GUI thread. This sucks. Fixable, of course, but it makes the current development version somewhat choppy.

More serious is that Shelf now sends the URL of every web page I visit, and the homepages of everyone who’s twitters I read, and the base URLs of every RSS feed I read, to Google. I want to look for context in the email signatures of people that send me mail too, so soon it’ll be sending the homepages of everyone who mails me as well. Some people would consider this creepy. Actually most people would consider it creepy. And I don’t blame them. I don’t really have a solution for this one either, other than a big clearly-labeled option to turn it on.

On the API

For this sort of use the Social Graph API is great. Although all this information is available through just fetching the source of the current page and looking for links myself, there’s no way I’d want Shelf as a local GUI app to be doing that sort of thing. Google aren’t exposing anything I couldn’t have found out myself, but they’re doing it in a simple and fast manner, and using the API is trivially easy. No API keys, dealing with XML, registering my app or anything. I love that they just went with JSON as the format, and hang everything else.

Where’s the next release?

On a related note, Shelf development has been a little slow recently. Partially I’ve been distracted by shipping important features for Dopplr, but mostly it’s because I’ve hit a sort of psychic barrier of progression. Shelf needs a decent caching layer. And a threaded context discovery layer. And a much better event-driven model for display stuff, so it makes a more controlled number of network requests to fetch RSS feeds. Basically, now I’ve explored the problem, I want to rewrite the whole thing to take advantage of my understanding. And that’s boring. So I’m not doing anything. I’ll get over it.

created 28 November 2007 in links tagged google, gsm, location and maps.

The new google maps for mobile will work out where you are from the local GSM cell ID. And it’s really good at it.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/11/google-maps-for-...

created 18 September 2007 in links tagged docs, google and presentation.

Google docs presentations. Meh. I just really like the video about it. Very silly style.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/our-feature-presen...

created 28 June 2007 in links tagged desktop, google and linux.

Google desktop for linux!

http://desktop.google.com/linux/

created 30 May 2007 in blog tagged django, google and python.

I’ve moved the DjangoKit source and documentation (such as it is) into Google Code at the request of Rob Hudson, so other people can work on it. Other people? Work on my code? Crazy.

created 24 May 2007 in blog tagged dopplr and google.

More Google Earth / Dopplr stuff - this time it’s an overlay of planned trips. Your planned trips, in fact, which isn’t terribly useful, but it’s a new API, and I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to do overlays for everyone you have data for. Then I need some way of establishing time data, or something. Plans, plans, plans.

created 20 May 2007 in blog tagged dopplr, earth, google and maps.

Thanks to a combination of dopplr, XML, mattb and Zimki, you can now display the locations of your Dopplr fellow travelers in Google Earth.

http://flickr.com/photos/mbiddulph/506393746/

read more (112 words)..

created 04 June 2006 in links tagged google, maths and programming.

[[ It is not sufficient merely to prove a program correct; you have to test it too ]]

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-re...

created 15 January 2006 in links tagged desktop, google, javascript and plugin.

http://desktop.google.com/script.html