Thursday, March 30, 2006

Finally: got the new Gmail improvements to show up

For those of you that don't know, recently Google introduced a whole bunch of improvements to its Gmail service, including "chat" integration (providing part of the functionality of Google Talk) and searchable chat logs right inside your Gmail window, with all sorts of AJAXy crap in there.

However, all of my contacts seemed to have got these upgrades, while I've been stuck with the older version of Gmail. I could select to have my chats saved in Gmail from Google Talk, but I couldn't actually access them!

I finally found out what the problem is. For some reason, the Chat functionality (and Web Clips, and Quick Contacts) are only activated if you have the language set to US English. So, if you had similar problems, I strongly suggest setting the language back to US (I had mine set to UK).

I'll be leaving mine on US to make sure I get any future upgrades straight away!

Update: It is now possible to use Gmail with Chat in Opera - simply mask as Mozilla using one of the latest betas under site-specific preferences, and all should work fine.

Saturday, March 11, 2006

Aur-Phala forums

Someone pointed me in the direction of the Aur-Phala forums earlier on today, and what I saw there has shocked and appalled me.

image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums

image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
Seems like a curious teenager, right? Wrong. image from aur-phala forums
A 41-year-old guy. Great. image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums
image from aur-phala forums

Sigh..

Google's CL2: calendar app, with screenshots

James Duncan has a mirror of the leaked screenshots of Google's CL2. (They were originally leaked by TechCrunch.)

Looks really nice, and I can't wait to get an invite - but apparently, at the moment there are only 200 users with no invite system whatsoever. :-( Two of the nicer looking screenshots:

First screenshot of Google's CL2

Second screenshot of Google's CL2

I'm really looking forward to trying out this automatic parsing of sentences in the above screenshot - if that is what it does. From what I can tell, you would type in " Dinner with Michael at 7pm tomorrow" and Google would give you an appointment titled "Dinner with Michael" at 7pm on the next day. (Just thought that needed some explanation :P) This would be a really great feature to see implemented into any other calendar app, but I still like the idea of having calendar integrated into Gmail. Synchronization with PDAs and smartphones would be cool too (or even iPods?). At the moment, I'm using Mozilla Sunbird.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Blog spammers

Bastards. I keep getting people adding spam comments to sites like the following:
http://www.imcmake-money-fast-online.com
(no link provided to avoid increasing their PageRank)
Unfortunately, I guess a lot of people don't check out the comments on their blogs. They seem to be in the same general format - "Hey blogger, your site is really informative! I'll check back later. Regards, make money online." The bolded text is always a link to their site with some sort of keyword that they presumably want to come up high in the search engine rankings.

The other sad thing is that apparently it works, or else these guys wouldn't be able to afford hosting fees. People actually search for "make money fast" and such and end up getting redirected to these sites, and apparently pay for whatever the hell they are selling. It's sad to think that people really believe this kind of crap:

Image taken from incmake-money-fast-online.com

Oh well. Looks like I'll have to keep deleting the comments, since I'm not turning on comment moderation. I don't even know why people keep doing this since rel=nofollow has been implemented on Blogger. :/