Google announced an advertising deal with eBay this week, and as a side-effect, the Google Talk team is now looking into possible interoperability with Skype, which eBay acquired earlier this year. Sweet!

On Friday, one of my managers at Google gave one of my co-workers and me his Lotus Elise for the weekend.


Yeah, that Lotus Elise; I couldn't believe it when I first heard it either!

And what an amazing work of engineering it is. I don't drive a stick-shift, so I just sat at the side and enjoyed the ride as we sprinted across the city on empty roads, taking off like a bullet at every green light. Before you know it, you're darting along at over 90 mph in a 45 mph zone. :D

On the way back to the Googleplex, we called my roommate, Aaron, and asked him if he wanted to take it for a quick spin. That made his day too. Check out the rest of the pictures.

Wow, what an experience...!

Last week, Adam Pash at LifeHacker posted a list of "Top 10 Ubuntu apps" that actually very closely matches the list of stuff that I install right after initial setup on my own Ubuntu box. As you might expect, these apps also work on any other Linux distro.

Ubuntu, in my opinion, already has the best out-of-the-box experience compared to every major Linux distribution that I've tried during the last several years (and my roommate, who was previously using Fedora will agree), but installing some of these apps will almost certainly make your life easier. VLC, for example, plays pretty much any video file you throw at it, and Beagle works pretty well as a desktop search tool. I had XGL running on my old laptop a few months ago, and while it's very cool stuff, it still isn't quite done yet, so be prepared for occasional crashes and other oddities should you choose to install it.

So yeah, go ahead...check out the list, and play with the apps that you haven't tried out yet.

Despite all the usual warnings associated with installing beta software on production machines, staying on the bleeding edge sometimes does have its advantages. Here's a little story to illustrate this point...

Some of you might know that I run the Folding@Home distributed computing client on my main desktop. This machine has been running the monthly Vista builds for a while now. The other day, I accidentally hit the switch on the power strip, and the machine turned off. Since the Folding client was in the middle of writing to the disk when this happened, the checkpoint data file was half-written, and the client had to restart the computation from scratch when the system restarted.

So I went into the Folding@Home directory, and clicked the "Previous Versions" button on the Explorer toolbar. I was presented with a list containing versions of the files as they existed the in the past. I selected the version from the day before, allowed Vista to do its thing, and restarted the Folding client. Now that the checkpoint files were intact, it was simply able to resume from where it had left off the previous day.

Okay, so the Folding data was not really all that critical. But had I accidentally deleted or lost something more important, "Previous Versions" would be the first safety net that I could have fallen back on. And it's always nice to have a safety net... :)

Google interns and our mentors/hosts went on a San Fransisco Bay cruise last week. Lots of great views of the city, the bridges, and the bay itself, along with good food, music, and (unanticipated) fireworks at the end. All in all, a fun evening. :)

I've got some pictures up.

Last week, GoogleWiFi, the free city-wide wireless network, was made publicly available to everyone in Mountain View. All you need is a Google account and you can sign-in to get free WiFi almost everywhere in the city. A coverage map that shows the locations of all the access points is available. Google Secure Access, a simple VPN client, is also provided as an optional download to encrypt data on the channel.

I couldn't blog about this earlier, but I've been using the network for a couple of months now as part of an internal test, and it's been working very well, except for a day or two of downtime. Since the access points are attached to lamp posts all over the city, the signal strength can be quite low indoors. Our solution was to use a pair of Linksys WRT54G routers that we had lying around - one with the official Linksys firmware, and the other with the Sveasoft firmware that enables Client Mode. The router running in client mode is placed near a window, and the antennae pick up the signal from the nearest GoogleWiFi access point. The second router is connected to the first one via an ethernet cable, and runs in regular AP mode to provide wireless access to all the machines in the apartment. :)

This is a great first step from Google, and I'd love to see more companies joining in the effort to make basic internet connectivity ubiquitous.

I was in Redmond last weekend for the Microsoft Student Partners summit, and I came back with the mother of all freebies - a Gateway M285-E Tablet PC. :)


Tablets have come a long way since they first entered the market. Unlike some of the first-generation underpowered machines, this thing actually packs quite a punch. The model I got includes an Intel Core Duo T2400 at 1.83GHz, 1GB of RAM, a 60GB SATA drive, and an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400. I'm running a (very recent) build of Vista on it, and it's working great with the full Aero UI and all. The battery life with the 12-cell unit is excellent - Gateway claims 8 hours, and based on what I've seen so far, it can at least do more than 6. Plus, the optical drive bay can hold an additional battery, so it could easily do a transcontinental flight on a single charge.

It was great using the machine on the flight back - I folded the screen back, giving me plenty of room, played Hexic, Inkball, Ink Crossword, and tried some of the other bundled pen-enabled apps. The handwriting recognition engine in Vista is even better than it was in XP (which was pretty good in the first place!), and using the pen actually feels pretty natural. I would have loved to have one of these back when I joined uni. Having handwritten notes that are fully indexed and searchable is so convenient. In any case, I have a couple of more quarters of coursework, so it's not too late. I bet Marc would be pleased; his old blog was one of the things that first got me interested in Tablet PCs. :)

Jeremy Zawody wonders what percentage of subscribers to his feed use Bloglines.

Out of curiosity, I checked my FeedBurner stats and got some numbers. The top three most popular aggregators among my subscribers are Bloglines at 28%, NewsGator Online at 19%, and Firefox Live Bookmarks at 9%. The rest use one or more of the following - the Windows RSS Platform, Google Desktop, NewsGator Outlook Edition, Safari RSS, FeedDemon, MagpieRSS, Omea Reader, RSS Bandit, Sage, SharpReader, and Thunderbird. A couple of people are using aggregators that FeedBurner doesn't recognize.

The fact that Bloglines and NGO take the top spots doesn't come as a surprise to me. I've used both (I use NGO these days), and found them to be the most responsive and reliable web-based aggregators out of the ones I've tried. There are a bunch of fancy new AJAX-based aggregators out there too, with new ones coming out every so often, but most of them are still lacking quite severely in performance and responsiveness in my experience, especially when handling a large number of feeds. It's also not surprising to me that the top two spots are both taken by web-based aggregators rather than desktop applications. More and more people are starting to use multiple computers (one at home and one at work, or a desktop and laptop, for instance), sometimes even running different operating systems, and using a web-based aggregator gets rid of the pain associated with keeping feeds in-sync across multiple machines.

When the first beta of Google Talk was released almost a year ago, I put up a first-impressions post, particularly emphasizing the superb quality of the PC-to-PC calls feature. Unfortunately, Mac and Linux users were out of luck, since the official client was (and still is) for Windows only.

Last evening, I installed a copy of Tapioca on my Ubuntu setup to test it out. Tapioca is an IM client for Linux that includes libjingle support, which allows users to make voice calls to other Google Talk users. I called my brother in New York, who was using Google Talk on Windows, and establishing the connection was as quick and painless as using GTalk itself. The latest beta of Jabbin, another Linux client, apparently also allows you to do the same.

Now someone just needs to show the Mac users some libjingle love soon. I hear the Adium guys are cooking something up.

One of the things that just never felt quite right to me was the quality of font rendering on my Linux setups. I've tried poking at nearly every setting in the GNOME fonts panel, but there was always something amiss.

Today, I stumbled onto what I think is one of the best tweaks for Ubuntu that I have ever seen. The patches were dead-simple to install, and the whole process only took a couple of minutes. And then, when the system came back up after the reboot, there was a look of utter disbelief on my face. It looked like someone had gone and replaced the laptop's screen. The fonts looked absolutely gorgeous!

If you have an Ubuntu box and an LCD display, you really want to install these patches...now. And if you're using another distro, find a way to do the same. Trust me, your eyes will thank you a million times over.

T-Mobile USA released an official ROM upgrade for the MDA that includes the Messaging and Security Feature Pack (MSFP) for Windows Mobile 5.

One of the coolest features included in MSFP is Direct Push, which keeps your Inbox, Contacts, Calendar and Tasks always in-sync with the data on your Exchange 2003 SP2 server. What that means is that if you send me an email right now, it should appear on my cellphone within the next 10 seconds, no matter where I am, as long as I have a cell signal.

I installed the new ROM over the weekend - a completely painless, five minute task. I didn't need to backup anything even though the device was going to get erased because all of my data, including my phonebook, sits on the Exchange server and is one sync away. It's just such an incredibly seamless experience.

This week, Ron Avitzur visited Google for a tech talk to tell us about the origins of Graphing Calculator 1.0, the math application he developed, and that Apple bundled with the very first PowerPC computers more than a decade ago.

It's a fascinating, humorously-told story of two software engineers who evaded Apple's building security and worked without pay for several months to deliver something that they were passionate about. Definitely a story you should read and enjoy.

What's really cool is that even today, about 20 years later, Ron continues to work on Graphing Calculator full-time, adding new features, fixing bugs, and taking advantage of new advances in technology. :)