gPC

You may have seen that Everex launched a $200 computer that runs Linux. It looks like Wal-Mart sold out of them, but not to worry: more are on the way.

Why should you be interested? Well, instead of Windows, it comes installed with gOS, which is a version of Ubuntu that is customized to work well with web-based tools from Google, Facebook, and Skype.

First, the box. The “gPC” stands for Green PC, not Google PC as some people have thought:

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Solicitations in the mail

Matt Cutts says

I still hear from people who get confused by solicitations in the mail. Here’s an example one:



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California wildfire relief

If you want to donate money for the people affected by wildfires in Southern California, Google has a page up. The Associated Press collected a good list of other organizations as well.

International bugs..

Matt Cutts says,

Every few weeks I like to call for Google bugs. I’ve got a joint meeting tomorrow with several people to talk about potential bugs, so if you know of any, feel free to mention them in the comments. To remind people of what I’m looking for, here’s the guidelines:

Just to be clear, pruning will be ruthless for this post: I only want to see specific queries that seem to show bugs, and the more concisely you can explain something, the better. I’ll probably keep just the first example of what looks like a bug. I’ve got a meeting at noon tomorrow to talk about search bugs, so I’ll probably lock the comments after that.

Please don’t include stuff like “it’s a bug that you (do something I don’t like, don’t index/rank my site as much as I want).” Instead, I’m looking for specific bug reports to pass on. (Read more...)

Engineering grouplets at Google

Google engineer Bharat Mediratta discussed some Google engineering customs in the New York Times yesterday. Bharat goes beyond 20% time to talk about some different aspects of being an engineer at Google:
Grouplets bring together like-minded engineers who care about things like documentation, improving our build system, or testing. It’s an informal process lets engineers contribute on the topics that they care about the most.
Sometimes we have “Fixit days” where every Google engineer is encouraged to tackle a specific topic. From the article: (Read more...)

Useful Google feature: better date search

As Google has gotten fresher, our advanced search page started showing more useful options for restricting searches by date. The shortest time frame used to be something like three months; now you can look for things that are less than 24 hours old.

What GoogleOS noticed is that the advanced date search affects a url parameter called “as_qdr” and Chitu figured out some of the possible values:

The nice thing is that you can change the value of as_qdr to custom intervals. Here are all the possible values of the as_qdr parameter:

d[number] - past number of days (e.g.: d10)
w[number] - past number of weeks
y[number] - past number of years
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Hack your iPhone: toolchains and cross-compilers

The iPhone can run “web apps” very easily. These web apps are really just specially-crafted web pages that take advantage of the iPhone’s built-in web browser. Such web apps can be very cool, but they don’t provide the full functionality that you can get from an actual executable program running on the iPhone. A “native app” that runs on the iPhone can read the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer, for example.

So lots of people want to write independent/third-party native apps that run on the iPhone. The problem is that while Apple hasn’t squashed the development of native apps, they haven’t helped, either. For example, Apple hasn’t provided a toolchain to compile programs for the iPhone. (Read more...)