I just came so very close to losing my afternoon’s work. I started a new Google Document at around 1500, and it’s been open ever since. I noticed at around 1800 that the ’saving’ message was there continually, but I couldn’t say when it had appeared. I left it for an hour, came back and there was no change. ‘Save and Close’ didn’t work, so I closed the tab. I refreshed Google Docs to be informed the document hadn’t changed since 1507. I opened the document and saw a blank screen. Oh, crap.

Thankfully, a little stab of paranoia had saved the day. When I originally went to close the tab the ‘you have unsaved changes’ message popped up. It always does, but for once I paid attention. I select-all/copied the entire document as a last ditch backup, and thankfully this was still in the clipboard a few moments later¹. I lost the page breaks, but that’s no big deal.

That’s the first time I can recall Google completely killing a document. That would have been bad. So, if in doubt, reload Google Docs in another tab and check the modified time.

1. actually I had another backup layer, as I run the security-nightmare but oh-so-very-useful Ditto [↩]

I’ve recently been using Google Notebook to collate research images for an upcoming project, but there’s an annoying problem: the images all get weirdly stretched for GN’s interface. It keeps the correct height, but sets their width to 245 pixels. I’m not sure what the rationale is, but it’s pretty irritating.

I’ve found what seems to be a permanent fix, though: ‘pop-out’ the notebook, and in each individual note select the picture then click the ‘remove formatting’ button at the top of the window.

Now if only I could talk Google Docs into exporting said notes without timing out…

I don’t use Google Maps for Mobile often, but when I do it’s a godsend. It’s slow, though. Trying to pin down the current position takes most of the time - invariably I’ll type in road names / an area and after a 20 second delay it’ll come back with ‘location unknown’, or lots of possibilities, most in Scotland. It probably won’t be long before all phones have GPS built-in, but for now Google have launched ‘My Location‘, which uses phone-mast signals to trace you to a circle with roughly 1km radius. Mine is 1.7km, centred roughly on Stratford. I can then search the local map for a street name, and I’m sorted. It’s possible to search for local businesses too - this would have been handy a couple of weeks ago when I was trying to locate a particular restaurant in the centre of London.

I’ve never understood all the attention paid to Powerpoint, and the fuss over Google’s new online presentations tool was baffling. Who uses presentations? Well, apparently everybody but me and, it turns out, I’ll be using them a lot during my degree. I had to figure out how they work in order to talk for 10mins about Philippe Halsman last Friday.

I used Google Presentations for its convenience - I shuffle between a few places in the week, and it’s handy to edit from wherever I happen to be - but was very impressed overall. The interface is snappy and fairly free of annoyances. New slides are created quickly, and always appear after the currently selected slide - handy when you’ve over 30. They can also be drag-and-dropped into the correct order, rather than having to mess about with ‘move up/down’ buttons. The template system is initially a little confusing: when you create a new slide you’re given five basic layouts, which seems limiting. Actually all of these are completely editable, and are nothing more than a starting point. I used many images of different sizes, and GP was clever enough to resize them appropriately for online storage - I didn’t need to download 700k pictures during the presentation itself, but I couldn’t detect any drop in quality.

Actually presenting it worked ok - I used Firefox on a Mac, and there was no difference from my tests at home (although I didn’t know how to go full screen, unfortunately). All pages are pre-loaded, so there was no delay in moving to the next slide. GP automatically loaded the chat window for use with online presentations - people could connect and view remotely if they wanted - but thankfully it was easy to close. The only slight disadvantage is having to log into Google Docs and having your recent documents projected for all to see (I couldn’t care less, but I imagine this would bother some), although I realised afterwards that you can get around this by publishing the presentation and typing the URL directly. Alternatively it’s possible to export from GP into an HTML slideshow, and I had one of these on a USB stick in case the laptop had no internet connection - the only issue with this is the local javascript throwing security errors (IE7 whines).

I think it’s a decent system, but there were a few annoyances. It could do with an align option for blocks, as centering images on the page by eye is difficult. It’s also not currently possible to export in powerpoint format (.ppt files - but not .pptx - can only be imported), although this wasn’t a problem for me. The Printable view could do with some love, as my printer was happy to spread a single image across two pages - I think there should be a way to separate pages in CSS? My only other issue was being unable to check the order of slides from my mobile - I’d planned to write out my script on the train, but stupidly neglected to print out everything. Apparently there’s a mobile interface if you have an iPhone, but nothing for us plebs yet.

Most other people used Powerpoint and dropped the file onto a USB drive, which also worked well. I don’t have Powerpoint so can’t compare the two applications directly, but I didn’t find myself wishing for more features online, although admittedly I don’t know what I’m missing. Overall I’d recommend GP: it’s intuitive and, unlike other online office products, as fast as a desktop app. The convenience of being able to edit anywhere is, as ever, a killer feature.

New gmail code is being rolled out at the moment, and it just hit my account. There are no major UI changes, but behind-the-scenes it’s apparently changed substantially. Differences I’ve spotted:

• Emails are pre-loaded, so there’s no delay when an individual message is opened
• The contact manager has been revamped and is much easier to use. I’m hoping there’s now an API, so we can finally sync gmail contacts with phones/outlook/whatever
• Searches are now bookmarkable, for example: http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/chickens
• There’s an ‘add event invitation’ option on new emails, linking directly into google calendar
• ‘More actions’ now contains ‘mute’, previously only available as a keyboard shortcut - this automatically archives email threads that are of no interest
• ‘More actions’ also contains ‘filter messages like this’, which sets up a filter with the appropriate fields already filled
• What was orange is now yellow

You’ll need your language set to ‘US English’ if you want to receive the new version (major difference - ‘deleted items’ becomes ‘trash’). It certainly feels snappier to use, although that yellow is pretty sickly. Google Operating System also reports:

• Individual emails are now bookmarkable
• The back button works (although I thought it did before)
• The pop-up ‘contact card’ that appears when you hover over a contact name is easier to use (good - damn thing always used to disappear half a second before I’d copied the address)

There’s apparently a new user-interface in the works, too, although there are no hints when this will be released. Unfortunately most greasemonkey scripts are now broken due to the code changes, but an upcoming API should prevent this problem reoccurring.

It took a while to surface, but over the weekend I finally spotted the obvious possibilities raised by Google Spreadsheet’s new xml-linking features. Abi and I currently enter isbn, title and author data into our bookselling spreadsheet by hand, and this gets old quickly. More so for Abi, who has to check the individual Amazon pages to gauge current prices. I knew of Amazon’s API, and was planning to create something to help speed this up, but the only programming language I was ever any good at was Visual Basic, which isn’t around much any more, and I’m seriously rusty at the little .NET I once knew. So I wasn’t quite sure of the best way to approach things, and GS’ new hotness seemed like an ideal solution, if I could get it to work. Happily it did, and I can now enter an ISBN and have GS download the author, title, amazon URL, amazon price and lowest used price data automatically. Here’s a basic way to set it up:

1. If you haven’t got one, sign up for an Amazon Web Services account and find your Access Key. This’ll let you make 1 request per second, although in practice this is fairly flexible.
2. Take a look at the Amazon ECS API, and determine the appropriate request. It’s a web service, so supplies data after a standard browser request. Here’s the query I’m using, with an example book:
   

   http://webservices.amazon.co.ukonca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService &SubscriptionId=[your_ID] &ResponseGroup=Medium &SearchIndex=Books &Operation=ItemLookup &IdType=ISBN &ItemId=0593055489

   The most important part of this is the ResponseGroup, which determines how much data Amazon supplies. Medium is a good all-rounder, but there are plenty of more specific request types. Specifying ISBN as the IdType allows the use of 13-digit ISBNs, which a standard ItemLookup doesn’t - Amazon’s documentation claims it doesn’t work on the UK site, but it does.

3. Test out the request in your browser window, and make sure it’s supplying all the necessary data.
4. Now it’s time to figure out the XPath statements you’ll need to extract the relevant info. If, like me, you haven’t the foggiest idea what XPath means, don’t worry. It’s pretty easy, and the W3Schools tutorial takes 10minutes to explain everything you’ll need.
5. In this case, I want to extract the Amazon price, the lowest used price, the URL of the detail page, the (first) author and the title:
   • The price I want is in the FormattedPrice element, underneath the ListPrice node. There’s more than one ‘FormattedPrice’ element in the results, so I need to specify its parent node. The appropriate XPath statement is “//ListPrice/FormattedPrice”
   • The lowest used price is the same element, but under LowestUsedPrice, so: “//LowestUsedPrice/FormattedPrice”
   • The URL is in the “DetailPageURL” element, and there’s just the one of these, so: “//DetailPageURL”
   • Similarly with title: “//Title”
   • There may be multiple authors, and grabbing all of them would mess up the spreadsheet formatting we’ll come to in a minute. So I’ll just grab the first one: “//Author[1]“. The number should, I think, be a zero to adhere to the standards. But, it isn’t - zero doesn’t actually work. Go figure.

   These can all be combined into one XPath statement with | operators, so the final result is:

   “//ListPrice/FormattedPrice | //LowestUsedPrice/FormattedPrice | //DetailPageURL | //Author[1] | //Title”

6. Ok, fire up a spreadsheet. Create a column for ISBN, price, lowest price, url, author, title and finally another for processing.
7. GS uses the ‘importXML’ function to import data. This takes two arguments - the URL and the XPath statement. Enter an example ISBN, then, in the ‘processing’ column:
   

   =importXML(”http://webservices.amazon.co.uk/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&SubscriptionId=[your_ID]&ResponseGroup=Medium&SearchIndex=Books&Operation=ItemLookup&IdType=ISBN&ItemId=”&B2,”//ListPrice/FormattedPrice | //LowestUsedPrice/FormattedPrice | //DetailPageURL | //Author[1] | //Title”))

   The &B2 at the end of the URL appends the ISBN number, so be sure to change this to the appropriate cell.

8. Google should now go fetch the XML file, process it according to your XPath statement and…dump all the data into the ‘processing’ column. If you click on the cells containing the data you’ll see they have ‘Continue’ formulae. This (currently undocumented) formula simply takes data from the array stored in the first cell. So “=CONTINUE(H2, 5, 1)” shows the data from the 1st child (if it exists) of the 5th item of the results of the XPath processing - the book Title. Copy and past these statements to the appropriate cells on the correct row.
9. We need to stop Google filling the subsequent rows, so enter a random text string in the second row of the processing column, then enter a different ISBN into the first row to refresh the query. Google will again fetch the data, then ask if you want to overwrite existing data. Say no, and it’ll only populate the Continue formulae we just set up on the correct row.
10. CTRL-D the formulae down a few rows, and voila, you’ve got an easy-to-use ISBN query spreadsheet that uses one query per row. If you want to tidy it up, wrap it in an if statement like:
    

    =if(B2=”",”",importXML(”[your_URL]“&B2,”[your_XPath]“))

    isblank() doesn’t seem to work properly with cells that have had content deleted.

Problems with this method:

• Queries are currently limited to 50. And that’s 50 queries present, rather than active - hiding them behind an if statement based on the contents of another cell doesn’t work. This is easy to get around via copy-and-pasting, but could be annoying in some circumstances.
• Queries update every two hours. This is unnecessary for this purpose, and I’d personally like to see unlimited one-time only queries that don’t update every 2 hours; hopefully that’ll come.
• Amazon theoretically have a 1 query-per-second limit. I’ve actually dumped 25 ISBNs at once and had results appear instantly, so I think they must have a flexible policy, but it’s a little risky and I don’t want my account suspended. This is another reason I’d like a one-time-only query option. It’s probably wise to play it safe by cutting-and-pasting the data into another table before closing the sheet.
• If Amazon doesn’t have a particular datum, the XPath query will be in the wrong order. For example, some annuals and readers digest books have no author listed, so the ‘Continue’ statement that should refer to the 4th field (in this case, the author) instead refers to the title. I can’t think of a way around this without multiple queries.

Hopefully I’ll be able to refine this in the future, but it’s not a bad start, and I’m very impressed that the functionality exists at all.

Google Spreadsheets now has an autofill box, meaning I can drag a cell to automatically extend a series. So if I enter ‘Monday’ and ‘Tuesday’ in consecutive boxes, then highlight and drag the node, it’ll fill in the rest of the days of the week. This is a useful feature in offline applications, and will undoubtedly come in handy online, but there’s a hidden payload: press control while dragging and it’ll look for correlations in Google Sets. I entered ‘monkeys’ and ‘cats’, and it extended the third box with ‘iguanas’. ‘Han’ and ‘Leia’ produced ‘Luke Skywalker’, ‘C3PO’ and ‘R2D2′. Now that’s pretty cool.

GS also added support for external data. Online XML, HTML, RSS feeds, and .csv files can all be referenced, with imported data updated every few hours. That’s extremely powerful, especially when you combine it with the ability to publish - I can now link directly to the data in another user’s Google Spreadsheet. Since the code’s already there, I imagine this’ll be extended to Google Docs pretty soon.

Google Reader now finally has a search box, and also maxes out counts at 1000 rather than displaying ‘100+ items unread’. That’s pretty much all the missing functionality I wanted.

Finally, Gmail and ‘Picasa Web Albums’ users can now buy more storage space, with 6gb costing $20/year. 250gb is $500/year. Clearly, nobody needs 250gb for email and pictures…Google drive, anyone?

Google today released an update to Google Earth which adds the night sky, complete with images of galaxies and nebulae, as well as planetary motion, wikipedia links and constellations. A cheezeball video on the GE website introduces the basics (update: much much much better video here). This sounded most exciting, so I downloaded the update.

It is, initially, underwhelming.

The positions of the objects base themselves around your location in Google Earth, so I set it to my address and hit the ’sky’ button. I saw black, with lines and coloured dots. Not as beautiful as I was hoping. There is no artificial horizon, so you start essentially floating in the middle of a black sphere. A myriad of constellation lines and names takes up much of the screen. I guess some people are interested in arbitrary groups of stars; I’m not. Thankfully, they can be easily turned off in a Layer panel similar to Google Earth’s.

Slightly disappointed, I played around with the layers. ‘Planets in Motion’ adds a slider, which when dragged shows the movement of the planets over the next three months. This was kinda fun. My search for Saturn failed, so I scrolled around manually until I spotted it, and zoomed in.

At which point: wow.

Once you start to zoom, GS downloads higher-resolution images in the same way as GE. And what images! Starry Night and other astronomy programs can map the stars, but don’t use real photographs, and it makes a hell of a difference. I haven’t tested it fully, but they seem to cover most, if not all, of the sky. The milky-way is a patchwork of glowing dust. The ring around Polaris is a bit weird, but everything else seems to be very high-quality. Hubble images are correctly located - check out the orion and horsehead nebulae (searching for stars / other objects seems to work better than planets). And you can keep zooming and zooming and zooming.

There is nothing like looking at images of billions and billions of stars. It’s astonishing.

The red and blue dots represent interesting sights: the Messier objects are included, all with associated information, along with the 12000-object New General Catalog and Yale Bright Star catalog. Between them these pick out the most interesting items in the sky, and each click brings fresh wonder.

The only obvious omission is the artificial horizon. Perhaps they’re concerned about competing with commercial products such as Starry Night. But Picasa is free and possibly the best image-manager out there, regardless of price, so this seems unlikely. Hopefully they’ll add one later - being able to view an easy-to-understand map of the sky above your head would be wonderful.

Google’s massive database means there’s huge potential here. I want to zoom in on Mars and see the Spirit and Odyssey photos. I want to see moon craters, comets and the real-time position of the international space station. I want to be able to switch to infra-red.

Don’t let the initial impressions put you off. Search for ‘ultra deep field’, and you’ll see objects which were exposed at the rate of one photon per minute. This is light from over 13 billion years ago, when the universe had barely begun. This is an amazing thing to release for free, and worth spending time with.

Update: From the discussion forum:

We had the horizon in during beta testing and the testers recommended
removing it because it was very confusing. Instead, you go somewhere
on Earth and then click SKY and see what is overhead.

We could consider bringing the horizon back, but it was confusing.

We really want Sky and Earth integrated….someday

The ecliptic could be added. We will think about it!

That’s a shame…Hopefully enough people are complaining about it that it’ll be back. The same post pointed out that CTRL-L will display the sphere’s grid, which makes the view a little more comprehensible, but is unfortunately bright red…

Not to detract from the point of his post, but Norm is currently the only person on the Internets to have used the word ‘wallonkies’. And I think we can agree it is an excellent word. I was going to call it a googlewhack, but that requires a two-word phrase.

His post only went up at 14:28. Google is fast. So I guess he won’t be the only result for long.

I had a great Valentine’s Day. I spent a lovely evening with a delightful companion, and I miss her today. Must. Concentrate. On. Work. Elsewhere, Google had a clever logo, xkcd was sarcastic (but has been beautifully touching before, so I don’t think he means it) and T-Rex wasn’t around, but a couple of years ago was rightfully getting told off by Utahraptor.

While on the Valentine’s theme, I really like this:

I sometimes see these things and later find out it’s a terrible photographic cliché, but I don’t think that matters.

A few months ago it became apparent that people with Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange accounts were having problems with email. My post on the subject has had a lot of attention. The company’s email servers were repeatedly listed on spam databases, and email providers all over the world were therefore rejecting all received email. F/W/O showed no interest in fixing the problem. I don’t know whether it’s working yet, but I don’t really care - their service was appalling and I don’t recommend anybody use them again. Unfortunately there was little that could be done at the time without changing email address, a process which is never fun. Recent updates to Google’s Gmail service, however, have provided a way around the problem without changing address.

It works by replacing your current email system with Google’s free Gmail service. Gmail can now automatically download your F/W/O emails, as well as make it look like all email you send is coming from your old F/W/O address. It means moving to a web-based email system (or not, with a little more configuration - see optional section) and giving your email password to Google (I personally don’t think this is anything to worry about), but email recipients should notice no difference and it should work exactly the same as before, except that all email is actually coming from Google’s servers, which won’t be rejected as spam.

Initial experiments suggest this should work:

1. Go to www.gmail.com and sign up for a free email address
2. Log into your gmail account (called Google Mail in the UK), then go to ‘Settings’, and the ‘Accounts’ tab
3. New users should have a “Get mail from other accounts” option (if this option isn’t there try changing the display language to ‘English (US)’ in the ‘General’ tab). Click ‘Add another mail account’.
4. Enter your F/W/O email address and click to continue.
5. Enter your F/W/O username (this is your email address, as far as I know) and password. The POP server is ‘pop.orangehome.co.uk’ on port 110. You might want to tick ‘Leave a copy of retrieved messages on the server’ while everything is getting set up, then remove it later. People familiar with Gmail can apply labels etc.. When all details are entered, click to continue.
6. It will ask if you want to be able to send email as ‘[your address]‘, click ‘Yes’, and then ‘Next Step’
7. Enter the name you want emails to appear to come from, and click ‘Next Step’
8. It will need to send a verification email to ensure you’re who you say you are. Click ‘Send Verification’, go check your email as normal, and follow the instructions.
9. Once you’ve verified the address, go back to ‘Accounts’. ‘Send mail as’ will contain a couple of different addresses. Click ‘Make default’ next to the F/W/O address.
10. That’s it! All email you send via Gmail will now appear to come from your F/W/O address, and Gmail will deliver all replies into your Gmail account.

I think this will do the trick. Please let me know the results if you try it…

To use Outlook Express / Outlook:

People who are using Outlook or Outlook Express (or Windows Mail, for that matter) and want to keep all their emails in one place / don’t want to use webmail can try this:

1. In Gmail’s settings, go to the ‘Forwarding and POP’ tab. Next to ‘POP Download’, click ‘Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on’, then ‘Save changes’.
2. Follow the instructions here to configure Outlook / Outlook Express (here for Outlook 2003). It’s probably wise to write down the existing configuration before changing too much over.

Email sent through Outlook/Express will appear to come from your F/W/O address as long as you’ve set it as Gmail’s default address in #9 above.

Notes:

This also lets you take advantage of Gmail’s formidable spam filters.

The changes were Google opening up to all users and releasing their POP3-fetching service, if you were wondering.

This would have been possible months ago if Orange provided an email forwarding service like normal ISPs.

Just back from a fun, if completely exhausting dance lesson. I think we managed the Viennese Waltz for over two minutes! Next challenge is to keep going for the full four and a half minute song. My ankles hurt even thinking about it.

Anyway, the main point of this post is to point out the Gmail for Mobile Client that was released today. It’s a small java download that works on most modern mobiles, and provides a gmail-like interface for checking and sending email. Sounds good in theory, but does it work? Happily, yes!

I’ve just set it up on my Nokia 7610, and am very impressed. First impressions are that it’s an effective duplication of the online interface. You can archive / label messages, view the content of existing labels, send mail with auto-completion of contacts and search mail, all with shortcut keys. Viewing mail displays the conversation thread in the same way as gmail, with read messages collapsed to just a header by default. Best of all, it’s fast and intuitive. Well, fast for me, although I keep my inbox empty and label+archive anything that needs attention - I’d be interested to hear how it copes with a 2000 message inbox. The blog entry says it’ll let you view attachments, as well as click-to-directly-dial from the contact list, although I can’t figure out this last one. The only options it seems to lack are ‘All Mail’ and ‘Drafts’, although the former doesn’t really matter when there’s an effective search.

Pics of the interface can be seen here. Nokia users may want to go to the App Manager utility and grant the Gmail app permission to access the internet continually after only asking once, or it will nag you every time.

I had trouble accessing the official page, and wonder whether it’s meant to be limited to the US. Maybe it’s to do with it being called ‘Google Mail’ in the UK. Whether that’s true or not, going to http://www.gmail.com/app from my phone initiated the download.

Given that gmail.com (suspiciously) times out over my Orange connection, I’ve been using the POP3/SMTP setup, which is far from trivial and involves creating two separate accounts on my Nokia. This is a much better solution, imho. I’d best watch the data transfer costs, but overall: nice one, Google. This’ll come in very handy.

Big enough to threaten the security of the nation. Via.

If you happen to use Firefox, Gmail, Google Reader and greasemonkey, this post is for you…

The recently relaunched Google Reader is very swish. Nearly good enough to wean me away from FeedLounge, in fact. The interface is very similar to Gmail, and Lifehacker pointed me towards this greasemonkey script, from a member of the Google Reader team, which directly integrates the post list into Gmail:

When items are selected the usual Google Reader options are available (although ‘email’ doesn’t currently work for me):

Reading between the lines of the post, it seems that official integration is a possibility but a long way from production, and this is their pre-Labs way of testing things out with a tech-savvy crowd. It does work very well, imho. It’s fast and doesn’t slow down Gmail overall, and feels surprisingly handy. Currently the list view can’t be filtered - the tag interface would undoubtedly clutter things up terribly - so it’s only appropriate for people with a relatively small number of feed items.

If you’re comfortable messing around with the greasemonkey script it’s apparently possible to get the ‘expanded view’ by searching for and removing “&view=list”.

Google Calendar has had US SMS notifications since it launched, and just added UK networks to the list. I entered my details and it seems to work fine, but the initial setup message said ’standard charges apply for each reminder’ and I’ve no idea how much these would be. Standard outgoing message cost is 10p, but incoming messages can vary up to £1 (if not more). Even if it’s 10p it’d mount up over a few weeks, given how much is in my calendar. Still, it means I can theoretically add events to the calendar via SMS, which could come in handy.