Google chrome

I have been using google chrome right from day one. It is simple and brings the search like interface to browsing history / bookmarks / downloads.  The isolation provided with the multiple processes for the tabs is nice. You can kill a tab and still keep the browser running. It is cool. 

It has not crashed any time but has got hung multiple times when i have opened multiple flash videos. Sometimes the pages do freeze. 

I have not verified if it uses more memory than firefox with no extensions for the same number of tabs. I have stopped using firefox with extensions for my day-to-day browsing. I do have a different profile which has extensions which i use occasionally. 

It will be interesting to see how the chrome evolves as it is just a new entrant in the browser market and has made it's presence felt. 

Yahoo mail considers mail from google as spam

I have seen mails from @google.com going to spam folder in yahoo mail even though the header has the Domain Keys signature which yahoo can verify. Yahoo brought this anti-spam standard which google has also implemented. It is kinda strange. However my mail from my gmail id goes fine into my inbox. 

I dont know the reason behind this peculiar behavior of yahoo mail. 

Google changed my identity

On Thursday debu pinged me close to midnight. I was chatting from google talk and debu was chatting from google mail.

Read the chat conversation below ..

11:23 PM Debarun: yo

11:24 PM me: hello

abhi kya kar raha hai ..

so ja ..

assignment ?

Debarun: woh....when did u learn hindi

:P

11:26 PM me: अभी क्या तेरे को पूरा हिन्दी में टाईप करके दिखाना पड़ेगा क्या

11:27 PM tu bata .. gandhi se mila ?

11:28 PM Debarun: omg

:o

suki?

11:31 PM me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f73o3iGwv8

oh my god !! suki ??

11:33 PM Debarun: abbe

asking if its suki effect

;)

me: nahi

8 minutes

11:42 PM me: did u see rupsa's snaps ..

Debarun: yeah i did

me: she added some more on orkut

Debarun: i saw

me: biju changed his status to "married" on orkut

so when are you studying ..

Debarun: wat r u doing at this time?

11:43 PM me: like this late in night

i shud ask you the question

it is only 1143 for me

for you it shud be 230 Am

close to

Debarun: huh?

where r u man?

11:45 PM me: i am in cyprus

what abt u

Debarun: oh i dint know

since when?

me: tu kisi bhi sawal ka jawab theek nahi de raha ..

11:46 PM kya huwa tere ko ..

call karoon kya ?

Debarun: abe bola na timepass

waise tomorrow we have a biz fest :)

Debu was asking questions as if he was surprised to see me chat in hindi. I was thinking what is this "suki" effect .. He was surprised that i was talking about Rupsa. Why will Rupsa share photos with me .. He was surprised when i said i am in cyprus. The whole conversation looked as if Debu and i were not chatting. The conversation was getting funny and both were completely surprised.

After that i called and then it turned out that Debu was seeing the mail id of rajesh as the person sending the messages. I did ask for proof and got the snap below. He was right. I asked my friend Vijaykrishna G working in google to report the case and he did.

Google silently changed my identity !!


Update: I chatted with DD today and she also sees me as Rajesh Vasudevan. I had a similar conversation and in between suki came :-) then i knew for sure she was seeing me as Rajesh. I donno why only with people who know Rajesh and me. My brother, my other friends all of them see me as prakash. She was also chatting from Gmail chat.

DD also told me that google sometimes mis delivers emails to wrong mail ids. That is a little too crazy. Google, fix these !!

Installing Google desktop in custom location

I have been using google desktop in office for over 1.5 years now. I basically use it to search my files and my history (web history , deleted files , deleted emails). I am more interested in the history part. Google Desktop comes handy in searching the deleted stuff.

I use lookout to search my office mails. It does a better job of indexing moved items. Google desktop fails to open the item in outlook many a time. But that is fine.

Recently in my company, google desktop became an illegal software to use. I am not supposed to install it and use it. In my company they officially support microsoft desktop search to be used. But i have too much of "history" information in my google index which i dont want to lose. So i do want to keep running google desktop on my company PC.

My company has an internal monitoring tool whose job is to ensure that only allowed software is installed and running on the computer. It blocks the installation of googledesktop. So to install it, we temporarily kill the process, complete the installation. Then start the monitoring tool again. I wanted to have a better way to do it. I found that the monitoring tool does not touch stuff in folders with "recycle" as part of the name.

But google desktop does not give option of choosing the folder to install. It must be picking up and using a default folder. I found that it uses the folder setting of registry key ProgramFilesDir in "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion" path. So i changed the registry entry to point to a folder with "recycle" in the path. I installed Google desktop, it got installed fine and the monitoring tool did not touch it. I also set the %ProgramFiles% environment to this path (just to be sure). I now have googledesktop in a non-default location. I reverted back the setting after the installation was done.

This change applies for all google applications (i think - did not test it). So now you can install google applications in non-default locations. Do add a comment if you find this tip useful.

It still is not configured smartly to kill the running processes of google desktop and remove the files. It is fairly simple to do. Hope they don't do it soon. I will keep running googledesktop till that day and may be another hack will get over it as well !!

Google Gears

Google gears enables web applications to provide offline functionality. It is now in Beta and the early release happpened in last week of may.

The first application to be gears enabled is Google reader. You can download 2000 posts and go offline and work with reader in offline mode (read posts /star items) and when you come back online, it synchronizes the changes back.
Oh Sam I Am, can I read it on the tram?

It is an interesting thing. Once gmail application enables the offline functionality, all my mail will be downloaded and i can still search and check my mails in gmail even when i am offline. There will be many more apps which will provide the functionality and it will be cool.

Check out the gears session in google developer days
GD Day London: Building better AJAX aps with Google Gears

So i thought i will get a feel for it. I downloaded the installer on windows and tried to install on my office machine. I started the installer but it erred with code - 0x80040800. It basically means that it could not connect to google site to download the gears setup. Seems like the GoogleUpdater has some issues with downloading gears - working behind corporate proxy servers. I got my proxy settings right for WinHttp api which is used by GoogleUpdater and even then it continued to fail. Finally i tried to install it on my laptop where it went fine and i got hold of the download link for the Google gears setup.

If you also face the same problem while setting it up, download the gears setup file directly instead of using GoogleUpdater to download the gears setup and install it.

On linux you just get an xpi and install the extension in firefox and you are ready to go.

I will read more on gears api and play with it.