A Blog With No Name

Interesting news, after five years of development Gmail is finally out of beta status, as well as Docs, Calendar and Talk.

For those users used to seeing "beta" written below the Gmail logo, they have created a Labs feature that displays the logo with the familiar gray text. I've been a user since late 2004, but I doubt I will enable this feature

Speaking of Labs, a definite cool addition is the "Inbox Preview" lab feature. It will show a static view of the inbox while the "loading" message is displayed, so you can see if there are new mails or not before loading. If you haven't experimented with Labs yet, you will find them under "settings"->"labs".

As you probably heard, Google is creating a new browser. Sound like an interesting idea. The beta is out, although only for Windows for now (download). They say (on the site) that you can build the code under linux and mac os x, but it won't run Well they promise it will soon. On the other hand, I was directed to a link (down in the comments), which explains how to run it under Linux with Wine

I finally got some time, so I went on to download it. The installation instruction that I got on the "Thank You" page was kinda weird. Take a look at the text and note that I am using Opera as always, and it shows explanations for Firefox, and Firefox alone.

1. Click OK or Save File in the window that appears.
Don't see a window? Click here.

2. Select Downloads from the Tools menu in Firefox.
A window displaying your downloads will appear.

3. Click Open next to the product in the Downloads window.
Your software will now install automatically. If you need help, click here.

Anyway then the installer downloaded some more stuff and it was set to go.
As they say it is very minimalistic and very sleak. There are some nice effects, but I think they are about right - not too flashy. The browser seems to work pretty fast, loads and displays nice. There are a lot of Opera-like features.
In the first tests I have run, I only noticed that it seems to be missing java support. But it is a beta after all.

All things Google (that I tested) work fine as expected. Calendar, docs, mail...
Facebook seems to work nice. I tested it not becuase I like it very much, but because in Opera it is a bit too slugish for me. (I actually don't like facebook at all, and use it just for contacts. Still it's better than MySpace.)

My brother suggested loading ign.com, because it a very slow site. Interestingly enough it loads faster in Opera than in Chrome. But then again, it really is somekind of a weird site.

And it comes with a built in site inspector of some kind. You can see page elements and their properties nicely, when you hover over the elements in code, they are marked with different color in page, similar to dragonfly/firebug.

Overal, a nice beta.
But I can't stop trying to do mouse gestures in broswers. Sometimes I try it in other applications too, and can't figure out why it ain't working.

So it seems I am a major geek.

At least according to this test.

I was browsing yesterday and bumped into someone saying they scored 13% on the test. So I had a little time, and did the test I scored 39.44773%, which is a major geek category it seems.

Oh, and I still don't know what happened to google on jan 2... though it was probably again about DNS servers... Though I've seen some stuff that could indicate that it was more of a local problem (local compared to the size of the earth )

Somthing ubelievable is happening:
google is unavailable...

I was tweaking something about the net, and was testing it with a standard try to go to google.com. Which failed. For no aparent reason. And it was working just 5 minutes ago. Weird, so I tested it on the other machine, to check if my connection is ok, and I kliked on one of the speed dial links and it worked. Then I tried google - no go.

so now it's been a while and it is still not working, of course all the related service are down too, and the local googles are, of course, also down.
photobucket is down too, I saw that on another site that was linking a picture...

weird. a search thru the internet (without google - how do you search it ) showes that there was some downtime also in 2005 link. Then they aparently said it was somekind of a DNS issue. Maybe it's happening again.