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".

For a few years now I've been using the Opera M2 as the primary email client on my computer.
Recently I've been using multiple systems and a lot of mail on the go (computers at the faculty etc). Syncronizing Opera is very nice, so that you have all your bookmarks and everything, and feel "at home" most of the time. But it doesn't sync anything of the mail, so I tend to use Gmail when not at home and though it would be good to have all the email addresses there.

The logical way is to export everything from Opera, and import at Gmail.

Opera exports the contacts into an "adr" file, which is not bad for reading in a text editor, but can't really be imported into Gmail, since it want's a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file, which you can get out of your favorite spreadsheets application (Google Docs, Open Office, MS Office).
I though about writting a program myself, but then realized that somebody has probably done it already. And I was right.

There is an app at sourceforge called "Opera2GmailCSV". The latest version is from 2006, but it worked just fine.
There is also an online app http://www.hallvord.com/opera/adr2tab.htm that you upload your file too, and shows the result in a webpage, which you can then save. I haven't tested the files from here.

Anyway the importing worked just fine, and I experimented with multiple adding of the same entries, and it seems the Gmail either ignores identical data, or merges multiple addresses for the same names. Which should mean that I can still use M2 as the primary client, and in the future maybe reimport everything into Gmail with the existing data just ignored. Nice.

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.

It seems there are more problems to IMDb than just often unavailability.
As you may now, "The Dark Knight" is currently occupying the N#1 slot at the Top250 list, so I check in to see how the grade is changing. You know how it goes, with all the hype, it takes some time for a realistic grade to form. I believe the movie is very good, but a grade of 9.7 that it had for a while is probably not realistic

Well today I was supprised, since the status was garbled, like this:


Going into user mode in Opera (thru the View bar, or if you don't have it, "View->Style->User mode"), shows the following:


Weird eh? The bottom list of course doesn't list the movie.

A web search shows that other people have noticed, and slashfilm says that some other films have been tampered with, for instance "Iron Man" and "WALL-E" don't have ratings at all.