Productivity Metrics

Google SMS

Looking for live IPL scores, current time in New York, today’s gold price, availability of seats or fares for trains from Bangalore to Mumbai ?

We have recently enhanced our SMS Search offering to bring you all that and more. A simple SMS to 9-77-33-00000 gives you instant access to Google SMS Search and that too at the cost of a normal SMS.

SMS ‘cri’ to 9-77-33-00000 to get much more than just international match scores; send 'cri ipl' for instant IPL scores, 'cri ipl ' (for example 'cri ipl knight riders') for your favorite team score and 'cri ranji' for domestic match updates.

Apart from stock prices, we now provides commodity prices as well. Just SMS 'price gold', 'price oil', or 'price cotton' to know the MCX spot prices for these commodities. To learn more, sms 'help commodity' to 9-77-33-00000.

Trying to call a friend in New York and wondering what time it is for him ? For an instant update on local time in any city or country in the world, simply sms 'time ' to 9-77-33-00000. For example 'time new york'

Didn't you wish you could do more than just getting your PNR status and train schedule on SMS ? We now provide seat availability and fare information as well. For ex. to check seat availability for 24th April on train #1018, going from Bangalore to Mumbai, simply sms 'train avail 1018 Bangalore to Mumbai on 24-04' or if you want to know the fare for sleeper class, sms 'train fare 1018 Bangalore to Mumbai for SL'. To learn more, sms 'help train' to 9-77-33-00000.

To learn more about various interesting features, please visit http://www.google.co.in/sms or SMS 'help' to 9-77-33-00000.

Cross Posted from Google India Blog

Best of all, you don't pay a premium charge for any of this, just the price of a standard SMS.

This site may harm your computer

Google fails badly today in its search results.. Someone screwed up.. :) What happened?

Google Card

Yes, My Google Card is ready. Apparently, my Dad told this to me. I nicked this idea from Kiruba, but I'm not going to print one. Be it someone is searching me to code or to get some portrait done or even as a groom. Now all they need to do is type in the 6 character name in the empty text box and say search. 0.07 seconds it lists almost everything. Try it!

Should I be happy that someone can reach me faster or be sad about my tranparent online identity?

Google Code Jam

I was there and it was awesome fun.

You like reading stories and thinking about algorithms while in the toilet. Then Code Jam is a place that you should checkout soon. Google CODE JAM as many of you know is like any other online coding competition. Simple - You need to code for an algorithmic problem on a allocated amount of time. Until last year Google was hosting this competition along side with Topcoder. This years code jam had a new and interesting format. One need not code and compile the code online, this time we can code in any language or even a paper pencil logic is also accepted and submit the code along with the solution.

It was great, I refreshed many of my college days maths from distance formula to some probability. I have coded in Java before, but not so fast. You need to code it dead accurate. Check all the boundary conditions and think of that one sample set that breaks the algorithm and handle it. Post match it was fun to discuss (fight) the same with some of my friends and colleague.

Once I read 2 important disclaimer when coding,
1) Read code and get your code reviewed.
2) Read the first disclaimer again.

So, after the coding matches are over, you can open other submitted code and read it. Oh boy! They code like automated codegen's beautifully crafting to its ultimate best. More than coding them, reading code can help you to improve. Similarly there are many other coding arena like Topcode, ACM, TIMUS ONLINE and ... If you are there next time in any of them, just let me know. We can competite.

Beta testing Gmail

After some interesting discussion over blogger I shifted focus to Gmail. To my knowledge one of the longest Beta product is Gmail. One strong feature I like is labels, which is far more superior than historic folder. Today surprisingly noticed a unexpected behavior in the labels, I call it a bug.

The steps are simple to reproduce:
1) select any mail conversation in your Inbox thats labeled, Open it.
2) Expand the conversation and delete the first message of it. (Yes Gmail allows to delete a single message from a conversation)
3) Return back to Inbox.
4) Now look at the conversation, Err! the label is deleted. :)

You need to relabel the conversation. The engineer has optimized the logic of associating the label with the first mail of the conversation. So when thats gone, the label vanishes. Instead, it should associated with a conversation or all mails in the conversation. Or add a condition

if(message.isFirst() && labeled == true && conversation.isNextAvail())
conversation.getNext Message().label = message.label;
del(message);

You can follow any progress on this from here.

Google + Yahoo + AdSense = Better Web

A Small Step for Man, A Giant Leap for Mankind!
-Neil Armstrong

This time it was Jerry Yang! Earlier in the week, Google announced that it will share its AdSense for search and AdSense for web page content on their US and Canadian market. Also more interesting was their interoperability in instant messaging service.

Official blog post.

Black Out

Yes, this would be my first step towards energy saving. Its obvious fact that white pixel (RGB - FFFFFF) consumes more power than dark pixel (RGB - 000000). Hence even Google made its Homepage blacked out for one hour in San Francisco Bay Area. This is an on going effort with lightsoutsf if you fellow bloggers also are interested join us. I will remain like this for some time!

Further on this effort I thinking on ways to save power, I created a custom theme on Gnome that blacked out 80% of my monitor display. Now other applications also have a view like my favorite terminal. What else can you think of saving energy. Open to comments.

Office Suite - Battle Ground

Few years back, I used to hit the browsing center to get some materials data from internet for my Assignment or Packages (I know it might sound ironic, but still believe it). I need to do it quick and save money. But as soon I have opened multiple sites and try copying the contents to a word processor, so that I can save it as a single file! Baammm! You will get a prompt saying bla bla bla. The software would actually not work. Which will screw you up! I visioned those times, why can't I do this editing, processing online and save the file to my floppy. But now I can.

Yes its possible through online web applications like Google Docs, Zimbra, Writely, Zoho and more. I would say they are coolest online apps available on date. With the internet infrastructure they work like offline apps. Responsive, neat and more cool sharing options that you don find in offline apps. I mostly use Google Apps for the majority of the time. I like the latest addition of Google Presentation. I quickly created a presentation and published it here. Have a look at it.

Here are some of the points I infer:

• Offline Office applications are becoming bulkier and costlier for user to get and deploy.
  
• It is very evident that almost 80% of the offline apps users use only the basic options available in those spreadsheets, Word processors, etc,.
• Growth in Internet infracture has mode offline apps a step behind.
• Online apps are Free! :)
• Good tools for startups to save money.
  
• They are quick and contains most of the basic feature needed for a primitive user.
• Better sharing which is well explained in this Google video.
• Popular vendor are migrating their softwares to online clones. IMB made its Lotus Symphony free. Yahoo buys Zimbra. Microsoft brings Office live.

Now my vision would be a computer as a hardware device without a software preloaded on it. Let your operating system be online, switch on the machine and connect to your online space and work. Windows becomes Windows Online, SUSE Linux online why not even Google OS.

New Orkut

Like a child that gets attracted to colorful new things, my mouse pointer often moves to my Firefox tab where my Orkut is logged in. Yes days back in the old UI, there was a faded out image saying New Beta UI. Now its in action. Haven't tried it out yet, play around soon. After carefully playing around with it here is my review.



Things I liked:

• The Layout - Its really a cool one. Highlights would include rounded corners, clear separation of various panes with enough space between each.
• Trusty, Cool, Sexy are neat. In the OLD UI they extend based on number of friends they mark it. Now its simple 3 level for each.
• Horizontal alignment of birthdays is good.
• Under 'Manage Friends' we can clearly find open invites.
  

Things I would like to change:

• When we accept a friends request, the separation of haven't met, acquaintance, friend, etc are good. But they have an old look of multi colored rectangles. They can be given rounded corners and clear separation.
• My communities pane is not getting refreshed with the latest updated community. If not frequently they could be done at intervals of 30 min or so.
• In case of landscape photos for profiles are aligned to the top, which doesn't look good because there is space between photo and name. The old way of alignment to bottom near name was good.
• Frequently updated users & communities like it happens in Youtube! Videos that are currently being watched.
  

Comment on what you think about the new Orkut UI?

Inbox Zero

I write, read, label, filter, archive, DELETE my mails. But still I wonder whats happening. Even Google still claims their Gmail slogan.

Lots of space
Over 2885.658874 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.

Ironically we know boundaries will be reached one day.

Google came to my rescue with its techtalk. Thanks to Merlin Mann, author of 43Folders for his talk on Inbox Zero! You can listen to podcast or view this video.

In Love of NUMB3RS

This post will definitely help fellow Bloggers to enhance their blogging experience and might motivate new bloggers!

Long since I have kept track of many Google's beta. Once such was this "Google Analytics". Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that a webmaster can optimize their AdWords advertisement and marketing campaigns through the use of Google Analytics's analysis of where the visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website and their geographical position. Today my older interface was automatically migrated to new Ajax rich interface. That I fell in love with immediately.

You get what you need. Thought I don host a commercial website, the figures that are displayed make me understand about the visitor who visit my blog. Some new features that caught my eye was Ajax rich User experience. The graphs and dimensional summary I get regarding my blog. My favorite of the all is the export as pdf option. For the report I give a perfect 10. Of late I was googling of how to upload files in blogger. The first link said bloggers disallow uploading files for security reason. But I din want to use third party servers to host my file. Finally with a little scratch of my head I found a method and uploaded my pdf report here.


Quick Glances:

• I found this post on Universal search interesting.
• Here is my Feed Reader. All news & blogs are read using it.

Easter Egg

I inherited my affinity towards computers from my Dad. In the early 90's he used to program using Basic with a 386 machine. At times will write a .bat script blinking on the screen saying, "Vijesh go and study!" when I try to run Prince of Persia game. His inquisitiveness made him read lots of computer magazine (both English & Tamil). Once when I peeped into one such magazine, I read a column about "Easter Egg". I was wondering what does nutrition topic doing in a computer magazine. Only then my Dad told the history of Easter and cleared me what an "Easter Egg" in a digital term. Those time Microsoft Office suite is the best place to find one. Wiki says...

Finally today several years after, I guess I found some "Easter Eggs". This time in terms of Google. Today Google is celebrating "Yuri Gagarin" - who on 12 April 1961 became the first person in space and the first person to orbit the Earth. I don know if I can call them as Easter Egg but still I would go about doing so. Instead of telling what each is, I would leave it for you people to try out.

1. Send a mail to your gmail ID but instead of using username[at]gmail[dot]com try using username[at]googlemail[dot]com
2. If you have a [dot] in your user name remove them and try sending a mail. For example user[dot]name[at]gmail[dot]com as username[at]gmail[dot]com
3. In your Gmail/GTalk chat window try putting text within [asterik] *hi Vijesh* see what happens
4. Like the previous ones put text within underscore _Hello GM_ see what happens
5. type this <3 [greater than followed by three]
   
6. try this smiley B-)
7. this smiley x-(
8. this :'( - but don use it often
   
9. this one :(|) [they call it as a monkey]
10. finally this one \m/ - Rocking out
    

Also Google has its own Easter Egg home page here...
P.S: [at] means @ / [dot] means . This post will be frequently updated since its "Easter Egg" :)

New Year Gift :)

B'day / Christmas gifts (t-shirt, shirt) are still glittering in my eyes! Before that New Year neared the calender. Its almost 2007 in the far east. Few min to go for us. How about getting a gift now! That too from Google. Yes I did get one!

I always wanted to update by blogger and wanted to experience the new Blogger. Week earlier it informed only selected participants are allowed to migrate. But today when I logged in I was in for a surprise. I was allowed to migrate to the new blogger. My favorite stretch view is one I always liked to have. I tried tweaking the old blogger template, but the static images was hindering my trials. Now all in one plate. It has lot other cool features. Yet to explore all.

Thanks to Google, for making this available so soon.