08 Feb 2005
I just read another blog entry where someone called Google a copycat. And to some extent we should agree with that.
However (and a big one at that), its not so much whether you are first, second or even third to market, its the quality of your offering and buzz you’re a
ble to create around it.
Google is the media machine and it could come dead last to market with a service and still build substantial market share.
I haven’t played with maps.google.com too much yet but suffice to say it looks very clean and fairly polished. It lo
oked up my address in Canada accurately which is a bonus. The next time I need to look up an address I may just try out their maps service instead of mapq
uest.
It’ll be interesting to see where they go with this. It’d be nice for them to integrate it into gmail and allow me to easily lookup and get directions to
addresses in my emails.
Innovator or copycat, keep on creating good services and you’ll keep me happy.
25 Jan 2005
I don’t know what caused me to do it, but tonight I finally bit the bullet and made the jump from KDE to Gnome.
I’ve been a KDE user for sometime, probably mostly out of laziness. I did switch my work desktop over a couple weeks ago but have been holding over switch
ing one of my home machines over.
I find gnome to be a slightly cleaner and more efficient interface to use. Other than a few minor usability issues, its not really all that different. I
have switched the default browser from epiphany to firefox (for plugins) and also use konsole instead of gnome-terminal. I’ve found that gnome-terminal i
s fairly slow (an understatement) when scrolling, thus causing significant slowness when starting JBoss..etc. The slowdown is noticable and on the order
of maginude of 20-25s on a 70-80s startup and deployment cycle.
I remember starting out with fvwm oh so many years ago. Fond memories of running xearth as your desktop background. From there it was a slow migration to
afterstep/windowmaker and than perhaps a jump to KDE, with a tryout of enlightenment in between. The jump to KDE came about from a distribution change, b
ut now that I’ve been running Debian for a couple of years, I haven’t had a need to re-install or change distributions, thus sticking with KDE. Well no mo
re.
Gnome 2.10 looks pretty slick BTW.
24 Jan 2005
About Google Video
Been looking around Google Video for the past couple minutes. It’s the new service from Google Labs that is geared towards letting you search the closed c
aption text listings from TV shows. It’s still in testing so who knows where/what this will materialize into in terms of the google’s regular searching ca
pabilities. Sure there’s a lot of TV material that could be indexed, do I have an immediate need for it, no I don’t think so.
It’ll be interesting to see where this goes and what kind of commercial partnership support there is for such an endeavor. Someone mentioned a similar ser
vice in TV Tome which seems to capture people’s tv show reviews.
from About Google Video:
*Just type in your search term (for instance, ipod or Napa Valley) or do a more advanced search (for instance, title:nightline) and Google Video will se
arch the closed captioning text of all the programs in our archive for relevant results. Click on a program title on your results page and you can look thr
ough short snippets of the text along with still images from the show. Visit the “About this show” side panel to learn when this show will air next.
*