Tuesday, December 5, 2006
A Google Halloween Costume
Funny. Jake (aka Jake’s View, who might just be the youngest forum member here with 9 years of age!) created a Google homepage halloween costume this year... and he already went as iPod in 2005, as cell phone in 2004, and as Powerbook in 2003.
Also see Google employees dressed up for Halloween and Ricky’s Google Images Halloween costume from 2005.
You can digg Jake’s post if you like it.
Join the ongoing comments thread.
XKCD’s Google Cartoon
This cartoon by XKCD is published under a Creative Commons license.
[Thanks MJ Rich!]
Web-based MS Paint
Look Ma, the OS is now inside the browser! This web-version of MS Paint – no plug-ins needed, though it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer* – is an interesting proof-of-concept of the <canvas> framework. [Thanks Luca!]
*A Google employee tried to create a cross-browser wrapper, though. Then again, you might also just use Flash.
Top Searches of 2006 and More
Yahoo’s kicking off the “this year in reviews” month, December, with the top searches of 2006 (Britney Spears is leading the list, which I’ll assume is cleansed of dirty words). Steve Bryant of Google Watch in the meantime recollects what happened with Google in 2006. [Thanks Gary Price!]
Biomedical Search
Alex Ksikes (who I collaborated with on Google Modules) just unveiled his latest project, BioMed Search, with the aim to “organize figures, images or schema found in biomedical articles.” Over 1 million illustrations have been indexed so far. While I can’t comment on the actual content (I’m no Ph.D. student at Cambridge like Alex is!), I like the usability of this one – it’s very simple to use, and the images immediately show up in nicely viewable sizes. Note that added to the default list-style results option, there’s also a more snazzy thumbnail view.
USA’s Wonders, Google-mapped
Juan Taylor maps the 7 wonders of different US states onto a Google Map. For example, the 7 wonders of Alabama are supposedly the US Space and Rocket Center, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Alabama Theatre, the Vulcan Park, the Riverchase Galleria, Oak State Mountain Park, and the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park. Clicking on individual locations open up descriptive snippets taken from websites. A nice idea. [Thanks RightReading.com!]
Google Code Review Program
Niall Kennedy describes Google Mondrian, a Google-internal project for code reviews by Guido van Rossum (the creator of Python, who joined Google in late 2005):
Code reviews can be initiated and completed from within the Mondrian interface. A developer requests a review from another user or a group of users to kick off the process. Each invited reviewer can add comments directly underneath a line of code or reference the entire file. You can request and diff the file against previous versions as well. It’s a pretty slick interface, lightly highlighting each line of code as you hover, and popping open a comment box in response to a double-click. Comments can be saved as a draft and shared at a later time.
[Thanks Denis Laprise!]
Web Cityscape Pixel Poster
Oh, what a nice web pixel poster by the Berlin-based Eboy art group... you’ll spot several Google properties, too (I’m counting 5). You can buy this one for around 21 bucks. [Via Waxy.]
Google Partners with Teach For America
By Haochi Chen
Yesterday, Google announced their partnership with Teach For America to “support [TFA’s] efforts to effect change and improve educational opportunities in American schools”.
From the Wikipedia entry on Teach For America:
Teach For America is a non-profit organization whose mission is to close the academic achievement gap between children from different socio-economic backgrounds.
Google has various programs for college students, such as the Google Ambassador and the Google Scholarships.
>> More posts
Advertisement
This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!