One step forward to the "Google Operating System"?

Yesterday Google released an open source tool called "Google Gears" which allows to run Google Applications offline. According to Aaron Boodman and Erik Arvidsson, two Google Gears Engineers, the ability of running Google web applications offline were one of the major user requests:

Unfortunately, today's web browsers lack some fundamental building blocks necessary to make offline web applications a reality. In other words, we found we needed to add a few new gears to the web machinery before we could get our apps to run offline. Gears is a browser extension that we hope -- with time and plenty of input and collaboration from outside of Google -- can make not just our applications but everyone's applications work offline.

At the moment they have just a developer test release available, so nothing to give to real end-users. But anyway it is nice to test it and see it working. If you have a Google Reader account, you can give it a try. Chris Wetherell, Google Reader Engineer, writes on the Reader blog about the integration of Google Reader with GGears. A really nice thing would be to have it integrated with Google Calendar, where it would give enormous benefit. Immagine that in this way the calendar functionality could be used without any Internet connection and when connecting then, the added meetings and entries could be synchronized as already done in Google Reader...In my ears this sounds as a step in the direction of the - so often stated - Google Operating System since with Google Gears all the apps are available locally, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Gmail maybe... :) who knows.

On Google Code, they describe that GGears disposes of the following features:

• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

I think it will be nice to see the evolvement of this project, and even to test it maybe for some of my homemade applications. If someone of you out there is interested in using it, on the following URL http://code.google.com/apis/gears/ there are the API's.

What "sucks" about Google Page Creator

Google Page Creator has a nice idea: Let people - without any major knowledge in HTML or web design - create and publish easily their own webpage.
What are those big advantages?

• you don't have to have an own domain, it will be hosted by Google at http://[your-google-account].googlepages.com
• you don't have to deal with a webserver or use an FTP to upload your stuff
  
• 100MB of webspace available for your page --> easy and direct upload over Google Page Creator
• WYSIWYG editing
• predefined stylesheets (a cons for experienced users)
• ...

About half a year ago (I think), however, Google Page Creator released a feature to create multiple sites (up to 5) with one Google Account. I found it to be a nice and useful improvement and immediately created a new site to test it.

So what did I do? I typed in the domain "xy" (with the intention to maybe use it later on) and a new page has been created, available at http://xy.googlepages.com. Everything just worked out fine till the point (some month later) when I wanted to create a completely separate Google account for that domain "xy", first, in order to have it separately from my personal Google account and second to get also all the features like Gmail, Picasaweb etc...Clearly it was not possible to create a Google Account with the name "xy" since this would have resulted in a name-conflict with my previously created domain. So I just opened Page Creator with the intention to delete the old domain xy.googlepages.com.

I just couldn't believe as I didn't found any link or button in the Page Creator's Setting page to remove the created page. I browsed for it on the forum and a hundred of posts popped up, requesting the missing functionality. There are some posts, but no usable answer or even an entry of the Page Creator developer team such that the User Community would at least know that they're working on it or not. I personally don't understand the reason why this functionality wasn't added yet. At least - if for some reason they are not able to delete created pages - they should warn the user, when he creates a new page. What if somebody accidentally makes a typo in his domain-name??? :D good look then..

I just hope they will change this, and add a "delete site" functionality soon or at least they should put a note about it on the forum.

Qi Gong

Last week tuesday was my birthday and I received a nice set of "Qi Gong" balls (see picture) from my girlfriend. As somebody may have read , I practice Yoseikan Budo already for a longer time. This passion causes also interests in other areas like Qi Gong.
Also not to post always computer science related stuff, I thought it may be interesting to put something about it here, since someone may not have heard about Qi Gong balls - although they're quite popular.

When searching on Wikipedia I got the following definition of "Qi Gong"...

Qigong is an aspect of Traditional Chinese medicine involving the coordination of different breathing patterns with various physical postures and motions of the body. Qigong is mostly taught for health maintenance purposes, but there are also some who teach it as a therapeutic intervention. Various forms of traditional qigong are also widely taught in conjunction with Chinese martial arts, and are especially prevalent in the advanced training of what are known as the Neijia, or internal martial arts where the object is the full mobilization and proper coordination and direction of the energies of the body as they are applied to some target.[...]

This relates more to Qi Gong in general. "Qi"(spelled ch'i) or "ki" (in Japanese) is a fundamental concept of the Chinese culture. It is something that exists in every living thing, some kind of "life force" or "spiritual energy". With a lot of practice this flow of Qi - of energy - can be controlled by oneself which results in a better balance and physical conditions. This is also where it relates to martial arts. The Shaolin for instance are able to get control over their Qi-energy and to focus it on whatever part of their body. In this way they are able to break iron bars on their heads without being hurt.

Usage of Qi Gong balls
I'm myself new to Qi Gong, so I can basically only write what I heard or read. The two balls are placed into the palm of the hand and then rotated with the help of the fingers. There are two kind of rotations: one where the two balls touch each other (for beginners) and then where the rotate on the hand without touching each other (more difficult).
The direction of the rotation as also the practicing hand should be changed in regular intervals, where left-handers should practice more with the right-hand and vice-versa.

Effects
According to the Chinese medicine, the "Qi Gong balls" are a way for letting the Qi flow inside ones body. When rotating the two balls on the palm, the producing "vibrations" stimulate the reflex zones on it which are linked to several organs in the body. The sound produced by some of the balls and the uniform movements have also a relaxing and calming effect.
They have also a physical effect, since the movements cause the muscles in the hand and lower arm to regularly tense and relax, improving so its muscular strength. Moreover blood circulation and agility of both of the hands are trained.

Google presents itself in new style

Google has done some major changes on its stlye related to the appearance, but also to the way they place the content on the search results.

One change is the navigation bar in the upper left corner. A similar one was already present in Google Docs and Gmail. Now they changed its appearance and put it also on their iGoogle site. This navigation bar makes it more easy to switch to other services which may be more appropriate to reach your wanted results (i.e. News search, group search, blog or video search,...).

As i mentioned before they also changed the way they place the results on the search page. This is the result of the launch of "Universal Search" which adds relevant video, image or code results to the normal web search results. David Bailey, Tech Lead, and Johanna Wright, Product Manager write on the official Google blog, whats behind the scenes of Universal Search (Here is another post about it). The Universal Search will give the benefit, that search is performed over all Google's content sources. For instance the following query for "Java":

Note that in the new bar below the Google logo, there is an entry for "Code" which links to Googles Code Search. A search for "Darth Vader" shows that there are different result displayed...

like "image" and "video" search results. Moreover as can be seen in the picture, on the bottom of the page relevant News results and other related queries are displayed.

There is now also a page called "Experimental Search" at Google Labs where they put their experiments related to searching. You can try them out and express your opinion. There are quite a few interesting things.

What all this will give, are most likely better search results, since Google will also start a "search for meaning" by translating the query in other languages and even do slight modifications on it to deliver better results.