Web Review » google

Google being evil with developers

riccardo — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:21:02 +0000

Don’t be evil is the famous Google slogan. Since some time, it seems that something is changing: last week they contacted Cyanogen, the author of the most famous “unofficial” firmware for Android phones, telling him to stop the distribution of these releases; the problem comes from the fact that Android code is open source, but Google applications that are shipped with it (Google Talk, YouTube, Android Market…) are not.

This contradiction bring the impossibility to build a fully working ROM (if the developer can’t release a firmware with Android Market, final users can’t even download the other Google Apps!). Cyanogen has confirmed his intention to respect Google copyright, so he will continue to develop new firmware without any proprietary component, but the final solution is still incomplete. Let’s wait to see if this story will have a happy ending.

see also:

CyanogenMod home page: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

“A Note on Google Apps for Android“, from the Google official Android developers blog.

Funny Google Reader bug

riccardo — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:23:39 +0000

I just encountered a little bug in Google Reader, that I use everyday to read some feeds. One of them (Downloadblog, a nice italian professional blog about technology) is marked in bold, having one unread item, but if I click on it, Reader tells me that it doesn’t contain any unread item.

The fun part of this bug is the message I get if I click on the “All items (1)” link: “Your reading list has no unread items.” that, in the italian version of Google Reader is: “L’elenco Ancora da leggere non contiene elementi da leggere.“. Translated in english it sounds like:

“The Unreaded list doesn’t contain unreaded items”
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Google uses Microsoft .NET

riccardo — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:33:30 +0000

I recently received an e-mail from the team of Google Adsense, that invited me to partecipate to a simple survey about their advertising service. I cannot speak about contents of this survey, as required by their terms… anyway I have to highlight an interesting point I noticed:

The scripting language used for the survey is MS ASP.Net! You can check this in the screenshot attached to this post: the extension of the Survey’s start page (and, as I checked later, in the survey process) is .aspx.

It impressed me because, as all we know, Google is usually very far from Microsoft technologies an, in general, from commercial software solutions. Which is the reason to use .Net for a simple survey script?

Google Calendar SMS notifications now available for Italy

riccardo — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 12:10:56 +0000

Versione Italiana dell’articolo

Google Calendar has (finally!) reactivated SMS notifications for Italian cellular operators.
You’ve just to go to Settings -> Notifications and enter your mobile phone number, to receive the verification code (it has to be entered on the same page to activate notifications).

Thank you Google!

PS: and about other countries? Are there other nations where SMS notification were deactivated?