Minimalist Geek

Google Buzz - Privacy and Assumptions

A couple of days ago Google started rolling out Buzz. The process was more akin to steamrolling over Gmail users with Buzz. Usually, I have positive comments to make about Google’s services apart from the occasional remark on some feature or lack of.

This time round however Google made a whole mess with Buzz. In all the frenzy with Facebook and Twitter attaining super star status, Google must have caught the social networking fever.

Not wanting to be left out and not content with merely returning search results from these third party sources, Google drew plans to have its own social network. Unfortunately, instead of doing what is expected and right, i.e. announcing the service and making it available for opt-in by the huge Gmail user base, Google rushed through with its plans and in the process made some silly assumptions.

One of the biggest assumptions was that since a user has let’s say 20 frequently emailed contacts, then it was obvious that you would want to follow them in a social networking sense. I cannot believe it did not cross Google’s collective bright mind that maybe, just maybe, some of those contacts are part of your professional network and not social buddies.

Finding hard to believe this did not come up during some persona building exercise, I have to conclude that they just decided to carry on with it no matter what, with an attitude and then we will see what the users think.

This is wrong for many reasons. First, Gmail has been out of beta now for quite a while and so it is no longer a testing ground. Secondly, you introduce a service and make it opt-in, especially when it is totally unrelated to the initial service, i.e. email. Finally, when privacy is at stake you have to choose the most conservative setting, i.e. after opting in, suggesting to the user to add people in the contact list to the Buzz network, and let the user decide.

The way Buzz was introduced exploited the trust people have put into Gmail.

Personally, even if the approach was right in the first place I do not have space, time, or need for yet another social network, so I would not have switched it on. Having it forced in such an unprofessional manner only hastened my resolve to switch off Buzz once and for all.

In response to the negative feedback received, Google apologized and tweaked the system to be more privacy conscious. However, I expect better from Google, which professes “Don’t be evil” as its informal motto, than to act irresponsibly and then apologize and amend. Unless, the informal motto is just corporate posturing.

Google Wave - Email 2.0

Email has been around for quite a while now, and it has served its purpose beyond the call of duty. However, its design, having been thought out for the needs at that time, is showing its limitations ever more. So, Google’s vision of how communication should be carried out in the 21st century is very welcome.

Two major limitations of email are that as a thread progresses, the email size continues to grow since each time the previous content is repeated, and that attachments in old emails are made redundant when a new updated email is sent.

The above two issues result in a lot of traffic being generated on the networks carrying the email, and an organizational nightmare for the users.

Google, through Wave, is aiming to solve these issues amongst others by proposing a new system that works more like instant messaging rather than like email. Each conversation is called a wave, and participants to a wave can add new participants at any time. One of the advantages of this approach is that if you get added in the middle of a wave, you will not have to read a jumbled up mess of text to get up to speed with what is being said. Instead you will see an orderly presentation of who said what and in what sequence.

Furthermore, if documents are attached to the wave and updated there will only be one version to view or update, and it is always the latest and most up-to-date version.

Google wave is thus very promising. However, the system can right now only work between Google wave users and so its usefulness is limited.

For Google Wave to be a success, the system must be endorsed by other big players to transform it into an industry standard just like email. Google is making Wave an open source platform so that third party developers can extend the platform. This is definitely a step in the right direction, but more must be done for global acceptance.

Windows 7 Rocks

I have been using Windows 7 daily for the last 6 months now, and I can say this is the best OS Microsoft has ever developed. I installed Windows 7 on the same laptop on which I had Vista, so as to make for a fair comparison.

You might say it is easy to be better than Vista, the latter being such a complete disaster, but I think Windows 7 has not only fixed what was wrong in Vista but gone further and improved stuff that was lacking in all previous versions of the Windows OS.

Cold boot-up time is very fast compared to Vista. I did not bother to time this with a stopwatch, because statistics like 5.4 seconds faster does not mean anything to people, unless they are geeks. But I can confidently say it is fast because you will manage to do less in the time it takes to boot than you would have before with Vista. Windows 7 is also faster to hibernate and wake up.

Stability is awesome. It did not crash even once in the last six months, and I am not an easy Word user. I develop software on this machine, whilst having at least six other applications running, including a browser with on average 7-10 tabs open. Most of the time I just hibernate the machine. No crashes and few reboots in the last six months are both huge pluses.

Memory consumption is another winner here. Windows 7 on initial install consumed roughly 500MB. With Visual Studio and a browser running the system hovers around 1.2GB. This leaves decent space to load a virtual machine or two. Vista is a memory hog, consuming roughly 750MB on initial install.

Not to mention the subtle but oh so productive tweaks done to the task bar. I just love the small live window preview when you hover on top of the task bar icons. It is such a time saver. No need to switch applications to glance at the progress of a rendering or download. Just hover, glance, move the mouse and your work space is back to normal to continue working.

Docking a window to the left and another to the right to view side-by-side can be done without thought with mouse gestures. Drag one window to the left, the other to the right, and voila!

With Windows 7 Microsoft are back on the right track moving full speed ahead.

Should I use twitter?

The short answer is no but let me explain why. If you need more proof that the internet technology industry is going through yet another bubble phase, look no further than twitter. Twitter is yet more air pumped into the bubble that is the current internet industry. Pushing more air into an over inflated bubble can only lead to one big fast burst.

My first reactions when I heard about twitter and what it is all about were what’s the point. Why invent yet another medium which facilitates yet more nonsense being written. As if the internet is not already chock full of gibberish and repetitions.

They claim that twitter is a revolution in the way people communicate and is providing a new medium where people can express their views on any topic, from religion to politics, to venting frustration at products or lack of support.

The point is that the majority of users on twitter start of strong, as in the rate of tweets not quality content, and then after a week or two, at the most a month suddenly forget all about twitter. Then there are the A listers, people who where popular even before facebook came around. These follow a few people, maybe a hundred, but have 10K+ followers.

Problem is that in 140 characters not even really interesting people such as Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, and Matt Cutts, who normally publish quality posts on their blogs, manage to say really interesting stuff on twitter. I don’t blame them, who can?

If I am interested in following someone’s thoughts and they have a blog it is easy for me to subscribe to their RSS feed, especially using Google Reader. Setting up a blog is very simple and there are sites like wordpress which make it point and click easy.

So you might say just don’t use twitter and be done, what is your problem?

My reply is, yes I did create an account to see for myself what twitter is all about before expressing my opinion and I have to say I only confirmed my initial feelings. In fact, as of today I deleted my twitter account.

The problem with services like twitter is not with the service itself but with the fact that it actually garners support just because it is hyped, millions of people are on twitter and it is free. What worries is the fact that companies like twitter get funding. The only way twitter can make money is if it starts charging for accounts, or includes ads and charges for them, or charges for official corporate accounts to be used as official support channels.

The first option would result in a mass exodus of users, the second option is not really palatable and I doubt it would work for twitter. The third option might make sense but if I have a complaint about a product I would rather go straight to the source rather than just tweet about it in the hope that someone from the company is following certain keywords on twitter.

So yes personally I think twitter is a big shiny over inflated red bubble and would not recommend people use it. As for the industry, I hope that after the latest global economic experience and the first internet bubble investors used more grey matter before they invest in over-hyped useless technology.

Part of the Reason Why Chrome Share Is Growing Slowly

Following my “Chrome market share and Matt Cutts” post yesterday I received a tweet from Matt Cutts himself asking me which browser I do use. I replied FF 3.5 and what compelling reason he could give me to use Chrome, since moving from IE to FF was an easy decision since there was a huge leap in quality and user experience.

As usual I kept on thinking on why a user using FF should decide to switch over to Chrome. Granted Chrome has a harder time penetrating the market since the browsers are now more mature. However, as usual there is always room for improvement.

For example, FF sucks up huge amounts of memory for no apparent reason. I usually keep FF open all day and hover between 8 tabs open at a time. Nonetheless this does not justify consuming over 200MB. And no I do not have a single add-on installed or shaky third party plug-in.

Even if that was the case, the browser should take care of that.

So to give Chrome a second chance, since the last time I tried it was months ago, today I decided to learn a bit more about how it works and the motivation behind it. For a quick introduction, this comic book style look at the technology and motivation for Chrome is great.

I agree completely with what the Google guys are trying to do with the web browser. The browser has to behave more like an OS, with proper process and memory management. As they outline, having the browser crash while editing an online document or email is a big deal.

So next, I decided to take Chrome for a spin once again. Plus points, minimalist design, better memory consumption, faster to load. On this last point I would need more time to see how it fares after three months worth of browsing history.

At this point I decided to import the FF3.5 settings, especially the saved passwords. Without those it would be a pain to initially re-enter all passwords I use. So I clicked on the wrench icon, clicked import, chose Firefox along with the option to import passwords. Everything seemed to work fine. I then browsed to one of my daily sites, and the login and password fields remained empty.

Quick search on Google returned “Chrome won’t import passwords from Firefox 3.5” support question. It seems Chrome cannot import passwords when they are saved in the sqlite database used to store FF settings.

Now, since I am a geek and want to try Chrome I will use it anyway, but what about the millions of Firefox users out there. The conversion funnel does not look rosy if after getting a percentage amount of users to download Chrome they discover that their passwords are not available. Those users will uninstall Chrome as quickly as they downloaded it.

This surely is affecting the adoption rate of Chrome. If I were Google I would give it high priority. I think Google Chrome is a great innovative browser so it would be a shame if adoption was suffering cause of a minor glitch in those important early minutes when a user is experimenting with a new product.

Chrome market share and Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts, a huge fan of Chrome, has just released his own website Google Analytics statistics to show that Chrome’s share of his website visitors has climbed. This on the first anniversary of Chrome.

He doesn’t of course base himself on those statistics to say Chrome’s market share is increasing, but quotes figures from Net Applications, StatCounter, and Clicky. They all put Chrome’s share around 3.5%. That’s all good and positive. More competition always leads to better products in the end.

However, I do not agree with Matt Cutts that “That’s pretty good for 12 months”. Why so? Well the Google homepage happens to be one of the most visited sites on the internet, not counting all the other domains, sub-domains, services, and of course YouTube.

Chrome was heavily promoted on these websites and yet after a year only 3.5% of people use it. I personally use Firefox, but do not consider myself a fanboy, in the sense that if something much better pops up I would switch without hesitation.

But it must be said that Firefox have managed the highly improbable with their web browser. Being the underdog at a time when Internet Explorer reigned supreme with over 85% share they steadily ate more of the pie to now being the dominant player putting Internet Explorer in second place.

I agree with Matt Cutts that Chrome is helping drive innovation, such as private browsing and un/dockable tabs, not to mention better speed and secure browsing. But saying 3.5% share is pretty good after a whole year of Google promotion (read millions of visitors) could have only been said by a fanboy

Accessing VirtualBox shared folder from Windows Server 2008 guest OS

If you need to access VirtualBox shared folders from a Windows Server 2008 guest OS, do not use the Network entry in Windows Explorer to map a network drive, since you will not be able to view the share.

The easiest way is to load the command line in Windows Server 2008, and assuming your VirtualBox shared folder is named sharename, execute the following command to map the shared folder to drive x.

net use x: \\vboxsvr\sharename

Copying / Cloning VirtualBox 3 vdi files

If you need to create a new copy of a VirtualBox machine, i.e. clone the machine, do not copy the vdi files directly. If you do so, when you try to add the hard disk using the Virtual Media Manager you will get an error that an existing hard disk is already mounted.

VirtualBox stores a unique identifier UUID, similar to a GUID, within each vdi file and if it matches the UUID of an already mounted hard disk it will not allow you to add the copied hard disk.

The proper way to do this is through the command line VBoxManage utility. Strangely enough cloning functionality although available through this utility is not yet integrated into the GUI.

Anyway, before you can clone a vdi file make sure that there are no snapshots associated or if you have you need to merge all changes before you continue.

Here I show how to use the VBoxManage utility from a Linux terminal, in this case Ubuntu distro. If your host OS is Windows read Cloning and Copying VirtualBox virtual machines.

In Linux all you need to do is load the terminal, go to the location where the vdi file you want to clone is stored, and then execute the following command:

VBoxManage clonehd "original hdd.vdi" "cloned hdd.vdi"

That is all there is to it. Note that this process can take up quite some time. It all depends on the size of the vdi file you want to clone and your physical hard drive speed.

Developing in a virtual machine

My main development machine was running on top of Windows Vista since it was pre-installed. When I bought the machine, I had neither time or willingness to switch OS.

To cut a long story short, Vista was really limiting the potential of my machine since out of the box it sucked up roughly 750MB of memory. After installing my usual tools, Vista was booting to a whopping 1GB of memory. This really limited my work since I constantly need to work with virtual machines.

So after reading some interesting information about using Windows Server 2008 as a main development machine and thinking how to go about it I finally made up my mind on the following setup.

Host OS: Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition + WICD Manager since Network Manager sucks, all of this installed in a 15GB partition along with a 5GB swap partition.

Ubuntu 9.04 uses less than 250MB after booting. Then I installed Sun’s VirtualBox 3 to create my virtual development machine. Guest OS, is Windows Server 2008 standard with some small tweaks to make it more useable as a desktop OS.

Windows Server 2008 consumes roughly 300MB after booting, leaving ample space for me to work.

With this configuration I also get all of the flexibility of virtual machines, such as cloning, suspending, using the same Ubuntu host OS machine to load any virtual machine I need, and on top of all that, never have to re-install Windows or any software if something goes wrong.

All virtual machines’ files are stored and run from an external 500GB drive, which is backed up on to another 500GB external drive. This way I am not tied to any particular machine, reducing downtime if something goes wrong. All big pluses.

WordPress 2.7 - 404 Errors with Permalinks

Upgrading or installing WordPress 2.7 on certain servers will give you 404 errors if you choose to use permalinks such as day and name. This depends on the PHP settings configured.

If you are having this problem, the solution is the following. Create a php.ini file in the root folder where you installed WordPress and paste in these two lines:

magic_quotes_runtime = Off

magic_quotes_sybase = Off

Save it, try to load your blog once again and everything should be working nicely.