Google owns and operates up to two percent of the world’s servers, an official Twitter app is coming to Android (in addition to the already-announced official iPhone app), and Evernote Premium users get a big update.
(Link: Remains of the Day: Google’s 1 Million+ Servers Edition – Remains – Lifehacker)
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gvoice-ruby is a library for interacting with Google’s Voice service (previously GrandCentral) using ruby. As Google does not yet publish an official API for Google Voice gvoice-ruby uses the ruby libcurl library (Curb) to interact with the web service itself by using the HTTP verbs POST and GET to send and retrieve information to the Google Voice service.
gvoice-ruby is currently a very preliminary project with limited functionality basically confined to returning arrays of voicemail or sms objects and sending sms messages, or connecting calls. It cannot cancel calls already in progress. It currently works under ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.2-preview1 on my computer running Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). It is not guaranteed to work anywhere else and has very few tests.
(Link: Ruby API to Google Voice)
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I did this simple and mostly fictional org chart in less than 3 minutes. Hopefully my friends at HR Bloggers won’t mind…
How to do it
1. create a new Google Spreadsheet
2. add 2 columns: first for employees, second for managers
3. select the data you want to use
4. click “insert”, “gadget”
5. click “diagrams”, “organization chart”, then “add to spreadsheet”
6. insert a title and click “apply and close”
(Link: Simple Org Charts In Google Docs)
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You may be interested to know that this document was originally written for internal use in the Operations department at Google. At the time, I was campaigning for the right to use Ruby on internal projects and I felt that a style and usage guide would probably assist in the battle for the language’s acceptance, as the officially sanctioned languages at the time already had one. If nothing else, we’d at least all end up writing code that was easier to maintain.
(Link: The Unofficial Ruby Usage Guide)
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“”have you ever met anyone who said they’d really like to try out that Interwebs thing, but they’re just put off by the low-quality operating systems and browsers that are available at this time, so they’re sitting it out for now? ”
(Link: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: on Chrome OS)
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[Google] recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.
(Link: Google Calculating Who’s About to Quit)
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Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, which beats all the other large tech companies we looked at, including big hitters like Microsoft, Apple, Intel and IBM.
(As you may know, we have been taking a closer look at what kind of money some of the most well-known tech companies are making. The ones we have been looking at are Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Yahoo.)
(Link: Technology Companies profit per head in 2008 | Congratulations, Google staff: $210k)
We’re happy to let you know that we’re sharing our updating software, Google Update, with everyone. Google Update is the shared infrastructure used by Google Chrome, Google Earth and other Google software on Microsoft Windows, to keep our products up to date on users computers.
(Link: Google Open Source Blog: Google Update Goes Open Source)
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Google’s new App Engine Java service is powered by Jetty! With App Engine, you can build web applications using standard Java technologies and run them on Google’s scalable infrastructure.
(Link: Google AppEngine uses Jetty)
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When looking at GAE/J, it’s important to keep in mind the security restrictions that Google has been forced to implement, to make the Java implementation totally safe for them. This includes restrictions of many kinds, and some of them might come as a bit of a surprise in some cases. One of the larger things you will notice is that some classes aren’t available – and you will get a ClassNotFoundException if you try to use them from your application. Personally, I believe that using a SecurityException when trying to load these might have been better, but this fact remains: many classes you expect will not be there.
(Link: Ola Bini: Programming Language Synchronicity » gae/j)
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App Engine now supports the standards that make Java tooling great. (We’re working on the tooling too, with Google Plugin for Eclipse). It provides the current App Engine API’s and wraps them with standards where relevant, like the Java Servlet API, JDO and JPA, javax.cache, and javax.mail. It also provides a secure sandbox that’s powerful enough to run your code safely on Google’s servers, while being flexible enough for you to break abstractions at will.
(Link: The new language on Google App Engine: Java™)
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