Another blog bites the dust

I’ve just stumbled upon this article stating the the IFPI – the international equivalent of the RIAA – has just released a virus that will delete your P2P software. Now I find this act to be criminal. All the recent worm writers that were caught and legal action was taken against them. This virus is sponsored by an organization and as much as they’d like to fight P2P piracy, writing a virus and deleting software from my computer without my knowledge IS a CRIME! [Read More]

As my good friend Dudu pointed out (and I forgot to tell you), Google Talk’s log abilities are very limited. It only saves the last 20 lines of chat (and only if the window was closed properly, otherwise it will NOT save the log). Since Google Talk currently lack any normal API (heck, its just one executable file ;-) ), I thought about writing a small up that would listen to file changes in the log directory, parse them and accumelate them in one file per converstaion with a person (similar to what the log is doing now). [Read More]

After discovering the Google Talk Chat Log format and seeing that its not human readable, I’ve decided to write a log viewer so I can check out and read my logs whenever I want to.

You can download the Google Talk Chat Log Viewer v0.1 from here .

I’ve also written there the Google Talk Chat Log format if anyone else is interested.

Enjoy!

Google Talk stored all of your custom messages that you have entered in a file in your user profile directory. The file is located at “%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Talk\status” Inside you will find a file named in the format [userid]-history.txt. So if your Gmail account is John.Dow@gmail.com the filename will be john.dow_gmail.com-history.txt (besides, there is usually only one file there anyway ;-) ). The file format is very easy. It start with a first line which has the character “1” in it. [Read More]

If you every wondered how to disable Google Talk’s auto update feature, I found an easy way of doing this which, at least for now, seems to work. NOTE: Be sure to backup the registry entries before using the registry’s Export feature when standing on the Google Talk AutoUpdate key. Close Google Talk Open the registry (using regedit.exe) Go to My Machine\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Talk\Autoupdate Change the value of UpdateURL to something in valid (or empty) Start Google Talk That’s it. [Read More]

I’ve just stumbled upon this, which seems to contain some very interesting speculations as to Google’s future plans. They all strengthen my point about in my previous post that Gmail IDs are a Passport like system for authentication and they will be used throughout current and future services. They are already being used in most of Google’s personalization sites. Another thing the link I started with talks about is the fact that Google Talk is also more about managing your contacts and you can see that the integration with Gmail and its Contacts into Google Talk also adds to the fact they it is heading to a more centralized authentication system. [Read More]

It seems that there are more than a few people (well, at least 2) that have some other thoughts about Google. I must admit that at first I was also inside the Google Talk frenzy, submersed in all the hype, but after reading Nuggest’s post and Drunken Batman’s post I started to ponder a bit about their thoughts and I must say that have some really good points. Although Google Talk is still in v1. [Read More]

I just installed Google Talk (talk.google.com). Its REALLY cool. It’s a basic IM and its in Beta but the Voice has a really good quality. I really liked the fact that they use an open standard, the Jabber/XMPP (www.xmpp.org) which is always good. This means that you can use any Jabber/XMPP supported client like iChat (for MacOS), GAIM (For Windows and Linux), etc. Read their developer manifesto here, to see that they mean business and I do hope that they will use the built-in federation ability of the Jabber/XMPP protocol to federate messages to other IMs such as Yahoo, AIM/ICQ and MSN. [Read More]

I’m so glad to see Discovery back in one piece. I still remember Feb 1st 2003. It was my grandmother’s birthday and we were sitting in a nice restaurant at the northern part of Israel. After eating, we went to visit a nice little place called “Hacula Vally” which was a swamp that was dried out in the 1920s or so but was now back to its (almost) original dimension. [Read More]

I just found out about the new name of the previously Windows code named “Longhorn”. Guess what, it called Windows Vista. Now I wonder who is the smart-ass marketing guy that thought about that? What is this? half resurrecting dead Digital Corp. companies? The year branding (95,98,2000,2003) I could live with, the XP signature was OK (at least it sounded good) but VISTA?! I guess Office will be the next thing to lose the year branding (although it lost it in XP and gained it back in 2003). [Read More]