#Google

2 days ago I wrote a post about the lack of Google Israel’s involvement in the development community.

It seems that in most of the places (I’m sure in the US, I’m not sure if the rest of the development centers in South American and Europe have the same involvement) where Google has development centers they are a little more involved with the development community in the form of lecture, places to meet and chat, sponsoring events, etc.

I know that Google‘s original Googleplex at Mountain View is very active for non googlers. There are frequent open lectures there and they host a bunch of other things like Summer of Code (well, not always host, but sponsor and make sure people know about it) and Google Developer Day (which is happening at 10 different locations worldwide, but NOT in Israel).

I know there are suppose to be two development centers in Israel, one in Haifa (which I know is located in MATAM cause you can see it from road #2 leading from Tel Aviv to Haifa near Intel and Microsoft Haifa) but I have no idea where the other development center in Israel is located, other than the fact that its suppose to be in the Tel Aviv area.

I own a Nokia E61 cell phone. A nice phone all in all (aside from the backup problems my wife encountered).

Gmail has this cool little applet that lets me access my Gmail account in a nicer (and better cached) way from my cell phone. It’s a really nice program and I use it quite often.

It has one problem though. If you host your own domain through Google Apps for Your Domain to get the Gmail like interface for your Emails you cannot use this program.

Google Gmail recently got a new feature allowing one to open Word documents using Google Docs and we can safely assume that PDF and Excel (for use with Google Spreadsheets) documents are on their way as well.

Sometimes a Word document can be quite big with lots of added stuff like images, drawings and so on.

If Google can handle the on-the-fly (or at least on-mail-receive) Word documents conversions I do think that they can (and hopefully will) handle Movie files conversions like I suggest in my previous post about integrating YouTube/Google Video with Gmail.

According to this, Google is opening an R&D center in Israel in the Tel Aviv area.

This is the second center, the first one opened in Haifa.

Microsoft has a research center in Haifa from 1991 and it was published in the Israeli press (sorry, I couldn’t find an English reference for this) that they are planning to open another research center in the Tel Aviv area.

The only company now from the big GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) that doesn’t have an R&D presence here in Israel is Yahoo.

I just saw that Google released the Google Ctemplate library.

While they do need to get some kudos for their efforts of releasing various code bits out as open source, I do have a problem with the Ctemplate library itself.

I don’t know when they wrote this library, but what I do know is that its yet another templating language to use. Why couldn’t they have used a standard language such as JavaScript (more exactly, ECMAScript) instead of inventing their own syntax? There are so many templating engines out there, why invent yet another one instead of trying to use an official syntax know by many?

According to this link in Globes, the Israeli Business newspaper, Google is going to open up an R&D center in Israel in the second quarter. The center will be led by Dr. Yoelle Maarek, a long time (17 years) veteran of IBM’s research labs and will be located in the northern city of Haifa (near the Technion, surprise surprise)

The only company out of the big 3, a.k.a, GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft), that has an R&D center in Israel is Microsoft. Yahoo had something in the first bubble and after the explosion of the first bubble it was quickly closed.

A long long time ago on July 6th 2005 I’ve posted a rant post about how I’m so pissed at Google after I had to pay $37.25 to get a “Free” Google T-Shirt I won because I wrote the Google Search API .NET Wrapper.

Well, now after 8 months I finally got a refund.

It started as a strange Email I got from the GoogleStore saying something about my request being handled. I didn’t figure what this was and the Email didn’t have any special links in it.

I read a this post on Niall Kennedy’s blog about the new features in the Google Toolbar which includes the ability to store and tag label bookmarks that can also later be retrieved when logging into a different machine.

While the concept is nice (and is similar in a number of ways to the del.icio.us extension for FireFox the thing that caught my eye was the fact that Google decided to call the tags labels.

Just saw this on Digg and since I’m already on a Jabber frenzy due to my previous posts, I thought I should share.

Looks quite cool, though I haven’t tried it yet.

I’m using GAIM so I got everything all up in one client. I’m just waiting to get a build of GAIM that works with libjingle so I would be able to chat with my friends using Google Talk’s voice features.

If I only had a bit more free time to actually code on GAIM that would be even better… oh well… back to the salt mines.