Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

Posted: 01 Feb 2011 12:51 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

Like many people we've been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.

We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It's already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.

Posted by Ujjwal Singh, CoFounder of SayNow and AbdelKarim Mardini, Product Manager, Middle East & North Africa
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/some-weekend-work-that-will-hopefully.html

[G] Egyptian protest footage on YouTube

Posted: 31 Jan 2011 06:28 PM PST

YouTube Blog: Egyptian protest footage on YouTube

It's been hard to open a laptop or turn on the television over the last week without hearing news of the unrest in Egypt. On YouTube, thousands of videos of the protests have poured in, whether as unfiltered footage from the demonstrations themselves, or as news reports from our media partners around the globe.

We understand how closely the world is following these events, and want to help people access and share this information quickly and easily on YouTube. We're helping people do this in three ways:
  • Highlighting the latest footage on CitizenTube, our news and politics channel, and inviting people to submit video they've come across.
  • Pointing our users directly to these videos through banners at the top of YouTube pages, and through links alongside YouTube videos.
  • Streaming live coverage of Al Jazeera's broadcasts about the unfolding events, on both their Arabic and English YouTube channels.
And our Google colleagues have also turned on a speak-to-tweet service to help people in Egypt stay connected at this difficult time.

Here's a playlist of videos that have come in:



YouTube has used similar tools and live streaming technologies in the past to give our users access to information on major world news events, such as the Haiti earthquake and the protests in Iran. We hope this footage provides a unique window into the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and many other cities across Egypt.

Olivia Ma, YouTube News and Politics, recently watched "28th Jan. 2011 - Storyful - Kasr Al Nile Bridge clashes."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/Fb3Qb2ohPYc/egyptian-protest-footage-on-youtube.html

[G] Simian: Mac OS X package deployment via App Engine

Posted: 31 Jan 2011 05:34 PM PST

Google Open Source Blog: Simian: Mac OS X package deployment via App Engine

Administration of software packages on the Mac platform can often be daunting. Google's Mac Operations and Security teams evaluated several solutions for OS X package deployment, but unfortunately none of them met all of our required features. We decided to build our own solution to do the following:
  • Deploy new or updated software by targeting a single Mac or tens of thousands.
  • Push security patches, whether the Mac is on an internal network/VPN or not.
  • Force mandatory installation of some packages, while allowing others to be optional.
  • Tightly manage Apple-provided updates.
  • Scale without deploying and maintaining additional server infrastructure.
  • Obtain reports on all of this and the fleet overall.
Today we are open-sourcing Simian, our solution to enterprise-class Mac OS X package deployment. Simian uses App Engine-based hosting to scale with the needs of your growing enterprise, and a Munki-based client which will continue to evolve through the outstanding work of Greg Neagle and the Munki community. We hope this to be the first of many announcements in sharing Google's unique IT approach with the larger community.

For more information, please visit our Simian project page, join the discussion list, and download the code. For more information about Munki, please visit its project page.

By John Randolph and Justin McWilliams, Google Corporate Platforms Engineering Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2011/01/simian-mac-os-x-package-deployment-via.html

[G] Google Summer of Code Announced at LCA

Posted: 31 Jan 2011 05:34 PM PST

Google Open Source Blog: Google Summer of Code Announced at LCA


Despite the recent devastating floods in Australia, the open source community is converging on Brisbane this week for the annual linux.conf.au (LCA). The LCA team "encourages everyone to still come to Brisbane and support local business and the community - we need your support." Monday during the introductory session at LCA, Carol Smith, member of the Google Open Source Programs Office, proudly announced Google Summer of Code 2011.

This will be the 7th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past 6 years Google Summer of Code has had 4,500 students from over 85 countries complete the program. We are excited to announce that we will extend the scope of the program this year by targeting a 25% increase in accepted student applications as well as accepting a larger number of mentoring organizations. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student that would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2011 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. And stay tuned for more details coming soon!

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-summer-of-code-announced-at-lca.html

[G] Googlers Down Under

Posted: 31 Jan 2011 05:34 PM PST

Google Open Source Blog: Googlers Down Under


Despite the recent flooding in Brisbane, Australia, linux.conf.au (lca) will proceed from January 24th to 29th, and Googlers from across the company will be there. LCA is a community-run technical conference for free and open source software enthusiasts, featuring but not limited to Linux. In addition to the many Googlers who will be attending, several Googlers will also be presenting at the conference.
The conference starts on Monday the 24th with a day of miniconfs, and Nóirín Shirley from Google's Zurich office will be presenting "Open Source: Saving the World" as part of the Haecksen track.

Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf will start the day on Tuesday the 25th with his keynote presentation, and later that morning he will present "In Search of Transmission Capacity - a Multicore Dilemma." On Tuesday afternoon, Google Summer of Code Administrator Carol Smith will give a "Google Summer of Code Update" at the FOSS in Research and Student Innovation Miniconf.

On Wednesday January 26th, Google staff engineer and Linux kernel committer Ted Ts'o will explain "Making file systems scale: A case study using ext4."

Andrew Gerrand and Nigel Tao of the Go team will give attendees "A Tour of Go" on Thursday the 27th, and Nóirín will present "Baby Steps into Open Source - Incubation and Mentoring at Apache," which is based on her experience at the Apache Software Foundation.

On Friday the 28th, Carol will present her talk, "The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Project Managers" in the morning. A little later in the day, Daniel Bentley and Daniel Nadasi of the open source and Geo teams respectively will talk about "Opening a Closed World," followed by Marc MERLIN, who works on infrastructure at Google. Marc will discuss "Saving Money with Misterhouse: Running Your Lights and HVAC System. Scaring your cat off the kitchen counter is just a bonus :)"

LCA always closes with Open Day, a free day-long event where the general public can learn about open source, open data - all things "open." The Open Day is on Saturday the 29th, and Cat Allman of the Open Source Programs Office will be presenting her talk, "What is Open Source?" there.
Come learn more about the latest happenings in open source, and join us in showing support for Brisbane's recovery. We hope to see you there!

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2011/01/googlers-down-under.html

[G] A refresh to the Documents List

Posted: 31 Jan 2011 10:46 AM PST

Official Google Docs Blog: A refresh to the Documents List

Over the past year, many of you have been taking advantage of the ability to upload any file to Google Docs. With more files and of a variety of file types in one place, it becomes more difficult to organize and find what you need quickly. As a result, we are happy to announce that, over the next couple of days, we'll be rolling out a refresh to the documents list, aimed to make it more useful to find, explore and share all your files stored 100% on the web.


First, we added a number of filters in this refresh, making it easier to narrow your search by type, visibility state, and other criteria. We also added priority sorting as a option in all views. Priority sorting is like Gmail's Priority Inbox, in that we look at a number of signals to put your most relevant files at the top of the list. And you can still use other sort orders like Last Modified Date or by Name.


This update will also improve the experience of exploring and browsing your files. We added a preview panel on the right side of the document list, so that you can see a preview thumbnail, sharing settings and more at a glance. And if the file is a video, you can start playing it directly from the preview panel or from the recently announced video player.


To make it easier to view photos, you can now click on the magnifying glass on a photo to open a full screen slide-show viewer.


There is also a new view called Home. The contents of the Home view are controlled by you so that the content you access the most often is easier to get to. You can remove files from the Home view by right clicking the file and selecting Don't show in home to hide them. And when you need them, these files can always be found later by selecting All items or using search.

You may also notice Collections have replaced Folders in the left navigation bar. Collections are designed to combine the best features of labels and folders. A file can live in multiple collections, just like with Gmail labels. Collections can also be stored hierarchically, just like folders on your desktop. And of course, collections can be shared, just like you can share docs.

Along with the improved find-ability and browsing experience, we streamlined the interface. For example, instead of using checkboxes to select multiple files, you can just use your Shift or Control (Cmd on Macs) keys.

That's not all. We've also been working hard on increasing the speed of the documents list by overhauling our back-ends to make things snappier.

This refresh is rolling out now and should be available to everyone over the next couple days. For Google Apps for Business customers that don't have "Enable pre-release features" box checked, this refresh will be coming in a few weeks.

Once the refresh is rolled out to your account, take the in-product tour and let us know what you think.

Posted by: Posted by Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/01/refresh-to-documents-list.html
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