Month: February 2010

Day in brief

Gmail Labs : it sucks being a minority

The latest announcement at Gmail blog covers some of the experimental features (Gmail Labs) that will graduate the Labs, or, in other words, will become a part of the Gmail service, and some features that will retire, or, in other words, will be completely removed.  While usually changes like this don’t affect myself much, this time I am in the minority.  That is, I am using one of those features that will be retired – Fixed Width Font.

Fixed width font

A lot of my emails have to do with coding and from automated scripts that send me the output.  These make much more sense when displayed with fixed width font.  Vertical alignment, tabulation levels, and simple table-like structures – these all break horribly when viewed with variable width font.  Too bad that’s how I’ll have to look at it now.

Variable width font

Some of that Google stuff is not for you

Google is all over the news recently with more and better applications.  However, not all of those applications are for you, an average Joe.  Consider for example the blog post about their updates to DoubleClick Ad Exchange, that they’ve bought some time ago.

Imagine you’re a major online publisher with a popular global surfing website and an ad sales team. Every second of every day, you have difficult decisions about what ads to show and how to measure their relative performance.

I think you can stop reading immediately after those lines.  Of course, there are plenty of global publishers who are using Google services in one form or the other.  But let’s face it – you are not one of them.