Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

33 down, 66 to go

I’m 33 today.  Feels exactly the same as yesterday and a year ago.  But getting all those best wishes from people all around the world is, of course, super cool!  Thank you all so much.

And while we are on the subject of age, here is a screenshot of hilarious comment from this Linux Questions thread (kudos to Chris for the link):

Restore Gmail contacts

Today, when I navigated to my Gmail contacts, I was greeted by the following message:

The “Learn more” link points to the page with very simple restore instructions:

  1. Click Contacts.
  2. From the More actions drop-down menu, choose Restore contacts.
  3. Choose the time you’d like to revert your contacts list to (e.g. 10 minutes ago, one hour ago, one week ago, etc). We suggest that you also make a note of the time that you restore your contacts, in case you’d like to return to where you started.
  4. Click Restore. You’ll see a confirmation at the top of the screen when the rollback is complete.

 

Ultimate geek respect for Adrian Hands

Here is something that touched and moved every geek out there:

Adrian Hands was suffering from ALS and had lost motor skills when he used his legs to type in Morse code and fix a 9-year-old bug in Gnome. The patch was submitted three days before he passed away.

I think the following comment does the best job expressing the feeling:

There are so many who benefit from the community, and so relatively few who give back. So many people claim some excuse to not contribute anything to anybody without getting paid. Then there’s this guy. I am honored to have shared a planet with him.

 

WordPress Embeds – images and videos the natural way

Those of you who, like me, were using WordPress for a very long time, as well as those who got into WordPress recently, probably don’t know that WordPress can embed images and videos into posts and pages without using any plugins at all.  Even though there are plenty of plugins available (for example, Smart YouTube), you don’t always need them.

As per WordPress Embeds page, all you need to do is add URL to image or video in your post or page.  Just make sure that the URL stands on its own line and that it’s not linked.  Alternatively, you can use [embed] short code. WordPress supports quite a few popular sites – YouTube, Vimeo, Revision3, Flickr,  Google Video, and more.  The support is based on the oEmbed format.

Of course you’ll get more power with specialized plugins, but for many bloggers out there this built-in support will be more than enough.

Recommendation engine that finally makes sense – Google +1

I’ve heard plenty of rumors about an upcoming Google social network.  I have no idea if they are true, and really I don’t care.  I have enough social networks as it is.  But what I haven’t heard about until now is Google +1 – a new recommendation engine that Google is trying out.

At first, when I read about Google +1 and that it was yet another attempt for recommendation engine for Google search results, I didn’t think it was interesting at all.  There were a number of tries in that area – some of them long gone, some still alive.  I’m talking about results reordering via drag-and-drop, starring of result items, and others.

All of them shared the same problem – promoting items from within search results doesn’t work very well, because the user hasn’t yet visited the page itself.  He’s eager to navigate away from the results.  And on top of that, page title, description, and a thumbnail aren’t always enough to make a judgement.

On the other hand, recommendation engines are doing pretty well with social networks like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and others.  Every other page on the web has a share button that supports one or more social networks.  And people use those.  Even though sharing pages on Facebook and Twitter might be useful, it isn’t as useful as increasing the karma of those pages in order to rank them higher in your future search results.

That’s where Google +1 comes in.  It makes perfect sense.  Now you can search Google, visit the results, and +1 those of them that you liked (and, of course, those of them that support the Google +1 sharing).  Not only it would be trivial to push those +1 to other social networks, but also now users have way more stimuli to share things, since that would improve their own search results.

Google +1 is yet available to everyone. Google will take some time to roll it out.  But if you want to try it out now, you can enable it on experimental page.