20 April 2006 in Google | Comments (0)

Just some general Google news for today

Google have released their newest search appliance – Onebox. Onebox pulls data from multiple repositories into one place where previously the Search Appliance could search file systems and web sites but didn’t help achieve Google’s mission of “organising all the worlds information”.

Onebox is the product of working with third party vendors to provide a much more complete view of enterprise data. This includes now searching over Cisco Meeting Place Express, Cognos (BI tools), Employease (HR tools), NetSuite (more BI tools), Oracle (HR, ERP, CRM and SCM applications), Salesforce.com (CRM) and SAS (yet more BI tools).

Bringing this data out of proprietary repositories can only be a good thing for the end users and Google have started opening up the API for the Search Appliance (if this would make it easy to pull data from it or provide data to it I’m not sure at the moment). Hopefully more vendors provide interfaces for the Onebox to utilise (Aftermail? )

Of course we’re still waiting for Google to make any of their search appliances available in New Zealand (come on! It’s been years since they debuted!). I’d also like to hear how well the appliance integrates the results and ranks them. Hopefully they’re all in one nice structured list that is relevant but that’s considerably easier to say than actually do.

Update: After some more reading it appears that they simply integrate links (Like “Web”, “Images”, “Groups” etc) into the Google Search so that they include the other repositories. They don’t look to integrate the results.

Press release: Google adds secure search across popular business applications.
Google blog link: Google launches exciting new search appliance.

- JD

18 April 2006 in Microsoft | Comments (1)

One thing that I’ve recently found useful in Outlook is how you can have it pre-populate your calendar with holidays for your country. I told my flatmate about this and thought I should post the instructions in case anybody else doesn’t know how to do it.

1. Fire up Outlook
2. Click “Tools” then “Options” on the menu
3. Click “Calendar Options”
4. Click “Add Holidays…” (near the middle of the form)
5. Put a tick in “New Zealand” and click “OK”
6. Done

This works in both Office 2003 and Office 2007 (Perhaps earlier ones too but I haven’t tested). Speaking of which I’ll hopefully post a few Office 2007 entries as time goes on

- JD

12 April 2006 in Google | Comments (0)

A nice new feature has been added to Google Analytics over night – time zones. One thing that has been a mild cosmetic annoyance is that the times don’t match up (so, for example, my traffic seems heaviest at midnight).

It will cause a slight skew in your data for the change (it’s not retrospective). So far I can’t seem to get it to change as it complains I’m not verified but I assume that will be ironed out.

Also other Analytics users don’t seem to see this option yet (“I see dead features”).

Good to see this being added.

– JD

11 April 2006 in Google | Comments (1)

So I decided to play around with Google Adsense. I love Google Analytics and a lot of what it offers is around how AdSense is working so I thought I’d see what else I can learn from it I don’t expect I’ll make anything from it though.

I thought I’d post a comment though that I’ve found the Google AdSense Deluxe plugin for WordPress. It seems like a really simple plugin to stick in and enable all sorts of advert management on your site. If you’re using WordPress and are thinking of using AdSense I’d endorse it

Check out Google AdSense Deluxe here.

Anyway, back to our normal programming…

- JD

10 April 2006 in .Net, Code, Intergen | Comments (2)

This is more for my own reminder but somebody else might find it useful. This code allows you to update the value of a config key in your .net 2.0 application. It also updates the section so subsequent reads from the .config will reflect that change. Really useful when you just need to store a single peice of information.

In this example I’m setting a last run date.

// Open the app.config
System.Configuration.Configuration config = ConfigurationManager
.OpenExeConfiguration(ConfigurationUserLevel.None);

// Update the last run time 
config.AppSettings.Settings["LastRunDate"].Value
= lastRunTime.ToString();

// Save the configuration file
config.Save(ConfigurationSaveMode.Modified);

// Force a reload of a changed section.
ConfigurationManager.RefreshSection("appSettings");

- JD

10 April 2006 in Business | Comments (5)

So my flatmate headed back to his parents house in the weekend. He is the family techo so of course he usually deals with all their computer related issues. He noticed that their internet was going slow, which seemed odd since they had a 5GB cap and they hadn’t used 5GB yet and had been slowed to 64k.

After some investigation he has found that Telecom gave them their “free” upgrade – from 512Kbps down to 2Mbps down. That’s great, free upgrades is always good. However, he also found that they had downgraded their cap from 5GB to 1GB. Everyone makes mistakes, so they phoned up Telecom. No, apparently this is normal and if they want to go back to a 5GB cap they need to pay $10 per month to get it.

So the “free” upgrade actually costs $10 per month. Sounds a lot like a scam to me.

Has anyone else found this sort of behavior when dealing with Telecom? I’m with Paradise so I haven’t personally had to deal with this issue (and my parents are stuck on dialup thanks to our amazing ADSL coverage in New Zealand).

- JD

6 April 2006 in Apple | Comments (5)

This is just fantastic news – Apple has released a beta version of Boot Camp – their tool for dual booting with Windows XP.

The install is around 87MB and includes all the drivers needed for the Apple hardware on Windows. This is great because up until now you couldn’t get graphics acceleration on Windows due to the lack of drivers.

All around great news – they’re really pushing hard to get people to switch. Now it makes business sense to buy a Mac as I can still do my development on Windows AND get the best laptop on the market.

Click here for more information about Boot Camp

- JD

P.S. Rumors are already flying that the next version of OS X will include hypervisor technology to run Windows apps from within OS X. Still wild speculation but fingers crossed it’s true.

29 March 2006 in Tools | Comments (0)

Just a quick entry for anyone who is at all interested in keeping an eye on RoR but doesn’t check out their blog – Ruby on Rails 1.1 is now out. It includes over 500 changes from 100 contributors. Not bad since 1.0 only came out a wee while back. Great to see so much progress being made (I’m not sure how good that is for site hosts who will need to test the changes before rolling them out however).

For more information on the “wow” features of 1.1 visit the Ruby-on-Rails blog

For more information on some of the lesser known features that just make every day better check out this entry by Mike Clark.

As for the quietness lately, I’ve been playing around a fair bit with Ubuntu and trying out some new technologies (like RoR). I’ll try and post more of what I’m finding soon.

- JD