Google's Driverless Car

The project has evolved so much since the last time I checked (when it was still a DARPA challenge project).

Personally, I like this project very much. Maybe there will be people saying this project is a useless project, with the argument like, "if you are lazy, can just call a cab, take a bus...". But if you think of it carefully, Human makes mistakes, and road accidents are very costly mistakes. It cost not only your own life, and others' too!

And most accidents caused by long distance trips. Even if you are a cautious driver, if others are not careful enough, it will still affects you.

And its fantastic that Chris Urmson and his team made this autonomous system a "very considerate" AI. It slows down and make way for other drivers! Watch the video! ;)

One more note: I'm not a huge fan of driving. To me, driving is just to get from point A to point B. So, yeap, I'm a huge fan of Google's Driverless Car project :p



More Readings:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/how-google-self-driving-car-works
Google engineers explain the technology behind their autonomous vehicle and show videos of the road tests

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=14119138

Gmail - Reply to "email"

This is why I like Gmail, you can reply to "emails" - to help people rediscover the buried email, in case they missed it.

Google Plus Games

Wow, seems like Zuckerberg is quite active in Google+ Games? :) haha

Reset your Chrome Sync Passphrase

The official guide to reset Chrome sync passphrase is here, but the link to Google Dashboard is broken for some countries.

To go to Google Dashboard, follow this link https://www.google.com/dashboard/?hl=en

Happy resetting Google Chrome sync passphrase :)

The next trend - Web on TV

Many, including me, believe that this is the next big thing. Google TV, Apple TV... In fact, I find many of my tech savvy friends already plugged their LCD/LED TV to CPU, and watch movie from harddisk / ppstream.

Maybe its about time the conventional TV channels to join the list of elimination, just like news papers, radio channels...

Find out more about Google TV here.

Google Latitude

Hehe, just share with you what Google Latitude can do -

• track the time you spend on work, and 
• track the time you spent out.
• Share you public location by embedding badge in your websites.
• Set up location alert to get nearby friends alerts.

Google Latitude

I like to keep track of my activities. Well, I don't really care about privacy (Google  use for data mining?... nah, doesn't really matter to :] ) What really important to me is that I want to be able to track, or keep a record of my activities.

Well this reminds me of a talk that I went to at Tertiary Tech Conference (TTC). One of the speaker actually set up webcam in front of his desk 24/7 to let the whole world watch him while he is doing his research paper. His idea is to let the whole world know that he is doing his work, and thus prevents himself from slacking.

Why bother about losing privacy when it increases your productivity.

---

Oh, another this that I share with people - my workout records. I track my workout history, via endomondo. Ah, quite sometime already since my last run. Sometimes lazy to bring my phone out with me to record then runs. But what I like is the "burn-out" events in endomondo, and how I can view my friend's workout, and... compare my stats with them... haha.

Endomondo

Finally, gMail Priority Inbox Activated

[Solution] Google Voice after clicking "Upgrade your account" shows "Not Available in Your Country"

Google says that the latest Gmail feature that allows you to make phone calls is only available in the US, but that's not true. If you set Gmail's interface language to English (US), you should see the "Call phone" option in the chat roster. You can also buy credit using Google Checkout.

If you're not in the US and you want to add credit to your account, make sure that you DON'T CLICK the "Upgrade your account" button from Google Voice. This feature is only useful if you are in the US, since it lets you get a Google Voice number. Unfortunately, if you click on that button and you're not in the US, you'll no longer be able to buy credit.

Here's what you'll see after clicking on "Upgrade your account":

And, heres how you can overcome this

1. Cancel the upgrade using a US proxy (try UltraSurf if you use Windows).
2. Click "Cancel Upgrade" when you enter Google Voice website.

Google Voice in Gmail

finally Google Voice is not limited to US only :)

Integrated to Gmail - call from Gmail.

Chrome extension 

Get Chome extension here :)

Check out the call rate; Its free in US and Canada!

Check out the rate comparison here!

Blogger Navbar search not working

Notice that the Navbar in my blog doesn't work properly. The old entries are not included in the search results.

Did a Google search and found this post in blogger forum.

Hey folks,

We've been troubleshooting failed navbar search results for a while now, and we realize that it is still a problem for a good number of you. The best next step is for us to gather a lot of search data, and debug from there.

So if you are seeing failed search terms for words that you *know* should appear in search results, please fill out this form with that information. We really appreciate your help and patience as we work to sort this out.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGdscTZmUXNadVdrTHJsT1V6YXo2OUE6MA..

G

Hope it helps some of you out there as well :)

Google Chrome Canary

Been always wanted to have 2 good, or should I say "perfect" browsers. Was using Firefox and IE as my second browser, after trying so hard to give Opera, and Safari chances.

Thanks to the Dev build of Chrome - Canary build, I can work with 2 browsers independently. Maybe some of you wonder why I need 2 "independent" browsers. This is because when I go to work, I prefer not to mix or logout of my personal accounts with work accounts.

Below are the excerpt from GoogleSystem.blogspot.com. Thanks for the article, I've found a permanent (and perfet) solution to address my problem :)

The Canary build is only available for Windows, it's "installed to a different path, gets updated separately, and runs side by side with an existing stable/beta/dev installation". Google says that the Canary build will usually be the same as the dev build. "Sometimes if necessary, we may push additional updates on Canary build so its version is higher than dev."

Site note:
Seriously, Opera and Safari lousy to the max, a lot of small bugs here and there. For example, a lot of shortcuts (for blogger) couldn't work. The worse things is when the layouts doesn't display properly, in Google Docs for example.

Hope the dev improve the browsers asap, else the browsers are going off the market soon.

Failure Is Always an Option at Google

Saw this article at googlesystem.blogspot.com. I find it very true in the computing world, in fact, its also applicable in our lives, as we always adopt trial and error method to test-water before we actually expand and further develop things.

The concepts which I think are important are in bold.

Google is a company that has a lot of ambitious projects and it's inevitable that some of them will fail. Eric Schmidt says that failure is actually a good thing.

"We try things. Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it's absolutely okay to try something that's very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that."

Google's Peter Norvig has a more detailed explanation for this attitude:

"If you're a politician, admitting you're wrong is a weakness, but if you're an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be."

In fact, Peter Norvig says that Google is a company where failure is always an option:

"I think Google was early in accepting hardware errors. Other companies have tried to say, 'Well, if you can buy big, expensive computers that are more reliable, then you'll have fewer breakdowns and you'll do better.' Google decided to buy lots of cheap computers that break down all the time, but because they're so much cheaper, you can design the system with multiple backups and ways to route around problems and so forth. We just architect the system to expect failure."

Why there are so many Google products discontinued after a few months or a few years of development? Peter Norvig thinks that's a by-product of Google's rapid development model.

"We [try] to fail faster and smaller. The average cycle for getting something done at Google is more like three months than three years. And the average team size is small, so if we have a new idea, we don't have to go through the political lobbying of saying, "Can we have 50 people to work on this?" Instead, it's more done bottom up: Two or three people get together and say, "Hey, I want to work on this." They don't need permission from the top level to get it started because it's just a couple of people; it's kind of off the books."

via googlesystem.blogspot.com

Google Prospective Employee Qualities

download Google's Pacman

Its PAC-MAN's 30th Anniversary! I believe Pac-man is another all-time favourite child-hood game for most of us, along with Mario, Twin-bee...

For this event, Google created and placed a Google-Version of Pac-man at its main page. And I manage to grab the Google-Pac-man and archived it :) hehe

22-May-2010, Google hosted a Google version of Pac-man at main page.

The game is now hosted at http://kr02.net78.net/js/pacman/. You can iframe it if you wish to include in your site.

The embed codes are available here: http://paste2.org/p/844326

Update: Google decided to permanently offer its version of Pacman at http://www.google.com/pacman

Chrome Update

Small change on Google Chrome.

Notice the incognito icon behind the downloads? Indicates the files downloaded in incognito mode. :)

Google Voice now available for all .edu Students

Yay! Google Voice now available for students with .edu email addresses! Just sign up by entering .edu email address right here. Too bad NUS is .edu.sg :(

Some notable features of Google Voice. More can be found here.

• One number: a single phone number that rings all your phones
• Voicemail transcription: The best feature to translate what your voicemail into text
• Free SMS: send, receive & store text messages online
• Block calls: send unwanted callers straight to voicemail
• Record calls: record phone calls and store them online
• Conference calls: join several people into a single call
• Screen callers: hear who is calling before you pick up
• Custom greetings: Set up a special greeting for different callers.

Stay tuned, until gVoice is open to public :)

Google Chrome Speed Tests

This is a nice advertisement for Google Chrome.

Although I think the video a bit fake. like the page loading from bottom up??? yeah... but still nice illustration of the speed.

Google search KFC, McD ads come out

Haha, Google search "KFC" will return you McD ads. Guess KFC gotta put more effort in advertising with Google? :)

Goo.gl - shortener

goo.ly shortener service at http://gaigalas.net/lab/googl

OMG! I didn't know there exist a site to get the super cool shortened url at goo.gl. All this while, I thought thats a service by Google exclusive to their own staff. The main website of goo.gl is just a bunch of text, indicate that its for Google products and not for broader consumer use.

Geez, gut the crap and heres the ways to get you cool goo.gl urls.

Chrome extension (by giakomino)
via gaigalas.net (by Alexandre Gaigalas)

The only drawback is there's no statistics and tracking for the urls created.
Therefore I shall stay with bit.ly, tr.im and ow.ly for the time being :]

Google Earth Day logo

Its 7.30am, and I am still awake... nvm, presenting to you - Google Earth Day logo.