Crescat Scientia

Blogger rolled out dynamic views some time ago. They provide a really nice, modern interface.

Blogger supports sharing to Google+ from the list of posts. Blogger also supports this wonderful feature of scheduling posts. But you can't share a post until it is public.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could share scheduled posts, meaning that when they become public, they will also be automatically shared to Google+?

To start posting more regularly, I'll start a series on small pet peeves with Google products.

Let's start with Google Drive. Google Drive can support archive file formats but only zip and rar according to the support page.

It should therefore be easy to add support for more archive formats, but notably missing are tar-based formats. Why not include uncompressed tar, and tar compressed with gzip, bzip2, and xz?

Finally, I end with two questions whose answers are not obvious: does Drive's search functionality extend to documents included in an archive? And, can archives within archives be viewed as easily?

Ally Bank has released Android and iOS apps. Ally alluded to this earlier in the year with a modification of their deposit agreement. The Android app functionality is limited to checking balances and making transfers currently.

Go get the app: Ally Mobile Banking

Remember when I rooted my Vibrant? Just recently CyanogenMod 9 (based on ICS) nightlies started being built for the Vibrant, so there's no better time to go ahead and jump up to bleeding edge CM9, right?

My only concern was jumping from the Bionix-v ROM to CM9. I have heard some horror stories when switching between custom ROM series. So just to be safer, I went through the CM7.2-rc1 release candidate as an intermediate step.

It was fairly painless. Of course, always start with a backup. I highly recommend Titanium Backup for apps and SMS Backup+ for SMS and call logs, though given my use of Google Voice the latter is not as important. Titanium can upload to Dropbox which is a bit of insurance against the worst case. I temporarily disabled two-factor authentication on my accounts where I use Google Authenticator as a second factor, so as to not lock me out if I bricked my phone. :) All my Google data is synced into the cloud. Finally, I also highly recommend Xmarks for bookmark syncing between all devices. Because of that, my bookmarks are also all safe in the cloud. Just one last sync, and that was it.

Then came the fun part! I downloaded CM7.2-rc1 from the link on the CM wiki. I used ClockworkMod ROM manager to download the Google apps package. I booted into recovery to install. And then, uh, it got in a loop constantly rebooting. Pull out the battery to stop the loop and boot again. :) Just to be a little more sure of the state, I used the "install zip from sdcard" option to again install CM7.2-rc1 and the Google apps. Reboot and... Android 2.3!

That was simple enough I then downloaded the CM9 nightly and Google apps package again, and used "install zip from sdcard" in the recovery. I had no issues, and a few reboots later I have Android 4.0!

I'm having fun in ICS. It is chewing through the battery though.

YMMV, of course. Happy flashing!

I posted a minor update to the LaTeX for Blogger user script to fix it in Blogger's new editor.

Posted from somewhere over the Midwest.

Initially, Google seemed reluctant to add hashtags, with some employees saying that they were unintuitive and a poor replacement for a good search. But people used hashtags on Google+ despite the lack of support and about two weeks ago, Google rolled out an update including improved search and hashtags.

Just two days after I posted I had been waiting for Google+ to leave its invite-only field test before I deleting my Facebook account... it happened. Google+ is no longer invite-only!

I assume the timing is just coincidence.

With the debut of Google+ to the public at large, they also released a host of new features which you should try out:

• The mobile applications for Android and iOS were improved.
• Hangouts (group video chats) are now supported on mobile devices. On Android, it requires Android 2.3. And on iOS, it requires a front-facing camera. So I haven't been able to use either, but I know a lot of people have devices that fit that bill.
• A preview version of Hangouts "with Extras" which include screensharing, a sketchpad, and document collaboration. They only feature of the original not supported by the "extras" version is synchronized YouTube video. Google is really building some tools here that could be useful for business.
• More APIs have been released. Start playing. Already there's a third-party whiteboard for Hangouts.
• Search! Ironically, Google did not launch Google+ with built-in search but now that's fixed.

I planned to wait until Google+ is officially open, but enough time has passed. I deleted my Facebook account!

You can find me on Google+.

Facebook intentionally hides away the option to delete your account, but if you'd like to do the same use this form.

Amazon silently released their Cloud Reader web app, whereby you can read your Kindle books online. There's also a Chrome app for offline access. Cool!

Via: Engadget, VentureBeat, and Lifehacker.

For Chrome users on Google Music, try the Music Plus extension. Includes: lyrics, last.fm integration, and desktop notifications.

My Twitter account languishes mostly unused. It's a funny story. I was stranded in Texas last Christmas trying to make it to the northeast. So I signed up for Twitter to follow the timely news from the airlines. That was immensely useful. Since then a few friends have joined Twitter, but they're mostly on Google+ now. So I asked myself what do I need twitter for?

In fact, there's only one stream of updates I would really miss: NY_NJairports, my favorite source of New York area airport information. I also occasionally find the AmtrakNEC stream useful, but I don't know that I'd miss it.

Here's the trick: you can follow Twitter feeds via RSS. I regularly check Google Reader, so that's perfect!

Do you want to move to Google+ but have a lot of Facebook photos you don't want to lose?

Fear not. Download the Move Your Photos extension for the Google Chrome browser. It gives you the option to download all your Facebook photos to Picasa, from which you can share them on Google+. I have used it and it works well. The only downside is that the extension doesn't download others' photos in which you are tagged.

The other option is PhotoGrabber which has downloads for Windows and OS/X, but also works on Linux. I also tried this, and it does allow downloading all Facebook photos including other users' albums containing pictures of you. You then have the burden of re-uploading them to Picasa. However, there is one caveat: those other users must be friends. Facebook allows others to have you tagged even if you aren't friends, and will happily show you their photos even if you aren't friends. Those photos you can see but PhotoGrabber can't download. This is probably not a burden for most people, but caused me some problems.

If you use Firefox, you may also be interested to know there is this Firefox add-on. I haven't tried it, so I can't share any firsthand experience. However, rumor has it that this extension is slower than the above Chrome extension.

As we as a society slowly migrate away from Facebook, it is important to remember why we embark on such a large undertaking. If you ever find yourself in doubt, here are some compelling reads:

• 10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account is a summary of the most important reasons why Facebook is not to be trusted.  The company and its executives are unethical and technologically incompetent.
• Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline is a timeline of the intentional degeneration of privacy in a Facebook world.

And if you still don't believe it, here are some highlights from Facebook stories over the years:

• Facebook tried to start a whisper smear campaign against Google and when finally caught, they weren't sorry.
• Accepting unknown friend requests may give hackers access to your Facebook account.
• You can get notified when your crush becomes "single" again (not directly their fault, but creepy).
• Facebook users had access to other users' account information via Hulu.
• Facebook is one of the top 10 most hated companies in America.
• Although Facebook wants you to share everything, and is constantly pushing you to do so, they are gun shy when it comes to their own data, even slides from a public presentation.
• Facebook, unlike its competitors, is strongly against letting you download a list of your contacts (name and email), because you could then email or chat with them outside the Facebook ecosystem.  A developer created an extension for the Chrome browser which downloaded your contacts anyways, and now in the days of Google+, his extension became popular, and naturally Facebook shut it down.  Presumably, because Facebook is scared of Google+.
• Facebook's latest "awesome" announcement (a technologically inferior implementation of a feature that was in Gmail chat in 2008) was universally panned.  Here's a funny CNN video.

Classify all polynomials with real coefficients which map rational numbers to rational numbers and irrational numbers to irrational numbers.

My last post was a bit whiny, but I'd like to expound on the usage of flash in Google Music, and why it gives choppy music on many of my machines.  This is something of a study in why you should avoid flash at all costs...

And really, an oft-quoted reason, the lack of flash support on iOS is not all that good a reason by itself unless the website is targeting mobile platforms.  iOS accounts for about two percent of web traffic, so it is entirely possible to ignore them.

I can give you a much better reason.  Just read this.  That's the reason flash is choppy on some of my machines (and there's a workaround I have been too lazy to use everywhere).  The gist is that there is a bug in the 64-bit flash plugin having to do with playing audio (uncovered because other things became less lenient), and resulting in choppy audio.  Even though this is a closed product, some very smart people figured out exactly what the problem was, created a workaround, and reported the problem to Adobe.  The true fix is literally is as simple as replacing one function call with another similar one.

That was in November 2010.  Adobe still has not fixed it.  What does that say to website developers?  Yes, you are presenting what is at best an irritating experience to people unfortunate enough to come to your site.  And yes, someone else already did the work to figure out why.  And yes, we can fix it easily.  But we won't.

On a more positive note, the workaround does fix it completely.  :)

Time for more bitching about Google Music.

The first and biggest complaint about Google Music Beta was obviously the crappy desktop app that doesn't support Linux, or for that matter Google's own ChromeOS. I guess users must not want to store music locally on a Chromebook.

The second complaint is that some enterprising person figured out how the uploading is done and fixed Google's own problem, only to have the underlying protocol changed out from under him breaking his extension.

But I soldiered on. The Google Music Manager runs under Wine. See this forum. Specifically, download the files, unzip the file, get a recent version of wine:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.3

and finally run from the unzipped directory:

wine1.3 MusicManager.exe

Now I can upload music. This gives me a whole host of new things to complain about, but let's call them feature requests:

• One cannot choose the songs to upload in the music directory. It's all or nothing.
• One cannot play music in the music manager, say to see if that really is the song you remember it to be.
• The website player requires flash. Seriously? As Google is telling everyone else in the world to move to HTML5 and is even moving their own properties such as YouTube to HTML5, they launch a new website which requires flash.
• The website player requires flash. This deserves a second mention, especially for the bugs I've encountered so far. On two machines flash audio is currently choppy on some websites, including Google Music, but not Hulu. On another, for some reason the website is completely nonfunctional even with flash -- it can't seem to notice flash is there. Which means, of three machines, the website player currently works on none of them.
• The Music Manager only supports a handful of formats, not including ogg. Most of my collection was in ogg format. At least they support flac, so you can use that as long as you have the space.
• But wait! When the Music Manager is pointed at flac files, the uploads never finished! I transcoded flacs down to a low bitrate MP3 (VBR limited to at most 64kbps) and only then did the uploads ever finish.
• Even then, the Music Manager took most of the day to upload 150 songs. It was mostly idle, and often complaining of connectivity to the Google Music servers. I have a decent internet connection too, by the way.
• It appears to be the case that if you upload music and delete it, the album still shows in the list of "New and Recent" albums.
• There is no easy way I can find to mass delete many songs or albums.
• That is unfortunate, because it seems if you reencode the same song with the same tags as an mp3 with slightly different settings, Google Music cannot tell that it is the same song, so you end up with duplicates. It can tell if it is the exact same file however.
• Cover art is found automatically for some albums, but not also for others including very popular music you would expect to be automatically located. You can manually set the album art, but it is an annoyance and I haven't tried.
• Google Music allows you to rate music "thumbs up" in which case it is automagically added to a special playlist. The UI for that playlist includes the number of "plays". This doesn't appear to register plays from Android devices as opposed to the website. Unfortunate, since that's the only device that currently works for me (see above).
• There is no way I can find to upload playlists.
• There is no way I can see to integrate with third party services such as last.fm. I have years of listening data at last.fm. If Google provided integration, they could very easily determine my likes and dislikes more quickly, and at the same time provide my updates back to last.fm.
• There is also no sharing I can see built-in. I thought Google was focused on social. There is no friends list, no way to easily share a certain song (which for listening would obviously require the recipient to own it until the music companies come on board). Likewise, there is no "+1". There are no badges to put on your blog to show what you are currently listening to, favorite songs, etc.
• There is still no record company buy-in.