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Shantanu Oak
Jul. 7th, 2009
08:26 pm - Google's Context-Sensitive Spell Checker
Wikipedia includes as an example: "Their coming too sea if its reel", a phrase that has 5 spelling mistakes, even though all the words can be found in the dictionary. If you enter this text in Gmail's editor and click on "Check spelling", Gmail won't find any error. Type the same text in Google's search box, and you'll get a "did you mean" message that suggests to search for "Their coming to see if its real". As you can see, Google's search box has a better spell checker than Gmail since it doesn't rely on a dictionary, it uses a huge amount of searches to determine what are the most probable sequences of words that follow a certain pattern. Unfortunately, the spell checker available at Google.com is optimized for searches, which are usually short, so you can't use it to spell check an email message or a blog post.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/0
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amusedApr. 28th, 2007
06:00 pm - straight answer to rounded corners
Rounded corners is an issue not just limited to web development but as a part of the regular design / art work.
Zach has picked up on google’s own corner generator.
The concept is simple. Request the 4 rounded corners directly from google. Google will generate the png on-the-fly and you display it on your page for free. The advantages are, you don't have to host the images and can create small or big images just by changing the w and h parameters!
Google probably doesn’t want this to be a corner service, but for now you can create your own google-esque corners with URLs such as:
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups/rou
The parameter list:
* c - the color, as either a name or a CSS-style hex color spec (RGB or RRGGBB) sans #. The color names are taken from the CSS2 spec and are as follows: aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow (thanks, anonymous commenter)
* bc - the background color, same acceptable input as c. One twist: if you leave out the bc parameter entirely, the background is transparent.
* h - height in pixels. If you leave it out, uses a default of 8.
* w - width in pixels. If you leave it out, uses a default of 8.
* a - which corner to generate; tl is top left, tr is top right, bl is bottom left, br is bottom right
Someone has created a dolphin image using this tool and a programmer has come forward to create a simple form if you are too new to this parameters thing.
Dec. 31st, 2005
06:29 pm - Ten Failed Tech Trends for 2005??
So Gmail has had a positive impact, in that it got the web mail providers to get off their collective posteriors and update their anemic services. And that's certainly been good for all users. But Gmail itself now seems to be lagging. Will Gmail ever come out of beta? Or is it simply a viral marketing ploy? Maybe 2006 will reveal all.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1
surprisedOct. 13th, 2005
08:06 pm - Gmail outage
Google confirmed that an outage affected an unidentified number of Gmail users on Wednesday. "We are aware that a small percentage of Gmail users experienced issues earlier today. Access was quickly restored," Google said in an e-mail statement. Asked to elaborate, a company spokeswoman said: "We don't have additional details."
http://news.com.com/2061-10812_3-589416
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uncomfortableOct. 10th, 2005
10:26 am - Why I don't use Yahoo?
The question here is never whether or not the search engine is greedy (they are all highly commercial ventures); the question is always wether they’re putting a priority on the best possible results, whatever the search engine considers that to be (and just having organic listings obviously doesn’t mean the listings are good). And in that respect, it seems, Yahoo often fails.
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/200
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lazy