First impression at google office on first working day
Here is an impression from a Google worker,
I'll introduce myself and my new blog. My name is mark jen and i began my life as a googler (or noogler for those of you in the know) today: janurary 17th, 2005. in previous chapters of my life, i'd interned at ibm and worked full time for 18 months at microsoft. so i guess you could say i'm getting first hand experience at three companies who embody the tech company lifecycle - ibm at the tailend of their era; microsoft at the inflection point leading to maturity; and google at the beginning of what would become a new empire.
so what happened today? nothing too exciting. i think new employee orientation is about the same at any company: you show up early, get a security badge, sit through hours of boring presentations and fill out the required paperwork.
cool things about the process at google:
* almost everything is electronic. only four forms need to be printed (two were required by the government; one was the electronic signature authorization form; and of course, the NDA we've all come to know and love)
* my login, badge and workstation were completely ready to go on the first day. you'd think this wouldn't be so hard, but it actually proves to be quite difficult at most companies. to top it all off, my laptop was given to me all setup and in its carrying case with a full complement of goodies :)
now the bad:
* same old 3 hour HR presentation about nothing important in particular
the rest of my day was spent surfing the corporate intranet. this was quite an experience. you'd think that an intranet would typically be oragnized and very cohesive - after all, it's the internal network for a single company. however, google has managed to recreate the chaos of the internet on its internal network. fortunately, they've applied their search engine to help sort through everything. which begs the question - did the intranet become messy becuase google had a great search engine to find things anyways? or would intranets naturally become a mess if not for the fear of creating a huge tangled mess with no search tool to help users?
closing thought: the ibm t41p is truly a laptop done right. i'm not entirely sure why any company would issue anything less to their employees (*ahem* microsoft :p)
Opera 8 and Voice
Although it won´t be released until the end of February, a beta version is online to be downloaded. It basically offers
voice recognition navigation , a new technology provided by Ibm, and pages-talked functionality. It´s available in English so far and Xp/2000 operating systems.
Donwload
here
FireFox launching day
Excitating story about how stressful
Firefox release was at Mozilla Foundation Office. It is nicely detailed by Mitchel Baker, a technical developer who told how good each department had to be ready and integrated with each other to make release successful.
Google and Firefox
The project leader of Firefox product Ben Goodger has been signed up by Google inc. Although he will be paid by Google, he won´t leave his role as Firefox product responsible. Is that a step from Google to gain knowlegde and experiencie in browser technology?.
Ben Goodger post
Rss readers for Pda
Rss readers for Pda as
PocketFeed or Newsmob could become good choices for everybody who wants to take advantage of rss contents. Actually, they simplifiy the downloads by linking rss atoms from any source in the Web. Most blogs and news sites are supporting this technology. However, It can´t be considered as definitive as long as linked sites don´t fit pages on these devices. Will Avantgo support it in next releses?
FireFox faster, really?
I have been reading a lot of posts about improving FireFox downloads. It simply consists on changing 3 configuration parameters. Type about:config in address bar and change '
network.http.pipelining' and '
network.http.proxy.pipelining' to true and '
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests' to 30.It looks easy, doesn´t it?. But, the fact is Mozilla.org considers them as
experimental features and they don´t support them so far due to certain servers and proxies could make it work wrong.
How is your experience with them?.
Pocket Pc Emulator
There have been a lot of problems when I decided to install all Pocket Pc 2003 Sdk. It should be enough to boot emulator included in it to start developing, but requirements as Visual Embedded C++ or changes on Visual Studio 2003 installation seemed to be mandatory. It also looks difficult to synchronize with ActiveSync.
At the end, I found
something that looks good.
Earth cartography
A wide set of
cartography pictures of Earth taken from Space Shuttle Endeavour have been published. They have been gathered since the beginning of Endeavour Mission on February 2000. Even small countries such as Portugal or Spain can be visualized.Both Tiff and Jpeg formats are included to be downloaded.
