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Google Now is doing a killer job identifying people and songs during the Oscars

Google Now is doing a killer job identifying people and songs during the Oscars

Protip: pull down to refresh and get up-to-date info!

 

If you see a "low battery" or "offline" warnings on your Nest thermostat check if you have a "C" wire.

If you see a "low battery" or "offline" warnings on your Nest thermostat check if you have a "C" wire.  I was lucky, there was an unused wire that I was able to easily attach on both ends.

The power stealing from the control wiring is a neat technique, but direct power is better.

 

Check out the BD doodle on http://google.fr/ today.

Check out the BD doodle on http://google.fr/ today.

Originally shared by Google France

M'enfin ?! C'est quoi ce Doodle ?

Le 28 février 1957 apparaissait pour la première fois Gaston Lagaffe, nouvelle recrue de la rédaction du Journal de Spirou telle qu'imaginée par André Franquin.

Aujourd'hui, Gaston fait un stage chez Google France et arrive en trombe sur notre page d'accueil, accompagné de son chat-dingue et de sa mouette rieuse.

Si contrairement à ses collègues Prunelle, Spirou et Fantasio  ou à nous même qui l'avons au bureau aujourd'hui, vous ne connaissez pas Gaston :

• Découvrez comment un Doodle est réalisé grace à ce GIF

• Apprenez en plus sur Gaston avec Google : http://goo.gl/mUI7IM ou sur son site officiel http://goo.gl/2wWxsh

Nous nous excusons par avance pour tout bug causé par l'une de ses gaffes.

 

Some perfect rainy day beats..

Some perfect rainy day beats..

Further blurring the boundaries between electronic music and rock, Ratatat's self-titled debut album mixes Evan Mast's fractured but propulsive beats and woozy analog synths with Mike Stroud's loud, yet somehow subtle, guitars.

 

Thunderbirds meets the Thorn Birds.

Thunderbirds meets the Thorn Birds.

Finally finished this series recently, highly recommended...

 

Twitter for business marketing department is cranking out the art...   5 pitches in 2 weeks.  All related to tv show integration.  (In this case the Oscars..)


https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/5984526121028377329/5984526124445161010






 

Listening to this new Information Society release while upgrading all iOS devices to 7.0.6.   Hack, hack, hack.

Listening to this new Information Society release while upgrading all iOS devices to 7.0.6.   Hack, hack, hack.

Originally shared by Information Society

Baked fresh today! Get your full-quality music here: http://informationsociety.bandcamp.com/album/engage-classic-remixes-vol-2

 

Listening to some UK Garage today.  Altavista reference made me smile.

Listening to some UK Garage today.  Altavista reference made me smile.

You won't find us on Alta Vista

Cult classic not bestseller, you're gonna need more power

Plug in the free phase and the generator, crank it up to gigawatts

 

Listening to some UK Garage today.  Altavista reference made me smile.

_You won't find us on Alta Vista_
_Cult classic not bestseller, you're gonna need more power_
_Plug in the free phase and the generator, crank it up to gigawatts_


https://play.google.com/music/playpreview?preview=AE9vGKqCnCd3p4qn9iqqezTaS3AvK63bBfq4F2l1DgNR4I3HhL...






 

I'm hopeful that the San Jose deployment has a halo effect throughout the Bay Area.  Your move Comcast.

I'm hopeful that the San Jose deployment has a halo effect throughout the Bay Area.  Your move Comcast.

Originally shared by Google

Today we’ve invited 34 cities in nine metro areas around the U.S. to work with us to explore what it would take to bring them Google Fiber. In the coming months, we'll work with each city's leaders on a joint planning process to map out a Google Fiber network in detail and assess potential challenges to bringing 100x faster Internet to these communities. We aim to provide updates about which of these cities will be getting Google Fiber at the end of the year. Learn more: http://goo.gl/tMg6F9

 

When I want reliable stats I always turn to BirdSignals


_We'll all be watching and cheering for our favorite athletes on TV in the next few days. In fact, 81% of Twitter users say that they will watch at least some part of the games. Of those, over half said they will be likely to Tweet about it as well ++ ._

_Through our TV conversation targeting, we make it easy to promote Tweets to users engaged with specific events on TV. This feature allows you to interact with people as they talk about a TV show on Twitter before, during and after it airs._

_++ Source: , Twitter & Vision Critical, February 2014_


https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/5981792006118916929/5981792003510010594






 

Are any of our politicians even trying to get inward investment of this type?

Are any of our politicians even trying to get inward investment of this type?  Twitter moved into a neighborhood (SF mid-market) that's worse than most areas of Oakland.  It would only take a few companies to change hearts and minds...

 

Understandable how this search result was tagged with a menu.  Because 'food' I guess.

Reported at http://go/bad


https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/5981514037966807201/5981514041010252658






 

Needed: Periodic testing for developer sample apps.

I've been importing a number of Google's sample Android apps into Eclipse and/or Android Studio.  It's painful.  If we could periodically download and run these Apps on a fresh Android Studio/Eclipse(/Xcode?) we might save developers a lot of time and catch broken examples sooner.   Automation for bonus points...

Here's just a few things I bumped into:

- GMS changed their APIs between v4.0 and v4.1  Half the things I was trying to do didn't work.
- Most examples have a hard coded compile version which means the import fails unless you've been downloading SDK versions for the past couple years.  Once you figure this out it's an easy fix, but it's still another roadblock.
- Developer Console vs Cloud Console.  'nuff said there..

Here's some of the bits and pieces:

https://code.google.com/p/google-api-java-client/wiki/Android
http://developer.android.com/google/play-services/auth.html
https://developers.google.com/+/quickstart/android
https://developers.google.com/+/mobile/android/getting-started









 

 

Can we learn from the last Comcast Merger?

Can we learn from the last Comcast Merger?  I hope we can.  This recent NPR interview with Susan Crawford goes into the details.

The big risk here is a larger Comcast can leverage Content to keep new entrants out of the market.

That new entrant has to enter on two levels. It has to build communications infrastructure. But it also has to get access to programming, because 91 percent of Americans have paid TV prescriptions, as well as high-speed Internet access subscriptions. They want both. So Comcast pays much less for programming - because it has so many subscribers, and because it owns one of the big players - than any new entrant would. This is yet another cudgel, another sledgehammer that Comcast can use to keep any potential alternative network competition at bay.

 

Just noticed this markup syntax for linking web pages back to FB profile pages.  We should probably parse these are rel="me" back to the the facebook profile.

@116679685807477912446  - sounds like an igraph thing, should I file a bug for it?


https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/guides/og.follows/






 

I haven't touched a single proto today











 

Finally some positive news for the stray dogs in Sochi.

Finally some positive news for the stray dogs in Sochi.

If anyone can find a way to monetarily support their work please let me know.  In the meantime I'm donating to the Detroit Dog Rescue, which is facing a similar stray dogs problem.

http://detroitdogrescue.com/

 

 -Where can I report 100% CPU bugs for chrome canary?

 I can consistently spin a Core 100% using code search.  I didn't see any specific Chromium bugs and would rather not report it on the public tracker anyway.









 

Is there a Youtube video that has the encoding information stamped on the video like this?

There are some _Example Show_ videos that when played tell you the bitrate and resolution.   It's also a surreal thing to watch...


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/05/netflix-test-video_n_4212826.html






 

Had a Google Now card for the album so I'd say it is available

Had a Google Now card for the album so I'd say it is available

 

Can someone write the same list for closure methods?


http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/






 

Daft Punk may have won some Grammys last night - but when I wanted retro electronic/synth I was pleasantly surprised...

Daft Punk may have won some Grammys last night - but when I wanted retro electronic/synth I was pleasantly surprised to discover Psykosonik via Google Play

Cyberpunk themes, Nintendo  SNES ties-ins and beats reminiscent of Crystal Method The   make this some great coding music.  They'll also be my soundtrack of choice if I ever make another ray-traced 3-D demo.

 

Anyone want to help me decipher the userId structure for this site?  It's tightly linked to our profiles.  (Naturally due to AKB48 crossover)

Example profile pages are good.  A regex that matches them is even better.


http://gp48.net/view






 

Anil Dash - I'm saddened that someone that I worked with and respect wrote something so out of touch with the...

Anil Dash - I'm saddened that someone that I worked with and respect wrote something so out of touch with the situation that's going on here in the Bay Area.  You seem to believe the media hype that the "techies" are elitist and out of touch and that better "marketing" will help win hearts and minds.

The reality is that tech companies and employees are already doing much of what you advocate for, and doing more of it, or marketing it, won't change the situation.  Avatars, Logos, and signs won't help.  Helping people afford housing will.

Specifically:

Using Voices

Employees and company leaders already advocate for better housing and infrastructure.  Google has succeeded[1] and failed[2] to build housing in Mountain View near it's campus.  Facebook too[3].

Volunteering and Civic Initiatives

Google (and other companies) match donations 1:1 and encourage their employees to give.  There's also the following

  - Google.org 

  - Google for Nonprofits 

  - Supporting local communities via GoogleServe[5]

  - Google sponsored a huge push to fund Kiva loans last year via their own and employees giving.

I am very proud of what's been done here and how Google has made me a better donator and volunteer.

Community Involvement 

Extending benefits like food and day care to people in the community is an interesting idea.  There are problems however -- employee services are at the work places, not in the neighborhood where people's rent are going up.

Plus there are often better ways for employees to engage with the community.  I've met and talked to plenty of people while picking up trash in West Oakland.  Plenty of other people are already very active in their churches, schools and communities.

In Closing...

If every shuttle was banned the problem would still remain.  In the past 10 years San Francisco has built  17k new units of housing while adding 75k residents[6].  This is a complex issue that's not going away soon.  Marketing isn't going to change it.  Getting more housing and helping people worried about paying rent will, even while many are directly benefitting[7].

I'll leave you with the conclusions from Elias Levy's in-depth data based analysis[8] of the situation:

In the end, tech workers are simply a convenient straw man for folks to direct their anger at high rents, which are simply the result of a strong economy, the anti-development history of San Francisco, the city’s limited geography, and market forces.  In a slightly different scenario, the vilified workers could have been in biotech, aerospace, or finance.  So long as the local economy is strong, San Francisco is a desirable place to live in, and the population increases, rents, like real estate, will go up in San Francisco.  At best, we can slow down these market forces and provide a helping hand to those less fortunate to ensure they have some support dealing with these changes.

Full disclosure: I work at Google. I wrote part of this on a Shuttle from the East Bay, and would still be driving if it wasn't available.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Business/google-invests-sparkly-housing-development-mountain-view-calif/story?...

[2] http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/south_bay&id=8731879

[3] http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/10/the-houses-that-facebook-built-are-coming-to-san-francisco/

[5]  http://www.google.com/giving/community/

[6] http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-San-Francisco-creates-its-own-housing-crisis-513...

[7] http://www.npr.org/2014/01/22/264528139/long-a-dirty-word-gentrification-may-be-losing-its-stigma

[8] http://elias-levy.tumblr.com/post/74103701680/san-francisco-eviction-protests

 

So I was just saying to myself wouldn't it be great if we could have incognito iframes and behold! there it is..  iframe sandbox's unique origin solves that problem...

Anyone using this in practice?  I'd love to use this as a way to serve up 3P content and supply the appropriate user information directly from the parent via postMessage to avoid user-overlap confusion.


http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-iframes/






 

Pluck spammed me about their new events/hangouts-like functionality.

Hello Paul,

Can you do this today?

Hold a live event, on your website or Facebook page. Invite an executive, topical expert or celebrity to host it. Let hundreds of thousands of your fans not only follow the event, but participate with comments, questions and photo and video uploads. Manage your event’s tone, pace and energy by choosing the content your fans see. Compel them to spend an average of 40 minutes on your website or Facebook page.

How about this?

Enhance a virtual or in-person event with a dynamic social wall experience. Collect, curate and display related social media content directly on your website. Moderate fan content – comments, questions, photos, videos, tweets, Facebook posts – so that it best represents your brand. Add your own original content or editorial commentary.  Create a complete, highly visual story around a particular topic or event.

Creating a Real-time Experience is about starting a conversation, not joining it. It’s about listening and engaging. Real-time Experiences are about collaborative content, and leveraging unique audience consumption opportunities on your owned media.

Pluck’s CoveritLive Real-time Engagement Platform gives you everything you need to design and produce highly interactive real-time experiences. More than 1,500 leading brands, retailers and publishers like Subway, EA, Jeep, Ford and Anthropologie have created real-time experiences with CoveritLive. They have connected with their fans – and generated new ones – through Live Blogs, Q&A Sessions, Social Walls, Second Screen Experiences, Featured Galleries and Facebook Chats.

For digital marketers seeking customer and shopper engagement, real-time experiences are highly differentiated and very sticky. CoveritLive routinely supports events with hundreds of thousands of attendees, who on average are engaged for 40 minutes.

And here’s the best part. You can download CoveritLive and run trial events of your own at no cost. What are you waiting for?









 

And more Perception vs Reality.

Don't take a -knife- fact-based argument to a -gunfight- irrational issue..


http://www.npr.org/2014/01/22/264528139/long-a-dirty-word-gentrification-may-be-losing-its-stigma






 

Anyone tight with the people at xda-developers?

See http://b/8002104 if you can relay a request to help them fix an issue.









 

Waiting for people.oz to turn green?  Play this....

Or heck, play anything from the 51 albums in the Rockabye Baby collection.


https://play.google.com/music/playpreview?preview=AE9vGKrGos62UGCnyd2XAGkVtdWmgfUG8zFRifPE5W7eUdCTtL...






 

All future postmortems will now contain animations.  Seriously though -- this is pretty detailed.. and a bit scary.

All future postmortems will now contain animations.  Seriously though -- this is pretty detailed.. and a bit scary.

Originally shared by Ihab Awad

Entertaining failure chain. :)

 

 

Epic.

Epic.

Pick your song, then pick your beats-per-minute dancers.

 

I'm feeling lucky artist-bomb.

Today I thought I was listening to some retro Ellie Goulding song.  Nope it was Traci Lords...  Mind blown.









 

One liner for output of /usr/bin/unsued_deps for 

*cat /tmp/oz_deps  | awk '{print -bash "\nblaze build " " || read -p BORKED "}'*
buildozer 'remove deps //java/com/google/common/annotations:annotations' //java/com/google/apps/people/oz/widget/signin:module
blaze build //java/com/google/apps/people/oz/widget/signin:module} || read -p BORKED
....









 

Some gutsy tagging on P turf.

(And real proof that the techies are taking over the Mission. P and NP gangs are the new Norteños and Sureños.)







https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/5968262152633464209/5968262154427017826?...






 

Dremel history backup for

load /auto/build/google3/maps/test/dremel/useragent.lua;

get_browser(useragent)









 

We're discussing Roboto performance over on

https://b.corp.google.com/issue?id=9088557









 

Had brunch there this weekend.  Great food, somewhat spotty service, but they're just getting going.

Had brunch there this weekend.  Great food, somewhat spotty service, but they're just getting going.

Originally shared by East Bay Express

How Oakland’s Barkada made a successful leap from bakery-cafe to full-fledged restaurant: http://buff.ly/1ckfSzQ

 

Graffiti partially removed/obscured and one bag of trash dealt with this morning.

I have a bag with solvent, gloves, rags, trash bags and a scrub brush.  If other people are keen on helping I can leave it out.  I also brought my portable leaf blower -- I can get some of that broken glass taken care of.

Also reported illegal dumping using SeeClickFix on 7th & Linden  (Download the App, it actually gets stuff done).  Also can someone get Caltrans to pick up the sofa and other junk that was dumped in the lot?


https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/5965831869026667441






 

Hey WOPR folks, let's clean up West Oakland.

I used to live in SOMA and there was a guy who would clean up all the trash and butts around the corner of 7th and Howard.  His small acts made a huge difference and he was the most popular guy in the neighborhood.

There's a trash bin at the corner of 7th and Adeline, so arrive a few minutes early, clean up and win a few hearts and minds.  And remember we have hand sanitizer on the bus.


https://plus.google.com/+PaulLindner/posts/NuzN8eaLjKx






 

My new morning routine -- remove trash from West Oakland.  Contrast that with the new defacement of West Oakland.

My new morning routine -- remove trash from West Oakland.  Contrast that with the new defacement of West Oakland.

 

Somehow I missed that Klari Reis was posting a new Petri Dish painting every day for all of 2013.

Somehow I missed that Klari Reis was posting a new Petri Dish painting every day for all of 2013.  The entry for December 26th, Poinsettias at Midnight, really captures the season.

Much more at http://thedailydish2013.blogspot.com/

 

Here's hoping that Play and BBC America get the latest Doctor Who episode up promptly.

The fiasco with the 50th Anniversary episode was pretty bad. Delivered late and with price gouging....









 

Relaxing in Palm Springs.

Relaxing in Palm Springs.

 

Power off those monitors

I just powered off 64 monitors and 2 HD screens on my way out the door.  Most monitors were in standby mode (~1.5w) about 10 were not (bad X config, dunno...)

Assuming that they stayed that way for 2 weeks that'd be 269 kWh.

That's ~ 7 of electricity or so just on my floor.  Kind of a drop in the bucket, but still....

 

tech

In Oakland this morning...

 

Couple more things you might want to look at:

Couple more things you might want to look at:

** While testing I saw a few errors pop up when looking for the _escaped_fragment-= version of pages.  Looks like this:

unknown domain: goodeggs-garbanzo-seoserver.herokuapp.com

** Your pages have a lot of boilerplate in them that can confuse things.  Consider adding html5 header/footer/nav elements. or just getting rid of much of that from your server-side-rendered output.  and....

** Seriously consider adding rel="canonical" -- it's the best way for Google to know the URL you want people to use and it helps to disambiguate your pages.

Regarding mixpanel you can see the unminified JS if you view source here:

  http://www.goodeggs.com/stepladderranch

Not a huge amount of bytes to be saved, but it can't hurt :)