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Plusones to Pinboard.in

A reminder that +1s *for web sites* are going away. You *can* export them to other places. I chose to move mine to Pinboard. One nice thing Pinboard does is archive the pages you bookmark, so now the content I +1'd is more stable long term.

In the process I found and fixed a bug where the timestamps on the plusones takeout export were wrong. It was broken for about 5 years and no one noticed :(

If you want a proper export file you can use https://ac-autopush-takeout.corp.google.com/settings/takeout for now. Prod push should be sometime this week...

https://pinboard.in/u:lindner/t:plusones/

 

*Google+ vs Facebook GIFs - 2011*

So I hear that body slam GIFs are all the rage now. Of course back in 2011...

Many more cringe-worthy things here:

https://zahidlilani.com/2011/07/19/hilarious-google-plus-gif-animations/



https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/6438194510653877985/6438194508238025506?...






 

 

 

Changes coming to the +1 widget you see on web sites.

Changes coming to the +1 widget you see on web sites.

Originally shared by John Nack

Making the G+1 button load more quickly

The G+1 button is shown billions of times per day on web pages around the world, so it’s important that it load as quickly and efficiently as possible. To make it easier for people to load and share the pages they’re interested in, we’ve created a simpler G+1 button sharing experience.

Beginning in a few weeks, clicking the +1 button will open a streamlined new Google+ sharing dialog, and the G+1 button will no longer display a +1 count. If you’re a publisher, you can rest assured that these +1s do not affect search ranking and the size and layout of the button will remain the same.

These changes will only affect the G+1 button outside of Google+. The +1 button within Google+ will continue to work the same way it always has.

If you’d like to view all of the pages you’ve +1’d over the years, you can download a list using Google Takeout.

We hope this change makes it that much easier to check out and recommend all the interesting things you discover!

 

PHOTO PRESERVATION DRAWING!

I have a mechanism that has enough crypto-theater to make me happier than just drawing numbers out of a hat and having someone pinky-swear that the process is legit
.

It uses a Random Beacon to seed a random number generator, which then chooses 5 winners from the 73 entrants. It's a silly perl script (might rewrite it in go if I
have time...)

https://plindner.users.x20web.corp.google.com/www/survey-drawing/README

------------------------------------------------

5 winners will be chosen on June 15th at noon Pacific Standard Time.

Read on to find out how winners will be chosen.

- Each of the 73 entrants is given a 'lot number', which is emailed to them.
- The file lot_to_username.txt maps the number to a hashed version of your username.
- You can verify that your lot is listed correctly. For example:

# Verify if your lot number is 12
sudo apt-get install apache2-tools
htpasswd -v -b /google/data/rw/users/pl/plindner/www/survey-drawing 12 lindner

- The http://winners.pl script chooses 5 random winners with a random seed.
- The random seed will be generated by the NIST random beacon on June 15th Noon Pacific Standard time. Results will be visible here:

https://beacon.nist.gov/rest/record/1497553200

- The seed value will be written to seed.xml at that point and winners will be
chosen!

TECHNICAL DETAILS FOLLOW

- The original names are stored one username-per-line in names.txt
- The lot_to_username.txt file containing bcrypt hashed usernames was generated using this command:

cat -n /tmp/names.txt | xargs -n 2 htpasswd -b -B -C 20 ~/contest.file

- Note that you could brute-force the usernames with moderate compute capacity. Please be polite and don't do that.

TAMPER VERIFICATION

You can verify that the usernames, script, and contest draw date have not been modified by verifying the PGP signature of the date and sums.

You can verify this message by using keybase https://keybase.io/lindner or looking up my PGP key [email protected]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

sha256sum lot_to_username.txt http://winners.pl

6a86aadf90310cb83b2cadcf820d3b3a0ea0bfbd175822ebcfb44a55a1fc1e0f lot_to_username.txt
bf45ed9e504d51934261610bf69153c0f0646dfbe0b58c1fe044803a90dd3ff3 http://winners.pl

Contest Seed: https://beacon.nist.gov/rest/record/1497553200
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

wkYEAREIABAFAllBLkYJEPhZKFJz9YBUAADv9gCgkHEiWKjs7RlfM3G5U4NsYNmK
rqUAoBpiZrhGAy/SMPUqzX+Wl/6AuQdD
=XjMK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

 

*Paul* Added *Groove Thang* to *Bumper Music*

[manually constructed activity post]

Plug for my bumper music playlist[2] that you can use to spice up your meetings and give it that TGIF vibe. Suggestions welcome, description below:

----
Waiting for people to show up for your meeting? Add some Bumper Music! [1] These are instrumental tracks that can be easily faded out at any point.

Retrospective? Let's do the Time Warp!

Your "classic" weekly sync? Apache, Frankenstein, Hocus Pocus, and Green Onions have you covered.

Top Secret Project meeting? Moby's James Bond

Or just spice up your boring all hands with some electro/synth/funk.

Suggestions welcome!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_music
[2] https://play.google.com/music/playlist/AMaBXynB0Y7GSMNgd3XrzHLe5CQOatDMjcWYhS0Gn7R7ACZuOmlJLQJ9vez4G...





https://play.google.com/music/m/Tur2wrgcwhqev3aymylzwn2d2em?t=Groove_Thang_2006_-_Remaster_-_BEF






 

And here I am redacting Google+ widget logs so we don't track you across the web...

https://support.google.com/plus/answer/6320398


https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169421






 

Sound Search

I didn't find my sound search within Google Play Music, but it appears that my 91 year old future self is still using GPM..

 

Digital Vellum Photos

Digital Vellum is working on a project to help people store Photos for 100+ years.

That means I'm thinking about how to build a long-term, stable, resilient systems and business. I'd also love to see this applied to Google so it too can be a very very long term entity.

So I'm not an expert in this area but it seems that there are some ways that we can focus the business on long term value. Some are structural, others based on rethinking existing systems. I'm not an economist or an MBA by any stretch, but here goes:

- Sell annuities that pay out in storage/access "dividends" spread out over a long time.
- Create a wholly owned Mutual Society to manage storage and serving. Google can then become a Lloyds of London-stye "Name". [This entity could sell long-term/perpetual bonds that also have storage dividends]
- Create a customer-owned collective to manage long-term assets. Think of it as "Vanguard for Storage".
- We already store Photos for iPhone users, why not have each company back each other up and come up with coordinated storage systems with rights of survivorship.
- For the crytpocurrency angle use something like Streem (http://steem.io) or Storj (http://storj.io) Allow anyone to participate in a long-term storage system. This might be more adaptable.

And also remember to take our Photo Preservation Survey if you haven't already:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfBR7omZ1SDgpgO05W4UD70cITmBk6zqS1xvxyU1t-rtV0Vkg/viewform?...

https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_reeves_how_to_build_a_business_that_lasts_100_years#talk

 

Cloudtop!

Finally can use GCP instances to replace Ubiquity.

Also so very happy that I put my dotfiles in git so I can get this rig the way I like it quickly...

https://user.git.corp.google.com/plindner/dotfiles/

 

Anyone know what's the latest on Macaroons? They seem to solve a large set of problems in a general way...


https://research.google.com/pubs/pub41892.html






 

I highly recommend The Product Excellence Workshop. Take it with your team for an even stronger experience. The instructors +101977395828280125935 and +100280079678510579493 deftly covered a large body of knowledge.

It's also good to see the H.E.A.R.T. model covered in formal training. People like
+114097187269026141752 and friends have done well to evangelize this in Social/G+ over the years.

Lots more at http://go/peworkshop and more resources at https://product-excellence.googleplex.com/



https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4hHF-4S5VYcTUNLMEl0bDVaOUk/view






 

Google+ Buttons...

*The +1 button for web sites is now the G+ button*

Hey Googlers - get ready to dogfood the new G+ button! It's an evolution of the existing +1 and +Share buttons you see across the web. It's leaner, faster and much less expensive to operate. Instead the world's most costly-click-counter you'll share directly to G+, which is what most users wanted anyway.

You can see the G+ button at various places such as:

- Blogspot blogs like http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/ or https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/
- The Chrome Web store https://chrome.google.com/webstore/
- And sites from a-to-z http://abc7news.com/weather/doppler/ http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/10069107/

Want to give feedback? There's a handy link in the pop-up sharebox to do so.

Big kudos to +106053902024703312631 / +110610523830483756510 / +104802479551695111660 and the cast of characters that have helped us get this far.

 

Unreachable!

Unsearchable and Daily Inspiration for a TGIF..

The following *delightful* Google Play Playlist is a comprehensive collection of music from Watch Dogs 2:

https://play.google.com/music/playlist/AMaBXyk097zW--4WF7YxbXiHUAwlq-_CkO6SUOEQuhlGiwkzcMYeVnWqK_Kyi...

Digdug doesn't know anything about it.

And yes, that's a base-64 encoded proto you're seeing! [and Let's hope that adding a new message to that proto doesn't rewrite all the permalinks....]

I was able to find the link to this in some disqus comments with a bit of search tweaking, but I couldn't get an actual link surfaced for a playlist in our own product. The original Spotify playlist does show up.

https://www.gamecrate.com/heres-all-music-featured-watch-dogs-2/15001

https://play.google.com/music/playlist/AMaBXyk097zW--4WF7YxbXiHUAwlq-_CkO6SUOEQuhlGiwkzcMYeVnWqK_Kyi...

 

CitC on mac, really hope security kittens are in my favor..

https://g3doc.corp.google.com/devtools/srcfs/g3doc/mac-citc.md









 


I still have business cards with code.google.com on them....








 

Checking out SAFe

Looks like there was an internal presentation that I missed:

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/eng-program-management/community-and-events/fireside_chat/safe

It gives names to processes that I recognize, so it seems like it might be a useful model..

http://www.scaledagile.com/

 


QoS is awesome. Returns 429 to GoogleBot when under load.

And Google+ is fortunate to have +103629377878623483645 implementing and developing it. Thanks!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-KFDiTrQe9lWDJOMWx3a0xCb28/view






 

This is a very well written article about how the film/content industries are attempting (and failing) to keep up with archiving their data.

Reading about LTO I now understand why gtape is moving to http://go/chronicle and http://go/timelock (Also interesting that timelock has a Q2 OKR for 500PB, which is 10x the size of the film archive mentioned in the article.)

I'm also curious if Google has had to delete data that we've regretted. Do we have all of the old street view data?



http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/it/the-lost-picture-show-hollywood-archivists-cant-outpace-obsole...






 

Emerald Sea Protocols

*Emerald Sea Protocols* - October 2010

_Make open protocols the "default choice" and the "easy choice"_ -- me

And 6 years later some of this stuff is finally taking off....

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1spaXUlKajV6Ng20zZBmcKHvDekDNbC2OO5M-R-Ug0q8/edit?_escaped_fragme...

 

*Oz News Update* - Early Q2

TLDR:
- Deathstar and other projects launched, we removed lots of code/GCUs/Zipit.
- We're going to keep removing code/GCUs/zipit.
- The +1 button will meet it's demise soon. Long live the G+ button.
- Contacts, People APIs and lots more are moving/moved.

Read the full episode at:

https://groups.google.com/a/google.com/d/msg/oz-eng/uXAdeOtGg5Q/KLsRdzBdEwAJ

And I'll leave you with some revolutionary, code killing, Oz-esque inspiration from Oakland's _The Coup_:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acT_PSAZ7BQ






 

Google+ Commercials and Promos

*Various Dates* - Various Google+ Commercials and Promos

In order of appearance with some notes on when they aired.

Introducing the +1 Button
Google+: Circles
Google+: Sparks
Google+: Instant Upload
Google+: Explore Circles
Google+: Explore Settings
Google+: Explore Hangouts
Google+: Explore Games
Welcome to Google+
Google+: A quick look
Google+: Messenger
Google+: Pages
Google+: Search
Google+: Sharing but like real life
Google+: Circles Love Story
Introducing the new Google bar
Google+: Say more with Hangouts
Muppets Google+ Hangout (featuring the Muppets).mp4
Search, plus Your World
Google+: New Dad
Google+ Nina
Google+: Daria Musk
Google+: Tom
Google+ Local: Places you'll love, from people you trust
Google+ Events: Share event photos instantly with Party Mode
Introducing Google+ Events
Connect with friends the way you want with Google+ in Gmail
Google+ for Android
College Football on Google+
Google+ 2012
Google+ Communities: A place for whatever you're into
Google+ Events: Introducing a new way to get together
Google+: Public Squares
Google+: Beautiful movies, made Auto Awesomely
Google+: Media

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrzxz5-dv4abGzg0lZPjCIYVSqhc-ivlw&_utm_source=gplus

 

Feedback...

_People long to be treated as co-creators. Not cattle._

[pulled from the massive Google+ feedback thread...]

 

I set up https://makamaka.me/ on Google Cloud. 1st time deploying a rails app, so it was interesting. Will write more about the experience soon.

Ping me if you want to sign up.

And yes, some of you may recognize the name....



https://makamaka.me/about






 

Google+ Features vs Oz Bulk

Finally figured out how to get Charts to overlay labels on the vertical...

Oh for the record, Peak Oz:

28151 files
330MB of Code/Resources
125 Backends
1525 HTTP Paths
673 Stubby Endpoints
3 binaries (widgetbe, widgetfe, frontend)
Lots and lots of qps, much 4514$

 

Social Multiplier

*The Social Multiplier for Google+* April 2011

A Social Multiplier applies to Googlers’ 2011 bonuses. It measures and recognizes the impact each team has on the success of Google+ and building meaningful relationships, sharing, and identity across all our products.

More details

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/2011-social-multiplier-faqs/home

 

Emerald Sea Mobile Update

*Emerald Sea Mobile Update* - 2010 Q3

by Punit Soni

- We've come full circle on Location Sharing. +111280803752736822602
- Making phone calls on profiles never happened, and the CallMeMaybe project 5 years later never launched.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17D9uqGEglLfrICSNiYOwKCzHsFmSjZcNNoc7KpJHOk0/edit?_escaped_fr...

 

I wish I could find the thread/post discussing admin-disabling Chrome Extensions on Mac. There has to be a way.

Not sure if this is just the skeezy myway.com developers or if it's some kind of XSS they enable. In any case the extension rewrites your google search results. Badly. You know you're in trouble when the support page has uninstall directions...

http://support.mindspark.com/










 

Just found out we have to restart our memcacheg servers due to the build horizon policy... Such a waste of good cache...

I wonder if there's room in the borg lifecycle to define a mechanism for jobs to 'handoff' from old to new; that way the contents don't get blown away during a restart.

Or maybe we'll just have to wait for gredis or gouchbase....



https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yuPqLH1grR9wyUlHVxugJHL8Dulf0diPuObOAs6r_d4/edit?_escaped_fragme...






 

Bitcoin Lightning

Bitcoin Lightning talk today:

_Come learn about the bitcoin Lightning Network! The Lightning Network is a "layer 2" bitcoin protocol designed to address some of bitcoin’s technical limitations in regards to scaling. Compared to on chain bitcoin payments, it promises instant payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds, scalability capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network, lower cost and improved anonymity. Olaoluwa Osuntokun (aka roastbeef) is a former Google intern and currently works on Lightning Network at Lightning Labs. He will give a deep dive into latest developments in the implementation of Lightning Network._

More info: https://lightning.network/, http://lightning.community/

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=ZGcxZDNhZjBnaW9sZDhwZ2tjYjl0Ymo...

http://lightning.network/

 

Aunt asks me about Alexa vs Google Home..

Being diligent I check for requirements... and just like that Google Home is out of the running.

Not everyone has or wants a Smart Phone and I find it embarrassing that Google; the company that benefitted strongly from the Web can't ship devices that are web enabled.

[I'm also looking at you Google Wifi, you promised us a Web UI a couple of years ago too...]









https://support.google.com/googlehome/answer/7035987?hl=en






 

https://omg.corp.google.com/#/show-incident/4289

A distributed system is on in which the failure of a gaia flume you didn't even know existed can render your own OnHub unusable...


http://www.azquotes.com/quote/585930






 

*In Search of... define:sgamster*

Google search and Google translate are stumped by "sgamster", which appears in lyrics from the short-lived Welsh Hiphop band Tystion.

If you go to the Tystion wikipedia page you'll find a link to

http://www.axkx15.dsl.pipex.com/tystion%20page.htm

that seems to have some translated lyrics. Digdug has this listed as high quality but it doesn't appear in searches.

And based on that, I'm guessing *Timewaster* is the answer.

h/t to the John Peel Radio show for this deep cut.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUwOQwBJCaU






 

Oz Monolith

*An Update on the Oz Monolith*

So it's a little over been two weeks since we turned down most of Oz for frontends. Project Death Star removed most Google+ traffic. Purple Hummus removed contacts.google.com. Project Falcon got iOS G+ on FEDS. And the OneGoogle Notifications Widget is now exiting too.

There's still much more to do, Apiary APIs, widgets and more need to go. And lots of code to delete as you can see in the Rise and Fall of Oz by # of files below.

Thanks to everyone that removed services/code, and let me know if you're missing a killoz teams badge.

 

 

Scanning

I guess just in case I was running some perl script I downloaded off of Matt's Script Archive on port 7888

plindner@arcwelder:[beaker]/google3$ host 172.25.65.58
58.65.25.172.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer security-scanner-amer-3.cbf.corp.google.com.

But it appears I can't make it stop :(

https://scarf.googleplex.com/checkip?target=100.109.7.129&list=

05:52:51.515942 IP 172.25.65.58.43577 > 100.109.7.129.7888: Flags [P.], seq 0:432, ack 1, win 229, options [nop,nop,TS val 1188697399 ecr 2097041011], length 432
        0x0000:  4560 01e4 1784 4000 3b06 ccee ac19 413a  E.....@.;.....A:
        0x0010:  646d 0781 aa39 1ed0 c325 02b0 5897 25e2  dm...9...%..X.%.
        0x0020:  8018 00e5 069a 0000 0101 080a 46da 1537  ............F..7
        0x0030:  7cfe 4e73 4745 5420 2f66 6f72 6d2f 6175  |.NsGET./form/au
        0x0040:  6b74 696f 6e2e 6367 693f 6d65 6e75 653d  ktion.cgi?menue=
        0x0050:  2e2e 2f2e 2e2f 2e2e 2f2e 2e2f 2e2e 2f2e  ../../../../../.
        0x0060:  2e2f 2e2e 2f2e 2e2f 2e2e 2f65 7463 2f70  ./../../../etc/p
        0x0070:  6173 7377 6420 4854 5450 2f31 2e31 0d0a  asswd.HTTP/1.1..
        0x0080:  486f 7374 3a20 6172 6377 656c 6465 722e  Host:.arcwelder.
        0x0090:  6d74 762e 636f 7270 2e67 6f6f 676c 652e  mtv.corp.google.
        0x00a0:  636f 6d3a 3738 3838 0d0a 4163 6365 7074  com:7888..Accept
        0x00b0:  2d43 6861 7273 6574 3a20 6973 6f2d 3838  -Charset:.iso-88
        0x00c0:  3539 2d31 2c75 7466 2d38 3b71 3d30 2e39  59-1,utf-8;q=0.9
        0x00d0:  2c2a 3b71 3d30 2e31 0d0a 4163 6365 7074  ,*;q=0.1..Accept
        0x00e0:  2d4c 616e 6775 6167 653a 2065 6e0d 0a43  -Language:.en..C

 

Launching today, see spike in 404s. One contributing factor? https://plus.google.com/+whitehouse is no more.

still accessible at:

https://plus.google.com/105479712798762608629

As "The Obama White House"

fun times. fun times.


https://plus.google.com/105479712798762608629






 

Now...

Achievement unlocked. Google Now tells me about my own posts on my own site.

 

gHarmony

Sad that they didn't call it G-Love and Special Sauce

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/deepcompatibility/home

 

Just heard Superfreak in La Place Cafe.

Was on the first cassette I ever owned. (First vinyl? Kiss Destroyer)

I wonder if people will remember their "firsts" going forward in a cloud based world....


https://play.google.com/music/playlist/AMaBXylLDTLqOEfkqa9onz7nF8OZV2Oot6mB9FrzK2DdmieX2Wg5iup7sNmAC...






 

Happy Holidays from the Google+ Death Star Project team and the Chewbacca family.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3a5j8PgQxg






 

Got the Holiday Gift blues? Watch Robot Reindeer.

ROBOLIGHTS combines your two favorite things: Robots and Christmas into a 3 acre theme park of crazy. Visit it before the authorities shut it down.

https://www.facebook.com/ROBOLIGHTS




https://photos.google.com/






 

Specialty Pharmacy Pfizer Farce

Still riding the blindfolded roller coaster with my wife and her metastatic breast cancer. We got a good 18 months from the 1st treatment. Fingers crossed that this new wonder drug will be even better.

I had a whole rant queued up about cancer drugs, Google's specialty pharmacy and Pfizer pricing Ibrance at 0k/month. Alas, MacOS+Chrome ate it.

Instead you can read this article and understand how we end up with ridiculous 80 monthly ransom payments copays. (Seriously life-and-death isn't subject to price elasticity of demand!)

http://www.fiercepharma.com/sales-and-marketing/pfizer-s-ibrance-pricing-shows-multiyear-market-anal...

 

Here's your friday lol, includes the extra special Google dis:

_You know rappers like to sell drugs_
_But you do it on the streets_
_And you deader than Google buzz or Google+_

http://genius.com/Ytcracker-bitcoin-baron-lyrics


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZfg1Gtcg08






 

 

 

 

As I said on http://g/opensource-discuss :

_We’re Google. The 10x solution is to replace DNS. (And I’m only half-joking.)_







 

20% project Idea

Create Google+ Communities based on donation match data from https://give.corp.google.com/b

Then expand that further, let anyone make communities with a recurring membership fee, or private profiles with a membership. Sort of like Patreon.. but better.