AlaaShaker's Weblog

In many situations, a person needs to execute some survey, vote-collection or throwing a poll for instance. There are several online services that offer that at a low price. Since most of us prefer not paying, we either go to distributing documents through mass-mails then suffer collecting the results by hand, or simply let a user group do that service for you (as Yahoo! Groups – meaning that your audience should be member users), or use creepy pages with tons of ads to get it free.

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Goosh.org is a Google command line interface that behaves like a Unix-shell in your browser. It has been released yesterday, still BETA. Also, it’s not an official Google product. Goosh.org has a set of commands, type in, and see the results.

Here’s the list of commands available so far:

I am not quite sure how this command line would be helpful, it’s still cool though – I hate using the mouse, you can do everything now using a few commands and Enter keystrokes

Seven years ago, Google decided to bring a new, free, easy-to-learn software for people to create, modify and share 3D models: Google SketchUp.

I do have an almost-intermediate experience with 3DSMax, Maya, Mudbox and other modeling and sculpting tools. But let me focus on the easy-to-learn part: I have built this very-silly-looking model, from scratch, in like, 2 minutes!

It’s not the best I can do, I never intended building something nice; it’s just that it was built without checking any documentation, learning any tutorial or watching any video! I only used two tools: the Push/Pull and Offset tools, along with a few basic shapes to bring this model to life – again, from scratch, in just 2 minutes - yes, that’s the whole thing!

I believe being that easy-to-learn is a great step towards building great software. This means less time to learn and master the tool, less cost to train the users, and results in being more productive. It happens a lot when you need a quick 3D model to take a couple of snapshots of (let’s say a logo or so) and it’s not worth installing, learning and building it on 3DSMax nor Maya, or even asking a professional designer to do it for you.

I do recommend downloading it for a quick try-out. Check out the Google SketchUp Official Blog for more info, updates and Tips’n'tricks.

After Google has launched Google Sky, Microsoft Research launched WorldWide Telescope (WWT):

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

WWT is a single rich application portal that blends terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience. Kids of all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the universe with its simple and powerful user interface. (Read more …)

I couldn’t help noticing that the site was built with Adobe Flash (Silverlight?) – perhaps that’s the main reason behind writing this post. LOL. Spend a few moments watching their video of how kids react with “WOW!” and “COOL!” to the WWT. Also, check out the minimum requirements.

So, here’s the trick. Firefox enables you to open any website from your bookmarks in the sidebar. Here’s how you could do that …

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Last week, Google Australia has launched Google Treasure Hunt 2008, a problem-solving contest  in computer science fields, posting a problem per week.

The Google Engineering team is launching its first ever Treasure Hunt – a contest designed to challenge your problem-solving skills. Starting soon, we’ll be releasing the first of four puzzles, drawing from computer science, networking, and low-level UNIX trivia. Each puzzle will be posted online week by week, and the first entrants to submit correct answers to each question will receive a prize.

I gave it a shot with the first problem – it wasn’t as bad as I expected!
It just had a small trick. I’ll leave figuring that out to you ..

RSS Feeds are a bless. Suddenly, I realized that I needed to subscribe in so many feeds that I needed a feed reader to show up notifications on my desktop once a feed is receive d ..

I started with sidebars. They are great especially that my laptop has a 17″  wide-screen; you see, I’m not losing much space of my working area as you’ll do if you keep your sidebar docked! The best I’ve tried was Desktop Sidebar, also Google Desktop Sidebar was great, too. But eventually, I realized that I’m wasting that tiny space and resources to watch a clock, weather, to-do lists, performance meters and more, just to fill up the space next to the RSS Feed Reader gadget.

In search for notifications, the next thing was desktop applications like Feed Demon and KilpFolio. I wasn’t that comfortable using Feed Demon even though it’s a good one, and I liked KipFolio more honestly. Even though, KlipFolio doesn’t import/export your subscriptions as Feed Demon does, but the application is easy to use, light, its shape incredibly customizable and suits my windows skin. It provides nice notifications on the corner of your desktop whenever there is an update. But I started to realize, some items aren’t marked as read correctly, so I get many redundant feeds as unread every time I shutdown Windows. I still think you owe this one a shot!

At last, I decided to settle for Google Reader!
It seems so far the best choice, except for the notifications thing – as long as I don’t have it open, I won’t know of any new feeds. But I guess I can live with that. There are few other merits: The subscriptions (categories) pane on the left, sharing feeds with friends and adding notes to them, as well as importing/exporting your subscriptions.

Enhancing your Google Reader experience:

• Need a desktop notifier? Try Google Reader Notifier for Windows, a system-tray-based application that alerts you when you have unread items in Google Reader.
• For Firefox fans: Try Google Reader Notifier Firefox Extension! It does the same thing but inside Firefox.
• Also, for Firefox fans: Add Google Reader Sidebar.
• Again, for FireFox fans: Upgrade to Better GReader.
• Smart Subscribe Bookmark: Bookmark this link in your bookmarks toolbar, simply open any blog or website that has an RSS feed and click it, it will add that subscription automatically for you.
• Don’t like web-based? Download GoogleAir; a free, open-source Adobe AIR application, that brings Google Reader to your desktop in a Mac OS theme. It lacks the key-board shortcuts, yet that should be included in their next version.
• Shortcuts:
  
  • j/k = next/previous item
  • m = mark-as-read/unread
  • g + h = Go Home
  • g + a = Go to All Items
  • g + u = Brings up a list of all Subscriptions
  • ? = Brings up a screen with all shortcuts …
• Embed Google Reader into GMail: Use GreaseMonkey in Firefox to embed Google Reader into GMail using some script.
• Suggestion: In Google Reader, go to Settings > Preferences > Scroll Tracking : Uncheck “In expanded view, mark items as read when you scroll past them.” then all you need to do is to mark the item “as read” after you’re done with it (if you don’t do this, every post you accidentally scroll by is marked as read – you’ll miss much!)

It happens a lot when you really need to do some sort of ‘advanced’ search in Gmail. It’s not always that a simple search does the job. How about some tips for using keywords that would make your life a lot easier?!

These are the keywords supported by GMail search:

Now, let’s see each keyword:

• from: { email address | name }
  Use from to search for an email from a specific person, either by their email address or simply their name.
  ex: from: Alaa Shaker – from: alaashaker@gmail.com
• to: { email address | name }
  Use to to search for an email sent to a specific person, either by their email address or simply their name.
• subject: { text | “exact text” }
  Use subject to search for emails with subjects containing the specified text, or containing an exact match to the text between the double quotes (case insensitive).
  ex: subject:my blog – subject:”my Blog”
• cc: { email address }
  Use cc to find emails carbon copied to a specified recipient.
  ex: cc:alaashaker@gmail.com
• bcc: { email address }
  Use bcc to find emails blind carbon copied to a specified recipient.
  ex: bcc:alaashaker@gmail.com
• filename: { filename | extension }
  Use filename to find emails that have an attachment that matches the specified pattern, or simply provide an extension (.pdf, .doc, .bmp, etc.) to list all emails with attachments that belong to the same extension.
  ex: filename:mytextfile.txt – filename:pdf
• label: { label-name }
  Use label to search for emails under a certain label
  ex: label:newsletters
• after: { any known date format }
  Use after to search for emails sent or received after the specified date.
  ex: after:March 25 – after: 10/10/2007
• before: { any known date format }
  Use before to search for emails sent or received before the specified date.

• has:attachement
  Use has:attachement to search for emails with attachements.
  ex: has:attachement
• in: { mailbox-folder }
  Use in to find emails in any of the Gmail mailbox folders: Inbox, Chats, Drafts, Trash, or Spam, or use the keyword ‘anywhere’.
  ex: in:chats
• is: { read | unread | sent | starred }
  Use is to find read, unread, sent or starred email messages.
  ex: is:unread

So, I can eventually do some complex search as:label:newsletters is:unread subject:coding horror after:1/1/2008bringing me all email messages sent after the 1st of Jan, 2008, containing the words ‘coding’ and ‘horror’ in their subject, and are labeled under “Newsletters”.

Furthermore, you can use basic boolean operations, negation and grouping in your search. The only supported boolean operation is ‘OR’, as ‘AND’ is implicit. Use ‘-’ for negation. Grouping is done using curved brackets’()’. as in:to:(sam mira) subject:(code OR executable) -label:projectswhich yields a search for all messages sent to Sam and Mira, with a subject containing the words ‘code’ or ‘executable’, and not labeled under “Projects”.

Now, if you use Firefox, enjoy searching your GMail using the default search toolbar after adding the Gmail search to it.

– References: http://girishk.com/2007/04/21/gmail-search-syntax/ and http://philwilson.org/blog/2004/12/search-your-gmail-in-firefox.html

For all GMail lovers, to make GMail your Windows default email client, here’s what u have to do

• Open Start Menu > Run (or press Win+R)
• Type “regedit” (without the double quotes!)
• Navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\Mail”
• Right-click on “Mail” and add new Key. Call it “GMail”
• Construct the following hierarchy by right-clicking and adding keys. Then give the corresponding values on the right by double-clicking the “default” item and changing its value, or right-clicking anywhere and adding a new item with the type described between brackets ..

• Gmail — Default = Gmail
  • DefaultIcon — Default = “c:\\Program Files\\Google\\Google Talk\\googletalk.exe”,5
  • Protocols — Default = URL:MailTo Protocol | EditFlags (REG_BINARY) = 02 00 00 00 | URL Protocol (REG_SZ) = <leave empty>
    • DefaultIcon — Default = “c:\\Program Files\\Google\\Google Talk\\googletalk.exe”,5
    • shell
      • open
        • command — Default = rundll32.exe url.dll,FileProtocolHandler http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=&su=
  • shell
    • open — Default = Gmail
      • command

In “DefaultIcon”, you can change the path to any other icon you’d like, just don’t forget to write the path with two backslashes. Also, you can also bookmark this link to directly compose a new mail in your web browser.

Everyone of us has a lot of things to do everyday. Organizing these stuff in a better way will sure help you get them done better and easier. People vary in their “task-keeping” scheme from To-Do Lists, Did-Do Lists, using applications as Microsoft Outlook, keeping data in their calendar or PDAs, or even sticky notes. GTD (Getting Things Done) is an easy, practical scheme to keep track of your tasks and actions.

Google Notebook is a perfect tool for processing your GTD lists. Why?

• Its contents are available from any computer where you’re logged into your Google Account; which is a main advantage for using Notebook rather than any other GTD desktop applications as Thinking Rock and iGTD.
• It automatically includes links in notes (including individual GMail messages).
• It can capture information anywhere on the web with a mature browser extension.
• It comes with Google’s signature killer search capabilities.
• Using Notebook’s collaboration features, you could allow your spouse or co-worker to drop things into your Inbox for you to process later.

Setting up your GTD Notebooks:

1. Log into Notebook with your Google Account.
2. Create five new notebooks: Inbox, Next Actions, Someday/Maybe, Projects and References. It would be better if you added “GTD.” to each title as in “GTD.Inbox” for sorting purpose.
3. Add items to any section, or add section headers for known categories of your interest, as “Work”, “College”, etc.

Walkthough:

Each notebook has a different function:

• Inbox: The entry point to you GTD List. Unprocessed thoughts get dropped off here for dealing with later. Pop-up thoughts, half-baked notions and “Oh! I should…” go here.
• Next Actions: This is your immediate, actionable to-do list, a few specific items you’ve decided to carry out in the next few days.
• Someday/Maybe: Here’s where the things you might like to do someday – but you’re not committed to right now – get shuttled.
• Projects: Big jobs that are made up of a collection of subtasks are not next actions, they’re projects. For example, the “Clean out the office” job is made up of several next actions (i.e., “Take out the garbage,” “Rearrange the book shelves,” “Purge filing cabinet.”)
• Reference: Research into a topic that you’ll need to carry out a next action or refer back to for a particular project goes here. For example, this is where you’d store links to the hotel, flight information and maps of a travel destination.

Get started ..

• Get Firefox Google Notebook Extension.
• Each day, review unprocessed items in your inbox and like a good GTD’er, decide whether to Do, Delegate or Defer it.
• To move an item from your Inbox notebook into its right place in the system, from the drop down menu on the far right side of it, choose “Move.” From there you’ll be able to choose another notebook and section, as pictured.
• Let others drop things into your Inbox: You can share your Inbox notebook with your spouse, boss, partner or co-worker virtually. To do so, click the “Sharing Options” link on the far right top side of the notebook. (Word of advice: just share your Inbox, not your Projects or Next Actions list. In theory the Inbox is the single entry point into your GTD system, so it’s the only one others should access.)

– Source: LifeHacker.com