Wizard's Blog

Gmail themes

Google just announced that they have added themes to Gmail!

They look pretty cool – I especially like the ones that update the time of day/weather like the iGoogle ones do.

Of course everyone’s tastes are different, so there is quite a variety and a few I don’t care for.

Unfortunately as this is a brand new feature, it isn’t available on my Gmail account yet, but I await with bated breath.

Gmail video chat

Yesterday Google announced the addition of voice and video to Gmail chat.

You download and install a plugin, and then you get extra options in the Gmail chat UI to start a video or voice chat.  It usually seems to work pretty well, though one computer we tried it on ground to a halt.  It has the nice ability to use it one-sided, so someone with a webcam can broadcast to someone without – you don’t need a webcam at both ends.

If someone you want to video chat with hasn’t installed the plugin, when you try to start the chat Gmail will send them a link to the plugin, so you don’t have to explain it to everyone.

The plugin seems to install for all browsers at once, which is nice and painless.

Here’s a video demonstrating the new features:

Once again, Google Talk lags behind Gmail chat, but I’m starting to ask whether Google Talk is really necessary…

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Image via CrunchBase

As promised last night, I started writing a story today.  So far it’s going well (617 words at time of post), but it’s already mutated away from the original concept some and I really don’t know how long it will end up being.

Although in the past I spent some time trying to find good writing tools, when the time came to start writing I ended up using Google Docs – allow me to explain why:

• It’s available everywhere (the joys of cloud computing) though it also has offline access
• It can export as several useful file types including HTML, which is what I’ll use when the story is finished and I want to publish it on my website.  I could easily publish it directly from Google Docs, but I want the Google Juice for my site.
• Revision tracking
• Built-in dictionary/thesaurus/encyclopedia/web lookup for words

What Google Docs is missing as a writing tool is a database to store characters, locations, plot points etc.

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Today is election day here in the US, and here is a Google gadget to show realtime election results:

I’m not an American, but living here it’s difficult to ignore the election, and in any case it’s something that affects the rest of the world.

For the record I think that George Bush has done a terrible job, and the American people need to express that it’s not ok.

I won’t bore you further – there has been more than enough political commentary around for the last few weeks/months/years.

Google Chrome logo

As promised, the beta of Google Chrome was released today.  With great anticipation I downloaded and installed it.

The installer went away for a while, using 100% (of one) CPU, but I think that was because of the sheer size of my browsing history being imported from Firefox.  Need a progress bar there, I think.

When it finally installed, I started it up and…

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Click OK to terminate the application.

I get that message every time I try to load any page.

That makes me a saaaad panda

EDIT: The problem seems to be caused by Symantec Endpoint Security (specifically the Application & Device Control component).  Hopefully Symantec will release an update that fixes this soon.  In the meantime you can uninstall Application & Device Control without completely uninstalling Symantec Endpoint Security.

EDIT: The problem has been added to the Chrome bug tracker, so you can track its progress here

EDIT: The problem has been added to the Symantec Knowledge Base here

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Google Chrome

Apparently Google have sent out a comic book (!?) announcing their browser project – Chrome.

For years there have been rumors that Google was working on their own browser – I guess the rumors were true.

They seem to have put a lot of work into performance, usability and security.  Each tab is a separate process, which makes memory management and security easier and means a javascript-heavy tab won’t slow your other tabs (or the main browser) down.  Hopefully this will also mean that it will take advantage of multi-core/CPU computers.

Interestingly they’ve included an Omnibar which seems to be very similar to Firefox 3‘s Awesomebar and IE8′s Smartbar.  They’ve also made a smart homepage like IE8 beta 2 has and Mozilla is thinking about.  Google Gears is of course included.

They have also put a lot of thought into a fast JavaScript engine called V8.  It seems to do a lot of the optimizations that Mozilla were talking about for Firefox 3.1.

An advantage Google has when developing a browser is the enormous resources of their index – they can run automated tests against millions of websites without ever leaving their own data centers.  So by the time their browser gets to beta it should be much more stable than other betas.

One interesting thing is that Google and Mozilla just renewed their relationship for a few years, and now Google will be in competition with them – I wonder how Mozilla feels about that.

I’ll definitely check Chrome out when it’s released, but the one advantage Firefox will still have is Extensions.

EDIT: Apparently they’re releasing the beta tomorrow

EDIT: Google Blogoscoped have found some more info about Chrome

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Image via Wikipedia

As you can see from the ads on the site, my previously mentioned AdSense problem is resolved.

The third message that I sent to AdSense support got a reply, so I guess persistence and rephrasing pays off :-\

I don’t think my problem is one that many people will have – in March I got them to change my account from a UK to a US once (since I live here now) and I got an automatic email saying that I had four months to do the phone verification.  But because I hadn’t earned $10 yet, I couldn’t do the verification (hello catch-22).  I emailed AdSense support and they said not to worry about it, because I wouldn’t have to do the verification until I earned $10.

Four months later (i.e. now) my account got disabled because I hadn’t done the phone verification :-I

What AdSense support have done is to extend the verification deadline by three months.  That’s fair enough, and thank you, but it took me two years to earn $5, so I’m really not sure I can do another $5 in three months…

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• AdSense Catch-22 redux

Image via Wikipedia

So I finally got a reply from Google regarding my AdSense problem and…

Due to the high volumes of emails we receive, we’re unable to individually respond to your inquiry. Please find instant, reliable answers to all your questions in our online help resources.

Well isn’t that helpful.

I’ve posted my problem to the AdSense Google Group but since I couldn’t find anyone else that had the same problem as me, I don’t hold out much hope for some random member of the public being able to help me.

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• AdSense Catch-22

Image via Wikipedia

Those of you who don’t use AdBlock may have noticed that my blog is now showing public service ads instead of the usual contextual AdSense ads.

There’s a message on my AdSense account saying:

Your pages are displaying Public Service Advertisements (PSAs) because you have not verified your contact information.

I think what it’s talking about is the new phone verification system where they give you a code, you give them a phone number, they phone you up and you put the code in.  Or the other way around, I’m not really clear on it.

Here’s the Catch-22 though: I don’t have the option to perform the phone verification until I’ve earned $10, but I can’t earn any more money because it’s showing PSA’s because I haven’t performed the phone verification…

I sent a message to Google asking for help, but so far there has been no reply.