Is google ever going to stop doing cool stuff? Can you imagine doing this type of thing for a living? Well, like it or not, the next time you decide to dive down the rabbit hole, you can turn to your computer and GE instead. Yep, Disney’s wonderland has been ported to google earth. Just load up GE and type disney world in the search field and make sure 3D Buildings are turned on and enjoy. Thanks big G, now I can scratch DW from my list of must visit sites .

Lifehacker has a couple of great articles on how you too can cut those ties holding you back from Gmail heaven and move your Email accounts (and old Emails) to Gmail. So go ahead, head on over to Gmail, create an account, download this utility and start uploading your old Outlook/Outlook express/thunderbird mailboxes from your computer to Gmail. Next Read this article to figure out how you can have Gmail “suck” your other accounts dry using the POP protocol and/or consolidate your other email addresses into Gmail. Oh and it’s all FREE as usual, so enjoy.

Well I finally took the plunge and signed up for google apps for my domain, nerdlogger.com. I use easyDNS (DNS-Only service & Registry Fees) for DNS and having gone through the setup I thought I would put a summary together for anyone else interested. Remember that this is specifically written for easyDNS (but should apply to other DNS providers with a bit of tweaking).

0) I assume you have your domain registered with easyDNS already.
1) Go to apps.google.com and sign up for a standard account for your domain.
2) Once you provide your info, google will take you to your control panel/Dashboard.
3) Note that google needs to verify that you own your domain. So click on the link to verify your domain ownership.
4) At this point there are two ways of verifying ownership, I used CNAME method and that’s what I outline here.
5) Once you choose CNAME method, the page will pump out a random hostname that you need to add to your easyDNS account so that google can verify your ownership of the domain. These hostnames are in this format: googlefffggghhh12345
6) So now hop over to easyDNS.com and log into your account. Once there under “Domain Settings” look for the DNS link beside your domain entry. Clicking this will take you to the DNS entries for your domain.
7) Scroll down to where aliases and add the following two CNAME entries to the table (ie: add one, click next, go through and come back to the page and add another one):

• “googlefffggghhh12345″ CNAME (without quotes) which points to “google.com”. This entry is temporary and for verification only, once your application for google apps has been verified, you can delete this entry (make sure your domain is verified first).
• “pages” CNAME (without quotes) which points to “ghs.google.com”. This is the permanent address (URL) to get you to your start page (ie: pages.yourdomain.com). You can (if you like) also create more CNAMEs for the other services offered under google apps (ie: calendar, mail, docs and sites could be other CNAMES pointing to ghs.google.com).

The second entry (pages) in the table will just make things go faster, that’s all. Now that you have the entries added to your easyDNS account go to googles verification page and click verify the CNAME button. The process normally takes a couple of hours. So relax, have a coffee, surf a bit and revisit the apps page (just reload it), once verification is done you will see “active” beside all the entries on your apps dashboard.
9) Now, if you like you can have google apps also be your mail server so that people sending mail to userid@yourdomain.com will get routed to google apps. If you need this, log back into easyDNS and go back to the DNS panel for your domain and add the following to the MX (Mail Exchanger) section. Make sure you delete the default MX entry that is already there.

This literally requires you to go through the loop seven times and add the seven entries, maybe if someone from easyDNS reads this, they can have a bulk screen so you can fill it in once and be done with it. Remember that the “Mail for Zone” field is “yourdomain.com” (without quotes). When you’re done and if you’ve done it right your DNS control panel should look similar to this screen shot. Don’t worry about the www CNAME and the A Record that’s pending, those are mine and are required for having a easyDNS custom domain name for your blogger.com account.

10) If you like (highly recommended) you can add the TXT field as well. This will get rid of a lot of spam that would normally originate from yourdomain.com. Do it — please — no one likes spam and it’s super easy. Add the following text (without the quotes) as the text record for your domain “v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all”.
11) Wait a couple of hours for the dust to settle in DNS land. Now go to your google apps dashboard and activate your Email app.
12) Now back to google apps dashboard, click on each one of the services in the “service settings” menu and change their web addresses, you can see the services I’ve created CNAMEs and modified URLs for in the picture below (ie: click on “Start Page” and change the default web address to http://pages.yourdomain.com or whatever you used for CNAME under item 7).

DONE!

Sixteen months after it’s purchase by Google, JotSpot has been launched into orbit as Google Sites. Our favorite G-Folks have completed their overhaul of JotSpots hosted wiki product. Users now have a choice between five basic templates – a standard wiki, a dashboard where google gadgets can be embedded, a blog-like template for announcements, a file cabinet for file uploads, and a page for lists of items.

Users will now simply embed spreadsheets, presentations and word documents from Google Docs, as well as Google Calendars, YouTube Videos and Picasa Albums. Like Google Docs, Google Sites wikis can be made private, shared with others, or made public. All wiki pages have RSS feeds associated with them to allow users to track any changes.

Google Sites is free (as usual) with a 10 GB storage limit. A premier edition is also available for larger organizations for $50/year/person. Hopefully google will merge it’s undergraduate Google Pages project with Google Sites and create the killer collaboration/social-net site.

Head over to 360 Cities and take a virtual tour of almost anywhere in the world. This google mashup is very similar to twittervision/flickrvision and shows you 360 degree panoramas from around the world.

If you’re a twitter nut — not that there is anything wrong with that — or are just plain bored, head over to Twittervision, a real-time geographic visualization of posts to Twitter. It’s all thanks to google’s open API (thanks guys/gals……you ROCK!!!). It’s kinda cool to have it opened — specially in 3D mode — on a large panel. Kinda makes you feel like the “Big Guy Upstairs”, listening to peoples “prayers”. Also check out flickrvision, which does for flickr what twittervision does for twitter…..I like it better.

…..Not only that — yes we know about google docs and all the other online word processors out there — it also allows you to go offline while editing your documents and sync when you get back online. All this is done through the magic of Google Gears browser plugin (Thanks G). So throw away that old copy of MS Office, uninstall it off your harddrive and start using Zoho Writer. While you’re at it you might also want to send them a “thank you” note for taking another MS shackle off your computer/ankle . More details + movie….

Well did you know google has been around for 200 years. If you don’t believe me have a look, they’ve got actual footage of it in motion .

So google does it again, as promised by Eric Schmidt earlier this summer, google presentations was released on the last official week of summer. Now it’s not quite power point yet (remember they have had a couple of years of head start), but is quite usable and actually offers some neat features missing from the standard power point. One of them is sharing and shared editing, the other is online presentation where you can actually invite people to look at your presentation, go through it with them and discuss your points over text chat. Now I know it’s not quite like standing in a room and presenting to real people, but something tells me that voice chat is right around the corner.

My biggest problem — and it’s not so much a problem than a missing feature — is that there is no ppt export function, but again I think those boys and girls at google are busy working on it right now .

Now if google can maintain the momentum of this platform (google docs) for another 2-3 years, I predict that people will seriously start to think about upgrading to Office 2010 (or whatever it will be called). With google docs on the market and Openoffice/Lotus Symphony/Abiword killer trio I think the days of expensive/closed office packages are over.

Well google has done it again. It turns out that there is a “hidden” flight sim built right into google earth client. You’ll need version 4.0+ for this to work. Here is the info on how to activate it and a listing of navigation keys. The short of it:

To enter the flight simulator mode, press Ctrl + Alt + A (Command/Open Apple Key + Option + A on the Mac). Once you have entered flight simulator mode for the first time, you can re-enter the mode by choosing Tools > Enter Flight Simulator. To leave flight simulator mode, click Exit Flight Simulator in the top right corner or press Ctrl + Alt + A (Command/Open Apple Key+ Option + A on the Mac).

The following keystrokes control navigation and other aspects of the flight simulator. You can also control the aircraft with a mouse or joystick. To disable or enable mouse controls, left click (single click on a Mac). Once mouse controls are active, the pointer shape changes to a cross on your screen.

Google has just announced google earth 4.2 and new to this version is the Skies. Several Sky layers are listed on the left-hand side, including Constellations, Backyard Astronomy, Hubble Showcase, The Moon, The Planets, User’s Guide to Galaxies and Life of a Star. The Sky layers are composed of over 1 million photographs from various scientific and academic sources.

Another new feature in Google Earth is the addition of super-high resolution photo content, which you can see by adding the layer Primary Database -> Featured Content -> Gigapxl Photos. Unlike Google Street View, these photos however are only available for a few select places (like buildings), so there’s not a lot of random fun stuff to be found.

So go download your free copy, install and hit “Switch between sky and earth”. This is absolutely fantastic and serves as a great resource for research and education. Thanks Google….You guys ROCK!!!

Before I start, this tip is Unix friendly (not just OSX), but requires you to know what shell scripts are and how you create/run them. Additionally you should be familiar with the workings of the “find” command in Unix.

I had lots of trouble getting the Google Analytics code onto my gallery site. The problem is that I use iWeb to create a front end that links to a discrete back end (ie: specific subdirectories generated by Photoshop, iPhoto or Aperture). I found this Automator script earlier, but it seems like every time I run the script on a Folder, the script only changes .html pages created by iWeb….Weird. So after some head scratching and googling, I found the following complementary scripts on RSVP – Xnews site. There is a certain amount of detail about what the script is actually doing on that site, but I just wanted to extract the meat and add a little garnish (yeah I made a couple of mistakes, that I hope you’ll avoid).

• First you need a new Analytics account or if you have one (with a existing profile) you might need to create a new profile for this new site you want to track. The mistake I made was that I had a existing account that tracks nerdlogger.com and I (by mistake) used it’s analytics ID in the script. Since my gallery site is a different domain, analytics creates a new ID when you add the domain (it actually increments the last digit).
• Then you need to create a script called insert (or whatever you like) and put this in it (just cut and paste from here):

#!/bin/bash

#INSERT SCRIPT#Your Google Analytics Code goes below.googleAnalyticsCode='UA-XXXXXXX-2'textToInsert="<script src=\"http:\/\/www.google-analytics.com\/urchin.js\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\">_uacct = \"$googleAnalyticsCode\";urchinTracker();<\/script>"textToReplace="<\/[Bb][Oo][Dd][Yy]>"#You need to substitute the path to the top of your webdirectory below.WebPath='/Volumes/idiskname/Web/Sites'

# this is where the actual work happensfind $WebPath -iname '*.html' -exec sed -i .bak -e "/$textToInsert/!s/$textToReplace/$textToInsert&/g" {} \; -print

• Now create another script called remove (or whatever you like) and put this in it (just cut and paste):

#!/bin/bash

#REMOVE SCRIPT#Your Google Analytics Code goes below.googleAnalyticsCode='UA-XXXXXXX-2'textToRemove="<script src=\"http:\/\/www.google-analytics.com\/urchin.js\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\">_uacct = \"$googleAnalyticsCode\";urchinTracker();<\/script>"#You need to substitute the path to the top of your webdirectory below.WebPath='/Volumes/idiskname/Web/Sites'

# this is where the actual work happensfind $WebPath -iname '*.html' -exec sed -i .bak -e "s/$textToRemove//g" {} \; -print

• Now we’re almost there. Create one last script called delback (or whatever) and put the folowing one liner in it:

#DELBACK SCRIPT#You need to substitute the path to the top of your webdirectory below.find /Volumes/idiskname/Web/Sites -iname '*.bak' -exec rm {} \; -print

At this point you should have three scripts insert, remove and delback. Use insert to insert the code into all the HTML files under a certain path ($WebPath). This will create .bak files and once you’ve verified the insert scripts operation you can delete/clean them using the delback script. Use remove to remove the analytics code from your HTML pages (if you decide later that you don’t like google analytics or something). Again this process creates .bak files that can be removed/cleaned using the delback script.

Keep in mind also that if you use iWeb to generate your pages and they are sitting on a OSX server that by default your web addresses get expanded after the browser requests them (ie: My gallery is http://www.rcc.ryerson.ca/~mayromlo but gets expanded and rewritten as http://www.rcc.ryerson.ca:16080/~mayromlo/Site/Welcome.html). So you need to get google analytics to go to the expanded version by editing the profile information after initial entry and changing the website URL. This last issue is very mac/osx specific.

Did you ever use google maps to get direction from point A to B, only to have to give up and do some manual adjustments, because you wanted to make a pit stop at location C? Did you ever want to get google maps (or any other mapping program for that matter) to take you through a different route, because you knew for a fact that some road along your route was under construction? Well I have and usually I end up having to pick a arbitary point somewhere to force the mapping engine to take a certain street/highway that I want.

Well those crafty engineers at google have solved the problem for all of us. You can now input your source and destination and if you don’t like the route, just move your mouse along the outline and move the outline (through the magic of AJAX) and force it to go through another path. All this is done in realtime and the mapping engine does all the calculations while you’re moving the route points.

Well, maybe. If there is one feature I like about spreadsheets, it is that you can use formulas, have them lookup other static field/colums and have the spreadsheet engine fill down an entire column automatically by reference. We’ve all done this and marvelled at the simplicity of the concept. Another feature that I like is that you can modify portions of a spreadsheet and have it recalculate related field. Well, Google docs and spreadsheet has taken that concept to the next level. Imagine having active spreadsheets that update their fields using google data. In the above picture I lined up a bunch of Baseball players names and created two columns using the following “formulas”:

• Date of Birth field: =GoogleLookup(A2 ; “Date Of Birth”)
• RBI field: =GoogleLookup(A2 ; “RBI”)

then I used the copy function to copy the field, selected the rest of that column and did a paste. After google digested the data, all fields were automatically filled in using google lookups. Now the neat thing about this is that if the data changes, the appropriate spreadsheet field will automatically update. You can see the power of something like this in creating simple worksheets that keep track of stock prices, auction prices, etc. The basic syntax is in the format of =GoogleLookup(“entity”; “attribute”), where “entity” represents the name of the entity that you want to access, like Kuala Lumpur, Audrey Hepburn, or oxygen, and “attribute” is the type of information that you want to retrieve.

Yeah, I like history, and I think you can learn a thing or two from it. In this case we’re talking about google (and I guess all search engines before and after). Just have a look at this ad for the “Answer Machine” from 1964. Published in Childcraft Vol. 6: How things change by Field Enterprises Educational Corporation. Are you having a “Wow, who would have predicted that” moment…?

(Credit: Web Owls)

In the continuing saga of starship “G” vs. the evil empire, here is a story that I almost missed. Gmail has introduced a slide show function that just happens to work with power point files as well. So now you can email that ppt file to your gmail account, go to your presentation, login to gmail and do a web slide show….all through the magic of AJAX. Now, you can’t edit power point files yet, but this feature will be added soon. This is thanks to google acquiring Tonic System. You can find the announcement here.

Google already supports web previews for Word documents and Excel sheets as part of their Google Docs & Spreadsheets program. You can see the pattern here – with every new instant preview, users have less reason to actually buy Microsoft Office. So go signup for a gmail account and choose your side in the coming galactic desktop battle.

In and of itself this might not be big news, but I think it is the trickle that will eventually turn into a flood, so put on your life jackets…..I warned you.

As a follow up on my earlier story on how google will use gears to move in on Microsoft’s domination of the desktop, here is the story of the first non-google app to use gears. Remember the Milk is a popular online todo list that until yesterday needed a network connection to it’s backend to work properly, but that’s not true anymore.

They have paired up with google to provide a seamless online/offline experience for their users. The offline experience will allow you to view your todo lists, add tasks, edit tasks, search your tasks, create Smart Lists, and do the zillion other things you normally do with RTM. Once connected to the net, you switch from offline to online mode, and RTM will sync all the offline data with the online data. My hats off to RTM, fantastic job.

Well, here is my prediction after digesting most of the content that came out of G-Day. Google Gears will soon make MS Office (and for that matter most “installed” applications) obsolete. Google’s Gears homepage explains that Gears is …

<<... an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

– Store and serve application resources locally
- Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
- Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness>>

Google in a press release states that Gears “marks an important step in the evolution of web applications because it addresses a major user concern: availability of data and applications when there’s no Internet connection available, or when a connection is slow or unreliable.” They go on to say that making the browser environment more powerful is increasingly important (Google snatched up a couple of Firefox developers – this makes even more sense in the light of this announcement).

Well I guess at this point we can just wait and see. Let’s just hope google doesn’t turn into the next MS when they get to the top.

Since the introduction of google maps streets view two days ago, people are going crazy in trying to zoom in and find hidden gems in those captured images. If you don’t know about this click on the link above and you’ll see what I’m talking about, or you can just go to maps.google.com and zoom down to street level in either NYC or San Francisco and push the new Street View button (top right corner of the map). Really cool and well–atleast according to some on the net–Scary!!! So the question is:

Do we need someway of telling the google van that we don’t want to be in their photographs? Judge for yourselves….