In Firefox, when you type stuff into the main url bar (the "Awesome Bar") it tries to do a Google I'm Feeling Lucky search. So if you typed in wiki it would figure out you wanted Wikipedia and take you to Wikipedia.org, it would even take you to the localized version, and when it's in doubt it shows you a standard Google result.

To get this in Chrome add a custom search engine. Use the following as the url.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=Im+Feeling+Lucky

If you make it the default, then any keywords you type into the url bar (the "Omni Bar") will run an I'm Feeling Lucky search. Or you can set the keyword to l. So to use the custom search you would type in l wiki.

Finally, just got this email:

It's finally here: Google Chrome for Mac. Available today in beta!

Hi there,

Thanks for signing up to hear from us regarding Google Chrome for Mac! We're excited to let you know that Google Chrome is now available in beta for Mac OS X.

Here are a few fun facts from us on the Google Chrome for Mac team:

73,804 lines of Mac-specific code written
29 developer builds
1,177 Mac-specific bugs fixed
12 external committers and bug editors to the Google Chrome for Mac code base, 48 external code contributors
64 Mac Minis doing continuous builds and tests
8,760 cups of soft drinks and coffee consumed
4,380 frosted mini-wheats eaten

Got taken to this page.

Where if you click on the lego image, you can see the Google Chrome Staff in lego form.. keep clicking for closeups. (not here, first go to the google chrome link one sentence above then start clicking)

Then watched the new ads(there's a bunch of them, at the end of each use the in movie menu, or click here):

Then read the blog post announcement here.

Where they had this video:

And also mentioned the Linux beta, and extensions.

Then I installed it and tried it out. It's fast. So I finished writing this in Chrome. Wonder how this will affect browser market share.

I've always had a problem with my ISP's DNS servers. They're slow, but they're also slow to update. I changed a few DNS settings for a domain I have the other day and could access the new settings from my phone over 3G within 5 minutes - if not instantly. Comparatively it took 3+ days for it to propogate through my ISP. Flushing DNS has no effect on this.

So I just switched to Google's DNS, it took a second to change, and it's definitely faster. Noticeably. The question is now that Google sees every website I visit, whether I go through Google.com or not, and they can easily associate my ip address with my Google account, or not, and have even more insight into my web behaviour, what's happening to my sense of privacy, and sense of self. I'm not saying I am the websites I visit, I'm saying Google is gaining an increasingly accurate representation of me, my wants and needs, in a virtual self, and using it to simulate my own decision making in the cloud whenever I do a search. They're taking a piece of my consciousness and feeding it billions of search results. They're using me to find search results for me.

If you use Google Chrome I'd imagine(I'm too lazy to look it up now) there's some TOS clause that prevented them being aware of every site you visit, but this Google DNS stuff is a service of me sending them each website I visit for the purpose of redirecting me to a given site. Also every application I use that checks for updates will now go through Google as well.

I feel as though my laptop is plugged into the Googleplex LAN. Sort of. I feel like someone should be studying how this affects my online behaviour, or how it affects the way I see Google. But, like, set up your scientific equipment in the driveway and bring your own food.

Oh yeah, and here's how to switch to Google DNS: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/index.html

Adobe is literally making it possible for me to create what I want, and cosmically in sync with where I am on the road to creating those things. I feel indebted - as I should, to the tool creators. The future will be a crazy cross platform interconnected kinda world. It's a great era to live in, and be a part of.

Watching some political stuff on Youtube and saw the ad on the side was for Google. It's rare you see Google marketing their stuff, but it seems when they do they tend to use their own platforms to do it. And why not they have access to billions of pageviews and they already know that people using Google like Google.. As well as tons of other info about you from using their services and interacting with Adsense all over the web.

Search Stories is a YouTube Channel that features the Google search bar. There are already a bunch of episodes and you watch a 60 second plot unfold through a series of searches. They built a custom episode player with sleek effects and if you catch it as it's loading you'll see the default Flex busy mouse cursor. Google uses Flex, I'm pretty sure they use it for the YouTube player as well and some of their other Flash constructions but I wonder how it ties in to their relationship with Adobe. Since they offer API access and libraries in Flash and Flex you'd think they'd already have had to develop their own framework for working in Flash.. Then again maybe they just use the best tool for the job.

In Google's words, more videos after the jump.

(more...)

The Adobe Air 2.0 beta is available for download now. Air 2.0 is a huge advancement and brings tons of impactfull new features. Most notably you can now write fully native apps, that use fully native installers and communicate and launch native apps. Hugely improved performance. Work with sound like never before. Sockets, and HTML5.

Download the AIR 2.0 Beta.

The Flash 10.1 prerelease is also available for download.

This is from the Adobe Labs.

New Features in AIR 2

• Open documents with the user's default application
  You can open document files in the application the user has set up as the default opening application. Launching executables or script files is not permitted unless the application is packaged in a native installer. See File.openWithDefaultApplication() and Opening files with the default system application.
• Microphone data access
  You can access the sound data from a microphone directly for recording or other processing. See Microphone.sampleData and Capturing microphone sound data.
• Mass storage device detection
  You can now detect when a mass storage device, such as a USB drive or a camera, has been connected to the user's computer. See StorageVolumeInfo.
• Updated WebKit version
  • WebKit in AIR is based on the version shipped with Safari 4.0.3
  • Support for JavaScript profiling
  • SquirrelFish Extreme JavaScript engine resulting in 50% faster performance using SunSpider tests
  • CSS3 Module support (2D transformations, transitions, animations, gradients, zoom and WebKit CSS selectors, etc.).
  • Styling scrollbars via CSS
  • Latest Canvas enhancements.
• Global Error Handling
  Global error handling lets you handle all uncaught errors (both synchronous errors and asynchronous error events) in one place in your code. See UncaughtErrorEvent.
• New networking support
  • Server sockets
    You can listen for incoming socket connections. See ServerSocket and Server sockets.
  • UDP sockets
    You can send and receive messages using the Universal Datagram Protocol (UDP). See DatagramSocket and UDP sockets (AIR).
  • TLS/SSL sockets
    You now connect to a server that requires TLSv1 or SSLv3 for socket communications. See SecureSocket and Secure client sockets (AIR).
  • DNS lookup
    You can look up Domain Name System (DNS) resource records. See DNSResolver and Domain Name System (DNS) records.
  • Network interface enumeration
    You can enumerate the list of hardware and software network interfaces available on a client computer. See NetworkInfo and Network interfaces.
• Packaging an AIR application in a native installer
  You can package an AIR application in a native install program instead of an AIR file. Applications packaged and installed using a native installer have access to platform-specific features such as the Native Process API. See Packaging an AIR application in a native installer.
• Native process API
  You can launch and communicate with native processes. Applications that use this API must be installed using a native installer. See NativeProcess and Communicating with native processes in AIR and the following quick start articles: (For HTML developers) Interacting with a native process, (For Flex developers) Interacting with a native process, and (For Flash developers) Interacting with a native process.
• Database transaction savepoints
  You can commit or roll back multiple database changes as a single transaction. See SQLConnection.setSavePoint().
• Screen reader support (Windows only)
  Users can use screen reader software with AIR applications. See Accessibility.
• Printing enhancements
  • Vector printing is now supported on the Mac.
  • PrintJobOptions.printMethod allows you to control whether vector or bitmap printing is performed. You can also let the runtime choose the best method (using an internal heuristic based on analyzing the content to be printed). See PrintJobOptions.printMethod.
• Idle time-out settings for URL requests
  You can override the default idle time-out setting for URL requests. See idleTimeout.
• Improved IPv6 support
  IPv6 format addresses can now be used with all APIs that accept an IP string as input.
• Increased maximum size of NativeWindow
  The maximum size of a NativeWindow has been increased to 4095x4095 pixels (from 2880x2880 pixels). See NativeWindow.bounds.
• File promises (Win/Mac only)
  You can now allow users to drag a file that has not been created yet out of an AIR application and provide the data for that function after the file promise has been dropped. For example, you could provide a list of files available on a remote server. When the user drops an item from that list onto their desktop, you can download the data and write it to the dropped file. See URLFilePromise and Dropping file promises.
• Multi-touch events
  You can listen for multi-touch and gesture events on computers that have multi-touch hardware and operating system support. See TouchEvent.
• IME API and IME text input enhancement
  Input Method Editors (IMEs) can be used with any InteractiveObject, not just TextField objects. This allows you to support IME input when using the Flash Text Engine or the Adobe Text Layout Framework, for example. See IME.
• Native runtime install packages for Linux
  Native install packages are now provided for the rpm and debian package managers.

Sammy Hagar

Joe Satriani

Michael Anthony

Chad Smith

Preview (and then buy) the album http://www.chickenfoot.us/listeningparty/

Watch the 12 days of Chickenfoot video podcast where the band explains each song in the album http://www.chickenfoot.us/12days

Myspace | Facebook | YouTube | twitter | iPhone app

It's been up for a while now, but I just went to look around and I gotta say it's looking good. They looked like they were floundering during the medium change but based on the site I think it's more accurate that they're slowly trying to integrate CNN - the pundits, journalists, stories, and brand with proven web stuff and they're definitely doing things right. Some of the online stuff isn't new, but in the new package with everything else it's starting to take shape and make sense. Lots of video, their Live video system actually uses Octoshape which is like torrenting the live stream - everyone who activates it becomes part of the grid and distribution network so during peak viewing times quality of the feed and buffering will improve as people opt in. Their other video player for non-live content is equally impressive in letting you quickly make playlists of videos, view info and related videos similar to Youtube's player, and more importantly when you embed, and share a link on twitter which takes you to twitter via cnntweet.appspot.com. That's right they wrote they're own tweeting application hosted on Google Appspot that creates a tweet to the video using bit.ly.  NewsPulse.CNN.com is a digg style article browser, where popular stories bubble up to the top. The other day I started watching Amanpour, I'm not sure if she has a show on tv cause I don't have one anymore, but the video podcast is great and daily. I think they should have given her a show a long time ago, but I'm just glad tomorrow I can download another one.

It's also about time more business woke up and started investing in podcasts and new media. How is it that they invest in TV where everybody changes the channel, hits mute, or goes to the bathroom during commercials and they don't seem to be interested in new media - where it's on demand and most people WANT to watch ads because they're more targeted and give viewers a means to 'reward' the hard work that went into creating and distributing the content. Because so many independents are creating content now, they talk about it, and viewers of new media are more aware of where and how their content gets to them because of it, and more happy to support those that create. We feel indebted to those that go out of their way to bring us content the way we want to consume it.

Back to CNN.com they've got a bunch of social media, and dashboard apps and widgets, an incredible iPhone app that does video, their shows have blogs, their personalities are on Twitter, Don Lemon is at blogworld shooting video on a handheld camera, and you can get a CNN.com account that gives you a personalized page of recently viewed items, local weather; news; and stock quotes.

I'm very impressed, clearly they've been paying attention. Do I think TV as a media format will die anytime soon? I think like radio, TV will be around for a long time still, but I think it will start to have more focus on live shows, late night/interview stuff and the triumphant return of the test pattern during the day. People that have access to tons of on-demand content won't sit around staring at 50 year old tv shows. People will continue buy more smart media centre devices, but there will always be a different screen for the living room/office/bedroom.. for people that have all those rooms.

A flaw was discovered in the tls renegotiation process where a 'man in the middle' could take over the connection in a number of ways and perform a number of exploits. Transferring login, credit card, and other important info using https:// is no longer considered secure. The 'man in the middle' could be bumming off your local wireless network, anywhere in between you and your ISP, your ISP and the destination, or on the destinations network. Secure Certificates from the likes of VeriSign can no longer be fully trusted until they find a fix, at which point you'll need to update all your software - browsers, email clients, twitter apps, smart phone firmware, as all the software manufacturers implement and roll out the new(not yet figured out or released) protocol.

Luckily the vast majority of internet users are stupid and this won't affect activity on the internet a bit, even people that are reading or writing this post will still log into their email accounts and go about their online life relying on sheer improbability of them being exploited by this massive(read: catastrophic) security hole. Once again it's stupidity and recklessness that will keep the world turning cause as we all know if you stop and think about anything too long you'll just give up and go live in the forest like we were originally supposed to.

If you're interested in a more technical description go here.

If you're a programmer and you contribute to or write software which implements tls please disable renegotiation a.s.a.p. and push the update to all your users until a new version of the protocol is released.

via Ars Technica