Tech Stuff

Google released a comic book to help explain Chrome.

Google recently announced the launch of their new browser.  I downloaded it as soon as it was availible.  I have been very impressed with it.  I figure if I am running GMail, Reader, and Analytics in a browser I might as well do it in a browser designed by Google.  Good to see some more innovations in the browser space.  The JavaScript engine that it is using (V8) was designed for speed.  I don’t know if it is the fastest out there as I have seen some speed tests where it did beat Firefox, but in some others it did not.  With more and more sites using JavaScript and Ajax to improve the user experience and make online applications more like desktop ones hopefully Google as a player will help push along the development of JavaScript Engines. In term allowing even more interactive sites.

Google adds a new setting to Gmail to allow the user to specify that all their activity should be done over a SSL connection.  You could change the URL before manually from http to https, but now you can have it done automatically.  This allows you to encrypt the data the transfers between your computer and the Gmail server just like you do when working on your bank’s website.

One of the things I have found annoying with GMail is that it would automatically create contacts based on my email activity.  I have ended up with a full contact manager that has some people in there many times.  Well the GMail team announced today that you can now turn off the auto create function in your address book.  Now I can go back and clean up my contacts.

GMail has announced that they have rolled out stricter criteria for verifying emails from eBay and Paypal to ensure they are really coming from them.  eBay and Paypal are now signing all their email with DomainKeys.  GMail used to just display a message above the email warning you that the message may not be from the send that it claims and now they won’t even deliver the message if it is from eBay or PayPal when the DomainKeys don’t authenicate.

Have you ever forgot to logout of your GMail account while on someone elses computer?  Do you have some “interesting” emails that you would rather people not see?  Do you think someone else has access to your account?  Well Google just rolled out the Remote Signout and the ability to see what recent activity has been on your account.  This includes the IP address .

GMail announces that you can now turn on new experimental features. Currently there are 13 available to activate. Some are a lot more practical than others and one is just there for fun like game “Old Snakey”.

Yes I do suck at the game.

Today Google announced they have opened up Google Apps so that anyone can signup.  They also released the planned pricing for people who exceed the free quota.  However, they are not yet offering the ability for developers to purchase additional resources.

$0.10 – $0.12 per CPU core-hour

$0.15 – $0.18 per GB-month of storage

$0.11 – $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth

$0.09 – $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

I am curious how the CPU core-hour is going to be defined.  Will it be like Amazon where it is the time you instance is running whether or not your instance is actually processing anything.  Or will they just charge for the cpu used while processing requests to your application.

Google also announced that a new image manipulation API is available.  This is the same infrastructure that is used for the Picasa Web Albums.  The other new one is the Memcache API which is a high performance caching layer.

I received my invite to use the Google App Engine last night. Time to learn some Python now as they don’t currently support PHP.

Google launches the preview release of their cloud computing environment to compete against Amazon EC2/S3 called the Google App Engine. It was limited to the first 10,000 developers that signed up and of course I didn’t make it.

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following features:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

One of the parts I find interesting is that Google plans on having a free version of the service that has a pretty good allotment of resources:

During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.