It's The Little Things 0

Posted by timgoh
on Wednesday, April 04

Google’s custom homepage now has a theme feature. One of them, “Sweet Dreams”, is pretty nifty in that it has a picture of the sky that changes according to your local time. So at noon, the sun is in the middle of the page and the background is bright blue, while at dusk you see sunset colors, etc.

But I had no idea of the level of detail until I saw this little easter egg while working early in the morning:

Now I’m no astronomy buff, but I am pretty damn sure there’s no constellation that’s shaped like the Pi symbol. So I checked my system clock and sure enough, it’s 03:151.

That’s really cool in my book. Because I know someone at Google went “Hey, wouldn’t it kick ass if we showed a constellation in a Pi shape at 03:14?”, and then went ahead and did it. Now I wonder what other easter eggs this theme has in store.

Non-geeks read articles about the free gourmet food and start gushing about how great a place Google is, but to me the best part of getting to work at Google is the company you’ll get to keep2.

Oh, and finally, since I rarely “pimp my desktop”, I’ll take this chance to point out how cool I run my HDDs

1 Yes the pedants will point out that Pi time is 03:14 but my Google homepage doesn’t refresh every minute, ok?

2 No bonus points for getting the obvious double meaning.

Gmail users beware 1

Posted by timgoh
on Monday, January 01

EDIT: Google has fixed this. I am not sure of the exact time involved, but definitely within 48 hours.

There is a big vulnerability documented on O’Reilly where your contact list is exposed to any malicious site as long as you are logged onto Google services.

This is not the first time Gmail has experienced such issues either, see here

It is a good reminder on this first day of 2007 that web apps simply are not at the stage they can handle sensitive data yet1. Keep that in mind as you read your mail in Gmail, create appointments in Google Calendar, have private feeds on Bloglines, and track to-do lists on Backpack. Not spreading FUD here imo – this is simply common sense.

1 My personal stance is that they will never be, at least for paranoid people like me.