Guido Van Rossum Left Google for Dropbox

From Forbes by Tomio Geron, Forbes Staff.

Dropbox Snags Google Exec And Python God Guido Van Rossum



Image credit:  by Doc Searls via Wikipedia.

Google and the Leap Second

Soon after the advent of ticking clocks, scientists observed that the time told by them (and now, much more accurate clocks), and the time told by the Earth's position were rarely exactly the same. It turns out that being on a revolving imperfect sphere floating in space, being reshaped by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and being dragged around by gravitational forces makes your rotation somewhat irregular. Who knew?

These fluctuations in Earth’s rotational speed mean that even very accurate clocks, like the atomic clocks used by global timekeeping services, occasionally have to be adjusted slightly to bring them in line with “solar time.” There have been 24 such adjustments, called “leap seconds,” since they were introduced in 1972. Their effect on technology has become more and more profound as people come to rely on fast, accurate and reliable technology.

Image credit: gunnar3000/Pond5.com

Going With the Flow

Google's Secret Switch to the Next Wave of Networking by Steven Levy at Wired.

Google’s Python Lessons are Awesome

via Hartley Brody

The lovably geeky Nick Parlante — a Google employee and CS lecturer at Stanford — has written some awesomely succinct tutorials that not only tell you how you can use Python, but also how you should use Python. This makes them a fantastic resource, regardless of whether you’re just starting, or you’ve been working with Python for awhile.

Google's Python class 

Top 10 Data Center Stories

for 2011 from Datacenter Knowledge.

The Mythical Man Month

by Dhanji R. Prasanna at Rethrick Construction.

I vividly recall my first week at Google. It was in Google's old office in Sydney, high up on the 18th floor of a triangular skyscraper. The views from virtually everywhere in the office were breathtaking. And inside, the walls beamed the warm glow of those wonderful colors so familiar from a childhood playing with Lego--Yellow, Red, Blue and Green.

Fast-forward six months and Google was in a lavish, new office with Walkabout fully underway and around 35 strong. The trouble, I am sure, began a lot earlier but this is when I started to really feel it. First, there was the dreaded endless meeting--they lasted for hours with very little being decided. Then, you started having to push people to provide APIs or code changes that you desperately needed for your feature but that they had little to no interest in beyond the academic.

Of course I enjoyed my time on Wave like no other time in my career. It was equal parts frustration, joy, defeat and passion. I don't regret a single moment of being associated with it. It remains a wonderful attempt at creating something unique, exciting and incomparably bold. Nor do I want to ascribe blame to anyone on the team or Google at large. I just want to point that even the smartest, most motivated and talented people in the world--with a track record of delivering success--are alone not sufficient to overcome complexity that creeps up on you. Maybe we should have known better, but we didn't.

In the end, the man-month as a scalable unit of work is hubris worthy of a Greek tragedy.

How to Stay Safer and More Secure Online

From Google.

Google Fixes Privacy Flaw? (Part 2)

Okay, when you write a post (or even after) there's a little drop down menu (triangle, arrow thing) at it's upper right.  One of the options is to disallow re-sharing.  You have to do it manually every time I think—I don't see a way to make that the default setting.

That's better than not having that option at all, better than email, and also annoying to have to do.

(Part 1)

Google+ Solves the Social Privacy Problem

By Making Friending Very Complicated by @LizGannes at All Things D.

Google Fixes Privacy Flaw?

(SAI Business Insider)  Oh no.  I thought G+ didn't allow a reader to reshare a post to a wider audience than the original post.

Google+ and Twitter

So I just reposted a story about the halo seen in Hawaii.  I found that story by reading my sparks (spark?) on Google+ where I've entered astronomy as an interest.  The question is, would I have seen it reading my Twitter feed?

I scanned back through my main Twitter stream for about an hour, which is a typical short reading session for me.  A long session might involve reading back through two or three hours.

Then I went to my astronomy Twitter list and read back through those messages, well into yesterday.

The story wasn't there, or at least I didn't catch it.  (Granted I did a quick skim and didn't actually read the Twitter posts).  Hm.

Hands on with Google+

from Macworld by Megan Geuss and Mark Sullivan.

Inside Google+ by Steven Levy

From Wired Magazine @stevenjayl (author of In the Plex) writes about Google+ as he witnessed things from his inside view.

New iGoogle Email Client

The new Gmail client in iGoogle is actually pretty neat.  It's essentially the same as the web-based client on, e.g., the Android phone.

Google Social Puzzle Pieces

By David Goldman at CNN Money.

Why Apple and Google Need to Stalk You

from cnnmoney.com.

New Blogger Looks

Google announces “five new dynamic templates in Blogger that you’ll soon be able to customize and use for your blog. These new views use the latest in web technology, including AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3….”

Here's what they look like on this blog.

Interesting, you can apply them to any blogspot blog by appending /view to the URL. That's an interesting approach to customizing.

Google's Quest to Build a Better Boss

From the NYT by Adam Bryant.

Interesting Ngrams

I finally got around to playing with the Google Ngram Viewer.  Here's an interesting example comparing IBM, Microsoft, Google, Linux and UNIX.

What they say is true, you can spend a lot of time playing with this!

Google Art Project

I finally got around to spending a little time looking at the amazing Google Art Project.  Zoomable, high-resoution images allow you to zoom down to the cracks and brush strokes.  Street view techniques let you walk through virtual representations of great museums of the world and look at the exhibited pieces.