Great stuff on Google Docs

This morning I opened up Google Docs and got this message.



This means that you can use Google as a repository for your documents in their original form (docx, for instance). Sort of like a G-Drive for office documents. A first step in the right direction, I guess (I'm really waiting for a functional G-Drive that would work like DropBox).
Note that when you upload a doc to Google Docs now, you can uncheck a box that says "convert to Google format. That's all there is to it.

Good work G-folks !

My blog posts technical ranking

Tech-rank: 1

I figured I'd rank my blog posts between 1 and 10 on a "technical" scale, one being completely non-technical, 10 being hard-core stuff that even programmers may not find interesting if it's not exactly in their area of expertise.
I'll just add it up there, on the post itself, if I remember.

Morning blog1 - Windows 7

Tech rank for this post: 5

I read a blog post from someone who suggested that instead of reading emails in the morning, or reading the paper - you should maybe write a blog post. I figured that's not such a bad idea. I've made a habit out of making note of every subject worth blogging, so that I remember to write that blog post later on. In recent months I've been working 18 hour days, so blog posts weren't exactly my priority. Seems like I should have plenty of items to write blog posts about, but when I went over the list just now, many subjects seemed kind of old.

One of those subjects was "Windows 7, good and bad". I remember that this issue went through my head after I installed W7 Release Candidate on some relatively old machine that had to be reinstalled. I could immediately see that this IS something different - not another Vista (as a side note - I nicknamed Vista "the new ME" -named after the notorious Windows ME, yet another operating system that everyone skipped and went directly to Windows 2000).

The first thing I noticed about Windows 7 is that its name fits its Hard drive footprint. After you install Vista, 7Gb of your HD are gone (if you really must know why it's called that way - I found this post from the team). Not so long ago, 10Gb was acceptable, and 20Gb was plenty. Well, these days are over, and in the age of smallest HD being 160Gb, that's fine.

Being such a negative person, I had to find something bad to write about W7 - hence that "complaint" about footprint above, but honest to g-d, other than this W7 turned out to be my next XP (as opposed to Vista being compared to ME).

The UI finally makes sense (Mac anyone?). Seriously. Check this out:

(note there's a new Windows+tab app switcher that does this 3D effect of switching between windows)
I always wanted a Desktop that looks this cool. W7 finally takes you there very easily. I'm even persuaded not to turn off all the fancy animation bits that hurt performance. A quad-core with 4Gb of memory has its advantages. If your machine isn't that strong, the OS will decide on its own to deactivate some of the fancy-shmancy stuff.

I could go on forever, but this morning blog would become afternoon blog, and there are plenty of other reviews of W7 out there.

Just a couple more notes -

The new paint

1) I am not usually an early adopter when it comes to OS, because I need to be productive, and don't have time to deal with v1 kinks. In this case it so much happened that I started to use virtualization on a large scale, and had to move to a 64-bit OS just in order to make better use of my RAM. My brother persuaded me that there's a good chance the 64-bit version of W7 works better than the XP one, and it actually made sense to me. I installed it knowingly, thinking that I'd run back to XP if anything goes wrong. It has been up there for a few weeks now, and for all practical purposes - I strongly recommend it to anyone with a reasonably modern machine (Dual core, >=2Gb RAM). Incidentally, I don't recommend the 64-bit, unless you truly know that you need it. It works fine, but if you're not a hard-core programmer, don't bother. 95% of the software is still 32-bit anyways. Most work fine on 64, but why bother having a bi-polar machine.

2) I know that it's really hansom, but we've always been to look at what's in the box, rather than the box itself. I can honestly say that finally the UI starts to make sense to me. Windows, to me, has always been about working AROUND its UI, rather than simply using an enjoying it. I've got plenty of productivity tools installed on XP machines, covering up for things that Microsoft just didn't do so well. I'm talking about trivial stuff like the windows explorer, notepad, clipboard, and a whole bunch of others (can you smell that next blog post coming?). With windows 7, there's a bit less of that, and a bit more usage of the tools that come out of the box. That's one nice thing.
But the nicest thing for me is that the entire UI and its behavior makes sense. My taskbar never gets filled up, and yet I can find all of my open programs easily, and this whole quicklaunch toolbar thing finally makes sense in its new form (again, behavior gracefully "stolen" from Mac).



Bottom line - go get one.
If you're a startup that fits MS relatively loose standards, you can get it free, along with every other piece of Software M$ usally sells for thousands of dollars. It's called Bizspark, and it's a good subject for another blog post.

Enjoy.

Bing not f@#$ing ready for Israel

My sincere apologies to all those who don't read Hebrew, but here's an explanation:

I entered the Hebrew word for "Movie" in Bing.
The fourth result read "Porn Movies". Then there's a very graphic description of what you'll get if you click the link, which I will not repeat in full. Suffice it to say it talks about a bathroom, a man, a semi-converted transgender, and certain body parts of both parties involved, all located below the waistline and above the legs.

I won't include a link, but if you write Hebrew, just enter the word סרט in Bing.

Let's see how quickly Microsoft removes this obscenity. It has been there for at least a few days now.

Yuck.

The POJ Stage

I just came up with a new software phase - The POJ phase.
The way I see it, in software you have Alpha, Beta, Release.

Alpha means what Beta used to mean before Google set up new standards. It means the software may break unexpectedly, but it mostly works.

Beta means what Microsoft used to call "V1", and sometimes "V2", and sometimes even "Vista". It's a product that works. Every software product has bugs, even after 10 years in the market. The standard that Google set for all of us is that Beta should work pretty much flawlessly.

Release only has significance in the MS world, and it is the equivalent of most of everyone else's Beta in recent years. It means the software should work flawlessly in its normal course of usage. Some previously unknown bugs may pop here and there in extreme cases.

This blog is not about that. It is about a new phase I just named POJ - the Piece of Junk Stage (I wanted to name it FPOJ but it's hard to pronounce and not very polite).


And why did I think this new term? Because I just tried using Google Wave. It's not Alpha or Beta or Gamma, It's in the POJ phase.
The POJ stage means "I can't use it for what I think the author intended me to use it for". The software can even work pretty well technically, but I just wouldn't be able to become a beta-tester of it, because it's missing important features, or important things break.
In the case of Google wave the first and most annoying problem of it is that I have to keep it open all day (and it's not easy on the RAM, CPU and browser, mind you). I don't get notifications when a wave has changed via email. Neither do any of the people I tried to surf the waves with. This is a killer - I update a wave, then go on to send an email to people telling them to look at the wave. That's when a short cry comes out unintentionally - WHAT A POJ!

Other things that bother me:
Other people can see what I write, and the "draft" box is disabled. Can you tell from this blog I'm a bit impulsive, and sometimes write nasty things? I do that over email too - but before I hit "Send", I hit Ctrl+A, Del, then I write a more polite version of what I wanted to say. It's my therapy and no one gets hurt. If people could read the initial versions of my polite answers to them, I'd be committed in a psychiatric institution. Well, now they can. Not good.
Kudos on the technical implementation, Stephanie (one can only imagine what it takes to perform this technically, assuming the whole world may be using Wave). But what the !@#$ were you thinking?

And why isn't reply working for me? I guess it's just a bug. I can only reply to my own messages - if I try to reply to other people, it comes out as new message. But that's a bug I can live with. There are others, I'll keep them off this blog an in the bug report (where is it, by the way?)

The Call for action:
Google - let's move out of the POJ stage, and into the Alpha stage, A-Hoes :) Please.