Google Wave Invite Needed

I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to get an invite (insert sad face here). However, there is still hope, as the lucky ones get a chance to invite 8 people! What do they do with such invites? Some probably invite their friends, others share them freely within their online community (e.g. Lifehacker).

Oh, and others sell them on ebay! That’s right, currently I see 7 people selling on ebay, with prices reaching up to $100. That’s really not so nice…

So anyway, if you have an invite to send me, I would be happy to receive one at this address:

And if you want to receive an invite, feel free to comment, and hopefully someone nice will come along and share their invite.

BTW, this brings back memories of the Gmail invites. I got mine in return for a postcard (actually 2 postcards, as 2 people sent me an invite).

Internet Explorer Market Share Decline

While checking my humble blog’s statistics, it was very interesting to see how Microsoft IE’s market share declined over the last few months.

At the beginning of the year, the IE visits on my site were at about 50%. Let’s take June for example.

July showed a rather huge decline of about 10%, which went mostly to Firefox.

August had an interesting results – an exact tie (what are the chances of that!).

And now we are in September, and although the month isn’t over yet, I wanted to check the status of this contest. As you can see, currently Firefox has taken the lead. However, Firefox has taken only some of the IE market share, and the other browsers have enjoyed this decline as well.

I know this isn’t an exact science. I don’t have too many visitors, and the sample data in each month is different (luckily I get more visitors these last few months), but still it is saying something.

WeGame - Beware of Spam

Just got a message from wegame.com saying "itai sent you a photo. Want to see the photo?"
As much as I love photos, it seemed to be a little suspicious, so I've searched "wegame" on the web and found some interesting stuff. First of all, if you just search for "wegame" you get their official site, and a few other, safe looking sites. However, if you search for "wegame spam" you get a few more interesting sites. I have not investigated this very thoroughly, but as far as I understand, in order to see the photo you need to sign up, and as part of this process, you may end up emailing everyone on your address book that you have sent them a photo. I don't know how it's done. Perhaps you give them your user name and password for your email, or they may do this in another way.

The main point is that if you get an email from wegame.com, don't click on any link, even if it's from someone you know.

If I'm completely wrong, please let me know.

Bing Translator Available for Hebrew

Bing Translator supports Hebrew, but it is so embarrassingly bad. Check out this example:

Some of the highlights:

• Chinese characters.
• English gibberish (not even a transliteration of Hebrew).
• Embarrassing translations (Nurse is translated as Nuisance).

Hope they do better…

Update:

I tried to translate another web site and got this interesting result:

The name of the reporter, Michal Henig, was translated as Linda Smith! I'm sure she would be happy.

No Images in Gmail in IE8

I’ve been facing an annoying situation for quite some time. When checking Gmail on Internet Explorer 8 and clicking an email with images, I get this warning message:

As a positive person I automatically click on Yes, and when I try to display the images, they are not shown. So finally I’ve had some time to check this out, and it appears that it may be worth the while to actually read the message rather than automatically click on Yes.

I’m using an HTTPS connection to Gmail. This message actually says that the webpage has content that isn’t available via HTTPS (the linked images), and if you click Yes, that content won’t be delivered.

So if you want to see these images, better click on No.

Thanks for HTTPWatch.

Google Street View zoom feature

Just found out a real cool new zoom feature in Google Street View. One in Street View, you get a kind of “zoom box” which enables you to zoom to specific spots, and there are multiple zoom levels, unlike the usual two levels. It also enables you to jump quickly to areas which are more far than the current location. If I recall correctly, previously you were able only to jump to the next picture, using the arrows on the road.

Update: just found out it’s called “Pancake”.

Google Analytics doesn't like Montana?

I'm using Google Analytics to monitor the "vast traffic" I'm getting to this blog. True, I'm not getting too much traffic, but I do get visitors from all sorts of places in the world.

The odd thing I've noticed, was that according to GA since the first day of the blog around November 2007, until today I had visits from every state in the US, except for Montana. Here are the cold facts:

 

It doesn’t make much sense to me. Is GA filtering out traffic from Montana, or is this just a coincidence that no one from Montana visited this blog?

Montana not on the internet?

I like to keep tabs (using Google Analytics) on where I get visits from, and what do the visitors read. Since this blog has started, during November 2007, and up until today, I had over 4000 visits (I know, not a lot…). Anyway, from the US alone I’ve had 1309 visits from all states, except for Montana. Why is this? Does Google Analytics not like Montana? Do the Montanans don’t like to visit my site? If you know the answer, please do let me know.

Windows 7 – IE 8 – Google Toolbar: Bad idea?

As I wrote before, Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 started hanging more than usual, and I had to forcefully shut it down too many times. Today, I’ve decided to disable the Google Toolbar. Since then, no crashes. Let’s see how it goes.

Google: The internet may harm your computer

In what looks like a bug, Google is now warning that every site may harm your computer. Here is what I see, when I search for “news”:

Notice that every site has “This site may harm your computer” link, and when you click on any link you get a warning page.

I'm annoyed with the new Windows Live Messenger

The Windows Live Messenger conversation window is too big. It's taking a huge part of the screen. Compare it to the Google Talk window, and see what I mean. BTW, this is after I decreased the default size a bit.

File Extensions Google Should Deindex

Scary stuff about what type of files Google are archiving...
File Extensions Google Should Deindex

Google Earth Blog: New York City in Photo-Realistic 3D Now in Google Earth

Google Earth Blog: New York City in Photo-Realistic 3D Now in Google Earth

Saw it yesterday. Quite amazing! I have relatives in NYC, so I've sent them a picture of their house, and they were blown away by how realistic it looks.

Why I don’t like iGoogle’s new look

A while back I was writing how I’m waiting for iGoogle’s new look, and now when it’s here, I’m a bit disappointed.

The main Google applications that I use are Gmail and Reader. Using Gmail in iGoogle for reading email is OK, but when writing I miss some of the features that are in the standalone Gmail (e.g. the paragraph direction). With Reader, I find the lack of left navigation bar a bit of a problem. It takes just too many clicks to get to the RSS feed that I want. So I usually just use the standalone apps instead of the iGoogle integrated ones.

Picasa Web Albums People Tagging Experience

Picasa Web Albums have a new feature – Name Tags. All you have to do is enable this feature from the Settings page. Picasa Web will then process your albums and identify people’s faces. That sounded exciting, as I am spending a lot of time tagging my pictures in a photo cataloging software. I had some albums in Picasa Web, so I decided to try this feature.

After a few minutes of progress bar Picasa Web completed the identification stage. It found around 800 faces. Picasa Web will try to identify the same faces and place them in a group, so that you can easily tag several faces at once. For me it worked great for around 120 faces. Afterwards the matching got worse, but still the tagging process is easier than other cataloging software that I previously used.

Picasa Web also caused my son to laugh hysterically a few times, when it placed wrong faces in some groups (for example, a girl from his kindergarten with several pictures of him). There were also a few cases of faces which weren’t faces, and faces which were faces, but not of real people. Here are the top face “failures”:

Psychedelic face:

Foot-face 

Cat jacket face

Puppet face

Airline face

And at number one:

Lego fireman face

Windows Live Writer Beta

I just installed the new betas for Windows Live Writer, and Messenger. Messenger looks a bit like a mess. A bit too cluttered. Writer has a cool look, but it looks like not too much has changed. At least it’s now easier to insert YouTube videos, like this one:

Speedtest.net has just found its match

Lifehacker had a post regarding a new DSL speed test site - speed.io. In the past I've been a fan of speedtest.net but after checking out speed.io I think I found a better speed test site. It seems to be less heavy, and more eye pleasing. It lacks the option to choose a test site, but it chooses the closest to you anyway, and that's what matters to me.

Google Chrome

I really wanted to try it. I love Google products. Unfortunately I get this nice error:

The application failed to initialize properly (0x0000135). Click OK to terminate the application.

The first result I get searching Google suggest that the problem is with a Symantec application, and other results suggest that as well. Unfortunately I don't have that (or any other) Symantec application, so that's not the case. The workaround that is suggested (try running Google Chrome with –no-sandbox) works, but why would I want to run it without the sandbox mode (same question here)?

Update 1: Found the problem! It was an incompatibility with Zone Alarm ForceField, although it wasn't running at the time. Since I don't use it anyway (slows down the system), I uninstalled it.

My living room in Photosynth

Here is my second try:

 

My first Photosynth!

Photosynth is a really cool technology from Microsoft! I've just created my first one. I photographed the Saitek X52 78 times from different angles, and the result is here: