Politics.NET

If you use the latest version of Google's Chrome browser , you may have seen this setting: Couple of days ago, I decided to turn it on. This way, I can get instant results when I search via the omnibox. Since I never go to Google's home page, this is the only way for me to get the benefits of instant search. So I turned it on and promptly forgot about it. Fact is, I never actually thought about how it worked. Why? Because the way it works is every character you typed is instantly sent, as a search query , to your search provider. So far, that's not a big deal. That's intuitive. However, what's not so intuitive is that once Chrome detects you are typing a URL , it starts sending those requests to the webserver for the URL. So say you want to type in "http://localhost/myapplication/pageAmTesting.aspx?Id=500", the last few requests Chrome will send are: http://localhost/myapplication/pageAmTesting.asp http://localhost/myapplication/pageAmTesting.aspx h...

I haven't really been paying much attention to politics. So I can't really write a full post about that. Except to say that I am really disappointed in the democrats and their leader, Obama. Apart from giving a bunch of banks free money with no strings attached; spending oodles of money on vague recovery projects in imaginary districts; pushing through a non-reformative Health Care Reform and giving sub-par gifts to visiting heads of state, what exactly has Obama accomplished in 12 months in the white house? What have the democrats done with their majority if they still had to kowtow to Lieberman on the so-called health care reform bill? Where's the reform if all you've done is force everyone to buy insurance (hooray for insurance companies) or pay fines? If people's health care choices are still tied so strongly to their employers? Where's the reform without any sort of public option? Anyway, enough about politics. In technology, Google, in a move to kneecap th...

Did you know Google now has an operating system? You didn't? Well I didn't either. But, like the classic definition of vaporware, Google announced their OS last week to widespread acclaim from the google fanboys. People are talking about Google OS having stuff Windows doesn't have. Nevermind that not a single code of Google OS has been publicly released (alpha, beta or RC). So when Microsoft releases vaporware, it's bad. But when Google does it, it's the dawn of a new day. I seem to remember the same acclaim when Google Chrome came out. Several months later, it's stuck way behind IE and Firefox (except of course amongst the fan boys). Also, if Microsoft got into hot water for bundling IE with Windows, how will Google circumvent the same legal trapdoor? I suppose it's more likely the presiding judge would be a google lover (or perhaps Google will impress upon him the need to rule their way or have his search data be public knowledge....I kid). Currently ...

Chrome is Google's new browser. So far it hasn't overtaken any of the major browsers in terms of user adoption. I have switched because it's much faster and uses less memory than Firefox. But it does have it's shortcomings (after it's just a baby compared to the others). Now I have noticed that Microsoft's Hotmail doesn't quite work in Chrome. You basically can't type anything. So while it's good for reading your hotmail email you can't really really.  Today, I saw Google has come out with a work-around for the problem: simply pose as Apple's Safari browser and Hotmail works fine. Minor fix! But leave it to these 2 big guys to get in a spitting match about whose fault is it and who should respond faster with a fix: Google position:  Normally you think of Web pages being faster to update than client-side software downloads. In this case though, Chrome updates near-weekly, much faster than Hotmail did. Another illustration that velocity and spe...

First came username/password combination. That quickly got old and unwieldily. Then came Microsoft Passport to makes authentication easier. Of course like all proprietory schemes, it failed woefully. Then came openID. While it hasn't gain much traction with regular folks, tech-savvy users have been embracing it. But oh no, here's comes Google and Facebook with their closed authentication schemes. Closed in the sense that, unlike OpenID , only Facebook can be a provider of facebook connect. Likewise Google is the only supplier of Google Friend Connect . I am sure Microsoft and Yahoo won't be far behind in coming up with their authentication schemes (not counting Microsoft Live since I have yet to see it on a non-Microsoft site). The question isn't so much who'll win but whether coming up with all these different authentication schemes isn't creating more problems than it's solving. The original problem was this: each website requires authentication. This ...