Google vs Bing

As a computer instructor, I am often asked why I prefer Google over Yahoo or Microsoft's search engine (whatever they are calling it this year).  80% of the world uses Google, which can be a little scary to think about.  It would be so easy for them to abuse their power.  I will be the first to admit that they have gotten a little less cool in the last five years, and I wish they had an advanced version that had less hand-holding and would let me just get on with my searches, but even with all that, Google is miles above their competition in a few key areas.  (I'm not going to really talk about Yahoo here, they have about the same market share as Microsoft, but they have too many ads and they don't try very hard to make their search better than any one else's)

No matter how "evil" Google gets, rest assured that Microsoft has done worse.  I should give some of Microsoft's history on here sometime, that would be fun.  Let's just say that you don't get to the top of the Business software game by being nice.

Google still has a sense of humor, although it's been getting dimmer over the years, and their April fools jokes are more about highlighting their newest product than having fun, and the Google Doodles are more about public relations than about celebration.  But, compared to any of the older corporations, Google is as playful as a puppy.

Google is a friend to Linux and Mac.  Because of the other markets that Microsoft is in, they cannot afford to be nice to Linux or Mac, and the more "features" they have that are incompatible the more people who will be unhappy with a move away from windows.  Enter Silverlight, .Net, ActiveX and all of their other web products.  Try using IE9 on anything but the newest Windows.  And, I'm using Google Chrome on my Ubuntu box to write this post.

Lastly, Google's results are better.  I have a fun example for you all, and I know it's nothing but one example, but it shows what each company thinks of getting relevant search results to the user, and really, at the end of the day, that's what we are all looking for.

I did a straight image search for the word rose, and then added the color filter of green, and here are the results:

Bing has ONE green rose out of fifteen results.  You get better results searching for green rose in the first place and ignoring the color filter.

Google has twelve green roses, two pictures from the movie Green Rose, and ONE rose that is not green.

Like I said, this isn't a rigid test, just one example I stumbled on while working on a lesson plan.

Using Exclamation marks in Google Command Line

As I found out in my previous post, you can't just add an ! into your post without getting a bash error. You can sort of escape them with a /, but then they both show up (like this: /!), which is silly. You can get around this by first, making sure that you use single quotes around your post and then adding a $ right before the quote that begins your post:

google blogger --title 'this is a blog post' $'this is an exciting blog!'

Picasa 3

I have a LOT of photos on my computer (approx. 23,000). They range from family snapshots to references for various art projects to charts and diagrams relating to topics that interest me and so on. I currently use Windows Explorer to sort out my images, and as of yet, I haven't found anything that works better. If explorer had tagging or virtual folders or something, it would be all I needed. All of the programs that DO offer those things do so in a poor manner or are seriously lacking in the stability / usability areas. I tried Picasa when Google first bought it, and found it wanting in a number of areas, but uninstalled it because it was unstable and caused my computer to crash. Now that Picasa 3 is out, I thought I'd give it a try. My thoughts, and a wish-list:

The Good

It's stable now! I've added all my pictures, and it still runs. I can't add hundreds of photos to the photo-deck thing without it getting pretty slow, but i can offload them fairly easily.

The collage maker is awesome, and I used it to create the back of a calendar yesterday, and it was great. The only thing that would make it better would be to allow you to individually move the photos around, rather than relying on "Scramble" to put them in the right place.

The thumbnail view is pretty good, the slider bar on the right takes some getting used to, but it's cool when you do.

The Okay

The User Interface has a lot to be desired, but once you find what you are looking for, most tasks are easy and straightforward. Exceptions will be covered in a sec.

The Bad / Annoying

When you're importing your initial collection, you cannot import a single set of folders, sort them into albums then add a second set of folders and still be able to easily see what you just added. You can sort by creation date, but when you have such a variety of images that isn't helpful - new folders appear randomly in the folders list. The same goes for all of the folder sort options. You can sort albums by when you added them to Picasa, but not folders.

Albums are great, but you can only place them in the Album collection, not in any user created collection. This is my biggest beef with Picasa - collections AND albums are both virtual organizers, why do they not work together? If this was added, I think it would finally do the one thing I want a program like it for: to organize my photos.

You also cannot place a folder into more than one collection! This means that there is no way for me to put a collection of photos in more than one place. What if I want to put my photos from a Grand canyon trip with other photos from that year, with other photos of my family and with pictures of the Grand Canyon. Currently, there is no way to do this efficiently. Either, I have to create an album for each subset of images which multiplies quickly and gets to be too much to deal with (remember, I have 20k photos) OR, create collections and choose one collection for each folder. Since there are no other sub folders, this also multiplies fairly quickly.

If I could only add photos to Albums, with a way to have subsets IN the albums (even if it just kept track of which folder it came from) and then add those to my custom collections.

After adding all my photos to Picasa, I ended up with 500 folders that got stuck into the Other Stuff folder. There is no difference (for me) between these photos and the ones in the Folders collection, so, I want to move ALL of them to the main Folders collection. There is NO way to move more than one folder to a new collection at the same time. It might work well for five or sic folders, but I don't want to individually move 500 folders (right click, choose move to collection, choose Folders from a list, repeat).

How does Picasa decide what gets imported into Folders and what gets imported into Other Stuff? About a third of my folders went into the Other Stuff collection rather than the Folders collection. I looked it up on their website, which told me that these are folders which have other types of content in them. But, I looked at the source folders, and many of them are all JPGs - I think this must be a bug.

The Missing

I wish I could select multiple photos between folders. I know I can push-pin them into the "shelf", but this gets annoying, and it's easy to forget that you are required to do so. It's also easy to forget to empty the shelf after moving them somewhere.

Currently you can only email photos with a Gmail account or Thunderbird. I know why, but it would be nice to be able to send with other clients (hotmail, yahoo, outlook, etc)

I remember tagging was a big thing in the older version of Picasa, but it conspicuously hard to get to without using CTRL-T or CTRL-K - and you can't see them either, or look at a list of tags or ... I think they are trying to phase them out, which is too bad - a well designed tagging system can be used for almost anything - which is what a good app can do. It's like a food processor that can only accept foods that are a certain size or shape or color. It seems arbitrary to the people who are trying to use it.

AwesomeBar and Me - Why I've left Firefox.

I upgraded to Firefox 3 back when it was in beta. Then, I uninstalled and went back to Firefox 2. I tried it again a few weeks later. Then, I uninstalled and went back to Firefox 2.

This was quite a while ago, but I will explain how I felt at the time:

Something was lacking in Firefox 3 that made me uncomfortable, and unable to be productive. Namely, the address bar, which had been replaced with something called the AwesomeBar. My main beef with the AwesomeBar actually isn't its ugly look, or the fact that it retrieves bookmark results, but rather, the fact that it requires visual interaction to be used effectively. The address bar was reliable. I knew what it would do when I typed. Its algorithm was something that could be fully comprehended in my head. I knew if I had cleared my history before starting, and had gone to calendar.google.com once, then visited ubuntu.com and apple.com and microsoft.com that I could simply press Alt+D "c" down enter to go back to calendar.google.com. Furthermore, it was the same knowledge I used to operate the old Start->Run dialog back in Windows, and the same knowledge I use to operate every autocomplete field in every website and every dialog box in both Windows and Linux.

With the AwesomeBar, my absolute and complete knowledge of the data being searched was taken away. Sure, I know which types of things it searches, but I don't know what data was present (in page Titles, for example) The extra steps are that I would have to press Alt+D, type, then look at the results and determine if there was an error, if so, I would have to arrow to the desired result before pressing enter. The developers of Firefox knew this, that's why they redesigned the widget visually to try to create enough visual distinction so that it could be scanned quickly. The problem is, I don't want to visually scan it at all. That isn't something I have ever been accustomed to doing and it slows me down and takes my focus away from the page I was browsing.

Since that time, I have continued to use "good old" Firefox 2. However, for whatever reason, my Firefox 2 installation began to become unstable. It would freeze up requiring restarts quite often, usually when I click on a javascript-based link. I finally got irritated, and decided that maybe it would be time to update or switch.

First, I tried Crossover Chromium. It is goofy because of its dependence on wine. I will give it another chance when it has been ported natively to Linux.

I searched through the Firefox add-ons/extensions to see what has been created, and found both "oldbar" and "Old Location Bar" - I had tried oldbar before, so I decided to go with "Old Location Bar," bit the bullet, upgraded to Firefox 3, and installed the extension. I didn't read carefully enough, and I presumed Old Location Bar would do what I wanted, as people were praising it for being better than oldbar. I was disappointed with Old Location Bar. It still didn't solve my problem at all.

Firefox 2 is freezing up. Firefox 3 is not efficient. I decided to go "old school" and switch to Opera.

I installed Opera 9.27 from the Hardy repository. Just a little ugly feeling in the menus, but the toolbars are not too bad. I can live with this. Alt+D doesn't work! Dang. So, I did this:

Tools -> Preferences -> Shortcuts -> Keyboard setup - Opera Standard -> Edit.

The one under "Browser Window" that says "Focus address field | Focus message list" I clicked, and changed to "d alt", clicked OK, and clicked OK again. Alt+D ... works!

Now I did some experiments with the address bar. It works!

I realize I'm not using the latest release of Opera. I may try upgrading and see if it still works. But, as long as it does what I need, maybe this older release is fine.

As I save this post, regrettably, I will change my default browser to Opera and uninstall Firefox 3. It isn't because I wanted to. It's because I was forced out. If I knew how to fork the Firefox code and reinstall the genuine old Address Bar, I would rather do that.

Using a dark theme in ubuntu

After installing a dark theme on my "new" laptop the other day, I've been adding quite a few tweaks in order to make it render correctly with the rest of Ubuntu 08.04 - Hardy Heron.

Theme installed: Darklooks - you can find it in Synaptic Package Manager (gnome-themes-extras).

Edit the theme file:

cd /usr/share/themes/Darklooks/gtk-2.0/

edit gtkrc, changing lines 181 and 182 from:

bg[NORMAL] = @tooltip_bg_color
fg[NORMAL] = @tooltip_fg_color

to:

bg[NORMAL] = @tooltips_bg_color
fg[NORMAL] = @tooltips_fg_color

This will keep the theme from crashing, I have yet to change the notifications and tooltips to be a dark color rather than yellow.

Enable the darklooks theme for gnome.

You can test it by opening firefox. If you have done the last step correctly, the theme should stick. Otherwise, it will revert back to a blocky theme.

Now for specific Apps, these tweaks are not theme specific - they should fix most dark themes.

The biggest concern for most people will be Firefox:

First, make a backup of your .mozilla profile folder (in your home folder)
uninstall firefox-3, and then install:

firefox-2
firefox-2-gnome-support
msttcorefonts

Why are we doing this? Firefox 3 has automated gtk integration - but, all those large dark widgets on top of light colored sites ... not very pretty. Firefox 2 has a way to get around this, but as of this post, Firefox 3 has disabled that option. You can write to your nearest Firefox developer and ask for this to be added back in!

Once you have firefox 2 up and running, merge your profile data back into your new .mozilla folder (bookmarks, add-ons, etc)

Go into the firefox preferences Edit > Preferences , and choose the Content tab. Click on the Colors button, and make sure 'Use System Colors' is unchecked. Save your changes and close that window. Next click on the Advanced fonts tab, and change the monospace font size to 14. Save and close all the way.

Download this archive, and extract it to a convenient place.

go to: /home/**/.mozilla/firefox/**/chrome , replacing the ** s with your user name and the correct profile code.

If you want to keep the ugly firefox 2 widgets, move the 'userContent-restore to firefox defaults.css' file into this folder, and remove everything after Content.

If you want prettier widgets, move the 'userContent.css' file into the chrome folder. You will not need to change its name. Next, go to /usr/share/firefox/res , and make a backup of your forms.css file. This folder belongs only to root, so you may have to do this in terminal.

sudo mv forms.css forms-backup.css

or some other such name. DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP! you should always make a backup when changing system files. Now, move the form-widgets folder, again using the terminal:

sudo cp -r where/ever/you/extracted/the/folder/form-widgets /usr/share/firefox/res/form-widgets

You should be done! You can use this page to test with.

If you know css, you can edit any of the .css files to change anything you like. You can also change the way the widgets look by opening them in your favorite image editing program.

These are the web pages that I visited in order to put all of these files together (along with a lot of my own tweaking):

Firefox Widgets
Instructions for FF3 I found this after I uninstalled FF3, according to a comment, it only works for FF2 ...
the stylish style referenced above
the unhelpful mozilla page
specific Darklooks theme problems
ubuntu forum thread with some helpful links
a possible fix for the auto complete bar in FF3
some good info

Things to fix still:

When you search for a word, it still uses a minty green color
The address bar on a secure page clashes, but is readable.
In the built in firefox boxes with hint text (like the search bar on the top right), the text is too dark to read easily.

One more thing! If you want to, you can install the stylish firefox extension, and then install a dark google theme, that way it will feel more like the rest of your desktop.


Open Office:
I haven't opened up anything but Writer, so, I don't know what else needs fixing yet.

Download this archive (7.7mb) and move the images_tango.zip file into /usr/lib/openoffice/share/config/ Don't extract it.

To change the icon theme so that it matches better (unless you like orange of course), go to the Tools > Options menu. Under the OpenOffice.org section, choose View. Change the icon size to small (if you think they are too large), and set the style to tango.

Next, to change the page background color from dark gray to white, choose Appearance from the left. Change document background to white, and font color to black. As you run into any other glitches, you can change them here.

Pidgin:
First, make sure you are running the new pidgin, it should be 2.4.1 or higher. If you have Hardy Heron installed, you are good to go.

In the Tools > Plugins menu, turn on 'Conversation Colors' and set Sent and Received Messages to #ADADAD (you can go lighter or darker, at your preference).

Next, turn on the 'Pidgin GTK+ Theme Control', and set the hyperlink color to #576BBE , the Sent Message Name color to #8496DD , and the Received Message Name color to #EA987D . Again, you can change these as you like, but this is a good starting place.

If you have a smaller screen (1024x768), you won't be able to see the save or close button. Click tab until you get to the re-read gtkrc files, then click tab again, and push your [ENTER] key.

Gedit:
Open Gedit, \go to the Edit > Preferences menu, and choose the Fonts and Colors Tab. Change the theme to Oblivion. This theme is not ideal, color wise, but it's readable!

Terminal:
Open up your terminal, go to the Edit > Current Profile menu, choose the Colors tab, you can try using the colors from the system, or change the scheme white or green on black. Whichever suits your fancy. You can also change the colors individually if you like.

That's it for now, as I use the theme, I know I'll run into more things that need fixing, and I will either add them to this post, or make a new one.

iGoogle is not My Google.

This is not strictly open source related, but it is in the interests of most Internet users, so:

I'm surprised that no one has spraypainted an "i" in front of their logo on their building after what they've done to Google Personalized Home.

The consensus seems to be that everyone tolerated Google Personalized Home because it gave us some good toys to play with, but as soon as they changed the name to iGoogle that was one step too far. Our favorite search engine now looked tacky and obviously is being driven by someone from the traditional side of Internet marketing instead of the normal trendy Google-type folks.

Well, I came up with a hack that will remove iGoogle, sort of. At first, I tried to remove the new iGoogle Logo, but to no avail. I tried everything. I even replaced the header section with a search box module. None of it felt right. Even if I switched out the logo, the best I could do was use past holiday logos, no thanks! Maybe this hack will be for you:

The reason I use iGoogle is to look at the modules on occasion. I want to use "Classic" search, however. So I came up with a URL that will take you to iGoogle *once*, and immediately unset the cookie value that keeps you at iGoogle. So, I made a Bookmark in my Bookmark Toolbar Folder called "iGoogle Once" and pointed it to this URL:

http://www.google.com/ig?sa=p&pref=ig&pval=1&q=/webhp

If you want to give it a whirl, just try it here. You can see your iGoogle page, with all the modules, and you can even search, and then if you go back to Google.com it takes you to Google Classic, instead of "remembering" that you selected iGoogle and throwing you back into it.

There is one caveat: You must click "Classic Home" once before this will work, and if you click "iGoogle" on the top of the home page, it will keep you on iGoogle until you click Classic Home again. In other words, you must only use the "iGoogle Once" bookmark to visit iGoogle lest you become iTrapped.

I hope this was useful!