Rich's Random Thoughts

Google just launched a new version of Google Apps for US Governments.  Why do they need to have a version of their “Apps” product specifically for US governments?  Because of a sensible requirement that American government data be store only on US based servers.  I’m glad that Google Was able to do this for American governemnts.  What I’d like to know is when the internationally based version is going to be launched?

I live in Canada, specifically in the Province of British Columbia, and our government passed a law several years ago requiring that publicly funded institutions store personal data on servers in Canada only.  This makes sense especially in light of the US Patriot act, which allows for American law enforcement agencies to look through private data without necessarily obtaining a search warrant, and without notifying the owner of the data that they have been snooping around.

So Google, when is the Google Apps for Canadian Governments going to be launched? I’m looking forward to the press conference!

“How can I save a YouTube file and save play it on my kids iPod on our next 12 hour road trip?”  Believe it or not, this is a question that I get fairly frequently as systems administrator at the UVic Law Library, and as the neighbourhood technology guru.  Here are a couple of tools that can make downloading flash videos from YouTube (or other video websites), a fairly easy task:

Step 1: Open Firefox, and download the Video Download Helper plug-in.  This plugin will allow you to save Flash Files to your desktop.  If that is allow you want to do, then you should be able to view the video using a video player like VLC Player.  If you want to convert the flash video into something playable on your iPhone or iPod, then on to the next step.

Step 2: If you are running Windows and want to convert the flash video to an iPhone compatible format, or Windows media format, then I’d suggest you download and install Format Factory.  If you are running Mac OSX, then I’d download Handbrake, to do the conversion job.

DVD Conversion: If all you want to do convert some DVD’s to iPhone or iPod Touch format for the road trip, then install Handbrake on your computer and rip the DVD’s into MP4 files.  This will take a while to convert the videos (almost as long as it would take to watch the video itself), but can be worth while if everyone is able to keep their sanity on the trip.

Have fun converting YouTube videos for your kids iPods for that next long family road trip!

Introduction to the Survey Results

In addition to the technology questions we’ve been asking UVic law students over the past seven years, we decided to ask some extra questions about the increasing important mobile technology that students are arriving at Law School equipped with.  One major change to the methodology of this survey compared to past years is that we sent the survey to all students at the law school, not just first year students.  The response rate was 25% this year rather than close to 100% in previous years.

[Note: if you have problems seeing any graphs on this page, please look at the underlying Google Doc's page for this blog post]

Executive Summary:

• 30% of students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet.
• 97% of students own laptops, and over 60% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
• 39% of student laptops are Mac’s.
• The average laptop price dropped to $1,200 from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
• All students now report having high speed internet in their homes.
• 82% of students bring their laptops to school almost every day.
• 86% of students own MP3 players capable of listening to recorded lectures.
• 54% of students use Gmail as their primary email account, 18% use UVic email and 15% Hotmail.
• 58% of students identified MS Word as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing.  27% chose Google Docs, 5% OpenOffice Writer & 10% “Other”.
• 100% of students now have access to high speed internet at their homes.
• 86% of students use Facebook and 65% of those students would like to see law school events and activities published on Facebook as well as through the online faculty calendar of events.

Read more…

I saw a great faux news article on the Onion News Network titled, “Google Responds to Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology“.  For starters the article is very funny.  What makes it even better, is that it addresses problems that Google will need to address in the not to distant future.

We know that their motto is “Do no Evil”, but now that they are a public company, their only real duty as a corporation is to enhance shareholder value.  If down the road Google falls on leaner times, and they have to choose between enhancing shareholder value and protecting the public’s privacy, I’m not sure how well our privacy will be protected.  I hope that they’ll do the right thing, but without strong regulation and threat of serious penalties, I’m not sure that who ever is in charge of running Google at that point in time will do the right thing.

Here’s a couple of great lines from the article:

Responding to recent public outcries over its handling of private data, search giant Google offered a wide-ranging and eerily well-informed apology to its millions of users Monday.

“We would like to extend our deepest apologies to each and every one of you,” announced CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking from the company’s Googleplex headquarters. “Clearly there have been some privacy concerns as of late, and judging by some of the search terms we’ve seen, along with the tens of thousands of personal e-mail exchanges and Google Chat conversations we’ve carefully examined, it looks as though it might be a while before we regain your trust.”

Google expressed regret to some of its third-generation Irish-American users on Smithwood between Barlow and Lake.

Added Schmidt, “Whether you’re Michael Paulson who lives at 3425 Longview Terrace and makes $86,400 a year, or Jessica Goldblatt from Lynnwood, WA, who already has well-established trust issues, we at Google would just like to say how very, truly sorry we are.”

-http://www.theonion.com/content/news/google_responds_to_privacy

I spoke to a local Rotary club recently on topic of - Google vs. the Library: Research & Collaboration in the 21st Century. The group wanted to know if Google and the Internet would be putting our libraries out of business.  My answer?  Yes and No (see the link above for more details).

Yes, Google and the internet (specifically Wikipedia) have already put libraries out of the business of providing basic reference material.

No, Google and the internet will not put libraries out of the business of lending books in the short run.  More importantly, Libraries for the foreseeable future will the the primary conduit for most people to access high quality and expensive research databases like Pub Med and other walled off online journals.

One interesting factoid from the presentation: The Encyclopedia Britannica contains about 100,000 articles and costs over $1,000 for a set of books. Wikipedia has over 3,000,000 articles and is completely free.  Wikipedia is 30 times larger than Britannica, and is widening it’s lead on a daily basis.

For now the Goliath vs. David battle is a draw

Do you want the good news or the bad news first?  I’ll start with the good news: Google Voice is the best thing that has happened to phones (including cell phones) and voice mail in decades… and it’s another free Google service!  The bad news: It is only available if you live in the United States.  So that means I cannot use it here in Canada where I live.

So for those of you living in the US, feel free to go to the Google Voice “Invite” website, and request an invite.  If not, take a seat on the bench beside me and wait for Google to roll out the service here in Canada.  Google has publicly stated that they will make Google Voice available in other countries, but have not given a time-table. So what are we missing?

Here are a couple more videos that talk more about specific benefits, and I’ll copy some text from the Google website outlining the features of Google Voice that explain why I think it is so revolutionary:

Use Google Voice with your existing number and get:

• Google voicemail: voicemail like email
• Voicemail transcription: read what your voicemail says
• Custom greetings: vary voicemail greetings by caller
• International calling: low-cost calls to the world
• Notifications: read voicemail messages via email or SMS
• Share voicemails: forward, embed, or download voicemails

Add a Google number to get these additional features:

• One number: a single phone number that rings all your phones
• Free SMS: send, receive & store text messages online
• Block calls: send unwanted callers straight to voicemail
• Record calls: record phone calls and store them online
• Conference calls: join several people into a single call
• Screen callers: hear who is calling before you pick up

What follows is an email I sent to a friend hopefully helping him to better understand how Google’s Page Rank system works, and how he can get his website on the first page of Google search resluts:

I’m glad that the Google stats for your site are looking up.  There is one thing that I tried to explain to you on the phone before Christmas that I don’t think I explained very well.  Let me try explaining Google Page Rank again:

Q1. What determines which websites are put on the 1st page of Google search results?

• The relevancy of the title and text on your web page to the search query.
• The number and quality of other people’s websites linking to your website.  You can think of other websites linking to your site as a vote… The more votes your site has, the higher your websites ranking will be.
• The best way to influence your page rank is to make sure you have good key words in the title of your page, the URL, and in the text on your page.  The other thing is to encourage quality websites to link to your site… These are the key things in your control (more info from Google).

Q2. What else can you do to monitor your website and find ways to improve it?

• Update you  website with current relevant content.
• Get a Gmail account so that you can access other Google resources to help your website.  http://gmail.com
• You can use Google Webmaster Tools to see how your site is viewed by Google, so you can modify it to make it more “Googlefriendly”.
• Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic is coming to your site, where the traffic is coming from geographically, and what other sites are forwarding users to your site.

I hope this helps!

At the last conference I attended, at least 20% of the people with laptops were using NetBooks this year.  The reason why I took notice, is because at the same conference the previous year there was not a single NetBook in sight.  So what is a NetBook? How do Netbooks coompare to Laptop comptuers?

1. NetBooks typically have a small screen than a laptop: typically 10″ diagonally rather than 13″ or 15″.
2. Netbooks also usually have slightly smaller keyboards, although the Dell Netbook I have been using has a keyboard almost the same size as my MacBook Air keyboard.
3. Netbooks typically have slower processors and less memory than laptops (Photo Shop and video editing won’t work well on them).
4. On the plus side, Netbooks usualy weigh less than laptops, and in some cases (as is with my Dell NetBook) have a longer battery life than most Laptops.
5. Netbooks also cost a lot less than light weight laptops, but are close in price to lower end bulky laptops. My Dell Mini 10 cost $329 CDN.

Admittedly the CALI conference attracts a pretty geeky crowd of law school technical staff, law librarians and law professors, even so, going from 0% to 20% in one year is impressive.

So what do I think?  I agree with Michael Dell’s assessment that for most people a NetBook makes an excellent companion to a desktop computer.  If you need to travel, or take a laptop to a meeting, a Netbook will do an excellent job.  After a couple days of use, I started to get claustrophobic in the very small screen space that the NetBook provides (in my case 1024 x 600 as opposed to 1200 x 800 on my laptop, and 1920 x 1200 on my desktop computer).

My recommendation for students, staff and faculty would be to get a full size desktop computer for your home or office, and then use a NetBook for classes, travelling and meetings.  If you use Google Documents, or DropBox for synchronizing files, you’ll have everything you need to work on no matter which machine you are using.

Very cool!  The ability to detect the language of text in the cell of a spreadsheet, and then translate it into the language of your choice.  I’m not sure how I would use it in my daily job, but it certainly would come in handy when translating labels on a web site into multiple languages.  So how does it work?  Here’s an example of the two key functions:

• =GoogleTranslate(“Oi, como está?”,”pt”,”en”) gives “Hi, how are you”
• =DetectLanguage(“Oi, como está?”) gives “pt”

I saw this in a Google Docs blog post.

If I was a student back in University, I’d defiantly be using Google Docs for collaborating on group projects. If I was fortunate enough to have a laptop and desktop computer (or had to use lab computers), I’d also use Google Docs so I’d be able to access all my files on any computer I was working on.

Here’s a link to the Go0gle Docs blog post, with a number of different uses for Google Docs as a student… including:

• Text documents with double spacing, endnotes, footnotes and bibliographies.
• Track exercise progress with spread sheet templates.
• Collaborate on outlines for classes, as well as group project documents.
• Use google sites for club and student organization websites.  Google sites is very easy to use, and is a browser based website editing web application.
• Use equation editor for math and science classes.
• Collaborate on power point like presentations in Google Docs.