Some weeks ago, I noticed a subtle change occur to the Google search 
page. Originally it would load up and just work. But recently, when it 
first loads up, several items are missing. And they *stay* missing until 
you move the mouse pointer. At that moment, they fade into view. WTF?

In the last day or so, the Google logo seems to have changed [quite 
apart from the almost daily guest logos], and the search box has got 
larger. I wonder why?

Maybe Google has a blog somewhere? Hmm, let me go Google it...

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Invisible wrote:

> Maybe Google has a blog somewhere? Hmm, let me go Google it...

Huh. Yes they do. It's on Blogger (which they apparently own now).

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

In fact, reading further, it seems they have several blogs - none of 
which are related to what I'm looking at...

Post a reply to this message

>> Maybe Google has a blog somewhere? Hmm, let me go Google it...
> 
> Huh. Yes they do.

I was looking at some slides from a presentation about testing and 
developer productivity. One slide was a photograph of an actual 
whiteboard at Google HQ, listing the things that had reduced 
productivity on a particular day:

- G4 sync
- Failing tests
- Fix build dependency
- Finding documentation

But the final point made me LOL:

- Grok insane API

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Some weeks ago, I noticed a subtle change occur to the Google search 
> page. Originally it would load up and just work. But recently, when it 
> first loads up, several items are missing. And they *stay* missing until 
> you move the mouse pointer. At that moment, they fade into view. WTF?

  Final proof that madness is finally overpowering you...

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:

>   Final proof that madness is finally overpowering you...

mʌθ gæbɪduːɔːl, mɪʃ rɑr nɪθɛb nɪθɪmbɪθ. mæf mænæ mɪʃɒn,
miːæf miːæw fwɔr!

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On 5/11/2010 7:04 AM, Invisible wrote:

> mʌθ gæbɪduːɔːl, mɪʃ rɑr nɪθɛb nɪθɪmbɪθ. mæf mænæ mɪʃɒn,
miːæf miːæw fwɔr!

Nonsense!

-- 
~Mike

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>> mʌθ gæbɪduːɔːl, mɪʃ rɑr nɪθɛb nɪθɪmbɪθ. mæf mænæ mɪʃɒn,
miːæf miːæw fwɔr!
> 
> Nonsense!

Actually it's IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), and you have no 
idea how long it just took me to transcribe that!

It's based on a recording of the late Richard Burton, played backwards. 
But, let's face it, *any* speech played backwards ends up sounding like 
a magic spell in some obscure language. ;-)

Oh yes, when I tell people that I speak fluent gibberish, they seem to 
think that I'm *joking*... :-P

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And lo On Tue, 11 May 2010 11:01:05 +0100, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> did  
spake thusly:

> Invisible wrote:
>
>> Maybe Google has a blog somewhere? Hmm, let me go Google it...
>
> Huh. Yes they do. It's on Blogger (which they apparently own now).
>
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
>
> In fact, reading further, it seems they have several blogs - none of  
> which are related to what I'm looking at...

You're not talking about this are you?
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-googles-new-look.html

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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Invisible wrote:
> Some weeks ago, I noticed a subtle change occur to the Google search 
> page. Originally it would load up and just work. But recently, when it 
> first loads up, several items are missing. And they *stay* missing until 
> you move the mouse pointer. At that moment, they fade into view. WTF?

They had an announcement describing this somewhere when they made the change.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

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Darren New wrote:

> They had an announcement describing this somewhere when they made the 
> change.

Yeah, I would imagine they did. But finding it might be difficult... 
(It's not like you can just Google "weird changes to Google search page".)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> (It's not like you can just Google "weird changes to Google search page".)

Did you try it?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

Post a reply to this message

>> (It's not like you can just Google "weird changes to Google search 
>> page".)
> 
> Did you try it?

No. Let me go try it now...

...yes, as I expected, it returns nothing of use.



However, performing a manual search of the Official Google Blog (i.e., 
scrolling through the page until you see anything relevant-looking) 
gives me this:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-design-turned-up-notch.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-googles-new-look.html

That covers the update that happened in the last few days. After another 
15 minutes or so of manual searching, I found this:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/now-you-see-it-now-you-dont.html

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> However, performing a manual search of the Official Google Blog (i.e., 
> scrolling through the page until you see anything relevant-looking) 
> gives me this:
> 
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-design-turned-up-notch.html
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-googles-new-look.html 
> 
> 
> That covers the update that happened in the last few days. After another 
> 15 minutes or so of manual searching, I found this:
> 
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/now-you-see-it-now-you-dont.html

Apparently there's a kind of history page:

http://www.google.com/corporate/timeline/

I also found the page for the previous change - when they made the 
search bar bigger:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/now-s-u-p-e-r-sized.html

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible escreveu:
> In the last day or so, the Google logo seems to have changed [quite 
> apart from the almost daily guest logos], and the search box has got 
> larger. I wonder why?

you only *noticed* it the last day or so, but it's been there for quite 
a while already (months).  At least the big official one rather than one 
of the "nationalized" versions for each country...

I thought the change was merely cosmetic but now that you brought it to 
attention, I also notice a virtual keyboard for security freaks next to 
the search entry.  Can't be bad...

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

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>> In fact, reading further, it seems they have several blogs - none of 
>> which are related to what I'm looking at...
> 
> You're not talking about this are you?
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-googles-new-look.html 

Yes, I eventually found that and several other related posts, by manual 
searching (i.e., using my eyeballs to inspect every blog post for the 
past X weeks).

Post a reply to this message

> I was looking at some slides from a presentation about testing and 
> developer productivity. One slide was a photograph of an actual whiteboard 
> at Google HQ, listing the things that had reduced productivity on a 
> particular day:

Sounds an interesting task, I should suggest people here do that.  But one 
of the problems here I see is that a lot of people count the "unproductive" 
work as productive.  For example if they spend a day trying to fix a problem 
with an incorrectly designed thing, they count that as a good productive 
day's work.  They don't realise their job is to design things correctly, and 
not to design things incorrectly and then fix them.

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:

> Sounds an interesting task, I should suggest people here do that.  But 
> one of the problems here I see is that a lot of people count the 
> "unproductive" work as productive.

Heh, gotta love that.

> For example if they spend a day 
> trying to fix a problem with an incorrectly designed thing, they count 
> that as a good productive day's work.  They don't realise their job is 
> to design things correctly, and not to design things incorrectly and 
> then fix them.

Yeah, that *does* sound like poor engineering practise...

Post a reply to this message

> Yeah, that *does* sound like poor engineering practise...

Other favourites are spending a day designing something when someone else 
has already done it, designing something from scratch because you don't know 
how to use the software well enough to modify and existing design, or 
designing something when you know the spec isn't fixed, then when the spec 
is fixed saying you don't have enough time to change the design...  It's all 
fun and games here :-)

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:

> Other favourites are spending a day designing something when someone 
> else has already done it

Sounds like either poor communication, or somebody with too much time on 
their hands.

> designing something from scratch because you 
> don't know how to use the software well enough to modify an existing 
> design

That's the kind of thing I'd do.

> or designing something when you know the spec isn't fixed, then 
> when the spec is fixed saying you don't have enough time to change the 
> design...

I suppose some people might argue that's a necessary evil when the 
customer can't make up their mind what they want and yet demand that it 
arrives on time. But I don't know.

> It's all fun and games here :-)

And I thought it was only my screwy company that does stuff like this...

Ooo, how about this one: Designing something when you have no spec at 
all, and then writing a spec to match the thing you just designed. You 
guys ever do that one?

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>> Other favourites are spending a day designing something when someone else 
>> has already done it
>
> Sounds like either poor communication, or somebody with too much time on 
> their hands.

The former, I blame it on the way the departments are set up in the company, 
it's like they are all in competition with each other, so information 
doesn't get shared very well.  It also doesn't help that everyone thinks 
what they are doing is highly confidential and can't even be shared with 
another department...

> I suppose some people might argue that's a necessary evil when the 
> customer can't make up their mind what they want and yet demand that it 
> arrives on time. But I don't know.

Usually we give the customer a design freeze date in order for the first 
deliveries to meet their deadline.  This is fine until the customer informs 
us of a change a week before the freeze, then we have to tell them that 
actually we don't have time now to make that change - things get a bit messy 
then.

> Ooo, how about this one: Designing something when you have no spec at all, 
> and then writing a spec to match the thing you just designed. You guys 
> ever do that one?

Not really, you need to have at least a rough idea of the performance 
required before starting design work.  Of course the detail level of spec 
varies from customer to customer, but the basics are always there to start 
the design work.

Post a reply to this message

>> Sounds like either poor communication, or somebody with too much time 
>> on their hands.
> 
> The former, I blame it on the way the departments are set up in the 
> company, it's like they are all in competition with each other, so 

...so all the departments are trying to beat each other and hence 
working aginst each other, rather than working together towards a common 
goal?

> Usually we give the customer a design freeze date in order for the first 
> deliveries to meet their deadline.  This is fine until the customer 
> informs us of a change a week before the freeze, then we have to tell 
> them that actually we don't have time now to make that change - things 
> get a bit messy then.

Shouldn't the freeze date be set far enough forward that it doesn't 
matter if they change something the *day* before the freeze?

>> Ooo, how about this one: Designing something when you have no spec at 
>> all, and then writing a spec to match the thing you just designed. You 
>> guys ever do that one?
> 
> Not really, you need to have at least a rough idea of the performance 
> required before starting design work.  Of course the detail level of 
> spec varies from customer to customer, but the basics are always there 
> to start the design work.

Heh. Several of our internal applications where developed this way. The 
CEO's nephew sits in a darkened room by himself, decides how the system 
is going to work, builds it, checks that it runs, and then we try to 
implement it company-wide. That includes writing the design specs so 
that they match what Mr Wizzkid actually wrote.

Never mine the *minor detail* that we have written procedures which 
prohibit such behaviour and there could as such be legal consequences if 
somebody like the FDA or the MHRA found about about this - which they won't.

Still, I guess you can't really do this for an external "customer". If 
you invent something off the top of your head and try to sell it to 
them, presumably they will suggest that you take a long walk off a short 
cliff...

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> ...so all the departments are trying to beat each other and hence working 
> aginst each other, rather than working together towards a common goal?

Not only that, but seemingly horizontal communication to different 
departments is actively discouraged in Japanese culture - so you end up 
having to go up several layers of management and then back down another part 
of the tree to get an answer.  And it's not as if managers are really that 
interested in (or have time for) the discussion of detail design.  So as you 
can imagine, each department is quite isolated.

> Shouldn't the freeze date be set far enough forward that it doesn't matter 
> if they change something the *day* before the freeze?

Sure, in theory, but in reality the Engineers are usually not sat around 
doing nothing during this time.

> Still, I guess you can't really do this for an external "customer". If you 
> invent something off the top of your head and try to sell it to them, 
> presumably they will suggest that you take a long walk off a short 
> cliff...

The customer will have at least asked for some minimum set of parameters, 
like brightness, contrast etc.  So the major design decisions are based on 
this.  Usually however they will ask for much more detail, often running 
into hundreds of pages with references to thousands more pages in other 
documents.

Post a reply to this message

>> ...so all the departments are trying to beat each other and hence 
>> working aginst each other, rather than working together towards a 
>> common goal?
> 
> Not only that, but seemingly horizontal communication to different 
> departments is actively discouraged in Japanese culture - so you end up 
> having to go up several layers of management and then back down another 
> part of the tree to get an answer.  And it's not as if managers are 
> really that interested in (or have time for) the discussion of detail 
> design.  So as you can imagine, each department is quite isolated.

That is utterly clustered. o_O

> The customer will have at least asked for some minimum set of 
> parameters, like brightness, contrast etc.  So the major design 
> decisions are based on this.  Usually however they will ask for much 
> more detail, often running into hundreds of pages with references to 
> thousands more pages in other documents.

Heh, yeah. The spec for our project DB system was "we need a project DB 
system". So some kid who's not even a company employee went and sat in a 
darkened room and came up with some VB thing that he thought was pretty 
cool.

4 years later, we're still using it. WTF?

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
> The former, I blame it on the way the departments are set up in the 
> company, it's like they are all in competition with each other, so 
> information doesn't get shared very well.  It also doesn't help that 
> everyone thinks what they are doing is highly confidential and can't 
> even be shared with another department...

Sounds like Bellcore. The company owned by its competition, none of whom 
were allowed to talk to each other.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

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> Sounds like Bellcore. The company owned by its competition, none of whom 
> were allowed to talk to each other.

Once, through a contact of a contact, I was able to get hold of some 
mechanical drawing I needed.  This was nothing confidential, the product was 
already released and anyone in the public could just buy whatever it was in 
and measure it.  Anyway, they would only hand over a *paper* version to my 
contact, and my contact had strict instructions to only show this to me 
under his supervision and then shred it!  This was totally WTF I couldn't 
believe what was happening.

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scott wrote:
> totally WTF I couldn't believe what was happening.

Yeah, but nobody ever threatened to send you to jail for illegal anti-trust 
collusion stuff because the guy across the hall liked to answer his 
voicemail on speakerphone. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

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On 12-5-2010 12:30, scott wrote:
>> I was looking at some slides from a presentation about testing and 
>> developer productivity. One slide was a photograph of an actual 
>> whiteboard at Google HQ, listing the things that had reduced 
>> productivity on a particular day:
> 
> Sounds an interesting task, I should suggest people here do that.  But 
> one of the problems here I see is that a lot of people count the 
> "unproductive" work as productive.  

Then there is the vice versa. Sometimes unproductive work turns out to 
be vitally important later.

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Wait, what the... NOW WIKIPEDIA IS DIFFERENT! O_O



Am I *really* going mad? Is anyone else seeing this??

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Thu, 13 May 2010 19:55:02 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> Wait, what the... NOW WIKIPEDIA IS DIFFERENT! O_O
> 
> 
> 
> Am I *really* going mad? Is anyone else seeing this??

Imagine this:  Software and websites get updated to newer versions of 
software and sites get changed to add functionality and that sometimes 
changes the interface.

<gasp>! ;)

Jim

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Wait, what the... NOW WIKIPEDIA IS DIFFERENT! O_O
> 
> Am I *really* going mad? Is anyone else seeing this??

They have been telling people about the future change in a banner in every 
page, for a month. Not to mention that the new layout was in an opt-in beta 
test for many many months.

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> They have been telling people about the future change in a banner in every 
> page, for a month.

Seems more like 6 months. I had by now assumed it was just an empty 
promise and forgotten all about it.

Man, first Google now Wikipedia. I'm just waiting to log into Facebook 
and find that it's now green instead of blue...

(I *like* green!)

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On 5/13/2010 1:55 PM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Wait, what the... NOW WIKIPEDIA IS DIFFERENT! O_O
>
>
>
> Am I *really* going mad? Is anyone else seeing this??
>


I've been seeing it for a couple months. I've been trying out the beta 
for quite some time ;)

-- 
~Mike

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Invisible wrote:
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> 
>> They have been telling people about the future change in a banner in
>> every page, for a month.
> 
> Seems more like 6 months. I had by now assumed it was just an empty
> promise and forgotten all about it.
> 
> Man, first Google now Wikipedia. I'm just waiting to log into Facebook
> and find that it's now green instead of blue...

Facebook likes to change it upside down every three months. I hate that.

Not because I don't like changes, but because I don't like the two-week-long 
whining from all its users who don't like changes.

I wish they would do incremental changes every week instead of giant changes 
every three months.

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On Fri, 14 May 2010 15:44:37 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

>> Man, first Google now Wikipedia. I'm just waiting to log into Facebook
>> and find that it's now green instead of blue...
> 
> Facebook likes to change it upside down every three months. I hate that.

Actually, with FB it's more like they change the default privacy options 
for all users to expose more data every three months.  It's not rocket 
science to set things up so when they change things, the default is 
"secure" rather than "open", would be nice if they actually learned that 
lesson.

Jim

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Fri, 14 May 2010 15:44:37 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> 
>>> Man, first Google now Wikipedia. I'm just waiting to log into Facebook
>>> and find that it's now green instead of blue...
>> 
>> Facebook likes to change it upside down every three months. I hate that.
> 
> Actually, with FB it's more like they change the default privacy options
> for all users to expose more data every three months.  It's not rocket
> science to set things up so when they change things, the default is
> "secure" rather than "open", would be nice if they actually learned that
> lesson.

It's not like they don't know how to make it secure; probably they are 
*intentionally* opening those privacy holes.

The recent addition of community pages and making public what pages you have 
"liked" is to let advertisers know what you like.

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On Fri, 14 May 2010 17:31:55 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Fri, 14 May 2010 15:44:37 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>> 
>>>> Man, first Google now Wikipedia. I'm just waiting to log into
>>>> Facebook and find that it's now green instead of blue...
>>> 
>>> Facebook likes to change it upside down every three months. I hate
>>> that.
>> 
>> Actually, with FB it's more like they change the default privacy
>> options for all users to expose more data every three months.  It's not
>> rocket science to set things up so when they change things, the default
>> is "secure" rather than "open", would be nice if they actually learned
>> that lesson.
> 
> It's not like they don't know how to make it secure; probably they are
> *intentionally* opening those privacy holes.

The EU is having a bit of a field day with it, it looks like, so 
hopefully some good will come from that.

> The recent addition of community pages and making public what pages you
> have "liked" is to let advertisers know what you like.

Yeah, that whole page thing is driving me a little nuts right now - every 
time I login it asks me if I want to become a "fan" of pages related to 
movies, books, etc that I've said I like in my profile.

What's more, everything is selected by default, and there's no "deselect 
all" option.

So if I want to continue to maintain my privacy on that stuff, I have to 
manually deselect each one of what looks to be about a hundred "we think 
you'll be interested in this" options.

Quite annoying.  Still, if I hadn't wanted to share that information, I 
could've not included it.

Jim

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> The EU is having a bit of a field day with it, it looks like, so 
> hopefully some good will come from that.

The fundamental problem is that legal systems are pretty much universally 
based on geography while IP is specifically designed to put every address 
equidistant from every other address.

If Facebook's entire operation was in the USA, what could the EU do?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

Post a reply to this message

On Fri, 14 May 2010 15:33:16 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> The EU is having a bit of a field day with it, it looks like, so
>> hopefully some good will come from that.
> 
> The fundamental problem is that legal systems are pretty much
> universally based on geography while IP is specifically designed to put
> every address equidistant from every other address.
> 
> If Facebook's entire operation was in the USA, what could the EU do?

That's a valid point, but at the same time, there are successful 
enforcements of privacy laws in different venues regardless of where 
services are hosted.

But I think with Facebook, they operate (as in "have servers located in") 
the EU, so the debate is something of a nonstarter as a practical 
exercise, but interesting as a theoretical exercise.

Jim

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Darren New wrote:

> what could the EU do?

Heh. What would Jesus do? :-D

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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