Category Archives: Uncategorized

Google sucks!

It is amazing how your view of something depends on where you are viewing it from (an insight of breathtaking brilliance I know… ). Take Google. I quite like Google. It usually gives me what I want when I ask it. I have generally used Google from the UK and tend to get redirected to google.co.uk as opposed to google.com – a bit of a pain but not a killer as I am going to interact with the site in English. Recently however I have been working in Romania. I don’t speak Romanian (apart from being able to mangle the phrase “thankyou” pretty atrouciously). Nothing on my computer would indicate that I can speak Romanian. When I try to use Google.com or (as is most frequent now days) use the embedded Google search tool in Firefox I get redirected to google.ro – and the search results are in Romanian. I am sure they are brilliant results – just unusable for me.

It makes no difference if I am signed into Google (gmail id) or not. I always get redirected and get the results in Romanian. That is a REAL nightmare. I shouldn’t have to muck around with setting preferences or any of that other stuff – it should just work. Google: dont get clever, just give me what I want.

Google Open Source code Jam

Went to the first Open Source Code Jam held by Google London yesterday. There was a good attendance, a real variety of languages, projects and people which is great. Several people stood up and gave lightning round talks (some were super lightning – 30 secs was the fastest I think!) – of upto 3 mins – just talking about what they were upto and seeing if people can help out etc. Lots of pizza, chatting and coding followed.

All in all a GREAT idea! Congrats to Joe and Zaheda for setting it up and I, for one, certainly want to go to the next one!. I am even going to dig out some old SEDA code I have (its called Raindrop) from a couple of years ago and finally make an effort to push it out into the real world. What more incentive do I need?