Google Buzz is a good idea that has a few problems. Until they fix those problems, I am off. Not sure how much harm is already done. Hope it is not not much.

My gmail account is personal. A lot of my family and friends are listed there. When I open up it doesn’t mean I am opening up the profile of my friends and family. I also do not want any one to follow me and get access to my non public information.

The default setting for any application in this century should be a closed one. Unless it is a stand alone one where you explicitly open a new account, like twitter. Facebook is pretty closed. I like it that way. Twitter is open and I like it that way. Buzz right now is neither and I don’t like it.

It feels like buzz was rolled out in a hurry unlike all other stuff rolled out by Google. I don’t remember seeing any closed beta for it.

As soon as I enabled buzz, I posted on twitter that “Not everyone considers friend and follower the same. Do buzz differentiate those?”. Now it sounds like the whole web is saying the same thing.

For now buzz is turned off in my gmail.

Update 2/15/2010: Just re-enabled buzz. On that later.

I have added ads to this site recently. I did not want those ads change the look of my theme. One way to achieve this for text based ads is to have a transparent background. Google AdSense ad setup did not have a way to express that. Backgound color is required is only RGB. All the ads made the site look terrible than it already is. Luckily for me I am not using gradient colors over a large area. The background image is a small rectangle that is tiled. I changed the background color to match the background image and it looks better than standard colors.

If you have gradient backgound spanning a large area or have a background image that is not uniform color try to place ads outside of those areas. You can probably create a bar or box with borders that will blend with the rest of the site. The best way to work around the problem is to come with a color scheme that will allow you to place ads in a more acceptable manner.

The fight continues…

If I try to access a Silverlight application that is hosted on pretty much any web site, Chrome handles it without a problem.  But when I try to access a Microsoft web site that has a Silverlight application, the webpage complains that the plugin has expired. Expired?

This is the page that complains. That page throws a message box. Not good. Now if you do not respond quick enough, Chrome will popup another message box asking if you want to stop the unresponsive plugin. Not good either. In this case it is the browser asking the question. But you never know. Message boxes should be banned from html and java script and also from all plugins. Only the browser process should dish out message boxes.

In the above page I think it was MSTECHED site ad or something that was causing the problem.

I clicked yes on the button that takes me to the Microsoft web page for downloading Silverlight. That web page says this browser is not compatible with Silverlight. Well, not according to all the Silverlight applications I have used on the web. Everything works fine.

There is a clear distinction between fair competition and animosity. These two are showing the latter with elementary school maturity.

Ok, Google logo change happened a while ago and it is not new anymore. I just noticed the similarity today. It is kind of mirror or upside down of the Microsoft Windows logo with a different shape. Blue, yellow, green and red in four squares. Was that intentional or just a coincidence?

I just installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 RC on a Shuttle xpc box. 64 bit. The first application I installed is Chrome. There is no need to add the in process plugin argument anymore to the chrome. It works just fine after the installation. This box is connected to my TV using HDMIvideo and SPDIF audio. I had Vista on it until now. Vista wouldn’t play DTS or Dolby Digital through the Denon AVI. Windows 7 played both right after the first boot. No driver installation nothing required. The display on the TV is much better than that was on Vista.

Chrome wins again?

I clicked on a link from Google search in Chrome and got the following error. It detected that the site has malware linked to it. I opened the same site on IE and it just showed me the site. No detection, no warning, nothing. Another question I have is, if Google already knows (it has indexed the site) there is malware hosted on the site, why it is appearing in the search list? At least there should be a warning. That way users from other browsers would know that it is not safe to click that link. Do no evil doesn’t mean do no good either. Damn competition. Anyway, it doesn’t look like anything was harmed. 

All day I was clicking links in Chrome to see how it handles malware. Here is a real malware almost blocked by Chrome. It would still go ahead if I gave permission. Avast detected the malware too.

I wanted to install Internet Explorer 8 RC1 on my desktop. I went to MSN.com which is my home page and typed 8 and hit search. I was too lazy. IE8 did not show up in the top. I though, let me see what google search says. Yes, IE 8 home is there on the first page. Alright, I am not a google fanboy but I have to admit google did a way better job. It may be just the ranking based on hits.