Google Health
No CommentsGoogle health launched today and could be really big. The new Google product will let you store and manage all of your health information in one central place. I think this is a great step forward for the online medical community. Sites like webmd are very informative but not personal. I can only imagine the amount of data Google will be able to index now. But hey, it’s free.
I hope Google doesn’t drop the ball on the social side, because it could be really helpful to a lot of people. Let users rate and comment on doctors and perhaps even view your friend’s doctors. Let users exchange medical treatments they tried out and give first hand accounts of medications. I’m tired of going to sites that pretend to be informative when, in actuality, are trying to push a certain new medication or treatment process on you.
- Start tracking a medical history and learn about your conditions
- Import your medical records
- View your medical history
- Find out how medications might interact
- Make your health information work for you
- Search for doctors and hospitals
Find out more information here.
Posted in Computer Science, Google, Life Stuff, Technology, Web
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Google Charts API, examples.
No CommentsI was finally playing with the Google Charts API so I could learn it… I will forgo the hurdles and issues I have with it… I just wanted to dump out the examples I made while learning it– for future reference.
A simple line chart.
Posted in Google
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A New Way to look at Networking
No CommentsVan Jacobson has, in his Google TechTalk, many good quotes… my two favorite:
“Data’s got a name, not a location.” — Van Jacobson
“Data doesn’t live anywhere; where ever it is, it’s great.” — Van Jacobson
Posted in Google, REST, Technology
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Tunnel to Gmail
1 CommentI am in Venezia, Italia and my host has graciously let me use her computer to check email. There’s only one problem… Google’s services (email, reader, hosted, analytics, etc) have been unavailable to me for the past five hours. There’s a problem upstream, somewhere, that prevents me from getting to GMail. A friend, in the Bay Area, tells me– over IM chat– that he has perfect access to GMail. All this tells me that it’s just a regional access thing.
Anyways, I really needed to check my email and couldn’t wait for the problem to get resolved. So I just worked up a quick hack.
First, I edited the laptop’s hosts file (c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts) to add the following lines:
127.0.0.1 google.com
127.0.0.1 www.google.com
127.0.0.1 mail.google.com
Second, I launched the signed-jar copy of Mindterm that I have sitting on my website; I logged in to my dreamhost shell account (in the States) and set up a couple of ssh tunnels that redirected web traffic from the local loopback address to google.com:
127.0.0.1 port 80 -> google.com port 80
127.0.0.1 port 443 -> google.com port 443
Finally, launched IE (she doesn’t have Firefox installed) for immediate access to GMail. 
What did that really do?
Normal Case: IE talks directly to GMail. IE -> GMail.
But the Normal Case is broken.
My Workaround: IE talks to GMail through a third party. IE -> Dreamhost Server -> GMail.
Posted in Google, Technology
1 Comment
Future Google Appliances
No CommentsKevin Dangoor suggests that we may eventually see Google provide an appliance for all our office needs.
Then I remember Cringley’s article suggesting a Google home entertainment appliance.
I would enjoy having nice simple, affordable, appliances to make my life easier. Heck, even though I love mucking with computer tech, I hate to spend all my time doing it. IT takes a lot of time to deal with, especially if one’s plans involve maintaining other locations (eg other family member’s homes). So if Google can come out with an appliance (all-in-one) that services all my office, entertainment and IT management needs, I would be all over it. But a message to Google: I just want something nice– and would appeal to my geek aesthetics– to just work, without it encumbering upon my freedoms (open integration, avoid lock-in).
Posted in Google
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Atom Publish Protocol and GData
No CommentsThe GData protocol introduced an optimistic locking convention, for resource editing, to the Atom Publish Protocol. The introduced method is quite simple: An Atom Entry’s edit URL is unique by version of the resource. Although the Google team’s method just added a version number to the end of the URL, the URL itself can be random and is opaque of semantic meaning. This versioned URL method allows the server to know if a client is trying to update a resource based on stale information.
After some pause, I had a question: Would it be better to have such versioned URLs or would it be better to add meta information in the Atom entry?
The APP draft spec states:
8.2.1 Editing entries with foreign markup
To avoid unintentional loss of data when editing entry collection
members, Atom Protocol clients SHOULD preserve all metadata,
including unknown foreign markup, that has not been intentionally
modified.
This means that an APP client will send back the version information even if it doesn’t know anything about versioning, which would allow for the server to detect version conflicts.
However, the metadata method’s one weakness is in that it only works with Atom Entries and will not work for other Media. Besides this, I have not found any compelling evidence to support one method or another when ignoring the metadata weakness. And I can’t see either method breaking the REST model, so maybe it’s up to the APP Service API designer.
Then my brain took a tangent:
Doesn’t having version based edit URLs (http://example.com/pic.jpg/1/ and http://example.com/pic.jpg/2/) imply that there are two separate resources as opposed to a single resource? In general, should different versions of a resource be modeled as separated resources? Yet aren’t we talking about editing a resource published at a single URL: http://example.com/pic.jpg ? If we have two separate resources, then shouldn’t the published (linked to in a blog entry) URL be the latest versioned URL (http://example.com/pic.jpg/2/)? Or can we say that http://example.com/pic.jpg represents the lastest version in the ‘trunk’? Or am I splitting hairs since they may just be two sides of the same coin?
Ah that’s it for thinking out loud…
Posted in Google, REST
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Google Reader Tag Delete
No CommentsI guess I was asleep when the Google Reader team pushed out better management changes. I can easily delete labels now .
Posted in Google
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Google Talk and AIM
No CommentsA press release announced the following:
Enabling Google Talk and AIM instant messaging users to communicate with each other, provided certain conditions are met
A nice first step. Let’s just hope that we can get AIM to use the open Jabber/XMPP protocol that Google uses. But I doubt that will happen anytime soon, if at all.
At the very least, I think I’ll be able to stop using my AIM account and just use Google Talk.
Posted in Google
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Google’s Internet
No CommentsCringley’s latest post about Google focuses on a mystery shipping container found in a Google garage:
This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.
He then explores what (and how) Google might make use of this grid (World Internet Domination). I’m still digesting what he has said for my own take, but my own gut reactions are:
- It’s not only a Data Center itself, but can be the key future building block for even larger Data Centers.
- Google may truely bring grid computing capabilities to the masses, something I don’t see Sun or IBM doing well.
- This is one big fun geek toy that I want to get my hands on.
Posted in Google, Technology
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