I just had this idea that could truly revolutionize search engines. Let's start with the motivation:

What do we usually rely on search engines for? Answer-finding, correct? We are part of a generation that mindlessly presses CTRL + T to open a new tab in our browser of choice, points it to www.google.com and types away whatever question we need an answer for. Then comes the tedious process of sorting through all the results in hopes of truly finding the answer to what we're looking for. Typically, in a good day, we will find a link that contains the answer to our question, use the answer and ditch the browser tab. Does this sound like something you do more than once a day? Well, then read on.

What if we could make this process better? Oftentimes, I'll require the answer to my question more than once and most of the times I just can't be bothered with bookmarking the page. Even because, most of the times, I forget that I bookmarked something and I end up going to Google to search for something I already have an answer for, buried within my bookmarks. So there's clearly a problem here. I'm wasting time more than once to find answers for the same information and - drawing on my recently developed and work-in-progress Dutch skills - dat kan niet.

Why don't we make search engines smarter? Let's look at an example.

I'm a hobbyist guitar player and every now and then, I'll go to Google and search for "soldier of love tab". Then I'll search through all the guitar tab sites and I finally find that one tab that is actually well written and faithful to the original song. Brilliant. I open it, I play it by myself once, I pretend to be an epic guitarist by playing along to the MP3 of the original and I close the tab feeling proud that I can play the guitar. But then, the next weekend comes and my girlfriend comes to visit. Of course, being the romantic guy that I am, I want to play for her but damn... it's going to take me long to find that really good guitar tab again and alas, the mood is killed. BUT! What if the first time around, I could have told Google "this link contains the exact answer for 'soldier of love tab' " so that whenever I searched again for this (or similar, e.g. 'soldier of love chords') string, Google would tell me "hey, you've searched for something similar before and you have previously defined answers for this question". Wouldn't this be great?

Wouldn't it also be great if I could even mark specific segments of a result page as containing the answer for my question? Maybe sometimes I'd search "how to list ant targets on the command line?" and I'd select a specific snippet of a website where it says "ant -p" as the answer to my question. Then, whenever I'd search for it again, Google would give me THE answer rather than links to potential answers.

Then we could get crazy with it. Make it anonymously social! "Other users have searched for a similar question, these are the links they selected as answers". Users, by adopting this technique for themselves, would be helping each other as well and soon, the millions (billions?) of people using conventional search engines could eventually turn Google from a result-based search engine into an answer-based one.

We would all spend less time searching and we'd all turn more productive by literally having the answers to everything we need at our fingertips.

That was the basic gist of my idea. Please, Google or Bing engineers, if you read this, you can take this idea. For free. I claim no royalties, copyrights or trademarks... but it'd be pretty cool if you told me about it in case you use it. Also, in roughly 3.5 years I'll be finished with my Doctorate degree and I'll be probably looking for a job. Keep that in mind, will you?

Yeah, it is serious I have 10 Google Wave invites to distribute to the first ten visitors to leave me a comment on this post. This is NOT a contest, I will be giving the invites to the ten first lucky people who leave a comment on this post requesting an invite. Please be sure to leave the comment with a working e-mail address, or the invite won't go through and you will lose your chance.

Comment away!

[UPDATE]: 8 invites left!

Here they are! The (supposed) first screenshots of what is to become Google's Operating System. The credibility and plausibility of those screenshots is actually flaky, but it's the best we have at the moment. Whether they are photoshopped or the real thing, time will tell.

The blog the images were taken from: here.

[via Engadget]

Update: The blog is a lie! Like I suspected, the leaked screenshots are actually fake. It didn't look so bad though!

Just a few hours ago Google has announced it will be entering the operating system market. The contestant? Google Chrome OS.

Google's goals seem to be speed and simplicity, although it remains unclear where they want to go with this. They go as far as stating that if you spend most of your time on the web, then Chrome OS is for you but this is all still too blurry. Will this be an actual operating system that lives outside the browser? Or is this some sort of mock-up of an operating system that you get in your browser? If it is the first, then I have a hard time finding true utility for it - a computer that can only browse the net? *Skepticism alert*

The time frame? Second half of 2010. Hit up the links below for more info:

CNET

PCWORLD

Yep, the title says it all. Today I have received my shiny new VISA from Citibank with the initial $505 loaded on it. The other kewl stuff in the envelope included a neat, Google-branded, moleskin and two GSoC 2009 stickers. One's going on my laptop, if I can gut it!

Well, I'll leave you with some photos now!

Waaaaaaait for it, waaaaait for it....... YES PEOPLE! I was accepted for Google Summer of Code 2009

This will be my smallest post ever but that is all I have to say I am friggin' ecstatic!

I know this post comes a little late and all but I still had to mention it on my blog. It turns out I am repeating the stunt again. After being turned down by Google last year, I decided I would try to apply once more this year.

Since last year I still had the change to get acquainted and get the logic of Apache Derby, I thought it would be wise to apply for the same project, and so I did. After all I do have an education on database management and also on Java, which are key for a project like Apache Derby. On top of it all there's also my tutor from last year; despite not having been chosen I still had a tutor who helped me all the way through. Kathey Marsden agreed to be my tutor again this year and that is a plus for me because I know upfront what I can expect.

So, the application period is over and my application is submitted. The results should be out on April 20th and I have my fingers crossed for me to get picked

I am certainly not. My life's about to get shaken up a little and I am going from idleness to a rather busy period, or so I believe.

At this point I have decided I will be applying once more for Google Summer of Code. I applied last year and sadly, didn't get approved. Still, I stuck around an open source project and actually got to do some work on it. The experience was invaluable and I am going for the very same project again. My experience will be a plus and I really am looking forward to be part of GSoC'09.

At the same time, I am having to do research for my final school project: analyzing and proofing the eXplicit Control Protocol (XCP). As exciting as it may sound, it gets a little demotivating when the true goals of our project are, to say the least, blurry. Still, I am aiming to do the best I can.

Still on my thought currently are two school subjects:
- Decision Support Systems - The labs on this subject are turning out quite interesting. The definition of DSS is interesting and it is fascinating to get your hands dirty with data warehouses and with extreme load scenarios. The theory however is kinda boring and dull...

- Enterprise Information Systems - Good ole SAP. It looks like this subject will be extremely intensive and will require a lot of work but it is certainly a nice challenge. Having SAP in my CV will also be a massive stepping stone for the future as SAP consultants are not only very well paid, but the position is also always in constant demand.

For the near future I also have some extra-curricular plans. I have volunteered to be part of the FITEC event, so that should be interesting.

And that's all folks! I better go get some sle.....get back to work I mean!

That's right, what about us, Google Apps users?

Google has recently released means for people to customize the looks of their GMail inboxes, but we, Google Apps users, are still in the blue. (That's my poor attempt at a pun)

Ever since Theming was released for GMail that I have been waiting and hoping to get the very same feature for Google Apps. After all, some of the G. Apps users are paying users, so one would expect the guys at Google to roll out the new features fairly quickly for their Apps users. That has not been the case. It was not the case with IMAP and it was not the case with Google Labs.

Now once more, it is not the case with Themes.

Sure, you can throw out all the excuses that there are a lot of users and that it needs a lot of work to roll out the features to everyone, but that just doesn't stick with me. Even recently we (Apps users) got our default theme changed to the default theme brought by the theming feature, however, the Themes tab is still MIA on the Settings page.

Clearly, part of the code has already been rolled out, but not all of it. The why is yet to be known, as Google won't give anything more than "soon, Themes will come to Google Apps". But how soon, Google?

So, really, now that the hype is over, what is the browser of choice? Well, the out of the box answer for me is Firefox but let's have a deeper look at the contest shall we?

What plays in favour of Google Chrome?
I for one really enjoyed the looks. It has a clean and sleek interface without your regular toolbar menus and without a caption bar. I find this amazing. It's the first browser that was designed with true usability in mind regarding the menu paraphernalia. The guys at Google really are being serious about seeing websites as actual applications, and proof of that is the fact that you can create "application links". This also plays in Chrome's favour in my opinion. There are pages that I simply have open at all times and ones that I have to be able to access quickly; Google Chrome with this feature allows me to run GMail (or any other website) as a separate window, simply by leaving an icon on my desktop. This separate window is also special, it has kind of usability on steroids since it has no menu whatsoever. It does have a caption, which in this case is good because I might want to move the window around while not maximized.

Ok, now that we're done talking about the user interface, we go on to the actual features. For starters, let's face it: Google Chrome is fast. Actually, it feels faster than Firefox as far as browsing is concerned. How do they achieve it? I'm not exactly sure and if my suspicions are right, you can probably achieve the same effect with FasterFox or with a properly configured Opera, but I'm dealing with the facts here and that is that Chrome feels fast.

There is also a technical choice in Chrome that pleased me greatly, in part I'm amazed that such a big open-source project like Mozilla Firefox, packed with paranoid security people let something like this go through on Firefox. The choice I'm talking about is the fact that Chrome spawns different processes for each tab whereas Firefox uses a threading system instead. It is common programming knowledge that when it comes to security, processes are by far much safer than threads, not to mention the advantages regarding memory management. Why, you ask? Memory leaks. This isn't just some buzz word that came with Firefox, this is an actual problem that Firefox and many more applications suffer from. What is a memory leak? Again, to put it simply, it's memory of your system that was reserved but that wasn't marked as free when it was no longer needed. So if a browser eats 100Mb of your RAM, and when you, say, close a tab it does not free the resources that belonged to that tab, then the more tabs you open, the more memory the browser will be using, and it can only use ever so much. How does multiprocessing help prevent this? It's simple: since each tab runs in its own process, when the process dies (i.e. the tab is closed), the memory that was assigned to it gets released automagically. So even as far as plugins are concerned (to name a few: Flash, Silverligh, Acrobat Reader...the list goes on), even if those are leaking memory, which has happened in the past, it will all be contained as soon as the tab is closed.

In practical terms, you open up Firefox and note down how much memory its using. Then browse for 6 hours in a row without closing and reopening the browser. Still, you open tabs, browse in those tabs, close some tabs, open up new ones and do some browsing following this procedure. Also, do visit some Flash-powered websites, and do view some PDF documents in-browser. In the end, close all the tabs but one, it can even be a blank, newly opened, tab. Now open your Task Manager and check how much memory Firefox is using. Note it down and do the same with Google Chrome. See what I'm talking about? I'm no future teller but Firefox will be using much memory after the 6 hours than it was in the beginning, and that is memory leaks plus memory fragmentation kicking in (which is also tameable by using processes instead of threads).

Something else that I find great about Chrome is its OmniBar. I had loved Firefox's Awesome Bar but OmniBar throws us to a completely different level of browsing. For instance it cuts off the need for two input boxes like Firefox has, since this address bar can do both automatic searching and regular browsing. Way to go Google. As of yet, I'm still trying to find a Firefox plugin that perfectly mimics OmniBar's behaviour.

The incognito mode is also a neat little feature, specially when you are on public computers (or visiting sites that you should not be visiting.....). This is something that has also been included on Internet Explorer 8 (InPrivate) but apparently is yet to be announced on Firefox, even if I'm pretty sure that there's already some addon out there that serves the same purpose.

Lastly there's the download management. Chrome's way of handling downloads is far from perfect, but I still like it better than that of Firefox. I really dislike having a separate window in my task pane just for downloads. It's a real pain in the rear when you're using the feature on Windows that allows you to group windows of the same application. I think there is still some work needed on this.

Now, for the not-so-good things about Chrome.
The spell checker. For God's sake, I still cannot believe that you cannot change the spell checker language without having to restart the whole browser! And even more, you have to crawl through the menus to achieve that. Thank you Firefox for allowing me to do that on the context menu.

The lack of extendibility. Unfortunately, Google Chrome still does not support plugins or addons, nor does it support themes. A shame really, specially because it doesn't seem like it's something that it's being worked upon, since their policy seems to be simplicity. This is kind of both good and bad.

It's still very beta. There's features missing (print selected text anyone?), it's still kinda buggy and well, it still needs a lot of work. As an advantage is the fact that it's an open-source project, meaning that if there are bugs, there's a high likeliness that the community will find and report them, and when those bugs are security-critical, this is a massive advantage over closed-source projects.

I also feel that Chrome's password management is less intuitive and neat than Firefox's. Maybe I've just grown used to the way Firefox handles things. I don't really know.

I believe I have in one way or another, covered out everything on both browsers, at least the things that affect me directly. There is a specific addon for Firefox that I cannot go without, that is Foxmarks. This addon allows me to share bookmarks across several computers, and I simply cannot get anything like it on Google Chrome, which is sad really. I keep a toolbar with my neatly organized bookmarks and if they aren't coherent across all my computers, then it defeats the purpose of having it there.

There's another topic on the «browser-war» that I would like to address here: memory usage. No, I'm not going to show screenshots or make videos of how Firefox uses less or more memory than Chrome, or anything like it. For ages, we've been living on the edge of a good program translating into a program that uses little memory. Nowadays this is a VERY wrong concept. In the early days, the RAM memory available was scarce and sometimes we had to make the craziest juggles to even play certain games. Today, we typically have more RAM memory than we can handle; memory which just sits there on our computer, idling. Now, think for a minute: what good is it to have free memory? Yeah, sure it prevents the computer for using the swap file since there's always free memory for that one application you've just started but hold on for a second. The RAM is extremely fast when compared to your hard drive, so populating the RAM with data that might be handy in the near future is a measure that will for sure make your computer feel faster. If resources for a certain application are being loaded from the RAM rather than from the hard-drive, you will notice that the application runs faster.

So I think you see where I am getting here? I don't really mind if browser X uses more RAM when compared to browser Y, as long as that RAM is being put to good use. That is, as long as that memory is being used to make the application run faster.

Firefox actually has a go at this but the Mozilla guys kind of failed. Firefox does use a ton of memory but it's far from being used to enhance speed, it's basically memory that gets left over and forgotten about. Since Firefox runs in one single process, this also builds up memory fragmentation within the process, which just adds up to the RAM being wasted mindlessly. The idea of fragmentation is as follows: say that you have 3 tabs. The first is using 20Mb of your RAM, the second is using 5Mb and the third is using 15Mb and also assume that they were opened by this order, thus they are ordered like that in the process' memory space (it's much more complex than this, but for this purpose we can simplify it like that). Then you decide that the second tab (the one with 5Mb) is no longer needed and you close it. Tada, you just have created a hole in your memory. Firefox won't reorganize the memory assignments just to fill the gap with the existing tabs, set aside the operating system doing that.

Now there are two scenarios:
- You open a tab that by default uses up 10Mb and therefore it won't fit the gap. (You are wasting the 5Mb that despite being free, they can't be used by whatever else that requires more space)
- You open a tab that starts up at 2Mb, and as you browse on it, it grows to 15Mb. Then you'll have fragmentation. Part of your tab's data will be on that gap, and the rest will be somewhere else.

Either scenario is undesirable and also avoidable with processes instead of tabs.

But hey, I'm going to stop hitting the same key, it's just that apparently Mozilla has pushed this notion way down on their priority stack and this is just foolish. I'm sure it will take a lot of work to switch from threads to processes, but it will be really worth it in the end.

The last remark on the two browsers
There's a new fight going on right now which is the Javascript fight. Google and Mozilla seem to be going head-to-head trying to make their Javascript engine be the fastest one. Truth is that when you compare Google Chrome (any version) to Mozilla Firefox (up until 3.1.0 which is still due to be released), Chrome simply is much faster as it is shown by many reviews out there. However, Mozilla is working on a completely new Javascript engine, TraceMonkey, which at first sight will put a hell of a fight with Chrome's V8. Who benefits from this? Us, users, of course. The more they fight, the better served we are .

To finish off my post, I just would like to clarify the reason I stick with Firefox. The point is that Firefox has been out there for quite a while now, and despite its security flaws here and there that have happened throghout time, it is pretty rock solid and secure. Google Chrome still has a lot to prove, it's still embrionary and it has a lot of growing up to do. Firefox also allows me to use addons that allow me to extend its features and I value this deeply, specially the possibility of using Foxmarks and of changing dictionaries quickly. These are practical things that I cannot go without, hence choosing Firefox for my day-to-day tasks. However, if what you do isn't exactly mission critical and if there aren't any extensions for Firefox that you use, then by all means, stick with Google Chrome. Only with a good userbase a piece of software can be improved.