Fridaygram

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

The final launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour is now scheduled for early next week. This will be the next-to-last mission planned for the US Space Shuttle program. As a young nerd, I loved to watch the progress of the space program. Almost as amazing as the missions themselves was the fact that I could see it all live on television, even from hundreds of thousands of miles away.

Endeavour is going to do much better than that. You can go to www.youtube.com/pbsnewshour and submit video questions for the crew of Endeavour. The crew will select some of the questions and answer them live on YouTube. For more details, see the Official Google Blog.

Much closer to home, and completely unrelated, Google Chrome got a pretty slick new feature in the stable release this week. You can now use voice input with Google Translate in Chrome. In many languages, you can even click Listen to hear the translation. This feature uses the HTML speech input API. Now I can practice those languages I never quite mastered on my last vacation.



For more on what you can develop with HTML5 and other open web technologies, see the Chrome Experiments site.

Finally, if you want to know why this Space Shuttle mission includes squids, read this page.