A few things about me

This is not a meme. There are no tags here. This is merely a list of a few things you might not know about me, that are somewhat related to this subject matter of this blog, and may in some senses color what I say here.

• I very rarely ask other people to be my friends on social networks like Facebook and Myspace... I usually wait for them to ask me because I don't want to impose on people. I don't want to be one of those awkward requests like, I don't know, their mom or something.


• Even though I haven't own a set in a long time, I keep considering going out and buying some Legos or some other similar kind of building toy. I don't know why this thought keeps occurring to me however.


• As I get older, it seems like every song by the late Jim Croce I hear is somehow increasingly evocative to me. At first, it was just "Time in a Bottle," but it seems like its happening with almost all his songs now. I mean, "Operator" I understand, but even "Bad Bad Leroy Brown"? I'm going soft, I really am.


• I have never played a Guitar Hero/Rock Band game... and in fact, my experience with rhythm based games is extremely limited. I never played Dance Dance Revolution or any of its predecessors or clones either.


• Critically acclaimed television series I haven't seen an episode of: Veronica Mars, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, Firefly, Angel, Rescue Me, Dexter, The L-Word, Nip/Tuck, Monk


• While I am a fan of violent movies and video games, I can't really stand realistic gore, blood or depictions of pain at all.

Tags: veronica mars, battlestar galactica, firefly, angel, dexter, l-word, monk, dance dance revolution, guitar hero, rock band, time in a bottle, jim croce, lego, facebook, myspace, rescue me, gore

Calling all JavaScripters: submit your Chrome Experiments for Google I/O!

We launched Chrome Experiments last month to feature some of the crazy things that are now possible with JavaScript. Since then, a number of developers have submitted additional experiments, many of which have made us smile -- take a look at a few of them.

In May, we're going to feature Chrome Experiments during Google I/O, our largest developer event (May 27 - 28), as well as on the Google Code blog.

So if you haven't already started experimenting, here's your chance to create something cool, fun, or quirky with JavaScript. Please submit it by May 26th. We'll reveal the top ten experiments here on the Google Code Blog during Google I/O.

Happy experimenting!

By Aaron Koblin, Google Creative Lab

Shiptracks!

During the past several days there have been some odd lines apparent in the visible satellite photos off our coast (see examples). These lines are often seen off the U.S. west coast in thin stratus and stratocumulus cloud decks. Sometimes they look like someone is playing tic-tac-toe over the Pacific. What causes they strange lines? And why was the U.S. Navy concerned about them?

The answer...these are called shiptracks and they result from the particles produced by the combustion in ship engines . But why would smoke and engine effluent cause white lines?
Nearly all low level clouds (such as stratus and stratocumulus) are composed of small water droplets that form on small particles, called condensation nuclei. Over the ocean, where air is clean, there are relatively few of such particles--thus there are relatively few cloud droplets...that grow big and fat since they don't have much competition. But if you add lots of particles from the smokestacks of ships the situation changes greatly...now there are many cloud condensation nuclei and you get a very large number of small drops in the clouds.

It turns out that if you have a certain amount of liquid water in a cloud, the reflective properties of a cloud with lots of small droplets is very different than one with a fewer number of large droplets. Specifically, clouds with more small droplets are more reflective and thus appear whiter from space. The bottom line: the particles from smokestacks cause more reflective clouds. So as the ship moves it leaves a line of whiter, more reflective clouds...the shiptracks you see! These shiptracks move with the wind and eventually get distorted and faded.

Interestingly, with many ships moving across the world's oceans, this effect can add up...even neutralizing a small bit of global warming. And the Navy was quite concerned about shiptracks during the cold war, since enemies could see where U.S. ships were by following the tracks. Fortunately, nuclear ships have no such problem..they have no impact on the clouds.

Best. Email. Ever.

Last Friday, CaptnKurt and his blog Information Nation won the Pageant of the Transmundane. This morning, I received the following email which I thought was worth sharing.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the mention of and link to Information Nation over at Culture/Cutlery, as well as the posthumous Transmundane Award. I will do my best not to sully the good name of my worthier predecessors. Memo to self: actually read a couple of the other award-winners' posts to see if the really are worthier.

Oh, wait. Did I say posthumous? That can't be right. Additional memo to self: Janine in Personnel needs to look into this...

Well, dead or alive, I think your blog is great, and I will keep an eye on it in the future. And by "keep an eye on it" I mean "steal content from and not attribute it to you".

Just kidding! And by "just kidding", I mean "I'm not kidding".

Regards,

captnkurt

I would consider that an acceptance speech, wouldn't you?

Tags: captnkurt, pageant of the transmundane, acceptance speech, information nation

Who's @ Google I/O - spotlight on Google Web Toolkit

Google Web Toolkit, or GWT for short, recently went live with their 1.6 release, which also included a Google plugin for Eclipse and integration with App Engine's Java language support. Google I/O will be rich with GWT content, including a number of sessions on improving productivity and app performance with GWT. In addition, there will be a number of external GWT developers leading some of these sessions and/or part of the Developer Sandbox.

As mentioned last week, we're giving you a closer look at developers who'll be presenting or demoing at I/O. Here is a taste of these GWT developers below. (New to GWT? Check out this overview)

• JBoss, a Division of Red Hat
  JBoss is well-known by developers for their enterprise open source middleware. Red Hat developer communities such as the Fedora Project and jboss.org have collaborated with Google on a number of developer initiatives over the years including Google Summer of Code, Hibernate Shards, integration with Drools and the Seam Framework and Google Gadgets integration with JBoss Portal. JBoss will be present at the Developer Sandbox.
  


• Timefire
  Timefire produces highly scalable, interactive visualizations of up to millions of data points for business intelligence, analytics, finance, sensor networks, and other industries in what they like to call "Google Maps, but for the time dimension." Their platform's built on Google Web Toolkit from the ground up, but also runs natively on Android. Timefire also uses App Engine's new Java language support for their social charting tool, Gadgets, OpenSocial, GData, Google Maps, GViz, YouTube Player API, and Protocol Buffers. Ray Cromwell will be at the Developer Sandbox as well as speaking on 2 sessions - Building Applications on the Google OpenStack and Progressively Enhance AJAX Applications with Google Web Toolkit and GQuery
  


• StudyBlue
  StudyBlue is an academic network which enables students to connect with each other and offers study tools. StudyBlue's website is built entirely with GWT. According to StudyBlue, GWT allows for complete AJAX integration without sacrificing usability or integration capabilities. StudyBlue will be at the Sandbox.
  


• Lombardi Blueprint
  Lombardi Blueprint is a cloud-based process discovery and documentation platform accessible from any browser. They've used GWT since early 2007 to write the client side of Lombardi Blueprint. GWT has enabled Lombardi to focus on writing and maintaining their Java code, while taking care of creating the browser-specific optimized AJAX for them. Alex Moffat and Damon Lundin will be at the Developer Sandbox as well as leading a session, Effective GWT: Developing a complex, high-performance app with Google Web Toolkit. (Check out Alex Moffat's video about Lombardi's use of GWT)

Finally, one little known fact - a number of Google products were developed with the help of GWT. This includes Google Moderator, Health, Checkout, Image Labeler, and Base.

Don't forget - early registration for Google I/O ends May 1. This means $100 off the standard list price (and a copy of the Chrome comic book). To register, check out the latest sessions, or see more developers who'll be presenting at I/O, visit code.google.com/io.

*Follow us for the latest I/O updates: @googleio.

By Christine Tsai, Google Developer Products

Attention Developers: Google Analytics now has an API!

Today we are pleased to announce the launch the Google Analytics Data Export API. This new API is being launched in Labs and is available to all Analytics users. If you haven't already heard, Google Analytics, is a free, powerful web analytics tool that provides a wealth of data about how visitors find your website, where they go and if they turn into customers.

So what's so exciting about this API?

The Analytics API will allow developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users. Large organizations and agencies now have a standardized platform for integrating Analytics data with other business data. Developers can integrate Google Analytics into their existing products and create standalone Google Analytics applications. Users could see snapshots of their Analytics data in developer created dashboards and gadgets. For example, how would you like to access Google Analytics from your phone? Now you can, with this Android application from Actual Metrics. How about accessing Analytics from your desktop? It's here from Desktop-Reporting.

So how does it work?

We made the API very easy to use. First, there are no complicated developer tokens, you only need to request an authentication token. Second the Analytics Export API is free and available for all Google Analytics users. The Analytics API is a GData API which is based on the Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 syndication formats. This is the same API protocol for Google Calendar, Finance and Webmaster Tools. If you've used any of these APIs in the past, the Analytics Export API will look very familiar to you.

Accessing your Google Analytics data generally follows these three steps:

• Request an authentication token from your Google Account
• Create a URL with the data you'd like to get back from the API
• Make an HTTP request to the Export API using the authentication token and the URL you created

Currently the Google Analytics API supports two GData feeds: an Account Feed (which lists all the Google Analytics accounts and profiles you have access to) and a Data Feed (which allows access to all the data available through the GA interface). The Analytics data feed is very powerful and allows you to query which GA dimensions and metrics you want to access, for a specified date range and even across a subset of data.

So it's now simple to access data GA data to answer questions like:

• What are the top referral sources by conversions to my site?
• What are the top browser language settings in the United States vs. the United Kingdom?
• What are the top keyword refinements and destination pages being used on my internal site search?

How do I get started?

There are three key resources you'll want to use when you start developing on top of the Google Analytics API. First we've provided two client libraries to abstract and simplify the process. The Java client library is available in the GData client library. And a JavaScript client library is now available through the Google AJAX APIs GData loader. We're also working on supporting more programming languages. In the meantime, for any programming language you want to use, you can make requests directly to the API over HTTP and access the data in XML. You can find example code, a developer guide, FAQ, and the complete API reference at Google Code.

Second, be sure to sign up for the Google Analytics API Notify email group so you get the key announcements on feature updates, code changes and other service related news that relate to the API. (Don't worry, this will be a low-traffic email list and we promise to only send emails when there is something important that affects developers.)

Finally, you'll want to become a part of the Google Analytics Developer community by joining the Google Analytics APIs Group for developers. This user forum is a great way to share ideas and get feedback from other developers. We also check in on these forums so let us know what you think about the API there, and share your ideas and your applications with us. We look forward to seeing your creativity!

By Nick Mihailovski and the Google Analytics API Team

Express Checkout: Fighting, Jackie Chan, Miss California

• I think I liked the movie Fighting better when I played it as Def Jam: Fight For NY. I mean, seriously... they look like the same kind of story... only DJ:FFNY has more stars than Fighting.


• There is a lot of controversy about Jackie Chan saying that he thought that the people of China needed to be controlled and was unsure about people having freedom. I thought it was a weird thing to say as well, but then I realized that he was in mainland China, giving a speech to a group of businessmen who liked what he said. Considering that the Chinese government can make decisions that can affect if his movies are available or even open in the country, of course, he is going to take a neutral position. I think people forget that he grew up in Hong Kong before the Chinese takeover and his parents worked at the American Embassy in Canberra, so it seems to me he was playing the situation in a rather smart way. He knew the audience, knew what sort of comment would play well and basically did what he needed to do for his career in mainland China.


• Speaking of boneheaded remarks, there is a lot of furor about the answer Miss California gave at the recent Miss USA pageant. She was asked by Perez Hilton about gay marriage and she said that she believed that marriage should be between a man and a woman. I disagree with her stance strongly, but it was her right as a contestant to give that answer. And really, does anyone have any expectation that what a beauty queen says while trying to win a title has any real merit, because we all remember those epic answers that some have given in the past that have led to widespread changes in the world. Wait, I don't remember any insightful answer... ever. I mean, wasn't it a few years ago when we were all laughing about a contestant from South Carolina talking about maps.

Tags: fighting, def jam, fight for new york, jackie chan, china, hong kong, canberra, american embassy, miss teen usa, gay marriage, california, perez hilton, question, maps