Developing products at the Speed and Scale of Google

Google Hyderabad Engineering is organizing a talk on “Developing products at the Speed and Scale of Google”. Ashish Kumar, Google’s Engineering Manager, will be delivering the talk. Asish is responsible for steering and managing the 100+ Engineering Tools team that builds tools for most engineers at Google.  He will talk about some of the key infrastructure elements that enable more than 6000 developers distributed over 40 offices to work together on more than 2000 projects. Limited seats. Register here by 07-Aug-2010.

Talk     : Developing products at the Speed and Scale of Google.

Date    : Tuesday, August 10, 2010, 6:00 PM onwards.

Venue : Google Campus, DIvyaShree Omega, Hyderabad 

Update: The talk has been re-scheduled to Wednesday, August 11, 2010.

Update-1: Have pinged the organizers to arrange for live streaming (as requested by many of my readers). The organizers have replied back saying this option will be considered for the talks in future. For this time around, the video will be recorded and shared later.

-- Varun

RIP Google Wave!!

Google Wave is now history. Google has decided to discontinue Wave but the technology behind that will be used in other products. I was one of the beta testers for Google Wave and have developed quite a lot of extensions for it. It is sad to know that Google is stopping the development on Wave. From the Google’s official blog post:

“Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily ‘liberate’ their content from Wave.”

“We celebrate our failures” -- Google’s CEO Schmidt

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [August 01, 2010]

Science & Technology

• Why People think computers can’t. Link.
• Yahoo! Japan to use the Google search in future. Link.
• Oracle rebrands Java. Breaks Eclipse. Link.
• Time saving auto hotkeys for windows. Link.
• Firefox 3.6.8 released. Link.

Social Media

• Twitter testing inline photos and videos. Link.
• Twitter begins user stream testing. Link.
• Facebook questions beta is out. Link.

Google

• Google’s CEO says there is no need for ‘Google Me’. Link.
• How to get a Google Nexus One. Link.
• Google docs to get a new file type “Punch”. Link.
• Google CEO announces Zynga partnership. Link.
• Upcoming GMail features. Link.
• YouTube launches a music video discovery page. Link.
• YouTube’s new embedding code supports HTML5. Link.
• Google places for Android gets Yelp like interface. Link.
• Play hidden snake game in YouTube. Link.
• YouTube increases the max video length to 15 mins. Link.

Gadgets

• Jailbreaking iPhone is legal now. Link.
• Apple announces new products on its store including Mac Pro and Magic Trackpad. Link.
• Froyo for Samsung Galaxy S leaked. Link.
• Froyo for HTC Incredible leaked. Link.
• Amazon reveals new Kindle. Link.
• Smartpen – a pen which records and playback what you wrote. Link.
• Android user interface stencil kit. Link.

India

• ISB iDiya 2010, a national social idea challenge announced. Link.
• IT dept has extended the last day for tax filing to 4-Aug-2010 due to technical issues on e-filing site.Link.

-- Varun

Happy friendship day!

Happy friendship day to all the readers of Varun’s Scratchpad! :-)

-- Varun

[How to] Control Powerpoint presentation with your Android phone

Ever had the pain of asking someone to control the slides when you are giving a business presentation? Here is an awesome solution for you -- an application in Android market to help you control your presentation from your Android phone. While there are lots of applications available in the market to control your PC from the Android device, Gmote stands out from all of them in terms of the features offered. Using Gmote, you can control the presentation on your PC / laptop, play media files, browse through the contents on your laptop, etc. Gmote application requires a server to be up and running on the PC side. Gmote client runs on the Android device and communicates with the server on your PC. Gmote client can talk to the server over WiFi as well as the mobile 3G network (which not many applications support). Another good thing is Gmote has support for Windows, Linux and Mac.

 

Installation procedure & Configuration

• On your android device, download and install the application ‘Gmote 2.0’ from the market.
• Download the Gmote server from here. Need to have admin privileges to install the same.
• Start the server on the PC which you want to control.
• Gmote server will prompt you to set a password to your PC. The same has to used while connecting from the phone.
• After that it will show the Media Path selector. Choose the location of media files which you wish to run remotely.
• Start the client on the Android device. It will prompt you for the server details and the password.
• Done. You are all set to control your PC from the phone.

Controlling the presentation from the phone

• Make sure you have done all the configurations mentioned above.
• Select ‘Browse’ from the menu and navigate to the power point file (.ppt / .pps)
• Choose the option ‘Play on Computer’ from the file browser.
• Click on the power point file to launch it on your PC.
• Once the presentation is launched, Gmote remote control screen will be shown.
• Press the play button to start the presentation. Use the left and right keys to navigate through the slides.

What else I can do with Gmote?

• Use your Android phone as a remote mouse / keyboard for your PC.
• You can play the media files on your PC from the phone.
• Streaming of media files on your PC to the phone.
• You can control the DVD drive on your PC.
• Browse through the shared files on your PC.
• Open a web page on your PC from the phone.

Check out the help page of Gmote. The only other application which comes closer to Gmote is RemoteDroid.

-- Varun