Google has given Google Webmaster Tools to "provide you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly". Although I have yet to use it for that purpose, I do occasionally log in and check what Google have done with the tools. They haven’t updated it much since the last time I logged in, except for maybe tweaking the dashboard a tad.

But I did notice something odd. Here is what was displayed on the summary:

and here is a Google search result for kavinda:

How did Google show that result of a blog post I did today if Googlebot last accessed home page on Jul 24, 2007? Is the data on Google Webmasters Tools in-accurate or does Google update its index without crawling the site? rss feeds? feedburner?

Some of us got blown away by twitter, some of us just got annoyed that it didnt work with Google Talk for Google Apps. But surely it should work right?

For GTalk to talk with Twitter you only need to add/invite twitter@twitter.com to your Google Talk contacts. It will instantly accept the invitation and you're only your way. It’s that simple. However that's only if you're signing in using a Gmail account (e.g. yourmailadd@gmail.com).

If you're a user of Google Apps and use Google Talk with that account, then simply adding/inviting twitter@twitter.com will get you nowhere. At least that’s where I got.

So, why didn’t it work?

When I checked the "Service Settings" for chat in the Google Apps Domain Control panel, it was obvious; to IM outside the Google network, you will need to edit your Service (SRV) records in domain settings. Ah, so that’s why!

The support document from Google said I'd need to enter the following DNS entries.

_xmpp-server._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

_jabber._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

Something was still not right; the invite to twitter@twitter.com was not getting accepted; even after leaving plenty of time for DNS entries to propagate.

It was time to try out another IM client. Google supports the jabber/XMPP protocol. This means I should be able to use any other IM client that supports the jabber/XMPP protocols.  

I choose Pidgin because it had a useful debug window! So I installed Pidgen and configured it to connect to Google Talk for my domain as instructed, and tried to sign in.

Now I'm getting somewhere! I was still missing some more DNS entries. _xmpp-client._tcp.kavinda.net could not be found. After a quick nslookup to see the entries for _xmpp-client._tcp.gmail.com

I added similar entries for my domain kavinda.net.

_xmpp-client._tcp.yourDomainName.com.  IN SRV  5 0 5222 talk.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.yourDomainName.com.  IN SRV 20 0 5222 talk1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.yourDomainName.com.  IN SRV 20 0 5222 talk2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.yourDomainName.com.  IN SRV 20 0 5222 talk3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.yourDomainName.com.  IN SRV 20 0 5222 talk4.l.google.com.

In goDaddy domain control pannel you'd enter the record,
_xmpp-client._tcp.kavinda.net.  IN SRV  5 0 5222 talk.l.google.com.
like:

That did the trick, I was able to sign into Pidgen. Now Back to Google Talk; Signed in using my Google Apps account, added twitter@twitter.com and it was accepted instantly. I had arrived.

I was surprised that Microsoft Live Search had managed to gain market share from Google and Yahoo according to recent comScore ratings. It was attributed to the Live Search Club. A place where you play games, earn tickets and get prizes.

The games were setup with a search box at the bottom so that when you were looking for information you could continently do the search within the same page. So during a game a player would do many searches on the internet. Also once in a while, it would do a search on its own and show the results (for example, when you’ve solved something, it would do a related image search).

I guess this is an effective way to get people to use live search and get used to it. However, to me it only

Here is a little command that I came across when I was looking for a quick and easy way to delete some old log files from my system.

C:\>forfiles /?

FORFILES [/P pathname] [/M searchmask] [/S]
         [/C command] [/D [+ | -] {MM/dd/yyyy | dd}]

Description:
    Selects a file (or set of files) and executes a
    command on that file. This is helpful for batch jobs.

As the command descriptions suggests, its great for using in a .bat file, so I put following line in a cleanLogs.bat file, and scheduled a task to run the batch job every weekend to clean up my system of old and unwanted logs.

forfiles /p E:\Logs\ /s /m *.log /d -60 /c "cmd /c del @path"

forfiles.exe is a tool that has existed in old res kits and has been moved to the standard installation of the newer Microsoft operating systems like Windows Vista and Windows 2003.

Its Official. Google has acquired FeedBurner.

I've been running the released version of DasBlog 1.9 [DasBlog 1.9.6264] from just about the time it was released (on the 264th day of 2006). It’s been more than six months and I finally do have my SLT ADSL connection, so I upgraded my blog to one of the more recent DasBlog daily builds.

One of the more attractive new features I noticed at once was under the “Spammer Settings“. It is that DasBlog now supports the comment spam killer Akismet.

What’s cool about it is that its free for personal use, so to get this working in DasBlog all you need to do is get yourself something called an "API key" to activate and use it.

To get a key:
 1) Logging to your WordPress.com account or Create yourself an account (creating an account only would do, without creating a blog).
 2) Go to "Your profile" (“Your profile” is located under "Users")
 3) Copy your WordPress.Com API key from it.

So, after you have your key in the DasBlog Akismet configuration and have things working; when a comment is made DasBlog will submit it to the Akismet web service which in-turn will tell DasBlog if its spam or not.

After having it setup I tried it out by entering a “spammy” comment. After submitting the comment I saw a message saying “Your comment has been received and is under review for potential violation of site guidelines. Do not re-submit.”, so I guess its all good. 

On the other-hand spammers will keep re-submitting till one gets through; because its not like they will listen just because we say to what we say "Do not re-submit"! However Akismet sounds very confident when it says:

"...without giving too much of the secret sauce away, we can safely say that it would be pretty difficult to poison Akismet. We use dozens of factors to determine the spamminess of a submission, and we also have an identity attached to everyone using and contributing to the system, which allows us to do some interesting things with weighting and clustering activity."

Very feisty, I love it.

Google shifted gears to venture a little deeper into the desktop by launching Google Gears(Beta), an exciting and new open source project that will bring offline capabilities to web applications via a browser extension. Google Reader was the first to put this new technology into use with an offline mode.

"Google Gears builds on the web's existing programming model by introducing new JavaScript APIs for sophisticated data storage, application caching, and multi-threading features. With these APIs, developers can bring offline capabilities to even their most complex web applications. Google Gears works with all major browsers on all major platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux." - Google Press Center

Google Docs and Gmail seem to be the other obvious candidates to enable offline capabilities. This also means a "Google Office" product could be just around the corner. However, even if there eventually is such a product I don't think its going to compete with the likes of MS Office but instead cater to a different section of end users with different needs.

A very exciting technology that Microsoft calls “Microsoft Surface” was unveiled at the All Things Digital conference by Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer. It’s a “coffee table” that not only is a multi touch interface but it can also recognize what’s kept on it.

Although multi-touch interfaces like the ones that Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel has been developing for years or the iPhone interface have been around now, what sets the “Microsoft Surface” apart is its unique ability to recognize objects like cell phones, cameras or even a beer glasses that are kept on top of it. Not only recognizing but knowing what to do with it!

If you thought new Apple iPhone was cool, this is going to blow your mind! It may essentially revolutionize the way we interact with computers in the future.

The product is currently being targeted at Restaurants, Hotels, Retail Locations and Casino Resorts, so we’d not be able to get our hands on one just yet. But eventually the prices would come down we’d have one at every household. In Sri Lanka we’re still working on getting electricity to every home. So it may take a while.

Last Friday we headed down to the Majestic cinema to watch the latest action of the web slinging superhero in Spiderman 3. Although the film itself did not live up to my expectations, going to the cinema proved to be a decent way to escape the heat of Colombo.

The film starts showing our friendly neighbourhood Spider having settled down to a nice rhythm in love with the girl of his dreams, studies on track and also managing his superhero duties pretty well. Then the story gets scattered in too many directions and seems all over the place.

The other thing that struck me is that Peter Parker needs to take up some crying lessons; he was terrible at it. Merill who was in the next seat promptly suggested that Peter should take lessons from Shah Rukh Khan!

The action, animations and special effects where pretty decent. In that sence it was it was a decent enough movie. Kids are bound to like it more than the adults. So, if you’re interested you can book your tickets at www.Etickets.lk which now includes the Savoy Cinema, Majestic Cinema and the Liberty Cinema. Alternatively there is mticket; a new service from Dialog GSM exclusively for its post-paid customers, where you can dial 444 and make a reservation. I haven’t  tried it yet so I’m not sure how good it is.

No offence to you ladies.. this is just another one "From my inbox":

A man was lying on a blanket at the beach He had no arms or legs.  Three women were walking past and felt sorry for the poor man.

The first woman said "Have you ever had a hug"
The man said "No", So she gave him a hug and walked on.

The second woman said "Have you ever had a kiss".
The man said "No", So she gave him a kiss and walked on.

The third woman walked over to him, knelt down and whispered in his ear, "Have you ever been f****d?
The fellow looked up in amazement and said "No". The woman smiled and said "You will be when the tide comes in."