google

Google Chrome will thrash to disk a lot to disk, at least in version 0.2.149.27, build 1583 (the first publically available beta) in Windows XP. It is so bad that my entire computer locks up a bit and becomes unresponsive. Disabling phishing and malware protection seems to stop the thrashing:

1. Click on the monkey-wrench icon to the right of the address bar.
2. Choose "Options" from the menu.
3. Click the "Under the Hood" tab
4. Disable the "Enable phishing and malware protection" check-box

[img_assist|nid=321|title=Google Chrome Disable Malware and Phishing Protection|desc=|link=none|align=none|width=418|height=315]

According to procmon it is writing to this filename: <systemdriveletter>:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Safe Browsing. There is only one other site where people are talking about this thrashing problem, at Ars Technica.

I use GMail for email, Google Reader for feeds, and Google Calendar as my organizer. Yeah, I'm Google's bitch. I recently discovered this Better Gmail extension. It doesn't have that much useful stuff. The one thing I find really handy is the integration of Google Reader and Calendar into the GMail sidebar. I no longer need 3 Firefox tabs open for these apps. It kind of takes up a lot of screen real estate opening up Reader and Calendar in an frame within GMail but with more javascript hacking this could be improved even more. Maybe Google will more tightly integrate these apps now that someone else has done it as a proof-of-concept.

[img_assist|nid=215|title=GMail Lockdown Screenshot|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=300|height=119]
All of a sudden I was logged out of GMail and when I refreshed the page, I got this message about "unusual usage of your account."

I do use checkgmail and I sometimes have GMail open on two different browsers, one at home and one at work. Never caused any problem before. I think I'll fill out their form.

I just created a custom search engine with Google's new Custom Search feature as part of Google Co-op. It's called Recipe Search. Just type in some ingredients and it will search all the best recipe websites. You can then narrow your search down further by only looking only at sites specializing in seafood, vegetarian, international cuisine, etc...

I am looking for people to help maintain and improve this search engine. If anyone has some knowledge of recipe websites and has an interest in helping out with this project, please let me know and I can invite you do be a collaborator.

Find out when you will run of of GMail space with this calculator. Looks like the pace of my usage is way behind the pace of Google's deployment of more disk space.

I went to a presentation by a Google engineer, Narayanan "Shiva" Shivakumar, tonight at the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver. It was organized by HPC Vancouver. He talked about some of the backend things that power Google, such as the hardware itself, GFS (Google File System), MapReduce (an abstract parallelization interface for running algorithms on large data sets) (see also MapReduce at Wikipedia), and BigTable (a massive hash table, their own custom database).

He showed some pictures illustrating the growth in Google's computing power GFS form its days in a Stanford lab to the present in massive data centres. The GFS is amazing, accessing redundant 64MB chunks on file servers with everything automatically redundant-ized and load-balanced automatically (and the amount of redundancy is variable depending on what the data is). I thought MapReduce was pretty cool. Reminded me of the map and reduce functions in Python.

Near the beginning of his talk he mentioned that they needed a lot of computing power to compute page rank and mentioned something about constructing a large graph where each node is a URL or HTTP page and each edge represents a link (I assume the graph is directed?). He did not say anything more about that problem though...

Update (2006-07-29): I think I may have gotten food poisoning from the refreshments at this event. If anyone else good food poisoning please let me know. I am trying to figure out if I got infected at this event or at lunch that day.