Remember the Lex tool that we used in college days?

Ever wondered who wrote it? It was Eric Schmidt, along with Mike Lesk.

That’s right, the CEO of Google.

I can imagine the CTO of a company to have such a background, but I never would have expected the CEO.

But then again, it’s Google. They can do anything.

After opening a strange envelope with a Sweden stamp on it, I was holding my first Google Adsense cheque.

Not only did I get money, but later in the day, Google (Mail) gave me career advice as well:

Heh.

I’ts amazing what you can whip up in just 15 minutes using CPAN (including reading the documentation).

!/usr/bin/env perl

use warnings;
use strict;

=head1 INTRODUCTION

Checks if there are new unread messages in your GMail Inbox.

=head1 USAGE

$ perl check_gmail.pl
1       Swaroop C H     Looks like check_gmail.pl works


=cut

######## Configuration

Change this to your correct username.

use constant GMAIL_USERNAME => "username";

Change this to your correct password.

use constant GMAIL_PASSWORD => "password";

#### Don't change anything below this.

use LWP::UserAgent;
use XML::Atom::Feed;

my $fetcher = LWP::UserAgent->new();
$fetcher->agent("check_gmail.pl/0.01");

my $request = HTTP::Request->new(
    'GET'   => "https://mail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom",
);
$request->authorization_basic(GMAIL_USERNAME, GMAIL_PASSWORD);

my $response = $fetcher->request($request);

if (! $response->is_success())
{
    die("Unsuccessful in trying to talk to GMail");
}

my $content = $response->content;
my $feed = XML::Atom::Feed->new(\$content);
my @new_messages = $feed->entries();

my $i = 1;
foreach my $message(@new_messages)
{
    print join("\t", $i, $message->author->name,
                    $message->title), "\n";
    $i++;
}

The End

Update : Baishampayan Ghose quickly jotted down a Python version of this script.

I just finished reading ‘The Search’ by John Battelle. What an amazing story to read. Learning about Bill Gross and his IdeaLab alone was worth reading the book, and he still keeps ideating, like Snap.com. Heck, even Picasa came from IdeaLab.

There are many tidbits from the book that were interesting, such as about Louis Monier:

It was Louis Monier who took AltaVista from concept to executable code … “I’ve always been interested in big, nasty problems,” Monier told me. Search provided one of the nastiest. Not only do the numbers scale to the near infinite, there was a very real need for good search in 1994. “Search engines at the time were just terrible,” Monier recalls. “Yahoo was a great catalog, but it had no search. So I set about to work on the crawl.”

About Stanford:

Stanford’s 6,200-acre patch of rolling California woodlands is the most productive incubator of technology companies the world has ever seen. Nestled between the silicon factories of Intel and Apple on one end and Sand Hill Road’s venture capitalists on the other, Stanford is a place where students have already dreamed of starting their own companies or going to work for a pre-IPO start-up. And Stanford’s computer science department, where Yang and Filo hung their hats, is perhaps the most prodigious start-up incubator of them all.

About Yahoo:

Another reason Yahoo succeeded was its sense of fun – a characteristic that would come to define not only Yahoo, but nearly every Internet company seeking the fickle approval of the Web public. Yahoo pioneered some of the Web’s earliest social mores – including, for example, links to competitors’ sites in case a searcher could not find what he or she was looking for, and listing “what’s hot” prominently on its home page, thereby driving extraordinary amounts of traffic to otherwise obscure sites.

Thanks to practices like these, the company captured the public’s imagination early and often, garnering a slew of adoring press notices familiar to anyone watching Google’s rise to prominence over the past few years.

About how a mathematical curiosity led to PageRank:

Page didn’t land on the idea of Web-based search at the outset; far from it. Despite the fact that Stanford alumni were getting rich starting Internet companies, Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes – a classic graph structure. “Computer scientists love graphs,” Page tells me, referring to the mathematical definition of the term. The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. One could reasonably argue that many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students. Winograd agreed, and Page set about pondering the link structure of the Web.

About Google’s geeky sense of humor and control:

On April 29, 2004, Google filed what certainly had to be the most unusual S1 – the formal public offering document – in recent memory. At filing, Google declared it would sell $2,718,281,828 worth of its shares – a seemingly random number, which was, in fact, the mathematical equivalent of e, a concept not unlike pi that has unique characteristics and is well known to serious math geeks. By manipulating the actual offering to provide this knowing wink to nerd humor, Google was in effect declaring: the geeks are in control.

Perhaps, the most interesting part of the book for me was the last chapter – ‘Perfect Search’. Battelle profiles what could be the future of Search.

When it comes to search, as with the Internet itself, the most interesting stuff is yet to come. As every engineer in the search field loves to tell you, search is at best 5 percent solved – we’re not even into the double digits of its potential. And search itself is changing at such a rapid pace – in the past year important innovations have rolled out once a week, if not faster – that attempts to predict the near future are almost certainly doomed.

I’ve been working on the Yahoo! Buzz Index for the past 2 years, and many a time I’ve been asked (by friends and colleagues) why I haven’t changed teams yet. But I often ponder to myself – change to what? Being a rabidly information-hungry internet user (well, I’ve calmed down off late), I always found search engines remarkable and Buzz does a lot of analysis on search, it’s quite fascinating, and the sheer volume of data is equally interesting. I’ve had my share of ups and downs (and some very steep downs), but it has been interesting.

We do a lot more than what Google Trends does, however Buzz has a more practical business model in which the interesting insights are kept for the paid customers and the interesting stories are written for the public.

(more…)

From a Times of India article:

Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt has predicted that India and not China will become the world’s biggest Internet market in “about five or ten years from now, based on current trends.”

And what’s more, Schmidt’s other futurist view is that Hindi, not Hispanic, could become one of the world’s three Internet languages, in conjunction with English and Chinese.

Schmidt’s remarkable predictions have left techies and the Internet market analysts scrambling to ask what Google was doing to prepare for a tomorrow when India is virtually the Internet and Internet is India?

That’s an interesting question. What does have Google in mind?

On a related note, the Yahoo! India Summer Special website is interesting as well.

Then again, I’m more interested in whether iTunes is coming to India.

A message by Bram on vim-announce:

The past few years many people have sponsored my work on Vim. Now version 7 is nearing completion, beta testing will start soon, very soon. A big thanks to all who supported me! I would not have been able to do this without your help.

But things are going to change. I have accepted a job offer and will go back to a full time job in a few months. To avoid speculation and rumours: I am going to work for Google in Zurich. Fortunately I can spend part of my time on Vim. But it will obviously be less than the past few years when I was working 150% of my time on Vim.

I will no longer need sponsorship to survive. Therefore, starting the end of March, all money given for Vim sponsorship and registration will go to the project in Kibaale, Uganda. And no, this is not an April fools joke.

The voting will continue as before. And seeing people give money will motivate me to keep working on Vim. The children need the help much more than me anyway. Thus please keep sending money!

P.S. Yes, I have donated to Vim before.

I just can’t wait.

Update on 14th April : It has arrived.

Somebody pointed to this in our intranet. From the Gaim website :

I (Sean) have been hired by Google, moved to Seattle, and have been working on the Google Talk team for about a month and a half. The goal of Google Talk is to make real-time communication as open as possible, and in that regard, I’ve been working to offer all of Google Talk’s features into other clients. Currently, I’m working on making it as easy as possible for other clients to use Google Talk’s voice features. You can expect Gaim and other clients to be interoperable with Google Talk’s voice features in the near future.

On a related note, the gaim-vv project—which aimed to offer a framework for voice and video support in Gaim—is being merged back into Gaim proper for hopeful incorporation into Gaim 2.0.0. This will be used to support Google Talk’s voice as well as MSN and Yahoo! webcams.

Wow! I was praying for something like this to happen.

There’s an article in the Times of India today on the presence of the Y, A and G companies in Bangalore:

(Click on the image to view it in full size)

It’s nice to see the media showing that cool stuff does get done in Bangalore. As you can see, the Y! Bangalore R&D team is 400 strong now… that’s a population explosion considering we were only 80-90 when I started out. Aah, the good old days…

One thing to notice is that they have words from the CEO of Amazon Bangalore and from the CTO of Yahoo! Bangalore, but no one from Google Bangalore! Relatedly, I hear about people joining Yahoo! and about people joining Amazon – how come I never hear about people joining Google in Bangalore? Is something happening in Google at Bangalore at all?

This is the first time ever that I’m seeing such a mailer daemon error:

Mail Delivery Subsystem <mailer-daemon@gmail.com> to me

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

    fink-beginners @ lists.sourceforge.net

Technical details of permanent failure:
TEMP_FAILURE: Too many connections to lists.sourceforge.net

Anybody else is facing this problem?