How Microsoft Tricks Its Users

Man, sometimes you just have to laugh when you use Microsoft and their software. I'm home for the Canadian Thanksgiving Weekend, which means I upgrade software and clean up my parents Windows XP computer. Today I visited Windows Update to get all the latest fixes (that aren't done in the auto updates), and the first page said that I had to download the latest version of the Windows Updater software. Among the list of advantages to this new version were things like resuming downloads, smaller download sizes, Windows and Office downloads in one program, and other features that I can't remember. I looked specifically if they were adding any copy protection or piracy checking, and that was not in the list. When I downloaded this new version of the software it downloaded only one package, called "Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool (KB892130)". I just love how Microsoft lied to me, saying it was this all new improved version of the updater tool, mentioned nothing about piracy checking, and then loads up a tool that serves no purpose but to check if my Windows is pirated.

Don't worry, I have the corporate version of Windows, which means they do no checking anyways.

Google Talk

You've probably heard of Google's instant messaging / voice messaging software called "Google Talk". I've seen more and more screenshots of people using Google Talk, either to test it out, or to use it extensively. I decided to check it out myself today, primarily because it works on the Jabber protocol, and I already have a Jabber account at jabber.org. In my research I found out that while Google Talk does use the Jabber protocol, the talk.google.com servers don't communicate with other Jabber servers. I was hoping I could use my preexisting @jabber.org account to chat with my @gmail.com friends, but have had no such luck. Google claims that they are working on it, and will update the service to support 3rd party servers, but they are still working out the kinks (like IM spam). So I will give this Google Talk thing a go, sans the voice functions. The nice thing is that if you already have a gmail account, then you already have a google talk account and you just add the account to your favourite jabber client.

I would still prefer that people add me under my "tiosc@jabber.org" account, but if you do use Google Talk, then you can add me under "dunnadam@gmail.com". It would be nice to use Jabber at least once to talk with someone! You can read more about Google Talk here, and you can find out how to add your account to the best instant messaging client here.

Google's Presentation, Room Panorama

On Tuesday (I know, I'm a little behind on these posts) Google gave a presentation here at UBC titled "Organizing The World's Information". Three Google engineers came up from Mountain View, along with one intern from UBC (the kid in white in the photos) to give the presentation. The presentation basically had the objective of recruiting, although no effort was made to hide this fact. It started with Dave Marwood, a UBC alumni himself, talking about the challenges that Google faces, like distributed processing, search algorithms, easy user interfaces, etc. He then talked about the lifestyle at Google, which morphed into how one could apply to work at Google. After the slideshow was finished, there were questions and answers, most having to do with recruitment, some about secret Google projects (to which they claimed ignorance). Pizza and pop were given out before the event started, and pens and long sleeve shirts were distributed afterwards. A raffle was also held for other Google clothing items. The talk was quite interesting, and they tried to show all the different areas that Google does research in, not just search. I didn't take any pictures of the slides, out of respect and copyright concerns, but I did get one of the opening slide, showing the presenters names. The lighting wasn't the greatest, and I kept my flash off, so some of the pics are also blurry. I picked up one of the orange pens, and the two shots of the shirt are the large that I picked up, front then back. I really don't feel like downscaling the pictures, so all of them are presented in the full 5.1 surround pixels.
Google raffle prizes on table
Slide 0
A fair turnout
Dave Marwood in background with intern in front
The recruitment part of the presentation
Dave Marwood and Wenxin Li
Intern and Kelly Poon
Savages fighting it out for Google shirts
Empty pizza boxes
Different angle of pizza boxes
Crowds starting to die off
People mingling
Google pens!
Front of Google shirt
Back of Google shirt

Speaking of surround pixels, last night I finished the compile (some eight hours) of a panorama tool called hugin. For the first test, I took five pictures of my room (in its messy-state) and stitched them together in hugin. Some Gimping had to be done to crop and scale, as I haven't figured out all the settings yet, and you will notice that the right-most picture was blurry. On Thanksgiving I will get an old tripod from my house and do more of this panorama stuff so that people on the other side of the world can better experience UBC life ;) Until then, all you get is my room.