Deems' Weblog » april fools

Gmail turns 5!

Deems — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 06:56:10 +0000

April fools pranks aside, except this one! Released on April Fools day back in 2004 everyone thought it was most likely a joke – a beta product released by Google offering users a free email account with tons of space.

Five years down the line, it might still be in beta, but it’s most likely one of the best email products out there – and best of all it’s FREE!

The engineers who created Gmail were frustrated with the existing email solutions, and wanted to build a better tool for people who got a lot of mail, which meant rethinking everything from the ground up. They built an architecture that was a combination of HTML and JavaScript (this later became known as AJAX), which offered a smoother, faster interface. And they designed Gmail with the most demanding users in mind — Googlers who got hundreds of messages each day and power users with broadband connections, back when 56k modems were still the norm. – source Google Blog.

There have been lots of upgrades to Gmail since it’s release and there are still many more to come. With the 15GB of space you get with your email account and the powerful tagging and searching of emails you never need to worry about deleting emails to save on space – just tag and archive!

Want to know more or be kept up to date with changes to Gmail – then visit their blog or subsribe to their Gmail feed

Google Chrome in 3D

Deems — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:55:54 +0000

How awesome is this – finally 3D comes to a browser near you – none other than Google’s Chrome browser now supports 3D viewing.

For detailed instructions hurry on over to Google’s Chrome 3D page now!
All powered by new technology from Google called CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity).

Conficker worm virus set to strike 1 April

Deems — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:07:38 +0000

If you’re like me your surfing habbits are safe and you know not to just open up any executable sent to you or visit just any website link sent to you, even from those you trust as their machines may have been compromised.

Some people, however, aren’t as diligent and will click on and open just about anything sent to them without worrying about the consequences – until it’s too late.

For some, they may be none the wiser – until midnight tonight that is.

The Conficker worm is nothing new – it’s been around since late last year and the various anti-virus companies have been keeping track of it and looking out for variations. Up until now it’s been a dormant virus like a sleeper cell just waiting for instructions to strike – and those instructions should be coming in on April 1st.

Windows Secrets have published an article freely available to paid- and non-subscribers giving more detail about the Virus and how to remove it. There’s also a report on CBS’s 60-Minutes here.

For more information about the Conficker worm check out CNET’s FAQ.

Thanks, Koukla for the tip.