It sounds like Google will be announcing
a Canadian version of Google Finance — they announced it a bit too
early and replaced the original article article with a “woops, check
back soon” statement.

Oops. We hit the button too soon. Watch for news about Google Finance in Canada next Tuesday.

But thanks to the internet (or Google should I say?) once it’s on
the web, it’s usually permanent — no matter how hard you try. So here
is the full text of their “deleted” post for your enjoyment.

Posted by Dion Loy, Google Finance engineer
We’re pleased to introduce Google Finance Canada, a localized version
of Google Finance tailored specifically, as you might guess, for
Canadian investors. Canadians are the second largest group of Google
Finance users, and as a Canadian myself, I’m excited to see Canadian
financial information presented in the familiar easy to use Google
Finance format. This new edition includes:

Top financial news from Canadian sources
Search with a preference for Canadian companies
Front-page high level economic data from the Bank of Canada
Portfolios in Canadian currency (or the currency of your choice)
Equity data from the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX Venture Exchange, and Canadian mutual funds

In addition, stock quotes and charts for Canadian-listed companies are now available through the Google.com web search

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Google « 

Technorati Tags: google, web, internet, news

Auto Warehousing Co. CIO Dale Frantz says his
decision to go from a Windows shop to one powered by Apple is based on
time and labor spent maintaining Windows.

A week ago, I noted that Auto Warehousing Co. was switching to the Mac platform.
The move, first chronicled by Computerworld, left a few loose ends on
Frantz’s business case. The biggest loose end: I looked like Frantz was
adding costs with an unclear return.

I emailed Frantz to get some more color on his
decision. Without offering specific return targets he did tie up a the
loose ends. Instead of interpreting his remarks and paraphrasing I
thought it was best to let him tell it. Here’s his reply to my question
about his business case for switching to the Mac on the front end of
his infrastructure.

Our proprietary application (written and
maintained in-house) is not Vista compatible. That was our first and
foremost problem that we needed to solve. We have a client/server
solution, with the client written in PowerBuilder, and Microsoft SQL Server on the back-end. There are no plans to move away from Microsoft SQL Server, only to rewrite the client app in Java.

That having been said, Vista is coming, and it is
unclear how long we will be able to delay its introduction into our
facilities. Our company is growing, and Microsoft says they will stop selling XP in any flavor no later than Jan 31, 2008. In
any event, at some point in the next 6-12 months we will be unable to
buy Windows XP pre-installed on a box anymore. This meant that we
needed to develop a migration strategy for our application (which we
have decided to recode in Java, which we anticipate taking 18-24
months).

All of our revenue-generating operations occur in
an automobile shop environment, and the computers that run our
application in the shop do not require any additional software (no
Office, etc.). At this point it is only those PC’s (several hundred in the US/Canada) that we are looking at replacing with 17″ iMacs. There is no plan today to migrate our offices (HR, Finance, etc.) to Mac’s.

We did a study to analyze the actual cost of “Windows” maintenance and support. In
part, we did this by asking our I/S Operations group to have their
technicians log all support calls that were specifically “windows”
related - windows crashed, locked up, driver errors, DLL failures,
whatever. We also logged any additional time spent on any Windows maintenance. In
other words, we tried to identify as best we could how many man-hours
we were investing in simply the “care and feeding” of Windows to keep
it up and running. When the analysis was complete, the
results were unbelievable - simply unbelievable how much time, effort
and money we were investing into the care and feeding of Windows on a
PC. When you add that internal support cost into the ROI calculation for Macs the results were undeniable. There
are those who would say that the Mac hardware is more expensive than a
PC, especially when you add Parallels and a Windows XP OEM license, and
if you stop there, that is true (but not a huge difference). However,
when you throw the Windows support cost in to the matrix, the results
fall drastically towards the Mac, based upon our estimates. Our
proof of concept testing found that Windows running on a Mac in the
Parallels virtual environment did not require the same degree of
support as full-blown Windows PC’s - much less, in fact.

As part of my due diligence I have visited 2 companies that have between 10,000 - 20,000 Macs on their network. In both cases the companies have blended networks, supporting both Mac’s and Windows PC’s. In both cases Mac XServes were the controlling architecture. The
network management tools and support software that Apple provides
allows each of these companies to have fewer than five I/S support
personnel. I have more than 5 just to support our fleet of Windows PC’s and related devices.

So, in summary, we found the true cost to support
a single PC in the shop environment to greatly outweigh the minimal
difference in hardware/software cost between a Mac and PC with Vista. It
is our belief that we will achieve a significant savings with this move
to Macs on the shop floor, as well as increase system reliability and
user satisfaction.

Frantz added that his due diligence was the result
of asking colleagues about their infrastructure. Few are actively
documenting the results of a switch from Windows to the Mac so
“industry networking is invaluable,” says Frantz.

More reading:

• Windows to Mac Chronicles.
• Vista-Mac Showdown.

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Technology « 

Technorati Tags: business, money, software, man, microsoft

Google has introduced some new interface elements to Google
Spreadsheets that make it easier to lock rows and sort columns. The new
sortbar is a
draggable break between your headers and data — it’s an intuitive way to create locked columns and to sort rows.

Another new feature is quick add. When you highlight a group of
numeric cells, you will find their sum in the lower right corner — this
change makes using spreadsheets a bit more interactive by allowing the
user to perform a simple calculations without writing formulas like
“=SUM(A5:A8)” in another cell.

Previously, Google Spreadsheets was only available on supported
browsers — now, regardless of your browser (supported or not), you are
at least able to view your spreadsheets. It’s too bad this application
isn’t 100% compatible with all browsers, but this is a good compromise
for now.

Read more about the new features here.

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Google « 

Technorati Tags: google

When Facebook first announced its new ‘Platform’ whereby third-party
companies could built applications and set-up shop within the social
networking site, many pronounced its ‘openness’ as a good thing, since
it gives developers access to the site’s millions of users. And whilst
access to all of those users is something no web startup should
dismiss, it did, and still does, make we wonder what impact Facebook Platform will have on the rest of the web?

…where does this leave the ’small pieces, loosely
joined’ philosophy of the net? If everybody sets up shop in Facebook,
keeping all the action inside the social network site, where does that
leave the rest of the web?

Over at Read/WriteWeb, Richard MacManus wrote a great post
looking at how ‘open’ Facebook really is, since it using it’s own
version of web standards, is, by design, a closed network in terms of
privacy (you have to join the site, and be authorized to view
profiles), and it doesn’t support standards to enable users to move
their data elsewhere.

Some have gone as far as to call Facebook the new AOL.

So, is Facebook good for the web? Take my poll, but also let’s debate this in the comments.

Is Facebook Platform good for the web?

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myDots « 

Technorati Tags: web, design, social network, man

Launching today, Boxedup is a
social bookmarking service for “things you want”. Think of it as a
universal wishlist (similar to Amazon’s wishlist but not confined to
one company’s store), with bolted on social networking to make it
easier to keep track of what products your friends are interested in,
and as a way of discovering new items for yourself through the site’s
other users. The service has evolved out of earlier effort by
co-founder Jeremy Baines, called Gigtagging, which I profiled last November.

To begin using the service, after signing up, you’re required to
install an add-on for Firefox or Internet Explorer, or if you prefer,
use the provided ‘bookmarklet’. Then when you’re browsing an e-commerce
site or product page, you can, with one click, begin adding a
particular product to you Boxedup wishlist.

I visited Freecom’s store, and added a Skype speaker phone to my
Boxedup wishlist. A bit like using the bookmaking service, delicious, I
was given the option of editing the title (which was grabbed from the
product page’s HTML title), and adding a description and keyword
‘tags’, as well as price. Boxedup also attempted to scrape any images
from the page, but on this occasion didn’t offer me the image of the
phone itself. Scraping is hardly an exact science — and a product like
Boxedup is evidence that a standard micro-format for product pages
would really benefit users. However, on most other occasions it worked
just fine. Baines tells me that improving scraping is the company’s
main priority, but without standards it’s a challenge for everybody.

Along with creating a ‘universal’ wishlist that works across any web
store or product page, Boxedup offers a number of social features. Each
user has the standard profile, with tabs taking you to their various
lists of “things I want”, and “things I have”, as well as a page of
people they’ve befriended on the site. With regards to the first two,
the idea is that you can express which products you want, but also
alert your social network when you’ve finally got them. The ‘friends’
are is where you can track other people’s Boxedup activity.

There’s quite a bit of power in the social aspect of Boxedup. For
example, if you see an item in a friend’s list, you can nominate that
you’ll purchase it for them so that they don’t receive a duplicate.
There’s also lots of opportunity for discoverability. Each profile, for
example, has a stream of activity similar to Facebook. This gives you a
way — in near realtime — to see what items people in your social
network are adding to their wishlist or have purchased etc. You can
also get a snapshot of activity across the site as a whole, via the
homepage, giving Boxedup a sort of StumbleUpon effect.

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Ping « 

Technorati Tags: free, web, internet, social network

It’s not unusual for Google to acquire a company and make their
flagship product completely free — it has happened several times in the
past with Keyhole (Google Earth), Picasa, SketchUp, and Urchin (Google
Analytics). Surely it wouldn’t stop there. Today Google announced that
two previously for-pay services from FeedBurner are now completely free
— they are called MyBrand and FeedBurner Stats PRO.

MyBrand lets you take the FeedBurner service to a new level by using
your own domain name as the feed URL. This has several advantages for
all bloggers, but mostly for larger blogs or blog networks by allowing
feeds to reflect your own brand. Instead of a URL that looks something
like http://feeds.feedburner.com/zdnet/Google, it’s now completely
possible to have a URL like http://feeds.zdnet.com/Google without
giving up the valuable information that FeedBurner provides.

The second feature they made free is the FeedBurner Stats Pro service. Here is how their blog describes the service:

PRO is feed analytics taken to the next level. You will
now have access to the number of people who have viewed or clicked
individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the
daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content. You
can turn this on by signing in to your account, navigating to the
Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the
“Item Views” checkbox to activate these PRO features.

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Ping « 

Technorati Tags: google, free, blog, blogger

Highrankings.com that gives us some juicy details about what it takes to get a good rank on Google and what tools we can look for soon. Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, attended the annual SEMNE (Search Engine Marketing New England) and “spilled the beans” on some things we can expect to see.

A new META tag will soon provide a way for webmasters to have time sensitive information appear in Google results for only as long as they are needed — there are many practical applications for this including pages that may contain sale information (ie. Item is on sale until August 31st). That sale page would be absolutely useless after August 31st, so why should it remain indexed?

    Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site. Unavailable_after is the tag for you! Pretty neat stuff!

If you wanted to do something like this in the past, you would have needed to maintain a very large robots.txt file — which I am sure nobody would want to spend their time doing.

Of course, this tag will not be supported by other search engines right away, but it never hurts to start using it where it makes sense. I am guessing the syntax will be something along the lines of <META name=”unavailable_after” content=”Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:01 GMT”>.

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Google « 

Technorati Tags: google, free, web, search engines, man

Over the past few weeks several people have asked me if it’s
possible to set up a Windows XP/Linux dual-boot system on a PC that
already has Windows XP installed on it, and if it’s possible, how easy
is the process. 

Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s pretty easy to do.  In fact,
the process is only marginally more work that installing Linux in the
first place (which, if you’ve installed Linux before, you’ll know if
pretty easy).

Here’s how it’s done.

1. First, start off with a machine with XP already installed on it.
2. Next, download a Linux distro.  I’ll be using my personal favorite, Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn.
3. Burn a CD of the ISO you downloaded and pop it into the drive and boot up off of it.
4. Start the install process.  This will take you through the Welcome screen, the Where are you? screen and the Keyboard layout screen.
5. Now you’ll come to the disk partitioner.  Choose the Resize [main partition] and use freed space
   option.  This is where you find out if you have enough free space to do
   the job.  The default recommendation for the new partition size will be
   ideal, but you can move the slider along to change the values to suit. 
   When you’re done, click Forward.
6. Now you can go away and leave the install to churn away until it’s done.  It shouldn’t take all that long.
7. When the install is complete the system will reboot.
8. When the system boot up, now you’ll be greeted by the GRUB boot
   menu.  From here you can choose which OS to boot into.  In my case
   Ubuntu will be the default and will start automatically in 10 seconds.
9. The first time that you reboot into Windows the OS will more than
   likely want to check the disk since the partition has changed size
   since Windows was last running.  XP will also likely want to re-detect
   hardware and such and probably reboot.
10. That’s it!  Yes, it’s that simple.

In Ubuntu I can also tweak the GRUB bootloader settings.  To do this you need to fire up a Terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type the following into the window:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Hit ENTER and then type in your password hit ENTER again and you get access to the boot menu file in gedit.

The default boot entry is defined by the default value. Change this value to reflect which OS you want to boot up automatically.  The default value is 0,
which means that the first entry in the list (in this case Ubuntu) will
be loaded automatically.  If you want to change it so that Windows XP
loads by default, change the value to 4 (because here XP is the fifth item in the list and the numbering system starts at 0).  You can also increase the boot menu timeout by changing the value of timeout from the default 10 to something else. Save the file to committ the changes.

Sweet.

Thoughts?

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myDots « 

Technorati Tags: download, free, linux, personal

There are different ways to make money online such as affiliate
sales, Adsense, membership sites, mini sites that promote a product
(your own or an affiliate product), store sites, and so on. What’s the
best way to make money online?

You need your own e-mail list. It’s much easier to sell to someone who you have a relationship with and who trusts you.

Is this your first time on this site? If so, are you going to buy anything I promote here? Probably not. You don’t know me.

But if you knew me, and had trust in what I say, you would probably purchase something that I highly recommended. Continue Reading »
Tips for Making Money Online

Earn money « 

Technorati Tags: adsense, free, web, money, internet, news, blog

Imagine a future in which wireless power transfer is feasible: cell
phones, household robots, mp3 players, laptop computers and other
portable electronics capable of charging themselves without ever being
plugged in, freeing us from that final, ubiquitous power wire. Some of
these devices might not even need their bulky batteries to operate.

A team from MIT’s Department of Physics, Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science, and Institute for Soldier
Nanotechnologies (ISN) has experimentally demonstrated an important
step toward accomplishing this vision of the future. Continue Reading »
Goodbye wires

Technology « 

Technorati Tags: free, media, design, mp3