Geek On The Mountain


Google SMS


Jul 17

Posted: under Internet.

Google SMS recently entered beta and man is it cool…. I heard about this earlier in the week and I immediately grabbed my phone and tried it out. I had the weather forecast, on my phone, by merely sending a text message, in under a minute.

(They also have a UK site setup but I think all that differs is the number you send the message to.)

Google SMS is simple. All you do is send a query to their number ( 46645 (GOOGL) or 64664 (6GOOG) in the UK) ) and they’ll send a text message with the results back to within about a minute.

What kind of queries can you send? From the site above:

* Get local business listings when you’re on the road and want to find a place to eat.
* Obtain driving directions to get from point A to point B without having to ask for directions.
* Find movie showtimes and theater locations of movies currently playing near you.
* Check weather conditions and 4-day forecasts to plan your day.
* Study the latest stock quotes and stay on top of the market.
* Get quick answers to straightforward questions.
* Compare online product prices with ones you find in retail stores.
* Look up dictionary definitions to expand your vocabulary or prove a point.

The potential applications are awesome. I can easily see how the weather, movie listings, directions, and phone number/business location lookups could be extremely handy on the go. Really, if you were in a store and you saw something, being able to froogle it could be handy as well.

The site provides a demo page so that you can type in different queries and see what the results will look like on your phone.

This functionality isn’t really anything that cell phones can’t do already as many of them have internet access, but the really awesome thing here is that everyone (pretty much) can use this, and cheaply. Text messaging is pretty standard these days, so even phones that don’t support web browsing (or who’s owners (like myself) don’t want to pay for it) can get this information. Furthermore, even if you can get on the web with your phone, this is probably a cheaper way to get some quick info.

Grab your phone and give it a try….it’ll be fun :)

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Site Looks Normal Again For IE


Jul 17

Posted: under Internet.

For some reason I looked at the site using IE and saw it was way out there.

For some reason (probably you don’t care..) the majority of people still prefer to use a feature-poor, insecure, ugly, and still technically dead web browser. So I figured I’d go ahead and make things look happy.

My crappy coding of the lists in the sidebar that only IE cared about is now fixed and I went ahead and replaced the 24-bit png that is next to each post with an 8 bit png as IE still doesn’t support 24-bit png transparency. In reality there was no reason for it to be 24 bit. I obviously forgot to lower the color depth after I was done editing it. It actually made it quite a bit smaller percentage wise (no surprise there), but then again when it was only 500 bytes to start with, who cares? The point is, it’s now nice and transparent around the edges instead of orange if you’re using IE…..once again, if you’re using a real browser, it wouldn’t have mattered in the first place.

Hopefully IE 7 will fix some of these bugs.

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