Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

Signal vs. Noise reports how Google is wreaking havoc on their web application product, Backpack, by deleting user pages:

The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they’ve already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here’s the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page — including links like “delete this” or “cancel that.” And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a “Are you sure you want to delete this?” Javascript confirmation behind that “delete” link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway. Disrespect.

We discovered this yesterday when a few people were reporting that their Backpack pages were “disappearing.” We were stumped until we dug a little deeper and discovered this Web Accelerator behavior. Once we figured this out we added some code to prevent Google from prefetching the pages and clicking the links, but it was quite disconcerting.

Users on the SomethingAwful forums posted screenshots of being logged in on other user accounts. Bad. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this.

Just installed this Google Web Accelerator from Google. Let see how it works.

1. 1. What is Google Web Accelerator?

Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google’s global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.

Please note that Google Web Accelerator is currently in beta test mode. If you have any problems using it or have suggestions for how we can improve it, please see the Google Group devoted to it.

Also note that during the first part of our beta testing period, users outside of North America and Europe may not see much improvement in their web page loading speed.

2. How does Google Web Accelerator work?

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

* Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
* Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
* Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
* Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
* Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
* Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

As a QA tester, this blog post at O’Reilly’s Radar is interesting:

Remarking on new companies like Spikesource and SourceLabs, he said: “It seems to me that the tester rather than the coder is becoming the new hero of the open source community.”

I think he’s onto something.

Hmm… if both designers and testers are the new heroes, is this further evidence of my oft-argued “open source paradigm shift”, where open source is leading to the commodification of many forms of infrastructure software, making testing and integration more important as an industry competency. Meanwhile, the new web applications “up the stack” are driven by a whole new class of “infoware design patterns”.

The decentralized nature of Open Source demands a need for rigorous, process-based testing of software before businesses can be expected to adopt it as part of their infrastructure.

Have you ever needed to send someone information from a program you know they don’t have installed? A lot of times you could just print something out and send a hard-copy, but there’s also a better way. I came across the free program called Primo PDF that installs a virtual printer on your machine that can output anything you could print into a PDF form. For example, if you had Microsoft Money 2005, it has the ability to create and print out invoices, but no way to save the invoices
in any other format than text. Why not just print the invoice to PDF and email it to your customer exactly as it appears? This has come in handy a lot.

Google released another awesome tool today. A personalized Google search history. You just login and it tracks all your searches, and the results you clicked. It is wicked.

• Marketing: All Marketers Are Liars
• Drawing / Illustration: Drawn!
• Defense / Military: DefenseTech, Global Guerrillas
• Tips: Tricks of the Trade
• Human Resources: HR For the Leader in You
• T-shirts: Preshrunk

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