Data Circle

Rumours of a Google calendar service have been doing the rounds for some time, but as of today the service has been properly launched under the unassuming name of Google Calendar. The calendar service is apparently tied into Gmail, although I’ve not managed to figure out quite how this works yet.

To be honest though, I’m surprised that it’s taken Google so long to launch this service. Yahoo! have offered a calendar service since 1998, and given how many boffins Google employs I would have thought they could have got some form of calendar service up and running before now. There is some interesting stuff involving natural language processing though – apparently you can specify “lunch on Sunday at 1pm” and the service will interpret that correctly. Since natural language processing is a real pain to get right (I’ve only covered a tiny amount of it in my degree course, and believe me it’s not easy) I’m prepared to cut them a bit of slack. I’m also somewhat surprised that support for syncronising calendars with external programs such as Outlook hasn’t been implemented as I suspect this would be an extremely useful feature for many people.

Further coverage

• Google acts to organise your life at BBC News – Technology
• Google Calendar Almost There at GigaOM
• Google unveils Web-based calendar app at News.com
• Google Opens Calendar Beta at Beta News
• Google unveils Web-based calendar app at ZDNet
• Google Calendar at Slashdot
• It’s about time at Official Google Blog

phpBB 2.0.20 released via phpBB.com

A new version of the popular phpBB forum system has been released, fixing a number of issues including several security problems. As always, I’d strongly recommend that you upgrade your forums if you haven’t already, as boards running older versions of phpBB often get exploited quite quickly by people Googling for “phpBB (old version number)” (although this isn’t as easy as it used to be because phpBB doesn’t display the version number by default).

Google launches personal finance site via Niall Kennedy

In their neverending release of new sites, Google has launched Google Finance, which is basically a search engine for financial information. There’s some pretty impressive graphs of previous stock prices that you can rollover to get more information at any given point, plus lots of core data on the company that you’re interested in. It’s not just limited to public companies as well, you can also view information about companies such as Transitive, although obviously their accounts aren’t public so there’s less data for Google to display. Alongside each company profile are links to news stories about the business and also any blog posts which might be related.

The main let down with Google Finance is that it will only display graphs for companies listed on US stock exchanges (such as the NYSE, but I imagine there will be other national versions available at some point. There also isn’t any new information available – it’s just a way of viewing several features that already existed in Google before, albeit with a bit more jazz and a clean layout. Smaller companies are missing too – I couldn’t find any details on the places I’ve worked in the past.

Further coverage

• Spring is the season for love (and data) at Official Google Blog
• Google Cashes in with Finance Portal at Beta News
• Google Finance Beta Released at Slashdot
• Google Rolls Out Finance Site at Forbes.com
• Google Finance Disappoints at GigaOM

evolt.org, one of the sites that I’ve been a regular visitor of since my early days of browsing, has announced a contest to design a new look for its web site. There’s a long list of requirements, but they all seem fairly sensible and are mainly there to ensure that any design submitted doesn’t require a huge backend change or anything like that.

Unfortunately my design skills aren’t quite up to creating something that evolt could use, but I am on the Design and Development group that will decide which design is chosen as the winner.

I’ve yet to figure out what’s so special about Newsvine, but if anyone wants an invitation to use the service I have twenty of them available. Reply with your name and email in the comments if you’d like one.

37signals, the company behind well-known web applications such as Backpack and Basecamp, has just released their latest piece of software Campfire. It’s a little bit like instant messaging, but with a permanent URL for the chat session and a record of everything that is said. There is a list of reasons why Campfire is better than IM on the web site for the software.

Like all of 37signal’s products, Campfire looks slick and polished, though I’m not sure if it’s worth paying $24 a month for the “plus” version (the cheapest one to have SSL encryption).

There is an interesting article on SitePoint at the moment, entitled Top 7 PHP Security Blunders. It’s lacking detail for most of the security issues raised, but it’s a useful article nevertheless. If it stops just one newbie PHP developer from making a major security blunder then it will have been worth the time spent writing the article, in my opinion.

Web Developer Extension 1.0 via 456 Berea Street

Web Developer Extension for the Firefox and Mozilla browsers has just reached version 1.0. This plugin is incredibly useful for anyone who does web development as it allows you to see how your site looks without images and/or CSS, resizing of the browser window to 800×600 and quick links to all the W3C validators, plus lots of other menu options to help you test web sites. Admittedly a lot of the options are just redirecting you to URLs with the right parameters already supplied, or making available options that already exist in your browser, but it’s so much more productive to have all these features available in one toolbar rather than having to go through all the Firefox menus to edit one preference.

Camino 1.0 Hits Beta 2 via Forever Geek

Camino, the browser from the Mozilla Foundation aimed exclusively at OS X users, and the only native OS X browser to use the Gecko rendering engine (Safari uses KHTML, in case you were wondering), has a new beta available for download. I don’t use Camino myself as I find that Firefox generally works reasonably well on, plus I like to use the same browser in Linux, Windows and OS X.

If you’re interested in the details of what’s changed in this version, you can read the release notes. A quick skim reveals built in SVG support, which is quite interesting, although I doubt that many sites use it at the moment so it’s probably not a major feature for most people.

phpBB 2.0.19 released via phpBB.com

A new version of the popular phpBB forum system has been released, fixing a number of issues including two XSS problems (although these only affect Internet Explorer) and SQL escaping in databases other than MySQL.

If you’ve not already upgraded, I’d strongly recommend that you do so – phpBB boards get defaced all the time because of security problems, and although this is often down to problems in the code itself (I personally don’t have a great deal of faith in the phpBB developers, for a number of reasons) it’s also because people don’t update their forums when new versions are available. Having your board defaced is also a great way to annoy your local system administrator, who, and I speak from experience on Compsoc here, often has to clean up the mess.