To Hell in a Handbasket

I am horrible with other people’s important dates, e.g., birthdays, anniversaries, date you got your appendix removed, etc.

I just realized I should put all that info into my Gmail Contacts, and then it will appear on my Google Calendar automatically. Oh wait… It doesn’t show up. Damn. Why doesn’t it work?

Turns out, this obviously valued feature is not turned on by default, but it is available.  To get your contacts’ birthdays and other events to show up, simply perform the following in Google Calendar:

Click Settings (the little gear icon in the upper right corner of the screen), then Calendars (link just under the "Calendar Settings" tab), then the Browse Interesting Calendars (lower right) link, then More (under the heading), and finally Subscribe next to the Contacts’ birthdays and events.

Fantastic!  Now you, and more importantly, I should have no reason to forget to remind our friends and family a Happy Birthday.

I am starting to design a new API for an application that will need to integrate with other applications.

Before doing so, I always make it a point to re-watch and re-read this presentation given by Joshua Bloch from Google.  Joshua does a fantastic job going over the DOs and DON’Ts of good API design.

You can also download the slides here.

I just saw on my RSS that GWT 2.0 has been released.  Gonna go play now. Bye.

I installed Google Chrome Frame about a month ago, and I am very impressed with how responsive and quick Internet Explorer is with JavaScript intensive web pages now.  If you use a lot of JavaScript intensive websites, e.g., Facebook, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Calendar, etc., you will notice a significant improvement in performance when using IE with the Chome plug-in.

I was also interested to find out that the new Google Wave application only works with IE if you have the plug-in installed.

The plug-in works in Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, and requires you to have Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7.

Just noticed today that Google Calendar now has built in sports schedules so that you can be sure you never miss out on a game.  Pretty sweet feature for the sports fanatics out there.

I just saw that Google released GWT 1.6 and an supporting Eclipse plug-in a few days ago.  I am installing now, and then I am going to attempt to use it to build a little resource time tracking application.  More updates to follow on this adventure…