Brand new Google icon, trouble coming?

Today while I was doing a Google search I noticed that something strange was going on, but at first I didn't realized what looked unusual.

Some search after, looking at my tabs I discovered what my eyes noticed what was changed: instead of the capital G the favicon of Google is now a little blue g.

Probably at Mountain View they are tired to be called the big G and decided to change their nickname in the most subliminal and easiest way they can go on: just changing they brand.

Do you like this new icon? I hope that the big G is coming back, the little g doesn't represent Google in my mind and makes too confusing to look at my tabs.

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Spotlight on Windows 7

This week Microsoft unveiled multi-touch capability of Windows 7.

Looking at the video we can see a well-working multi-touch demo, but nothing on how that technology would be used in every-day works. So far looks like more an advanced mouse replacement than a brand-new way to use pc. I hope that other interface changes, that should enable users to enjoy multi-touch even when working and not only when looking at photos, are Top-Secret classified information and Microsoft choose to perform that demo just to show something to who is asking an early release of Windows 7.

In the last days Steven Sinofsky said that Windows 7 kernel would be an evolution of Vista's one. This is a bad news for the I-will-jump-to-Windows-7 boys that have to update their claim in I-will-jump-to-Windows-8 (or somewhere else). Vista users should be happy of this because of the total compatibility between the 2 OS drivers and software since nothing, especially the driver model, will change.

I was dreaming Windows 7 as a fully .Net based OS, with the old Win32 system virtualized just for old applications support so I feel a bit disappointed. On the other side Vista kernel is already a very good piece of software with the only problem that users aren't feeling this. Hopefully Windows 7 would allow the user have a better configuration on what system loads as already happens in Windows Server 2008, a OS that shares huge part of code with Vista, but surprisingly is not considered as bad. Maybe it's because Apple never choose a character for the server in their stupid advertisements.

The last thing I want to show you is this useful Mary-Jo Fooley post where she wrote what we know about Windows 7. But be careful, don't believe everything you're seeing about Windows 7.

p.s. In the title Spotlight meaning is this, not this.

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Photo of the week #02

Here comes another great picture from a spanish photographer, Victor Espinoza.

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How to fix CPU-hog Quicksilver

There's one application I particularly love: it's Quicksilver (for Mac).
This week, unfortunately, it started to behave oddly: my PowerBook was continously hot and I quickly found (through Activity Monitor) out that it was Quicksilver's flaw, which was eating 20-90% of my CPU.
I tried to quit and reopen the application, delete the preferences file and to rescan manually my catalog: nothing seemed to work.
After wandering around my Mac's folder for a bit I found the folder containing the indexes used by Quicksilver:
/Library/Caches/Quicksilver/Indexes/
I quit Quickilsilver, moved the folder to the trash and reopened Quicksilver... it worked!
Everything is now back to normal.

A quick explanation Quicksilver builds indexes that make it really fast when searching: they are what makes Quicksilver a pleasure to use.
Considering that I've been using Quicksilver for years, those files might have become corrupted and that was making Quicksilver consuming 20-90% of my CPU.
Clearly the problem was not in the application itself (in fact downloading and reinstalling Quicksilver wouldn't have worked), but it was in some of the files it was using.

One of the most used file is the preferences file ( /Library/Preferences/com.blacktree.Quicksilver.plist ), but deleting it didn't help.
Other files used by Quicksilver stand in /Library/Application\ Support/Quicksilver; but there's another folder used by the application: /Library/Caches/Quicksilver.
You might be wondering "Why isn't the cache in the "Application Support" folder?". It's because cache is something that make the program faster and can exist or not; deleting it might make the application slower but it mustn't affect program settings.
The "Application Support" folder, on the other hand, is used to store customizations of the program, such as plugins, etc...: deleting it would definitely make lose what has been set.

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Check if a site is down just for you

Have you ever get stuck looking to a page that doesn't load?

With this simple web application you can easily check if the page is really down or if you have to double check something in your configuration.

You can save a lot of time you would have spent waiting for a never loading page knowing if the page is down for the whole Internet.

Do you know any other good simple web application?

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