Google is celebrating Newton’s Birthday today with a poppy javasript falling apple. Google recently added javascript to their homepage with the fade in /  fade out of the text around the edges. Google usually adds cool graphics for holiday’s like Issac Newton’s Birthday but they have decided “what the heck,” we are already using javascript on the homepage, let’s add something else. I think it’s kind of delightfully tacky.

google donates $20 million to charity for Christmas / Holiday 2009 season

Quote:

“Because charities are experiencing their toughest year in decades, we have committed $20 million to helping those who help us all. Our gift to you is a gift to them. Happy Holidays” – From Google

View their page

Google will be donating to these organizations:

• Feeding America
• Boys and Girls Clubs
• Smile Train
• CARE, Mothers Matter
• World Wildlife Fund, Natural Capital Project
• Mobile Creches
• Prajwala
• HEAL Africa
• African Institute for Mathematical Sciences

• The Mango Tree
• National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
• Harlem Children’s Zone
• Save the Children, Latin America focus
• Reporters Without Borders
• Witness
• Loud Against Nazis
• Global Voices

• Ushahidi
• Save the Children, Middle East and Eurasia focus
• Grupo Cultural Afro Reaggae
• Ashesi University College, Ghana
• Pratham
• Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience
• Shin Shin Educational Foundation
• Tzu Chi Foundation

What does it mean?

Google’s code. This is a reference to the all your base are belong to us. However, on google’s homepage in the animation of the alien spaceship, the aliens are stealing the google “o” thus we have “all your O are belong to us”

Just convert the numbers to the alphabetical counterparts (a=1, b=2)

This is using something similar to the caesar cipher

What does “All your base are belong to us” mean?

Wikipedia says:

“All your base are belong to us” (often shortened to “All Your Base“, “AYBABTU“, or simply “AYB“) is a broken English phrase that was central to an Internet phenomenon, or meme, in 2000-2002, with the spread of a Flash animation that depicted the slogan. The text is taken from the opening cut scene of the 1991 European Sega Mega Drive version of the Japanese video game Zero Wing,^[1] by Toaplan which was poorly translated by Sega of Europe. It was popularized by the Something Awful message forums.^[2] The lines For great justice and Somebody set up us the bomb are often replicated as a secondary memes, with the phrase for great justice applied to an ordinary or inappropriate action.

Watch the Video

Google’s Homepage

Animated Gif

1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19

Are you frustrated that when you search g-mail there are only 20 results that show up at a time? It’s quite difficult to review, mark, and move messages when the search results are limited to 20 messages.

Does it make sense that a “search company” which offers GIGABYTES of storage in their e-mail system limits your result count to 20? No. Of course not.

Visit the GMAIL SUGGESTIONS PAGE and choose the second one from the bottom “Better message search functionality” – also, possibly choose the dropdown box at the bottom, select OTHER, and tell google you want more than 20 results! :)

google wave is going to be awesome

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

So, I was using one of Google’s sign up forms, and I noticed that it gave me a nice tip – The valid zip codes for my state! Along with some sample zip codes for my country (usa). I opened up the firebug console and checked out the ajax call – it was this: https://www.google.com/adsense/addrform/resources?kind=country&code=US

That’s really cool. It returned an XML document with all the state’s valid zipcodes. While it may be unreliable to make this same AJAX call from within your own web application every time, the XML document itself is quite valuable with the zip code validation.

Download that XML document here.

looks like you now have another “i’m feeling lucky” type of option from google. links in the autosuggest area! why wasn’t this done before? it it helpful or annoying?