I did play around with it a bit, and it's pretty rudimentary; a lot of the list functions aren't supported, but it will sort data and do formulas in cells, you can import and export .xls and .csv files, your files are stored online so you can access your spreadsheets from anywhere, and you can share the spreadsheets over the web and control who can get to them. It's got a ways to go before it can match Excel, but it's still under the Google Labs banner, so give it time to grow I guess.

Makes me wonder what's next though; a web-based replacement for Access and Word? But thinking about trusting all that to Google makes me just a tad uneasy. Is Google's internal slogan "All your data are belong to us"?

How do I roll this back one version? I really hate going back to IE just to view flash sites.

US English is well known for spelling things how they are pronounced, because the stupid idiots can't understand anything el- I'm sorry. What I mean to say is, here in Britain I have said 'alumin-yum' many times, but that is merely a contraction. The proper way to pronounce it is 'alumin-ee-yum', and the spelling should reflect this.

You can go to any article and click the 'Discussion' and 'History' tabs at the top to get the 'story behind the story'. This sort of open debate is why Wikipedia is great.

There is, of course, an edit war occurring with regards to the contents of the 'Lame Edit Wars' page.

Via Waxy.

The huge influx of cash at the turn of the millennium led to the whole Web being built in the image of the Bay area. The website patterns that started there and - just by coincidence - happened to scale to other environments, those were the ones that survived. Those that bootstrapped off the postal service, for example, did well--eBay and Amazon are the big two. Others didn't: They had assumed that because the pattern worked well in their home territory, they'd be just as appropriate to the rest of the USA, and to the rest of the world. But they weren't appropriate, and they failed. We're left with a Web that's useful to everyone, yes, but one that's primarily shaped by West coast North America.

The Web is San Francisco circa 2001, writ large.

He also has advice that's key for those of us trying to come up with the next successful web app:

The Web's been coasting since 2001. It consists of that which started in SF and happened to adapt to the larger ecosystem, and that's it. But since 2001, there are millions and millions more people online--and they're pretty much uncatered for. They have no native services.

Where are the applications for people who live in tight communities of a thousand people and strong local government? Where are the corner-stores offering convenience and personality coupled with the economies of scale and selection of the whole web?

[...]

The automotive industry, the consumer electronics industry, the media producers and distributors, and more: they're all looking at China and India, emerging markets of a billion or more people. For us internet folks, there's a homeland China, the China inside, a mass market of a hundred million or so, come online in the past 4 years, and waiting for their own killer apps.

Via kottke

"Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you."

Not nearly as smooth or as customizable as the Dock, but just give them time.

Gadgetopia usually does pretty well in Google searches, but I imagine there's always room for improvement.

Use meaningful text inside your tags so the Googlebot can associate that text with that href link. Meaning, if I am going to link my pictures from the war protest, I should say "Take a look at my photos from the war protest" instead of "My war protest pictures are here." Now, Google doesn't explicitly recommend this. But I have a friend named Damion who has a weblog which I link with the word "Damion" on my Bookmarks list. If you do a Google search for the word Damion, this weblog is the third result. So what, you say? Well, Damion doesn't mention his name anywhere on his site.

So don't use link text like read more or go here or download it or, God help us, click here. Don't click here.

Webloggers: take heed of this when you display the permanent link for a post. You should link the title of a post which presumably contains words which indicate what the post is about instead of a [+] or the word permalink or, common amongst Blogger users, the date and time.

Like that. Whoops.

So I placed a backorder through GoDaddy for $18.95 thinking that was all I needed to do. During the week that followed, I learned a lot about the domain expiration process. Two and a half months and $369 later, I am the proud owner of a shiny new domain. A really really good one.

This article will explain the domain expiration process and what you need to do in order to use it to your advantage.

Mike's explanation of the process is interesting to me on two levels.

First, I've always wondered about the true value of a 'good' domain name. If you've got the best content on a given topic, your site will usually rise to the top of the natural search results, which is how most people find things anyway. When I need mop handles, I google for 'mop handles', I don't randomly hit mophandles.com. Unless someone else had the name of my company, it would be hard to persuade me to pay much for a domain name.

Second, it's always fascinating to me how engineers will put a system in place that makes good technical sense, but then someone will find some money in some aspect of it, and then build an entire economy around beating the crap out of it.

Via waxy.

Google Inc. said on Wednesday movie showtimes are now available on its leading Web search engine and can be accessed via personal computers or mobile phones and other wireless devices that use short-message service.

I'm planning on checking out Constantine, so I ran a test using my zip code. Works quite well.

Via Xinhuanet.

• Live Photoshop-like effects such as drop shadows, glows, and strokes
• MUCH faster rendering and better processor management on both Macs and PCs
• A better anti-aliasing engine for text (codenamed Saffron)... sIFR will benefit greatly from this
• Fully alpha-maskable video, with much better compression as well
• Much much more...

Unfortunately, I doubt it will include a feature to prevent peopole from making pointless intros for their web sites.

Via Daring Fireball's Linked List.

I installed the Turck MMCache PHP accelerator on the server this afternoon. Here's the lowdown:

Turck MMCache is a free open source PHP accelerator, optimizer, encoder and dynamic content cache for PHP. It increases performance of PHP scripts by caching them in compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. Also it uses some optimizations to speed up execution of PHP scripts. Turck MMCache typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.

It makes a big difference. First of all, all the code is now running from a compiled state. In the case of eZPublish, most of its caching strategy is just to read template files and write them as PHP includes. With MMCache, now that's being compiled too. Smarty uses the same strategy, so any Smarty-based apps would get this double benefit as well.

Thanks to Gentoo, installation was a no-brainer:

$> emerge turck-mmcache
$> etc-update
$> apachectl restart

Bingo. (They of course have install docs for those with other systems).