Go, Google's Programming Language

Flemming Steffensen found an undocumented trick that lets you customize a Google Docs form by injecting CSS.

Let's assume that the URL of your form is:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=0Ato1MNFt5ld1cExhRTl0c1ZMcF8zcWZJRTNPSGhLQkE

You can add some new CSS rules as a value of the f parameter:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=0Ato1MNFt5ld1cExhRTl0c1ZMcF8zcWZJRTNPSGhLQkE&f=;}body{font-size:14pt!important}.ss-q-title{color:green}

Here's the result.

The most important things to remember:

1. the value has to start with ;}
2. you need to use !important for some of the rules to override existing values
3. check the source code of the form to find the classes used by Google
4. this a trick that may no longer work in the future.

For more parameters that let you customize Google Docs forms, check this test page.

Labels: Google Docs

Go, Google's Programming Language

Some smart Google engineers decided that it's time to address the limitations of C and C++ by designing a new programming language: Go.

Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming. Programming had become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation, efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.

Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to be modern, with support for networked and multicore computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system; concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by libraries or tools; a new language was called for. [Language design FAQ]

Here's a Go program that outputs "Hello, World!":

Cheaper Google Storage

Google updated the pricing for the additional storage you can buy in Gmail and Picasa Web Albums: $0.25 per GB per year.

Storage	Price (per year)
20 GB	$5
80 GB	$20
200 GB	$50
400 GB	$100
1 TB	$256
2 TB	$512
4 TB	$1024
8 TB	$2048
16 TB	$4096

Here's some historical data:

Pricing (August 2007)

Storage	Price (per year)
6 GB	$20
25 GB	$75
100 GB	$250
250 GB	$500

Pricing (January 2009)

Storage	Price (per year)
10 GB	$20
40 GB	$75
150 GB	$250
400 GB	$500

Google says that the storage is shared between Gmail and Picasa Web Albums, but it's obvious that the additional storage will mostly be used in Google Docs, when the service morphs into Google Drive.

"While storage costs have been dropping naturally, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce costs even further. Today, we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage more affordable. You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year, twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera," explains Google.

If you've already purchased Google storage, there's a good news: "Your total storage will be increased according to this page at no extra cost. For example, if you had previously purchased 10 GB of Google storage, you now have 80 GB available."

I wonder how much free storage Google Drive will offer when it's released.