Google Calendar: Add Country Holidays

Google Calendar with holidays of your country; is this something you are not quite familiar? Does colleagues from other countries schedule meetings on holidays of your country? If it is, no one else is there to blame (other than you); they are not aware of those holidays unless otherwise you notify them. The simplest way is to mark those days as holidays in your calendar, but it is not practical to add all of those manually. 

Importing Holiday Calendars

You are not required to add each of those manually. With few clicks, you can import the holiday calendars of your country into your Calendar. Out of the box, Google supports a number of country holiday calendars; 41 countries as of today, hopefully it will grow further.



You must open your Google calendar from a browser, and click on the
'Other calendars' - > 'Browse Interesting Calendars' on left panel as shown above.

This shows a page with holidays of each country, and you can subscribe to any number of those as per your interest. After you subscribe, those will be shown in your calendar. If you are working with colleagues in multiple countries, I suggest you to subscribe to their country calendars so that you will no longer be scheduling meetings on their holidays as well.

My County is not there in Holiday Calendars

If your country is not found in holiday calendars, we need to use an alternative approach. As you can see from the above screen, there is another item named 'Import Calendar'. When you click on that, Google Calendar allows you to upload iCalender or CSV file which has events. You will have to search the internet and find such an event file with holidays and upload.

2013 Sri Lankan Holiday Calendar

You can find the 2013 - Sri Lankan holiday Calendar here, click on the 'Download' link on top of that page and save the calendar2013sl.ics.txt file on to your disk, then import using the above popup window. It will add 26 events into your calendar, and following is how you will see the holidays.

As Google Calendar has become the defacto standard of meeting schedules in many organizations, my belief is that it is the right time for you to spend 2-3 minutes to import holiday calendars into yours (if you have not done it yet). The advantage is obvious, meeting organizers always notice if you are not available.

Firefox: Dramatic change in release version patterns

History of Firefox starts in 2002, when a new flavor of Mozilla was released under the name Phoenix. With the release of 0.6 it was renamed as as Mozilla Firebird, but it lasted only for two releases. This most popular name "Firefox" was introduced with the 0.8 release, and it continues as of the time of this post. Initially, Firefox made a major release every two years with minor releases in between.

Two yearly
Version 0.1 - 2002
Version 1.0 - 2004
Version 2.0 - 2006
Version 3.0 - 2008

However in 2011, the release pattern completely changed which resulted in major releases within every one or two months duration as shown below.

 Monthly
 4.0 - 2011/03
 5.0 - 2011/06
 6.0 - 2011/08
 7.0 - 2011/09
 8.0 - 2011/11
 9.0 - 2011/12
10.0 - 2012/01

Particularly within first 6 months of 2013, there were 5 major releases (18.0 to 22.0).

So it is worth finding the reasons for this dramatic change in the release process. As per my understanding, this change had a direct relationship with the new comer Chrome browser in 2008. First major release of Chrome (1.0) was done few months after the Firefox 3.0 release. However in early 2010 Chrome started making major releases every few months and when Firefox 4.0 was out in 2011 March, latest Chrome release available was 10.0.

Mozilla team seems to have identified a potential problem when introducing Firefox over Chrome; release number of Chrome is way beyond Firefox (which may look as related to number years of existence by someone). So Firefox releasing pattern also seemed to follow this fact track, but the latest Firefox version 22.0 while Chrome is 30.

As a side note, I think it is worth mentioning a summary on this battle.
When Firefox was so popular in around 2006, Google funded Firefox and in return became the Firefox's default search engine. Interestingly, 2008 born Google owned Chrome became the most popular browser sending once most popular Firefox into the third position behind Internet Explorer. I personally believe Google did it perfectly, they had a great plan and won the battle well ahead where as Firefox team could not resist a lot.

Winning Plus grows and loosing Buzz dies at Google

Google has decided to shutdown Buzz in few weeks raising the closed product count to around 20. With the growing popularity of GMail, Google introduced Buzz in February 2010 as an integrated product to GMail which could easily attract users into Google's Social Networking product.

However Buzz failed to attract much users; may be because it was something in between a Twitter and a Facebook. At the early stages, Buzz faced a privacy issue causing user's to think twice because using it. Though Google resolved the privacy issues, it was too late. According to our experiences this is an expected news which Google postponed till a better replacement is found. Both Google Plus and Buzz are catering the same requirement for Google; creating a Social Networking product into Google product base.

As Google mentioned;

"We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+".

As a proof of above statement, Google Plus considered Privacy as the main concern and came up with a feature named Circle. Google Plus web interface made it simple to understand how this new privacy feature functions. Another good restriction is the age limit; only users over 18+ are allowed to create Plus accounts as Google is still working on proper safety additions.

According to early analysis, Plus is definitely growing well unlike Buzz. However Google has a long way to go, as the required user base is huge. According to social networking giant Facebook's statistics, it has 800 million user base while Google has around 40 million (within 3 months). According to statistics, 800 million is still bigger compared to Google's GMail user base; but let's wait and see.

Related: Google redirect to incorrect country domain: Fix on Firefox

Google redirect to incorrect country domain: Fix on Firefox

Google servers identify the country of the googler and redirect to the relevant country domain. They may be using the IP of the request to locate the country before the redirect. However there are situations many googler getting redirected to incorrect country domains. For example, even though our requests are generating from Sri Lanka, most of the time we are redirected to another country (Taiwan) domain. Some misconfigurations at the routers or at the ISP may cause this issue, which makes it harder for a general browser user to get that resolved. This automatic redirect mechanism does not depend on the browser used.

Following is a quick fix to this issue. However this will only work on Firefox browser, sorry friends if you are on another browser.

Install Redirector extension

Redirector is a small extension available for Firefox, and it supports most of the versions ranging from 2.0 to 3.0.*. (we are using latest Firefox; 3.0.3). You can freely install it from here.
If you are a newbie to Firefox extensions; just click the "Add to Firefox" button in the web page and click "Install now" in the pop up box. You must restart Firefox, to complete this installation.

Now you will see a small icon in status bar (bottom right corner) as shown here. This is the redirector extension we installed above. You can enable/disable this extension just by clicking on this icon.

Configure a redirect

Right clicking on that Redirect icon will display a settings panel. Click "Add.." button to add a new redirect.

Now we have to fill 3 options in this new redirect box.

1). Include Pattern: Here you must try the incorrect Google country domain url. As our incorrect country domain is Taiwan, we set the following as "Include Pattern".
http://www.google.com.tw/*

2). Redirect to: This is the place where you specify the correct country domain url. As we live in Sri Lanka, following is the redirect url for us.
http://www.google.lk/$1

3). Pattern Type: Set this to "Wildcard".

It's done, quite simple. Now the Redirect settings box will look somewhat similar to the above image.

Now try and load Google home page, and it will display the country domain home page you set in the redirect settings.

Gmail Multiple Sessions Alert: This account is open in 1 other location

"This account is open in 1 other location at..." Gmail user interface provides this message when your account is used in multiple locations simultaneously. One of the most important and interesting security feature that any web mail service would wish to provide. I suppose Gmail is the only web mail service that has this type of security feature (let us know if any other does). Users become aware of any misuse of their Gmail accounts.

Gmail is countering the number of active sessions per account in providing this information; so "open in multiple locations" means that there are multiple active session for this particular account. Gmail also provides more details about each session making it easy to track the misuser. Access Type, IP address and Date/Time are displayed as details.

Effectiveness

All these details are visible to all web sessions including misuser's session; so the effectiveness of this feature is in doubt. For example, a misuser can sign out as soon as this information is displayed in Gmail account. However a solution for this will not be simple and easy. In the meantime, these information is not displayed in a very prominent place (shown at the very bottom of the page), only the misuser will use these information rather than actual (innocent) account owner.

Improvements

We are not highlighting the weaknesses by neglecting effort made in providing this feature. However, as an improvement; active sessions count can be shown at the top bar; so that all users will notice the multiple session usage. However this should be displayed only when multiple sessions are active.

Chrome or Firefox - which browser to choose?

Chrome is the newest baby in browser family or the next competitor in browser war. What ever it is, Google released their browser named Chrome. But Mozilla Firefox is the most popular browser in the world right now and Google was the major supporter for Firefox. Even while supporting it, they have built their own browser free and open source. Here we are looking at the two browsers and trying to compare them to decide whether to switch to the new one or not leaving our old but fascinating friend Firefox?

Interesting features

1. One Process per each tab
Tab is not another thread running inside the browser process; there is a separate process per tab. Even if one tab crashes, the rest of the tabs will be running as nothing happened; which was not available in Firefox. This is one of the most interesting features.

2. New tab is filled with useful links
For a new tab in Firefox, you can load a predefined page, a blank page or a predefined set of page links (using an extension). But you would be much happier to see a set of links that you dealt with in recent past; Chrome comes exactly with that. The new tab will show a set of links;

• Most visited pages
• Recently closed
• Recently Bookmarked

I do not think the last one will be much useful, but the other two will be pretty handy.

3. Rich Location bar
Location bar in Chrome is a combination of location bar & search bar. You can directly type a url or a search keyword, also it comes with suggestions.
Using separate location bar per each tab is also an interesting move, each tab looks like individual browser instances; while in firefox you have single location bar shared by all tabs.

4. Speed
Stephen Shankland at CNet has posted an article on speed, and it tells most of the details. However Brendan at MozillaZine has published another set of testing statistics. So we'll have to check some statistics done by an independent party to get a clear view. Anyway Chrome is starting up so fast compared to any other browser.

Some complains

Since Chrome is still in beta, this may be a good time to suggest some features or improvements. Following are some complains that we have.

1. No warning in closing
When multiple tabs are opened Firefox is used to show a warning in closing the browser, but Chrome does not and closes immediately. Since people can accidentally close the browser better to add it soon.

2. Displaying different fonts
Some of the fonts are not displayed smoothly as Firefox used to do. Above image shows how the same content is displayed in two of these browsers.

3. No XML viewer
May be it is not a must to have a XML viewer in a browser, but we are used to it. Firefox and IE both have good XML viewers, but Chrome lacks it. Similar to this Opera and Safari also do not have this feature. Many people happened to work with XML files every day and having an XML viewer in the browser is an added advantage.

4. Security issues
Chrome has exposed to a set of known security issues by using an older version of WebKit, which had already been fixed. Anyway we expect Google to fix it soon.

Main Concern

Above all of these our main concern is the lack of support for extension development. We are used to live with some great extensions with Firefox, which we are not experiencing with Chrome. Since it is still in beta version, we should wait for extension support. However no API is released for extension development, users will have to wait longer than expected to see some useful extensions. There are so many extensions that makes our lives easier and better. Few of them are;

• NoScrip
• Adblock
• Gmail Manager

What are the other reasons that you are not switching to Chrome straightaway?

java.lang.SecurityException: Blocked attempt to access interface - Issue in GWT 1.4.6 upgrade

Exception while dispatching incoming RPC call
java.lang.SecurityException: Blocked attempt to access interface 'http://localhost/myApp/org.kamal.project.module/', which is either not implemented by this servlet or which doesn't extend RemoteService; this is either misconfiguration or a hack attempt

The GWT application was working fine earlier; so decided to upgrade to the new GWT versio. But!!! with the upgrade, application fail with a Security exception.

Above is an extract from the exception thrown by GWT, while upgrading old GWT application to GWT 1.4.6 version.

Even though SecurityException is thrown, most possible cause for the above error is; old gwt-servlet.jar file has not been replaced with the new gwt-servlet.jar in the server side. (Make sure you replace all the old jar files in a upgrade).

By placing the new gwt-servlet.jar file inside the lib directory on your server, this issue will be resolved.

Complete stack trace would look as below.

- Exception while dispatching incoming RPC call
java.lang.SecurityException: Blocked attempt to access interface 'http://localhost/myApp/org.kamal.project.module/', which is either not implemented by this servlet or which doesn't extend RemoteService; this is either misconfiguration or a hack attempt
at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RemoteServiceServlet.processCall(RemoteServiceServlet.java:211)
at com.google.gwt.user.server.rpc.RemoteServiceServlet.doPost(RemoteServiceServlet.java:167)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:709)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:802)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:252)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:173)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:213)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:178)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:126)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:105)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:107)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:148)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:869)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11BaseProtocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.processConnection(Http11BaseProtocol.java:664)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.PoolTcpEndpoint.processSocket(PoolTcpEndpoint.java:527)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.runIt(LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.java:80)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable.run(ThreadPool.java:684)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)

Add css styles for gwt widgets

Adding Cascading styles (CSS) to Google Web Toolkit (GWT) widgets is much simpler and involves only two steps.

1. Style name
   • set style name
     for a widget using the $widgetInstance$.setStyleName() method or
   • stick with the default
     style name of the widget (use for setting global values)
     default style name examples:
     • for buttons: .gwt-Button
     • for Check Boxs: .gwt-CheckBox


2. CSS style rule
   • Add CSS style rules to a .css file and import that into the html page or
   
   
   • write those inside the html page itself. (not recommended)

Let us provide you with an example which would create buttons shown below.


Coding in your java class:

Button cancelButton = new Button("Cancel");
Button loginButton = new Button("Login");
loginButton.setStyleName("buttons");

CSS rules:

.gwt-button {
 background: #EEEEFF;
 color: #0000CC;
 font-size: 12px;
}

.buttons {
 background: #CCCCCC;
 color: #333333;
 font-size: 12px;
}

GWT releases 1.4 and is no longer beta

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) has released a new version, 1.4. With over 1 million downloads GWT is moving forward well; and it's no longer beta. The user group is really active and well established; so if you haven't tried GWT yet, it's time to have a look.

Read more about GWT and news release at GWT blog.

For any issues visit the GWT user group here.

Adsense Ads between blogger posts

If you have switched your blog from older blogger to new blogger platform (which uses layouts) and looking for adding adsense advertisements in between posts; Blogger has created a new widget for this purpose. And they have made it such that any non-tech blogger even can use this. This widget lets you specify number of posts between an adsense advertisement. You can see the full guide here at Get inline.

If you haven't switched to new blogger yet, don't worry. You still can put adsense ads between your posts. You have to put the adsense code inside the tags that shows up the blog post. My home page has done like that. If you need any assistance on that, just drop me a mail or write below as a comment. I would be happy to help you.

GWT not working on Internet explorer 7 (IE7) giving "Element not found" javascript error

GWT web application started to give "Element not found" javascript error message on Internet Explorer 7 (IE7)? This application worked fine on Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 2. Now your best guess would be; GWT not working on IE 7 properly. Wasn't it?

But the scenario became confusing and unbelievable because your application worked fine on IE7 in some machines while not on some others. Have you faced this issue? Then the below solution is for you.

This issue can be fixed by a making a change on windows registry.

Steps to follow are;
1. Open up the Registry editor - type regedit on command prompt.

2. Look for the key shown below

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{EAB22AC0-30C1-11CF-A7EB-0000C05BAE0B}\1.1\0\win32

3. Click on the "Default" row and see the value there. If it's value is "C:\WINDOWS\system32\shdocvw.dll", then that is what causes the above mentioned issue. If you have installed Windows in a different drive; C:\ must be replaced with the that letter.

4. Replace that value with "C:\WINDOWS\system32\ieframe.dll".

5. Now restart IE7, and load your GWT application.

Set Cookies with GWT applications to expire after expected time period

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) supports HTTP cookies similar to other web technologies. GWT provides methods for setting cookies for specified time duration, for specific domains and paths. Below is a listing on how to set a basic cookie for a duration of one day.

Date now = new Date();
long nowLong = now.getTime();
nowLong = nowLong + (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 7);//seven days
now.setTime(nowLong);

Cookies.setCookie("sampleCookieName", "sampleCookiValue", now);

When retrieving the cookies, you have to specify only the name of the cookie, nothing related to duration. If the cookie is found in the browser for this domain (not expired); value you set will be returned.

Cookies.getCookie("sampleCookieName");//only name

In setting cookies, you must consider on what you actually plans to get done using a cookie. There are two features you can achieve; remember duration (i)from the day it's created, (ii) from the last day this particular user viewed your site. If your site always set cookies when ever a user visits your site; then your cookies will expire only after the user does not revisit your site for the specified duration. But if you are providing a feature like "Saving the password for 2 weeks", then you probably should store the cookie only if the cookie does not exists. For that you must look for cookie before setting it again.

String sampleValue = Cookies.getCookie("sampleCookieName");
if(sampleValue == null){
    //set cookie again after informing user on expiration.}

Scrollable table with GWT

We came across a requirement to build a scrollable data table using Google Web Toolkit (GWT) because we had a limited space, but a growing table depending on the search criteria. As anyone can guess, having a scrollable table would be the best option. For that we used two components rather than one; com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.ScrollPanel and com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.FlexTable. The data table was added inside the Scrollable Panel.

For clarification, we have added the code below.

ScrollPanel scrollPanel = new ScrollPanel();
FlexTable dataTable = new FlexTable();

dataTable.setWidth("100%");
scrollPanel.add(dataTable);
scrollPanel.setSize("300", "200");

//add data to table
....

For setting width and height; it's advised to use css rules, but for ease of understanding we have shown some hard coded values here.

Jar not loaded warning/error in Google Web Toolkit (GWT) deployment to tomcat

When a Google Web Toolkit (GWT) web application is deployed to Tomcat web server, you may encounter a warning message as follows.

org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader validateJarFile
INFO: validateJarFile(<$webAppsFolder$>\WEB-INF\lib\gwt-user.jar) - jar not loaded.
See Servlet Spec 2.3, section 9.7.2. Offending class: javax/servlet/Servlet.class

No need to worry too much about this warning message. This raises just because WebappClassLoader has loaded the servlet.jar already. The gwt-user.jar already contain the content of the servlet.jar file. Even though this message can be ignored, this warning message can be avoided just by replacing the gwt-user.jar file with gwt-servlet.jar (which comes with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) download).

Following image shows the content of the gwt-user.jar, and the content of the servlet.jar is highlighted.



gwt-servlet.jar has been created by removing the content of the servlet.jar from the gwt-user.jar, so this change will not have any impact on your project.

Adsense rounded borders for ads formats

Google Adsense has come up with a new feature for ad borders, that is "Corner style". This features improves the look and feel making an advantage for site developers.

Now publishers can choose between 'slightly rounded' or 'highly rounded' corner (two sample are shown here). If your site has a rounded template this will help a lot.

To apply this change for existing Adsense ads, you only have to add another line to set another value inside the script. Set the value of "google_ui_features" as follows.

google_ui_features = "rc:6";
google_ui_features = "rc:10";

"rc:6" is for 'slightly rounded' while "rc:10" for 'highly rounded'.

Google Adsense gets nice look and feel with Google Account

Seems Google has started integrating Google Adsense with Google Account. We believe this as a good step since it makes life easier, login to only one account but have many services working. Previously Google did this with Blogger as well. New login page is very nice and colorful. New login page looks as below.


Currently the two old and new login pages can be accessed using two different URLs, but this will be changed very soon.
Old login page: www.google.com/adsense/login3
New login page: www.google.com/adsense/login/

Gmail hacked? All contacts and messages deleted in some accounts

Recently some gmail users made complains saying all their mails and contacts were automatically deleted from their mail accounts.


And this was first reported on 19-12-2006 saying "Lost Everything in My Account..email,contacts,sent mail..". It further explained the issue as;

Found my account clean..nothing in Inbox, contacts ,sent mail..How can all these information residing in different folders disappear? ..How to write to gmail help team to restore the account..is it possible? ..Where to report this abuse?.

This message received so many replies saying others also faced the issue. But one important point came up there was that they were using Firefox 2.0.

Another user pointed out that the following message was left after deleting all the mails.

"This is not a mistake. All your emails and contacts have been deleted
on purpose. This was a malicious attack and not an error. Have a nice
day. =)"

People who got attacked had kept the Gmail opened under Firefox 2.0. I was also used to keep my Gmail opened under Firefox 1.5 (not 2.0) and fortunately I was not caught to the attack.

More new Gmail features

Even though Google introduced Anti-Virus capabilities to GMail recently, now they have introduced another set of new features which are available at What's New page.

Features

Web Clips
This will allow users to view news and RSS feeds inside GMail, without having to leave the GMail page.
View Attachments
With this you will not need to download or open attachments of many file types as it provides a "View as HTML" feature.
Supported file types are;
.pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt, .rtf, .sxw, .sxc, .sxi, .sdw, .sdc, .sdd, and .wml.


read more | digg story

Google Desktop tweaked to block attackers

Due to a bug in Internet Explorer, data of Google Desktop (in user's machines) was in danger. Google has fixed it quite soon and users do not have to apply any patch as they have done it on their end.


But according to the news Microsoft is still looking into the bug.

Why Microsoft can not make a bugless browser? We know that developing a software without any bug is an (so-called)impossible task. But Microsoft is always issuing patches?



read more | digg story

A Baby Named Google

Today only I heard that a child is named Google, actually Oliver Google Kai born on September 17th 2005 as son of Walid Elias Kai (a Ph.D. holder in search engine marketing) who is also a Google fan.

He is having his own home page, and also a blog.

Read More>>