My gmail account is locked down!@!

Google is going crazy on me. While I was normally trying to send an email by clicking on "compose" in gmail, I got locked out of gmail and got this ugly message: "Your account is locked down because of suspected unusual activity"

Google says:
Unusual account activity includes, but is not limited to:

1. Receiving, deleting, or downloading large amounts of mail via POP in a short period of time.
2. Sending a large number of undeliverable messages (messages that bounce back).
3. Using file-sharing or file-storage software, browser extensions, or third party software that automatically logs in to your account.
4. Leaving multiple instances of your Gmail account open.
5. Browser-related issues. Please note that if you find your browser continually reloading while attempting to access your Inbox, it’s probably a browser issue, and it may be necessary to clear your browser’s cache and cookies.

I am sometimes doing number 4 - That is using gmail on several browsers, but I was not doing this this morning.

This is a serious issue as I am incapacitated without my email, docs, address book, etc. Nobody to speak to at Google. Any idea, suggestion?

Luckily my Blogger account is not locked down.

*UPDATE* - Google unlocked my account after a couple of hours. I got scared and started thinking of a plan B. No harm done this time.

Things I don't like and things I like

• I hate it when I am doing a chat session with somebody who is a slow typer
• I love it when code I write runs on the first try
  

Searching attachments in Gmail

I have been wondering this for about a year now, my answer to myself has always been: "They are probably working on it and by the time you blog about it it will be avalaible for all."

Well, it's been over a year now and it still is not available yet; so here it is:

Why can't I search my attachments from withing Gmail??

I mean, if somebody sends me an attachment in an email, there is no way for me to search within this attachment that I know of. The only workaround I found so far is to import the attachment to Google docs and then it becomes searchable from within Google docs. But I mean this is really cumbersome.

Isn't Google supposed to organize the world's information and make it accessible and useful? How about my own information?

Love the US open?

Please answer the opinion poll below -

Thanks

Frank

Ball in the mail

I just received a ball in the mail. A real ball, all inflated and all. The stamp was on the ball and my address too. It has been sent by Julian Cash because he enjoyed one my papers on tag clustering. Here's a Web friendly version written by Philipp Keller; Mail me if you want to read the original paper.

Thanks to Julian Cash for his creativity.

Facebook ads are evil

I really think that Facebook ads are obnoxious and very bothering. See the one below on my personal profile? They even have some that blink in big red letters.

Is this what one should expect of the rising star of the Web2.0 sites?
Is this how they are getting some $80 million a year?

Am I missing something here? Free cash on Facebook??

Blog addiction

It turns out I am 68% addicted even though I did not post that many entries recently.

68%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Mingle² - Online Dating

Caponata on the grill - Healthy and Tasty

This is a version of the traditional caponata as shown here at Bencook.
This version contains much less fat as it uses the grill instead of frying and in fact it is much more tasty as you really taste each of the ingredients.

Also I took some more liberty and added Zucchini to add to this a unique Mediterranean flavor.

So here is goes:

Ingredients: 2 each of (Big) eggplant, zucchini, peppers, one small onion all cut up in small cubes.
2 tea spoons of olive oil.

Lay the cubes nicely on an aluminium foil and sprinkle a few drops of olive oil, Put the whole thing in the oven in the Grill position at the max heat.

Wait until the chunks are a bit burnt on the side.

Take out of the oven and sprinkle a good dose of fresh basil, a dollop of olive oil and some salt and pepper.

That's it you're in the Mediterranean heaven, the famous Gan Eden.

Not so delicious search -

One of the things that surprises me about delicious besides its poor usability and its relative frozen stage is that the search is not really satisfactory. This is surprising because, although it is acceptable or even good for a one man show to have a poor UI and virtually no search, I think that a Yahoo! company should put the standard a bit higher. I mean Yahoo! is trying to position itself as a search company right?

So, here it comes, if somebody from Yahoo! reads this, please pass this along to whoever can do something about it. Here's what I think is broken with delicious search:

Here's what I expect from a search on my and other people bookmarks:

Part One: The Basic

- There should be only one way to search - Currently on delicious if you type something on the seach box you get a set of results, but if you click on a tag you get a different set of results. The difference is that on the first search you do a plain search and on the second you search only on the tags. I think that a regular user does not care about that distinction. Tags are simply an additional layer of information and if they are not here one should still be able to retrieve pages. So please keep this distinction for the "advanced searchers" - People who only click should have only one option and it should search not only on tags.


- Fast - del.icio.us search sometimes takes up to 1mn. Del.icio.us is already a Yahoo company for a year or so and I'd expect they had time to address this already. I don't think that they lack experience of money in making services go fast. So just do it. [For those interested, I believe there is a need for serious re-engineering here because tag-search is reasonably fast, however "plain search" is painfully slow. So I suspect the plain search has been done in an inefficient way and would have to be redone completely.]

- "bug tracking" and "bugtracking" should bring the same results. The fact that delicious is forcing users to write space delimited tags in the first place forces people to do ugly things like bugtracking or bug_tracking. There are 2 ways to fix this: 1. switch to comma delimited tags and 2. do some smart processing to be able to find out that "bugtracking" and "bug_tracking" are really like "bug tracking" -

- "tracking" should also bring pages that have been tagged "bug tracking" - I mean there are so many ways to tag a page that some people might say "bugtracking" whereas others would say "bug" and then "tracking" or whatever combination. One wants them all.

- Search on notes too - Again, Notes are like tags, simply an additional layer of information added by the users. Some users like tags some other like notes. The search engine should not discriminate and it should search on notes as well as in tags.



Part II The Advanced

- Related tags: I expect here to find tags that will help me find something, thus either tags that reduce my search or tags that change my search. Instead delicious puts tags that are related somehow. For example: if I search "google" then "google" will be on the related tags. This is not helpful, what I need are either the most discriminatory tags or tags that would help me search something else ("did you mean").

- Related users: When i search on a topic, I'd like to get the "wisdom of crowd" effect and see what are the users that are knowledgeable on this topic. Delicious does not even try to do that. Simpy does that well for example.


Well I figured that when a search company acquires a small startup, one of the first thing they would do is fix the search - Apparently it has not been a priority yet, I just wish they would put more effort into this.

Twitter is cool

So here's what I think about Twitter - I think it is a great broadcasting tool !
I've seen several uses of twitter in various blogs already, but I think that what it boils down to for me is that with Twitter I am able to broadcast a short message to my "followers" -

These followers are for example all the people I work with and who need to:

• know how to reach me
• ask or answer questions

For example, if I am stuck with a technical question such as "How do I configure lighttpd with multiple sites?" instead of asking several of my friends separately, I can broadcast this on my twitter and whoever knows and is available this day can pick it up and answer.

The second best use of twitter is the "Message of the Day" or "Status message" that is currently available in most IM tools. I think this is a cool use but I am not sure this is sustainable until they have an automatic update from my IM. For example if I am away or in a meeting.

What I like most about Twitter: I like the gtalk integration. I don't need to go to twitter site in order to either update my message or get updates from the people I follow. Kudos to the twitter team for this feature!!

What I want from Twitter: I'd like to be able to have several groups of followers (in a way multiple accounts). I'd like to have a group of technical people following me, a family group and maybe a friends group and a co-worker group. Please do that for me and you'll be my favorite tool.

Here's my Twitter page: http://twitter.com/FrankieMbaye