Dan Olsen’s Weblog

Over the past month or so I have found that my GMail account had been responding very slowly in Firefox. It turns out the the BYU CS department’s proxy throttles GMail connections because of the multiple requests to the server. Yesterday I opened up Safari and found that my email responded quickly. This made me curious so I started looking into the problem a little further. Just a few minutes ago I noticed that my GMail was responding normally in Firefox all of a sudden. That’s when I noticed what the problem was. It turns out that the chat function in GMail was what was slowing down the response time to my email. So, I turned off chat in now I am running smoothly again.

So, because of the checking the proxy was doing on each request and response from GMail, the response of GMail was being creamed. I live the chat function but I now know that having it on at work is not kosher.

It looks like I’ll be going to IIW 2006 Part A with Phil Windley in a week and half. He approached me yesterday about coming and doing the running around for the workshop. I don’t mind the running around, it’s a small price to pay to hear what people have to say.

The great thing is that it is being held at the Computer History Museum. That should be fun. If you haven’t registered to come head over to the registration page and sign up now.

Today Google announced the release of the Google Calendar Data API.

I don’t have as much time as I wish I had to make something fun and useful using Google’s many APIs but I do like the fact that they provide such a service. I currently have a brother-in-law in South Korea. Since the family is all here in the US I created a map that shows where he is and where he has been with some basic information. It was fun to spend some time playing around with the Google Maps API.

Now, if I could come up with a cool page that integrates all these services into one useful service. If anyone has any good ideas or knows of anyone who has mashed together all these services into something cool, I’d like to hear about it.

I am currently redesigning my blog. I finally decided to come up with my own WordPress theme. It is still a work in progress but it just feels good when it’s your own work that displays on the page.

It’s now official. Google has finally released Google Calendar. I have been looking around this morning and like what I see. They even provide instructions on how to put a button on your site to add an event to you Google Calendar. The button that you see on the right is a button that allows you to add the Internet Identity Workshop event information into you Google Calendar. Give it a try, I recommend it! (So far)