Today, Google Maps launched the new Street View feature, and I’m very impressed (no, even though I work at Google I had not seen this until now). Street View gives you a 360 degree panoramic view of the chosen location. You can use the mouse to turn around, virtually walk up or down the street, as well as zoom in or out. The picture quality is quite good (particularly in fullscreen mode), generally detailed enough to make out signs and house numbers....

I’ve been negligent about updating my blog for the past two months… I’ve also been told that I really need to post an update about my new job, so here you go: A few weeks ago, I joined Google! Due to the sheer size of the company and the corresponding infrastructure, there’s a huge learning curve, so I can’t post anything specific about my concrete job yet. However, the environment is truly fantastic....

If you’ve been as overwhelmed as myself with the amount of new, often indistinguishable social web applications that are going live every week, you might get a kick out of this hoax site: Useless Account Its only purpose is to allow you to create and edit an account (as you might in a social web app), nothing else. And heck, it’s officially “Slightly more useful than Twitter”, according to the fake TechCrunch quote (OK, they call it TechLunch) on the site....

About half a year ago, I started using an old PowerBook at work. Shortly afterwards, I was hooked and bought a MacBook for my wife. Now I finally bought a Mac for myself: a shiny, nice MacBook Pro. One of the great things about the Mac is that it is highly usable right out of the box. It includes a decent browser, a very nice email application, a chat application, video editing tools, audio software, and much more....

As I promised, here is the second part of my notes on setting up a new Mac. This time I will focus on development tools for Ruby on Rails. In theory, Ruby is already installed on the Mac. Unfortunately, the bundled Ruby interpreter has some problems, and even if it didn’t, you’d want to use a more up-to-date version than 1.8.2 (which is included in OSX as of Tiger) for Rails development....