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There are teachers, and then there are educators

According to a news report, a certain private school in Washington recently was faced with a unique problem. A number of 12-year-old girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the bathroom.

That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick they would press their lips to the mirror leaving dozens of little lip prints.

Every night, the maintenance man would remove them and the next day, the girls would put them back. Finally the principal decided that something had to be done. She called all the girls to the bathroom and met them there with the maintenance man. She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian who had to clean the mirrors every night.

To demonstrate how difficult it had been to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required. He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it. Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirror.

There are teachers, and then there are educators ...

Zero-to-online! within seconds with Google Chrome OS

Another day, another major announcement from Google: the Chrome OS!

Here are the key points about this new operating system:

• Open source
• Lightweight, built initially for netbooks to be available in the second part of 2010
• Designed for speed (start-to-online within seconds), simplicity and security
• To run on x86 and ARM chips
• Linux-based kernel
• Independent from Android

I think announcing this ambitious project is a major news for technology. It's also a call for help to finally have an OS adapted to the Web and not the other way around.

Google Apps update

Starting today, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk are no longer in Beta. Also Gmail introduced new features for large enterprises: mail delegation and mail retention.

The blog post also provides links on how to switch to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

Need to send a survey to multiple persons?

The Forms in Google Docs Spreadsheet provide an easy way to create surveys, emailing them to multiple recipients and collect their responses directly in a spreadsheet.

Translator Toolkit helping to multiple world web contents

If you regularly, like me, deal with documents in several languages, having a fast and accurate tool for translations is critical. Machine translation improved a lot in recent years, but in most cases the generated outcome still requires manual changes. To make this 2nd part of the translation process much easier, the Google Translator Toolkit is now available. Its announcement from Google is here. It makes it very easy to translate not only Word and HTML documents but also Wikipedia and Knol articles, as explained in the following video.

Software Test Engineer at Google

I am about to celebrate my 3rd year at Google as a Test Engineer. The products I mainly worked on range from internal infrastructure to Gmail Themes, Spam detection, translation tools and navigation corrections. Our team grow significantly in the meantime.

We focus not only on developing quality tracking tools, but also on improving software development best practices and processes. Google in Zurich is still hiring passionate software engineers who want to become experts in software quality and engineering productivity. More details can be found here.

What's on their iGoogle page?

Here is how some celebrities populate their iGoogle pages: http://www.google.com/igshowcase

Bill Cosby's speech on Nerds

Someone asked me what a nerd is. You can read the Wikipedia definition or watch the beginning of this speech from Bill Cosby's.