Facebook has a million and one applications. Among them are a number of IQ Test applications. Even to view someone else’s results, you have to install the app, with the corresponding permissions screen as shown below:

Now, maybe I’m not supposed to have the IQ to understand, but why should an IQ Test application need access to “your profile information, your photos, your friends’ info and other content that it requires to work”? Ah - maybe all that information is used to adjust your IQ score… you know, if you’ve used L33T-speak on your profile, that’s a -20 adjustment right there. Are you in a Palin supporters group? -30 for you! Photos of kittens? +5. Photos of dogs? +10!

Naah, quite unlikely. In my opinion, what should happen if you press that “Allow” button is the message: “Your IQ Score: 0″!

It’s difficult to identify a single page or site on the Net as being yours. Sure, you may have your own blog or even a completely independent website, but with sites like Del.icio.us, Flickr, FriendFeed and your profiles on all these pages, you’re bound to have at least a half dozen other pages that are “yours”. So now that you’re on these services, what should you do? To get the most of them, you’ll of course need to find your buddies on these sites, and that’s where things get tough. How do you know that the John Smith on service XYZ is in fact the same John Smith that you play scrabble with? If John has linked from his web page to his user profile then it’s no problem, but what if he’s only got a link the other way around, from his user-profile page back to his web-site. You shouldn’t have to click through the dozens of profile pages to find his - let Google do the work for you through the Google Social API!

A few months ago, Google made available an API which you can use to query the social network inherent in the web, by following the “me” links or pointers from one network’s profille to another, as well as the “friend” pointers. By then giving the URL of my web site, I can find all my “other” pages on the Internet, as well as everyone else that I link to or am linked by.

Using this social graph of services, it’s easy for you to find what services you have in common with someone else to be able to link with them there. To make this easier I have a very trivial bookmarklet I can invoke when I’m on any site, which does a lookup via Google Social’s API. To use it, simply drag and drop the “Google Social API Lookup” link to your bookmarks toolbar. Click it when you’re on any blog or profile page, and you’ll do a Google Social lookup. Enjoy!

After having tried many different ways of organizing work on my computer, I find myself having gone full circle and settling with the ever popular 5-folder configuration, as you can see in the small screen grab. Variations of how these are named can be found everywhere, but regardless of how they’re named, they’re all used in exactly the same way.

The only icons on my desktop are the icons for the drives, and these 5 folders. As part of my GTD contribution, I’ve made available a ZIP file of my GTD customized folders, all ready to go! The icons were collected from various sets from the Interfacelift Mac Icon collection.

A lot of people know that I’ve been working with Selenium to automate UI tests. You can now see a few examples of how specifically we use Selenium at Google, via the publicly released Selenium-based tests used as part of the Maps API testing process.

When you’re developing a Web-based application, testing a Web UI can get quite time-consuming. Throw in the problem of having to support multiple browsers, and the complexity of AJAX, and things can get out of hand quite quickly. This is where having an automated set of UI tests can be a life-saver. Make these tests part of your CI process, and you’ll get feedback as soon as something is broken.

Often, people end up testing the UI as part of an end-to-end test. This isn’t necessarily the best way to be testing the UI, as you’re no longer able to pinpoint the location of problems to a particular layer. Is that problem you’re seeing a data-encoding issue of the HTTP request/response, the database, or the persistence API? It could be anywhere. So take advantage of that multi-tiered system design which you have. Test each layer in isolation, separate it from the other layers that it’s talking to by putting fake, mock or stub layers in place, and test that layer by pumping in events and calling methods. Check the calls appearing out of that layer to verify they’re what you expect, and you have a much more useful set of tests.

Here’s what Facebook would be like if it were to represent actions in the real world:

Would YOU let anyone do that? Enough with the poking and scrabble and superwall for heaven’s sake!

This is yesterday’s “Business as Usual” picture:

And here for comparison is a similar group photo of today, where people are a bit more “normal” than yesterday’s picture:

(Note that the dog who was wearing a tie yesterday is also in a far more relaxed state in her T-shirt)

We’d already been advised to make sure to dress appropriately (in a suit), and been constantly reminded to bring our wallets. Here’s a picture documentary of what awaited us. In short, there was no more free food or drink, the pinball machines require you to put coins in (*gasp!*), and the Wii and XBox have disappeared. I think my favourite prank was the message on the printers:

The money collected today is being donated to charity.

Here’s a group shot of all those who participated:

The Google public April Fools jokes so far include Google Australia introduucing Google gDay, Gmail adding Custom Time, and Virgin and Google cooperating for Virgle. In other news, Google China’s Search is now powered by real humans and the YouTube homepage has been rickrolled (click on any featured video)! Google Book search introduces - scratch and sniff, and Google Calendar has the Wake Up Kit!

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is CERN’s flagship as it’s the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. They’re having an open day next Sunday. One guess as to what I’ll be doing on Sunday. Read more about it at the Slashdot post (Imagine a Beowulf cluster of ….., uuh, never mind), the XKCD comic, or more likely the corresponding Wikipedia entry. Should one even be surprised that a botanist is claiming that powering on the LHC will hurl the earth into a parallel universe! Well, I say “go for it”, I’ve always wanted to see what a parallel universe would be like! I can’t wait for the TED talk about the LHC to become available.

I’ve recently started exploring more and more of the TED talks, finding the range of topics discussed to be both unique and eye-opening. Some of my favourite talks include Hans Rosling’s talk on debunking third world myths, James Watson on the discovery of the structure of DNA and Ben Dunlap on the life of Sandor Teszler. I was never a big fan of podcasts until I found the TED talks available as podcasts via iTunes. For those of you interested, here’s a direct link to the iTunes TED Talks podcast.

After installing Nokia’s Multimedia Transfer application, I’ve created an iTunes smart playlist which contains the last 3 TED talks. Ensure that this smart playlist is within the N95 sync folder, and I always have the last 3 TED talks available on my phone for when I’m in a tram or bus. The screen on the N95 is not that large, but for watching most talks this is more than enough. Mmmm…. both the N95 8GB and N96 have larger screens…

A London-based HR consulting firm has for five consecutive years ranked Zürich as the city with the highest quality of life. Two other Swiss cities were in the top-ten list, with Geneva and Bern coming in at 2^nd and 9^th place respectively. The analysis is based on 39 criteria including political, social, economic and environmental factors, personal safety and health, education, transport and other public services.

You might already have heard about the Freeze at Grand Central Station in NYC, the Freeze in San Francisco, and many others. Here’s my video of the Zürich Freeze:

The beginning of the video is not that great due to the backlighting.