Olivet University - Olivet Institute of Technology

Google I/O 2013 Lines Up Innovation, Inspirations

The sixth annual Google I/O 2013 conference for software developers was held at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center last week.  In attendance were IT students from Olivet University’s Information Technology College, OIT, who soaked in the developer-centric event with glimpses into future products offered by Google. 

At its 3-hour keynote, Google introduced its latest progress for Google+, Hangout, IDE, Chrome, Android devices, music services, and Google Maps. The company announced that there are over 48 billion apps installed from the Google Play store, thanks to 900 million activations of Android devices.

Google’s new development environment-Android Studio, which aimed at speeding up code building, was announced. It’s a full IDE with an Android-friendly code editor utilizing margin previews for editing. It also has a live simulator, which can show views in real time on multi screen size devices across multi languages. OIT students tried out the new Android Studio and marveled at its efficiency.  Google added five new features to Google Play Developer Console that can assist developers, particularly OIT students working on Android development in their curriculum.

Google+ provided 41 new features, including new column-based layout of Google+, and its amazing photo tools.  Improvements were made to reduce the labor-intensive works of organizing, sharing, and uploading photos into an easy process. It aims at building a smarter social network using innovative algorithms to improve the user experience. Google’s redesigned its Maps experience for mobile and desktop, making it smarter and more personalized. These changes imply the trends of how technology is being used. Olivet University’s IT students are working with trends in mind as Google’s lineup of innovative products offer nothing but inspiration.

GOOGLE WANTS TO INSTALL A COMPUTER ON YOUR FACE

Google glass are taking steps to get even more high tech. The compact frames have on one side a hidden camera, a battery, motion sensors, a wireless connection to reach the Internet, and other electronics. It also contains a small display, which works by having a small light directed into a person’s eye by a thumb-size prism positioned just under his or her right eyebrow. 

But how this Google R&D project might become a popular product and a significant contributor to Google’s bottom line remains fuzzy. There are several aspects that Google glasses have to take into consideration. 

source: http://www.technologyreview.com/

Google PageRank checksum PHP algorithm revealed

In a blog entry, the Google PageRank checksum algorithm was revealed.

The Google PageRank functionality in Google Toolbar works by querying Google’s server for information on the PageRank of a specific page. This might seem easy enough to implement in your own program/website, but the problem is that the toolbar calculates a checksum on the page URL before querying the server, and the server only responds if the checksum is correct. Fortunately the checksum algorithm was reverse engineered from Google Toolbar 7. I was provided the hand decompiled version of the algorithm in C from a friend. Then I went ahead and rewrote it in PHP for web development usage. You can find both versions below.

As an example, the query URL for the page ‘http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk’ is http://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?client=navclient-auto&features=Rank&q=info:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk&ch=783735859783

Any other query with a checksum other than 783735859783 will result in a ‘403 forbidden’ response.
Enjoy.

PHP CODE:

<?php

/* the floating point hacks are due

   to PHP's bugs when handling

   large unsigned integers */

functionfch($csm)

{

    if($csm< 0)

        $csm+= 4294967296.0;

    $a= (int)fmod($csm, 10);

    $t= 1;

    $b= (int)($csm/ 10);

    while($b) {

        $c= $b% 10;

        if($t)

            $c= (int)($c/ 5) + ($c* 2) % 10;

        $b= (int)($b/ 10);

        $a+= $c;

        $t^= 1;

    }

    

    $a= 10 - $a% 10;

    if($a== 10)

        returnord('0');

    

    if($t)

        returnord('0') + (int)(($a& 1 ? $a+ 9 : $a) / 2);

    returnord('0') + $a;

}

functionchecksum($str)

{

    if(strlen($str) == 0)

        return0x1000;

        

    /* the floating point hacks are due to PHP's bugs when handling integers */

    $a= 5381.0;

    for($i= 0; $i< strlen($str); $i++)

        $a= fmod($a+ ($a* 32) + ord($str[$i]), 4294967296.0);

    if($a> 2147483647.0)

        $a-= 4294967296.0;

    $a= (int)$a;

    $b= 0.0;

    for($i= 0; $i< strlen($str); $i++)

        $b= fmod(($b* 64) + ($b* 65536) - $b+ ord($str[$i]), 4294967296.0);

    if($b> 2147483647.0)

        $b-= 4294967296.0;

    $b= (int)$b;

    

    $a= (($a>> 6) & 0x3ffffc0) | (($a>> 2) & 0x3f);

    $c= (($a>> 4) & 0x3ffc00) | ($a& 0x3ff);

    $d= (($c>> 4) & 0x3c000) | ($c& 0x3fff);

    $c= ((($d& 0x3c0) << 4) | ($d& 0x3c)) << 2;

    $a= $b& 0x0f0f;

    $e= $b& 0x0f0f0000;

    $b= (($d& 0xffffc000) << 4) | ($d& 0x3c00);

    return($b<< 10) | $c| $a| $e;

}

$PR_SERVER= "http://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?client=navclient-auto&features=Rank&q=info:";

$page= "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk";

$csm= checksum($page);

printf($PR_SERVER. "%s&ch=7%c%u\n", $page, fch($csm), $csm);

?>

Google Fiber launched !

Google launched it’s Fiber service. Being what we would describe as revolutionary will even provide free internet to whoever doesn’t need the 1Gb internet (yes, you heard well)!

Read everything here and here.

UPDATE!! : See here an unlisted official video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uZVqPuq81c