I’m trying to geotag the photos from my brother’s wedding using a combination of Picasa and Google Earth. I’ve done this before many times but now I do all my work from a non-admin account under Windows XP, and I’m running into a problem.

When I click the Tools | GeoTag | Geotag in Google Earth menu item, for some reason MSI is launched trying to find the Google Earth.msi in a temp directory in the admin user’s Documents and Settings folder, which obviously my non-admin account doesn’t have the privs to read. The resulting dialog box says:

The feature you are trying to use is on a network resource that in unavailable.

Click OK to try again, or choose an alternate path to a folder containing the installation package ‘Google Earth.msi’ in the box below.

Of course, the box below contains only the path into the admin’s profile folder, and there’s no option to change it or browse for an alternative. If I click cancel, the box reappears.

Ever since Google announced IMAP support for Gmail accounts on the 24th, I’ve been waiting for them to enable it for my Google Apps domains, nullpointer.net and, more importantly, apocryph.org. Yesterday afternoon I logged out and back in to my mail accounts, and lo and behold, my nullpointer.net domain had the IMAP option in the Settings window. Still waiting for apocryph.org, though. How long must I wait? It’s killing me!

Source code is in many ways a private hangout for developers. End users and management seldom if ever see the code, and when they do it’s so inscrutable they tend not to linger long.

As a result, developers are able to express themselves in source code with little oversight, apart from occassional reviews by fellow developers. This was demonstrated somewhat amusingly when the Windows 2000 source code was leaked, revealing ample profanity.

Now that Google has released a search engine for source code, open source developers can now be subject to the same scrutiny. It didn’t take long for someone to use Google code search for profanity. Some of my favorites:

Today I was on my way to my Google Notebook when I stumbled across Google Browser Sync for firefox. The idea is you install this extension on all the computers where you use Firefox, and it keeps the settings in sync between them.

This might seem trivial, but it is in fact huge. Cookies, favorites, cached passwords, browser history…they’re all shared with this tool. I just installed it on my work laptop, and can’t wait to put it on my home machine and never set the same config option in two

I run the Drupal module, gsitemap, on apocryph.org. However, I didn’t realize that Google has a separate service, Google Sitemap, in which you register (‘claim’) your site, and tell Google you’re producing an XML sitemap according to their sitemap specification.

Today I learned of a new Google endeavor, Google Analytics. It’s basically traffic analysis software, mostly targeted to advertisers (in fact, it’s free to AdWords customers), but also useful to bloggers and other amateur content authors. Since I’m not an AdWords customer, I’m limited to 5M page views (per month, presumably); that leaves me with a margin of barely 4.999 million.