Google Movie Showtimes: Now in Canada

This may be old news if you’re one of those people who follows all the Google product blogs. I don’t, so it’s new to me. I just did a search for avatar and was pleasantly surprised by the next 2 show times at 2 nearby theatres. There’s only one problem with the results, Google Movies only seems to know about 3 cinemas showing Avatar in Winnipeg. I Wonder why.

Google Streetview Rolls Out in Canada

Google has started to roll out it’s streetview across Canada. As of right now, cities include:

• Ottawa
• Montreal
• Toronto (and GTA)
• Calgary
• Hwy 1 to Banff for some reason
• Vancouver

Hopefully more cities will be added soon.

Even Google Makes Mistakes

This is an expert from a Gmail Blog Post re: the recent gmail outage:

Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.

This sounds exactly like the types of bugs I create. The fact that Google makes these sorts of mistakes, even though they do a lot more testing and have bigger teams, etc; makes me feel good about my programming skills.

Canada Finally On Google Street View

Sort of.

Looks like Google has added just about every major Interstate and small town to Street View. This means you can now see the Canadian border in many different locations.

Here’s the link

Google Chrome Bypasses OpenDNS (and How To Fix It)

I started using OpenDNS again for the first time since Google released Chrome.

When I ran Chrome, I noticed a curious little quirk, Chrome was ignoring OpenDNS’ shortcuts and auto typo correction. I whipped out wireshark and took at what was going on.

By default, every time you enter a character into Chrome’s toolbar it fetches results from google.com/complete/search. Since google knows about every single website, Chrome is able to decide if you’re typing a valid domain without querying DNS. That is, it’s actually redirecting you to a google search results page at the HTTP layer, before your request queries any DNS info.
While it’s not neccessarily a bad way of doing things, it is somewhat annoying. 

Luckily, google actually built a great product!
This feature is totally customizable. 

To turn it off; pull up “options” under the wrench menu, click the “under the hood tab and uncheck “show suggestions for navigation errors.”