Google Goes Geek With Command Line

Noemi Twigg — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:05:44 +0000

They say real geeks know how to work the command line. If you’re lost at this point, then maybe you ought to do a little bit of research before proceeding. Else, just give up on this post already.

As of today, Google geeks can rejoice over having more (and easier) control over their Google Apps. Google has released what is called GoogleCL (not very creative, I know). This program can be used to manipulate Google applications such as Blogger, Docs, Calendar, Picasa, and even YouTube. The program is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Let it not be said that Google discriminates based on operating system!

With GoogleCL, we can all just key in commands to automate certain tasks – the delay of having to point and click is done away with. Here are some examples.

Blogger
google blogger post –tags “GoogleCL” –title “Test” “Guess what? I’m posting using the command line!”

Calendar
google calendar add “Coffee with Lenna today at 7pm” # add event to calendar

Contacts
google contacts add “John Doe, jdoe@gmail.com”

Understandably, not everyone will be clapping their hands with joy because of this piece of news. I was just telling a colleague about it when she looked at me with a blank expression on her face…as if thinking “What’s wrong with her?”

I am pretty sure, though, that GoogleCL will have a pretty strong following in certain circles. I can already name a few who will, for sure, use it – they’re probably trying it out already. What about you, does GoogleCL mean anything to you?

If you want instructions for installing GoogleCL, check out PCWorld (for Windows Vista) and Lifehacker (for Unix).

When Gmail Goes Down…

Noemi Twigg — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:18:02 +0000

Yesterday, I had a meeting for about an hour so I was not able to check my personal Gmail for a bit. Neither was I constantly checking my work mail, which is based on Google Apps as well. That is why when I went back to my desk, I was quite surprised to see people lounging around just chatting, some looked kind of panicky and irritated at the same time. So what was happening?

I found out soon enough when I tried to send the minutes of the meeting through my Google Apps e-mail. At first I thought that the error I was getting was because of our Internet connection – it does become funky at times. Then I realized that everyone was experiencing the same thing. Pretty soon, I saw proof of the worldwide “blackout” on the Web – Tweets about Gmail were all over the place.

So what happens when Gmail goes down? The world comes to a standstill!

If you haven’t noticed, or you haven’t been keeping track, this is actually the 6th downtime in 8 months! That’s almost once a month of outage! For personal e-mails, I suppose that that is not such a big deal but if your work e-mail is on the line, then such a frequent occurrence is not a very good thing. Google has no explanation for the latest glitch as of yet but it has already been dubbed as “The Great Gmail Outage of 2009.” And great it was indeed – I lost about 2 hours of work time yesterday. What were you doing when it happened? How did you deal with it?

ForeverGeek » Google Apps

Google Goes Geek With Command Line

When Gmail Goes Down…