Using Google to Find Housing in SF

About a month ago, I decided that I wanted to find a new place. I'm currently living in a 1-bedroom apartment near the San Antonio Shopping Center in Mountain View, and I have a couple issues with it: 1) It's BIG. Until I moved my bed into it, the "bedroom" just served as an area for me to walk through on the way to the bathroom. It's entirely unnecessary for one person to have both a living room and a bedroom. (Keep in mind that I literally lived in a closet last year at USC). 2) I'm all alone, and 'fraid of the dark. I know, I'm supposed to get over that fear - but I can't help it if the monsters are still alive! It would be better for the environment for me to live with roommates, as there's a chance I'd then turn the lights off at some point, and it'd be better hygienically as there's a chance I'd take showers at night. 3) I miss having roommates. I love having the possibility of interaction with a human while I'm sitting on the couch coding and watching trashy TV.

So, thus begins the housing hunt. I started off at this AMAZING mashup site called CribQ (I knew about it as the author emailed me about geocoding issues previously). It's a Craigslist/Google Maps mashup similar to HousingMaps.com, but it takes it to a whole new level. It gives you a login, lets you rate listings, add notes, search by viewport and price range. Plus, it shows how Google Maps + Virtual Earth can live peacefully together: whenever you click on a marker, it loads the Birds Eye View for that location below the Google Map. How perfect is that? You get the great aerial navigation of Google Maps plus the hard-to-navigate-but-easy-to-look-at side view from Virtual Earth. Oh, and one more thing: it's a mashup of mashups. It has another tab that loads in a WalkScore ranking for that location, and WalkScore is another of my favorite Google Maps/AJAX Search mashups. So I used CribQ to find a listing from a guy interested in starting up a house in the Mountain View area, contacted him, and together we signed a lease for a house he'd found earlier using a different Google hack. He'd done Craigslist searches for certain housing criteria, then subscribed to them in Google Reader, and starred the ones he liked. The house he found was pimp - 4 bedrooms, outside covered hot tub, and plenty of room downstairs for a bar and dance floor.
So thus began the hunt for a roommate, and of course, more Google hacks. We made a shared Google calendar between us for tracking when we were meeting up with potential roommates, created a Google doc for our ridiculously organized and comprehensive Craigslist roommates wanted listing, and created a Google spreadsheet to keep track of room rent prices/dimensions and potential roomie pro/cons. The collaborative aspect of Google technologies is what makes them so useful for doing something like a househunt together.
Anyway, we're pretty much decided on our roommates now, and moving in in a few weeks. I look forward to using Google apps for doing our house party planning (and clean-up duties :)!

Learning German with Google: Browser Language Preference

So, I had to change my browser language to a different language in order to verify that the LocalSearchControl based the language of its text ('search') on the browser preference. And then once I did that, I thought - well, why not just change the browser language permanently? I'm in German class right now at Google (taught through Berlitz), and I need ways to absorb more German outside of class. So, I changed my browser language to German and saw most of my Google services suddenly had a lot more 'k's in their UI messages. The cool thing is that I've pretty much memorized the UI of stuff I use all the time, so I can translate just based off position in the site layout. The hardest part has been with banning spammers in Groups. It's a lengthy process that involves expanding a message, clicking one link amongst a row of 10, confirming ja/nein, going to the moderate members section, finding the member, and then selecting an action from the dropdown menu. The fact that it's not as obvious as other UI has made it so that most of the words I've learned so far are from Groups (eftnernen = remove!), since I can't rely on position as easily and actually have to think about it.

Anyway, it's been a learning experience. Moving to Germany would probably be a whole lot more effective immersion, but that might be slightly more difficult. ;)

"Voices that Matter" Conference: GWT + Maps + Gears

Today at the last day of the "Voices that Matter" GWT conference, Dan Morril (of Valleywag-Muppet fame) and I presented a session on using the Maps + Gears API wrappers in GWT. (And yeah, I overslept, couldn't make a Caltrain time, and paid $100 for a taxi ride up to SF. One day I'll learn. Maybe.)

So Dan and I presented a pretty fun/useful combination of the two APIs: Offline Driving Directions. First I presented the non-Gears-ified Driving Directions example, which basically tries to mimic the Google Maps "to" and "from" box, complete with auto-suggest based on entered queries (using the nifty built-in MultiwordSuggestOracle), and of course, the directions steps and map overlays. Screenshot below:

Then, Dan showed how to make the app more functional by adding Gears, in two ways:

1. Use the local Db to store entered queries, so the app remembers all queries we ever enter on that computer, regardless of browser shutdown. That data persistence makes our auto-suggest alot more useful.


2. Use the local DB to store directions results (the text), and use the local server to capture the files used by the application.

Want to try it out yourself? First you need to download the google apis wrapper library (beta) here. Then download the zip file of the driving directions sample here. The gears version isn't up there yet, should be soon.

Note that you can't actually take the Maps API tiles and functionality offline with Gears, for a couple reasons. The local server can only store files that are on the same-domain as the app. That means it cannot be used to capture Maps API tiles or the Maps API script. It is technically feasible to download the script to your server and setup a proxy for the API tiles, but that would be against the (in)famous Maps API Terms of Use.

Using Google AJAX APIs to show "me on the web"

I realized the other day, as I was struggling to find all the videos of me/by me on YouTube, that I'm scattered across the web. I'm guessing we all are - at some point, we choose some arbitrary service to upload our creations or thoughts to, and at some later point, we might abandon that service and start putting ourselves somewhere else. That's one of the reasons I love Google -- I hope that at some point, everything I put on the web will be within a Google service, and I'll have one profile I can point people to. But, that day hasn't come yet. So how can I create a page that requires no maintenance but still reflects my current self on the web?

The answer: Google AJAX APIs. The AJAX APIs let you retrieve solely via Javascript information on the web, either ATOM/RSS feeds with the AJAX Feeds API or Google search results with the AJAX Search APIs. The AJAX APIs also come with several controls (slideshow, video bar, etc) that you can take advantage of if you like. So I've replaced my server front page (previously featuring my old projects blog) with this. It uses the AJAX Feeds API to display thumbnails from my flickr feed, youtube uploaded videos, youtube playlist, and uses the provided FeedControl class to display snippets from the Google Maps API blog, my old projects blog, and this blog.

So hopefully I won't be depressed anymore when I go to my server front page and see loads of outdated information. Atleast I know that atleast some section of those feeds will update frequently, and the knowledge that this is the representation of me to the world should motivate me to add to the feeds. Here's for hoping. :)