I’ve been wasting my time this week. I’ll have to do it again next week. I noticed one thing though. It’s much less stressful for me to visit a dentist than having to deal with slovenian bureaucracy.

I added Google ads (again), but with a bit of a twist. They can be seen only on posts at least two months old, so they don’t annoy my few regular readers and are seen only by fly-by visitors, who’ll never return again. Since they are the same people who come to this site by searching for something, it’s also more likely that ads will be beneficial to them. So in a way we all win or at least nobody loses (much). If you think the idea sounds too good to be mine, well, you’re right. It isn’t. It’s Simon’s .

I also admit to writing misleading title for this post. There are no connections between those three words or at least not in this article, but wouldn’t it be great, if all university students in Slovenia were required to write 3 new wikipedia articles in their final year? By then they should certainly be qualified and experienced enough to meet the level of your average wikipedia post and it wouldn’t add much to their workload.

It’s an expected fact of a geek life that interesting technologies and gadgets appear when you don’t have either means or time to play with them. No surprise then that Google Gears was announced exactly at such a time for me. As you’ve probably read elsewhere, Google Gears is a browser extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer (with Safari coming up) which lets developers create web applications that can also run offline on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Google isn’t the first company doing something like this. Adobe has Apollo, Microsoft is working on its own thing, Mozilla added support for offline storage in version 2 of the fox and there are some less well known attempts like Dojo’s. What makes it special are few things.

First, unlike Apollo or Firefox, it’s not a special environment and it’s as cross-browser and cross-platform as it gets these days. Google is also trying to build an industry support for this and Adobe already announced it will support Gears API in Apollo. Same has already been done by Dojo Toolkit. There’s also an intention to make it an open standard by submitting proposal to WHATWG/W3C (and hopefully them accepting it).

Personally, I can’t wait to play with WorkerPool API (which seems to be overlooked in all the excitement). Having a possibility of running time-intensive operations in a background without the fear of triggering “unresponsive script” dialog is a wish come true. Even though you can’t access objects document and window (and hence any part of the DOM). Reason for this is that background scripts don’t share any execution state and hence can’t all access unique objects like aforementioned ones.

This might limit usefulness of the API somewhat, but there are still plenty of uses that come to my mind. What also comes to my mind is a problem, that isn’t really technological. Web applications gave impression to public of being fairly safe to use even on public computers (which isn’t really true) and I fear many won’t understand that new tools may now store private data where they don’t expect or want them to.