Looking for a way to report a problem with YouTube software I found a link “Report a bug” a the bottom of the page. However, when I clicked it, I got redirected to:

http://www.google.com/tools/feedback/intl/en/error.html

Which says:

An error has occurred

We are sorry but we were not able to capture your feedback.

Seems to be a fine day at Google today, perhaps engineers are pulling hair.

This morning, I was looking at a spreadsheet in Google Docs and suddenly some 20 values simply vanished right before my eyes. I wasn’t even working anywhere near that part of the sheet. I was inserting new values at bottom and somewhere in top-right corner the values were gone. I tried undo and to scroll around (big sheet) and only when I switched to another sheet and came back the values showed up again. Phew. From now on I’m doing export and download to my computer every time I finish editing.

Few hours later, a new issue. Looking at a spreadsheet I selected Save from the menu. It said that it’s ok. I did some changes, clicked Save, got no error but the screen read “Last saved 2 minutes ago”. Ok, maybe it’s just a minor glitch. 15 minutes later I tried to save again. Once again, no errors, but it still says “saved 17 minutes ago”. At this point I was confused whether save is not possible or the message is simply wrong. I exported the document to xls format, checked in OpenOffice and then closed the browser tab.

Three strikes and blog post is out. I just had another issue, now with GMail, so I guess it’s time to make all this public. I wrote an e-mail message and it said “Your connection to GMail has expired. Please log in again.” Ok, it’s not like I haven’t seen that one before, but it’s been almost a month. I though they had it fixed. I logged out, logged back in and… it still does not allow me to send an e-mail. I can read messages fine, but as soon as I try to post, I get a warning that “Your connection to GMail has expired. Please log in again.”.

Oh well, I guess we get as much as we payed for it ;)

Today I noticed something really strange. I’m logging into my GMail
account, and the login page redirects the browser to some youtube.com
subdomain before redirecting back to my inbox.

Looks like now I can “like” YouTube videos without having to log in! Hurray!

Although this is a strange way to make it work, I appreciate the
end-result even if it means one more redirect. I just hope Google
won’t do the same for all their services, because having a dozen
redirects before logging into GMail would really be bad.

1. Firefox crashing
2. Google Apps multi-login failure
3. Linux terminal
4. Liquidweb routing
5. Xorg server killing keyboard
6. stuck SSH sessions

Ok, let’s go into details:

1. Firefox crashing

One of the best features Firefox has is crash-recovery, and that with
good reason. However, it still is not perfect. It happens often that I
have 10+ tabs open, one of those crashes FF and when I restart all my
GMail sessions are lost (see point 2. for more pain), I have to log in
again. Same with some other websites. Sending report to mozilla takes
forever, and even though there are sites I reported like 50+ times
while using FF 2, 3, 3.5 and 3.6, it still crashes FF 4. I wish Chrome
was easier to install on Slackware and if it had all the extensions I
needed (TamperData, Firebug, RequestPolicy, Screengrab are a must)

2. Google Apps multi-login failure

Having to log into accounts in exact order is painfull. What’s even
worse, once browser saves the cookie it is impossible to login into
any of domain-based accounts directly. You have to log into regular
GMail account first. Maybe I should take a job offer to go to work for
Google and help them fix this ;)

3. Linux terminal

I spend about 20% of my working time in terminal, mostly using ssh to
access remote computers or using make to build/install programs and
packages. KDE’s Konsole is the best tool I used. However, these is one
problem with resizing. I still haven’t been able to determine the
exact way to reproduce it, but switching from 80x25 to fullscreen at
some point starts a strange behavior. Parts of typed text get lost,
overwritten. This happens only when command cannot fit in 80 
characters. Maybe it happens when you get one command that is too long
for the fullscreen terminal, and after that something gets messed up.
I never managed to catch it, but it does annoy me. The only was to get
proper line wrapping back is to normalize the window size so that the
terminal is 80x25 again and then you should forget about fullscreen
until you log out and log in again.

4. Liquidweb routing

For more than a week, there has been some routing problem in
Liquidweb, and it does not look like it’s going to be fixed any time
soon. Searching on Google yielded some results, i.e. other people see
this problem, but it seems to be only sporadic in US, and I guess LW
does not care about the rest of the world. Some of my websites are
hosted at DTH and I’m accessing from Europe. Using some different ISP
in Europe makes it work, but traceroute shows completely different
path that does not go through LW at all. To cut the story short, I
don’t have access to our main bug/issue tracker, 3 company websites,
and one web service I’m using. I have to build SSH tunnels to my other
servers and reconfigure my local system to deal with this. It’s not
unsolvable, but it’s a major PITA.

5. Xorg server killing keyboard

When I’m working all day at full speed, I get this at least once. It
only happens on my 2 desktop computers, the laptop running same
version of Linux kernel and Xorg works just fine. At some time the
keyboard simply stops responding. I can you the mouse though. I tried
replacing the keyboard, mouse and motherboard, problem is still here.
This leaves the only conclusion: it must be software. It’s either
Linux or Xorg. My guess is Xorg, because I can use mouse to log out of
KDE, and then keyboard magically starts working again and I can type
password at KDM login to log back in.

6. stuck SSH sessions

I guess there is some configuration on my client’s network routers to
simply “lose” stale network connections. I log in via SSH and some
20-30 minutes later the session is stuck. The connection is not
dropped, it just stays there, waiting.

Do you have some stuff that really get’s on your nerve on a daily
basis? Please share…

I have 4 domains using google apps accounts and been mostly using
e-mail on them. Today some of the domains switched to new whatever and
multiple-domain feature started to wreak havoc. I was able to use
multi-account for about a month until today. Even that was a major
PITA as I had to log into accounts in correct order, otherwise you get
the darned “page is redirecting is such way that … whatever”.

Now, I have even funnier stuff happening, I wrote a 4 page long e-mail
and when I try to send it, “my session has (mysteriously) expired”.
Copy/paste the email to a text editor and re-login into google apps.
Well, not so simple as I had to close Firefox completely first.

Another “cool” thing was when I opened my inbox, clicked the first
unread message and voila, “my session expired”. WTF?

Combine that with 100% CPU usage when writing long e-mail messages,
turning € symbol into word EURO, preventing some types of attachments,
and, recently too agressive SPAM filter that eats most of my
mailing-list mail. GMail might be a nice product, but I certainly see
a lot room for improvement.

So, for the time being, Google Apps is dead to me. I’m looking for an
alternative. If I’m unable to find something worthy, I might switch
back to using Thunderbird and setting up my own IMAP (or whatever)
server, or even building Google Apps competitor myself. It doesn’t
have to have all the bells and whistles, but basic stuff must work
flawlessly.

17th May of 2011. - Google Apps FAIL

Please, please, PLEASE, stop changing the € sign in my messages to
word EURO. You don’t translate $ into DOLLAR, so keep my € as it is.

I’ve been using gmail account for personal stuff for some years now,
and I also have a google apps account for company domain. I the past I
was able to log into both using the same browser in different tabs. In
2011 all apps accounts will be upgraded to new software, so you can
use them as regular google accounts. This is great, except there’s one
bug that makes this change actually bad: you cannot be logged into 2 
accounts at the same time. This means that I cannot read personal
e-mail and company e-mail at the same time. Now I could run 2 
browsers, but I’ll really a shame that Google with all their
engineering potential cannot make this simple thing work properly.

I hope they’ll fix it soon.

Google has trouble counting… to 5.

Anyone using Google Analytics, AdSense and even Google search knows
there is some kind of fuzzy logic applied to the counting process,
especially when sum of all values is not quite mathematically correct.
I never wondered much about it because Google runs a lot of data
through their system and it could all just be the cloud effect, or
even really AI fuzzy logic.

Until, today I tried to access YouTube with Firefox 2, and I got this
interesting message. Admitedly, it is a nice way to promote Google
Chrome browser, but it also shows that Google has even trouble
counting to 5. For those of you not looking at the screenshot: the
text says “here are 5 ways to leave your browser”, and shows only 4 
browsers listed underneath ;)

Well, maybe this is really a sign of future world domination. The
original Pentium I processor also had problem with math, and Intel is
#1 in that area today.