Day: June 21, 2012

Categories
bitching

3 Internet has the worst broadband I’ve used in 12 years

Just Sayin’.

(for past 20 hours, 3 has had no connectivity to 95% of all internet sites, including – intermittently – Google.co.uk. (*). Impossible to get anything done. And for the past 4 months, the service has been running at 1/50th of the normal speed. They don’t care – multiple calls to customer support result in being told “if the modem switches on, it is working. My script doesn’t allow any other possibility.”)

(*) – At times like these, I seethe that Google et al decide “What’s good for us” and actively prevent anyone from using e.g. Google.com, even if they want to. No, you MUST use your local country’s version of Google. I remember the good old days of the Internet, back when you were allowed to visit any site you wanted, just by typing it into your web browser. I never thought those days would end :(.

Categories
fixing your desktop Google? Doh! programming system architecture web 2.0

Google Docs 2012: Google loses your documents

Beware – latest version of Google Docs has the Gmail bug whereby emails (documents) randomly disappear and become completely inaccessible (this happens a few times a year with Gmail’s IMAP client). With Gmail, you can use the web interface to get around it and see the actual email – but with Google Docs, I don’t know of an alternative route. What you get is that Google appears to have deleted your data, with no comeback.

I just saw it now with Google Docs where a doc created yesterday allegedly didn’t exist any more – it had been removed from history, from recent documents, and … most distressing of all … it resulted in zero hits if you searched for it.

Solution?

There’s none – it’s just Google’s software being stunningly bad (again).

You have to wait. And pray. And wait some more. And click random things. And pray some more.

For me, clicking around on the different tabs on the left hand side (Home, All Items, Owned by Me) after a minute or so it randomly reappeared.

SaaS In the Cloud: Screwing the User, yet again…

I’m coming back to this topic more and more, because these abuses of web and HTML services are getting more and more damaging to the users.

If the “old” version of Google Docs doesn’t have this bug, it doesn’t matter – Google has already confiscated it from us. Unlike the core concept of desktop, laptop, and home computers … Google repeatedly takes the software that you possessed, and destroys it, for no reason other than to make things a little easier for engineers who don’t like to support the bad code they shipped.

That’s what this is about: people who use Cloud/SaaS to avoid taking responsibility for the apps they created.

Categories
fixing your desktop programming

GitHub 2nd chance: infinite crashes

I’m periodically re-trying GitHub’s GUI client, just in case it becomes stable enough for anyone to use on a real project.

Today, with the latest version: every time I start the app, it immediately hard-crashes. The app is literally unusable – it won’t run at all.

At least with the previous versions it would actually start up, so … this is a pretty big step backwards. If it had decent error reporting, like most apps do, I might be able to work out what’s wrong, but of course that’s one of the original problems with GitHub’s app – it disables all error reporting.

(as an aside: it’s interesting that Apple’s Mac App Store has made it so rare to see an app crash that … I can’t even be bothered to try and fix this app or complain about it. For an app to crash on startup is so VERY far behind the current “normal” for apps that … it’s just not worth the effort. I think the Mac App Store is one of the worst things to happen to computing in the last 20 years [if the US govt allows Apple and Microsoft to continue in this way, computers will become a thing of the past], but I have to admit it is achieving some great things)