Posts Tagged google

I don’t understand Google Help

December 10, 2008 at 1:00 · Filed under software, virtual-life ·Tagged , ,

This is the problem I have for a long time. In normal software (I don’t wanna say that Google is bad, just…) I use some bugzilla or Jira (I love products using Jira!). I can watch how my issue progresses – or is ignored for that matter. ;-) Google is different. Sometimes it’s good – and that’s also the reason why I like their products. But I don’t understand their help. And this lasts for more than two years now. I wanted to report something in Gmail… I didn’t find how. Sometimes I was lucky and hit the form where I might write what I wanted – great idea for example. But that’s all. There are dozillions users of various Google services and I understand they can’t answer all. Even when I think some of my ideas were great. Not like revolutionary great, but normal great… like “All mails” without Chats in Gmail because look how it looks if you save talks and talk often. That was just for example.

Today I edited caption of one photo directly on Picasa web. I used quote signs in it. Normally if you do this in desktop Picasa it is changed to different quotes when the photo is uploaded. Not here. It looks fine after you enter it – it even looks fine when you go to different photo and back. But after reload ugly HTML entities appear (“). So I wanted to check out if someone else has the same problem (I bet someone does). I’ve googled for “picasa caption quote problem” and I’ve found something from summer of 2006. Ok, either it’s the same manifestation of a different bug or… doesn’t matter, I decided to file the problem. And so I clicked on “Help” in the upper right corner. It brought me here. Tell me what to do here when I have the problem? I decided to check if there were other unlucky users with the same problem – Known issues brought me here. Ok, nothing with captions in Web Albums section. I resorted to the sentence down there: If you’ve found a problem that’s not listed on this page, let us know. Link brought me here.

This time I was lucky on the forums searching for “captions” – on the second page I’ve found “quot” substring on the page and here it goes. But what IF I don’t wanna “fast answer” and I want to report bug? Other links are very limited to only a few topics in various areas and at the end… either go to Forum or to Help Center (where you started :-) ). On Forums you can ask. That’s all. It’s not the same like reporting the bug in my eyes.

The whole problem is that I generally become more and more ignorant to various bugs. I haven’t even tried to report the problem with side bar in Google Docs. Was it intention? Was it something revolutionary? I always doubt if it is bug or some great Google idea. And I’m afraid to submerge into their Help Center and cycle there without ever reaching reasonable suggestion/bug form. Maybe they have too much of feedback – I don’t know. But what if they don’t have enough feedback? Even too much can be not enough if I hit more and more glitches in their services. It’s never anything critical (luckily) but I’m afraid it’s inevitable that it will be worse and worse. I hope I’m wrong because I generally like Google services and I’d like to stick with them.

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Picasa 3 with stupid Other Stuff

December 3, 2008 at 12:25 · Filed under real-life, software, virtual-life ·Tagged , , ,

I’m angry. This time about Google again (last time it was missing side bar in Google Docs – still missing BTW, no drag&drop to move the document to some directory anymore). Picasa offered me an update and I agreed – why not to update? Well – after I started my brand new updated Picasa 3 I’ve found out that I miss some directories in the Folder list. Well – it’s so called collection with the name Folders. Incredible. There is another collection called Other Stuff. Any directory I uploaded some picture from was put here. 95 victims in my case. First problem was to find them, second to get rid of the Other Stuff collection. You can’t – because it’s a “default collection and cannot be removed”. When something is impossible it’s not a problem anymore – it’s simply the fact. Very stupid fact in this case. I thought I can select first directory, shift-select last and move them all to Folders. No way – you can’t select more directories. Imagine you have 1000 directories there. Imagine that you have to browse your photos from yesterday there and photos from today and the day before yesterday in the Folders collection. That’s the power of Picasa 3. No questions during update – bang!

Who’s stupid idea was this? I don’t know. I don’t care “default collections” – but please, don’t get in my way. Google was many times about surprises, but they were mostly nice surprises. “Yeah, how could I live without this idea before?” That sort of surprises. This is not the same kind. I’m sad.

Few minutes after my last sentence I switched Picasa from “flat folder view” to “tree view” which doesn’t divide my directories into Folders and Other Stuff. I’ll use that as it also better reflects disk placement. Still doesn’t change anything on my view of this “default collection”.

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Google Docs enhanced?

October 13, 2008 at 23:02 · Filed under software, virtual-life ·Tagged ,

I’m not sure if it’s on purpose or not, but I miss sidebar in Google Docs application containing folders and some other stuff. You can see it on the picture on this page. Now the trouble is, that I miss that list of folders for a few days already. This is how it looks in Chrome:

In Firefox there is even no space on the left side left. I hope this is only temporary problem and not enhancement. :-)

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Blogging for two years!

October 12, 2008 at 23:11 · Filed under virtual-life ·Tagged , , , ,

Yeah, it’s true! I would probably not celebrate it if I had ended my blogger’s career in a typical way (you guessed it… I meant simply to stop writing). It was actually pretty close to that but I somehow revived my taste to write again. The taste I have since my early years as I always liked to write various short stories. The biggest of them is my Slovak mini-novel called Cesta (The Way or maybe The Journey, doesn’t really matter) and as it is the biggest thing I really pulled off to the end it’s no surprise I decided to revive and revise it as well.

But originally this blog was created because of Utopia. I’d had my utopia in my head for some time before but I simply did not write that time. I generally still write much less than I used to. I used to write songs as well, now it’s more than four years since my last one. Satisfied comfy life might be the creativity killer. But I did other things! I made some maps for UT2004, I started the promising page about UT3 level editing (still has many visits every day mostly thanks to static mesh catalogue) and if there had not been some troubles with UT3 and/or my online connectivity problems I would have continued in these areas. And I still may in the future as the desire to do some map returns to me here and there.

But back to the blog itself. I expected Gavin to meet his Susan in just a few installments of the Utopia, but discussions were longer than I expected and I didn’t want to have posts too long. We’re obviously far from any end with Utopia – I don’t have any in my head actually because it’s the Utopia exploration in the first place. :-) Cesta is my sure shot – I can release any part anytime if I find just a little time to reread and correct it. But aside from these things I knew from the start that I want to write about current things around me as well. It wasn’t any accident that I started to write about Google, now I use Google Docs to write and “backup” my posts, I originally started on Blogspot until I found out that there were serious problem with printing from that page and that these problems were unsolved for a few years (I don’t care about current situation).

As said in “About me and this Blog” this site is not really topical, but while I agree that it’s nice to have a topical blogs, I think it’s not the problem to do otherwise as well. There are many post aggregators that feed various topical lists with appropriately tagged posts. So Java people have their posts from my site and people interested in music or movies have their too. There are search engines after all. While my post about Seam haven’t attracted any attention, other two Java posts related to some very specific problems with specific products and setups have been read and I’m sure they will be. Doesn’t matter that they are maybe the most off-topic if there is any topic on this blog. ;-)

After some initial enthusiasm (13 posts in last 80 days of 2006) I had obvious crisis during the whole year of 2007 (only 7 posts!). Notice the big gap between May and November – ended with Travian Intermezzo – yup, Travian is killing the rest of your life. :-) Year 2008 started much better. I have moved here to WordPress, I helped my wife to establish her blog about cooking (in Slovak, but with a lot of pictures :-P ), I started to write about games and other stuff (music, movies, although I have to extend this part ;-) ) and I started to be active blogger again!

After those two years I’m happy to be here although my blog is more loose than I expected. I don’t care. I have some visitors (although my wife’s cooking blog is beating me even without using world language!), I have something to look back to – and I believe I have also a lot of to look forward to. And I want to thank you for bearing with me. :-)

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Moving In

March 1, 2008 at 11:29 · Filed under virtual-life ·Tagged , , , , ,

This is actually copy of post from Blogspot after I migrated all posts here. Only the title there is “Moving Out”. :-)

When my wife wanted to create blog with recipes I suggested Blogspot because I like it and it’s Google corporate. I like Google products. But Blogspot is first case when I decided to move out. Continuation of this blog can be found here:

http://virgo47.wordpress.com/

Now – of course – it’s time to explain why. Well, the reason is very silly. ;-) It’s impossible to print properly blog posts from here without some effort. I don’t care about my blog – but recipes are likely to be printed out. In Firefox you get first page nearly empty (only title) and second contains your post – but only what fits there. Anything else is not printed at all. Not to mention that sidebar is standing in the way narrowing print area. IE works a bit better but there are reported problems with it as well.

You can probably solve this with some custom styles, but whatever I tried it didn’t work for me. HTML template consists of various blogger tags and I can’t limit default style to be media=screen only which makes my media=print style to be effectively ignored. This makes a lot of advices (to be found in various Blogspot posts) from 2005 invalid because they worked with more plain HTML template.

Long story short: There is no easy solution to print and I decided not to continue on blog site that works in this status for at least three years now.

I work with many SW products and normally I just address authors and tell them. However Blogger is for free and I can’t expect fix very soon when it’s like this for many years. To contact Google (I mean normal written text) is not that easy because all those forms lead you in circles to various helps – which obviously can’t help me now. And Blogger Google Group? You can find the same problem there – unsolved. I tried different layouts – that’s also why I don’t have my previous style anymore (and I don’t plan to change it back because it’s pointless now).

I’m staying with Google – but I’m leaving Blogspot. I’ll leave this blog here and maybe sometimes I post here just a summary pointing out to my new blog. But I’m blogging elsewhere now. So does my wife with her recipes (Slovak language). :-)

Final note: Of course here I have to pay $15 per year for custom CSS, but even without that it:
* works in the first place (whole post is printed);
* side bar is printed after the article, so you can just set last page(s) not to be printed.

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