Posts Tagged ‘google’

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Google Drive broke itself? Deleting the user settings…

Monday, February 2nd, 2015

About 3 weeks ago, I think Google Drive tried to update itself and broke itself. This happened on multiple computers running at one of our client’s businesses. These were Windows XP Pro computers, in Workgroup mode, and the users are running in Limited User accounts. I’m not 100% what the trigger to the problem was – it didn’t seem to be a  wide spread problem, since, my brief web searches on the topic didn’t turn up anything recent.

I tried an uninstall and re-install of Google Drive, but that didn’t work. In hindsight, I should have tried disconnecting the drive from a Google user account, and then re-connecting it.

What I actually did was to delete the Google Drive user level files (and, as it turns out, the settings). As far as I can tell, this seems to reset the software. It looks like Google Drive doesn’t really use the Windows Registry – this makes sense, it makes it easier share code across platforms like OSX or Linux (if such clients exist).

So, I renamed this folder, to “break” Google Drive:

C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Drive

I think Windows Vista and later would have it here: C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Drive

 

Upon re-opening the Google Drive client, I was prompted to do the initial setup. And after entering the Google Account username and password, and pointing to the original drive folder, it started to work. There was an initial sync check, where all the files were compared to the cloud copy, and then a prompt to correct any discrepancies.

I’m not impressed that this happened, it makes me wonder about all these automatically updating programs, like Chrome (which has also caused me grief after an automatic update).

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Posted in annoying, software, windows | No Comments »

Thunderbird Email Losing Sync with Google Hosted Email (via IMAP)

Monday, August 19th, 2013

Update: I wrote this too soon. This worked for a day or two, but then Thunderbird got out of sync again. I will have to try something different later.

Update 2: For a week or so, I have disabled mail.server.default.use_condstore  in Thunderbird, as suggested here: http://www.ghacks.net/2013/09/07/fix-gmail-imap-slows-thunderbird-mails-arriving-timely-fashion/ – I’m again cautiously optimistic that it’s worked around the problem.

My email is currently hosted by Google and I use a mix of the web interface (often on multiple devices), Thunderbird on a workstation, and my phone to access email. For reasons unknown to me, a couple months ago  Thunderbird client stopped updating itself when items were read or deleted from other devices or interfaces. I often resorted to closing Thunderbird, and re-opening it to force a re-synchronization.

I vaguely recall updating Thunderbird at about the same time that  this issue started, but, I’m not 100% sure. I hadn’t updated in quite a while –  probably over a year. Or, perhaps Google changed some settings on their end. I really don’t know.

I finally spent a bit of time trying to figure out a workaround or fix.

I disabled IDLE support in the email account in Thunderbird. It’s under Account Settings –> Server Settings –> Advanced. For those who don’t know, IDLE is supposed to push new email notifications to your email client, in this case, Thunderbird, more or less instantly. That’s normally a good thing.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, disabling this seems to have fixed my Inbox’s “deleted” and “read” status issue, and I can live with a few minutes delay before my emails reach me.

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Posted in email, Google | 1 Comment »

You can search Print-Bingo.com!

Monday, February 14th, 2011

The other day we added a Google Custom Search box to the top right of print-bingo.com, our awesome web based bingo card generator.  We’ll probably tidy up the setup if we discover that it is used frequently enough.  The nice thing for our setup is that we configured this Google Custom Search Engine to search the three sites that have print-bingo.com content, the site itself, our corporate blog (the site you are reading right now), and our support forum.

This is actually our second run-in with Google Custom Search.  Late last year we played around with this technology when we created KittenSearch.net, the cutest search engine in the world.  We still haven’t decided if we’ll keep KittenSearch.net around or not.  We learned a few things, and that was the primary goal.

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Posted in print-bingo.com, search, web development | No Comments »

Google Chrome Built-in PDF Viewer Incompatibility with IFRAME and a Workaround

Saturday, December 11th, 2010

With the recent automatic upgrade of Google Chrome to version 8, Google made their built in PDF viewer the default viewer *.  I.e. there is now no need to separately download Adobe Reader or Adobe Flash Player to browse the web with Google Chrome.

Generally, I like this addition to Google Chrome; however, it caused some work for us.  Our web based bingo card generator, print-bingo.com, is highly dependent on PDF’s.  That’s the sole reason why our bingo cards are dead-easy to print out by the hundreds.  Unfortunately, Chrome’s built-in PDF renderer does not display PDFs that are in an IFRAME tag properly.

For the last few days, this is what users of print-bingo.com would see after generating 5 pages of bingo cards on print-bingo.com:

 

Broken PDF rendering in an IFRAME in Google Chrome 8 - screenshot from print-bingo.com

Broken PDF rendering in an IFRAME in Google Chrome 8 - screenshot from print-bingo.com

Chrome tries to scale the parent page to fit everything in… and it fails badly.

We were not able to get things working 100% the way we would like, but we have a workable situation now.

The basic steps that we had to take:

  • Change from IFRAME to OBJECT tag.  For whatever reason, this fixes the zooming issue.  And it was quite simple.  In our case, there wasn’t much difference between the two HTML tags.
  • Unfortunately, we can’t find a way to get Chrome to print the contents of the object tag without printing the rest of the page (though, perhaps using CSS  might work).
  • Instead, we added some bold warning text that gives Chrome users instructions to use the manual download links. We use a little function to identify Chrome users – the two key lines of code are: 
    $u_agent = $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’]; 
    if(preg_match(‘/Chrome/i’,$u_agent)) { $ub = “Chrome”; }

So, we ended up with a workaround.  We sincerely hope that Google will add the missing interface elements that will make things just work, but until then, we are doing some other site improvements as we prepare to bump up the price of Premium Access to $12 in 2011.

* If you want to go back to using Adobe Reader in Google Chrome, you can turn off the  built-in viewer by going to the special address about:plugins and change Chrome PDF Viewer to Disable.  Of course, website owners should not depend on end-users to do this just to visit your site!

 

 

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Posted in annoying, bingo cards, Google, html, print-bingo.com, printing, programming, web development | 1 Comment »

Is it a good thing when you don’t notice that your AdWords campaign was turned off?

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

We’ve run campaigns for print-bingo.com on Google AdWords from day 1.  Actually, we ran ads before the site was even on the print-bingo.com domain.  So, it’s been years.

We learned this week that Google has quality checks to make sure that AdWords customers are running legitimate websites.  I.e. they don’t want to sell advertising to scammers, malware installers, virus tricksters, and whatever Google deems to be low quality sites.  As with all things Google, these are highly automated processes. This quality score concept  makes sense –  I would be less likely to click on ads if there was a chance that the landing page was virus laden.

Apparently,  after our large edits to print-bingo.com in  August, we tripped the quality scanner and our AdWords campaigns  were turned off.  We sent a support request in to Google and a few days later, after a manual review, our ads are now running again.  Yay!  More advertising expenses.  :)

The strangest thing is that we didn’t even notice for two weeks.  We’re happy to say that sales are up so much year over year, that we just didn’t notice.  It did seem weird that we weren’t getting many (in retrospect, zero) referrals from Google AdWords that lead to conversions, but that happens some days, so it didn’t shout problem.

What’s the point of this post?  Well, actually, I think we’re bragging about our increased sales.  But on a practical note, make sure you watch your campaigns – I couldn’t find a way to get email notifications, but it might be buried in the interface somewhere.  You can always watch your logs.  Anyway, the point is, even if things are going well, it’s possible that they could still go better.

Technical notes: If you want to see when you’ve been visited by the quality bot?  Check your web access logs for the user agent AdsBot-Google.

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Posted in advertising, bingo cards, Google, print-bingo.com | No Comments »

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