Last night, I found a chat in my Gmail account that I'd never seen. It was sent an hour after I left the public library on February 26, while I was offline, but never showed up in my Inbox. It wasn't even labeled as sent while I was offline. I was baffled completely until I realized this afternoon what I'd been doing that night at the library.

February 26 (a Thursday, the day of #snowmageddon here in Minneapolis/St. Paul) was the day I discovered that Ping.fm—my very favorite social networking tool, second only to Twitter—had added support for Google Talk statuses. Of course I had to try it out; I'm an early adopter.

So I went into my network settings on Ping.fm and added my Google Talk and AIM accounts. Next thing I know, Gmail Chat is complaining that I'm no longer invisible (I like to be invisible because it minimizes interruptions). It says I'm signed in somewhere else. That somewhere else could only be Ping.fm.

By that, I gather Ping.fm actually signs in to Google Talk and receives all chats sent to one's account, 24/7. Not only is that inconvenient (I'll continue with that in a moment), but it's a bit of a privacy hole, especially if you don't fully trust Ping.fm. And honestly, I trust a lot of websites with a lot of things, but I like my chats to stay inside Google's ecosystem, thank you.

Anyway, the fact that Ping.fm is always signed in to one's Google Talk account means that one always appears to be online, and offline chats won't work. Invisibility in Gmail Chat is also disabled. Both of these, combined with an apparent dysfunctionality (I couldn't get my GTalk status to update from Ping.fm), led me to deactivate the integration.

What I'm trying to say is, Ping.fm has a lot of work to do before I'll even consider re-adding my GTalk account to my Ping.fm networks. It doesn't work, and causes a lot of problems.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

Image via Wikipedia

And a memorable three shows they have been. From George's early pants removal at the beginning of the first night's show to skipping half a scene the second night (something from the last night would have been better, but I couldn't think of one), we've had our share of mix-ups and mistakes. Fortunately, many of them actually made the show funnier.

Lots can happen in two hours, and this show was very near that total. The beat sheets backstage had a list of eleven scenes and songs, some long enough to be shows in and of themselves. But we combined them all together. We even faked an intermission during entry #8, "Intermission Song". But there wasn't really an intermission; it was all a practical joke.

The full program went like this:

1. The Actor's Nightmare (scene) *
2. BusyBusyBusy (song) *
3. DMV Tyrant (scene)
4. Belly Button (song) *
5. Canker Sores and Other Distractions (scene) *
6. On the train (dance) *
7. Funeral Parlor (scene) *
8. Intermission Song (song, duh) *
9. Under Duress (scene)
10. Nobody Understands Me (song)
11. Medea (scene, not the full play) *

See, the entire show was composed of scenes ("short plays") by Christopher Durang (a Tony and Obie award winning playwright) and songs by the Philadelphia Chickens (On the train was choreographed by our, er, choreographer). Every item is funny, each in its own way. There was a good mix of all kinds of humor, from political commentary to slapstick and just plain weird stuff.

By the way, items with an * are the ones I took part in. Just thought that would be useful. As you can see, most of the list is items with *s. I was very busy.

The Acts

I'll summarize each thing here, just to give those who didn't see the show -- probably a lot of you -- an idea of what went down. (I'm thinking about asking my dad to edit and digitize the videos so I can upload them. More on that at a later date.)

The Actor's Nightmare

George Spelvin, an accountant, wanders into a theater just before a performance, and is told he has to go on for one of the lead actors (who has been in a car accident and broken both legs, taking the traditional good-luck wish a bit too far). But the situations he faces quickly get out of hand. Is it a dream or is it reality? Who knows?

BusyBusyBusy

This song is just pure funny. There's even a cellphone involved. I should know, I was part of that bit.

DMV Tyrant

James Agnes, a permit-holding student who has just taken and passed the driver's test, wants to get his (yes, his) license, but the counter clerk is none too cooperative when it turns out that neither James nor his test score is in the computer.

Belly Button

I performed a part of this song, and I still don't know what the point is. I think it's just supposed to be weird.

Canker Sores and Other Distractions

Martin and Prunella, a divorced couple in their middle age, meet by chance after ten years and are swept off their feet into love, but their choice of restaurant leaves much to be desired. The other painful afflictions don't help matters.

On the train

This is just set-up for the funeral parlor scene.

Funeral Parlor

A very strange woman whose father won't even return her phone calls any more shows up at the funeral. Very. Strange. Woman.

Intermission Song

Comic relief, and a practical joke on the audience.

Under Duress

Someone is unhappy with the way the President is running things, and decides to make her views on global warming heard.

Nobody Understands Me

Pure jazz.

Medea

Not your ordinary Greek tragedy. It's also supposed to be The Trojan Women.

The Glitches

As with any show, things don't always go according to plan. Each night had its own share of little hiccups. I've listed all the ones I noticed here.

The Actor's Nightmare

First night: George (Stanley?) drops his pants way too early, prompting a hilarious bit of cover-up (which was really fun to come up with: "Look, nobody's allowed backstage before a performance -- especially people without pants on -- so you'll have to leave..." Great fun!); part of one of George's lines is dropped in the Hamlet section; the executioner messes up kicking the cutting block over and has to try again; the entire Man for All Seasons section is totally whacked.

Second night: Tiny flub during the Hamlet section (not sure who messed up, though); Man for All Seasons part whacked again, even after multiple run-throughs before the show.

Third night: Very small line flubs and a slight mix-up in the final scene.

BusyBusyBusy

First night: Umm... It went quite well, given that it was nearly cut the day before.

Second night: The cellphone bit ended up being a bit crackly due to the transmitting end having to be relocated on account of noisy ballet dancers from the show next door (this one was most likely my fault, folks).

Third night: Great!

DMV Tyrant

I couldn't find anything wrong with this one, except that the clerk was a bit hard to hear the first two nights.

Belly Button

Failure FAIL (can there be such a thing?). Meaning nothing.

Canker Sores and Other Distractions

First night: Midge took a little long coming back a couple times, forcing a bit of ad lib.

Second night: It went pretty well; nothing comes to mind.

Third night: I definitely paraphrased a line somewhere in there... But it was a good rendition nonetheless. Which was great because I had people actually there that night.

On the train

First night: Quite well, just not always together.

Second night: Better. The downstage boundary of the train apparently moved somewhere between stage right and stage left. One or two people were too far downstage.

Third night: Very good, but there was one outlying cast member stage left. Too far downstage, again. Oh well.

Funeral Parlor

First night: Almost all the extras (everyone but me) left, and way too early at that. Only some of them are supposed to go, and not till much further into the scene.

Second night: A large section of dialogue was dropped, including the cue line for extras to start leaving to go change for their next role (the cows in the Intermission Song) and the first bit of keening by Marion. Oh, and the set was missing (a few chairs).

Third night: The best run!

Intermission Song

First night: I didn't notice anything.

Second night: Nobody fell for it! Rats.

Third night: Almost got 'em, but my triangle finger was too itchy. People were this close to getting up when I rang it.

Under Duress

Worked for me...

Nobody Understands Me

First night: Flawless. (No, that's not a problem; it's another way of saying I couldn't find anything wrong with it.) We were just missing the bass part, because it turned out the notes in it were wrong.

Second night: Very good, and we even got our bass part back (because the director figured out the right notes before the show).

Third night: I think the best one of the three nights.

Medea

First night: I flubbed a couple of the chorus lines, because I lost my script a month ago in Chicago.

Second night: It went much better. But nobody brought the boxes for the chorus (needed because the other three members are so much shorter than I am .

Third night: Boxes were planned better and we all knew what we were saying. Completely.

Conclusion

So obviously we had our share of flubs. But the great thing is, the audience hardly noticed a thing! And that's the magic of theater.

One interesting little tidbit came this morning, at the end of a rehearsal for another show with the same theater school. The principal of the location I attend (the only one with a Further Stages™ program) was trying to inspire the cast of that show, Working, after an abbreviated run-through. After giving her notes, she made a short speech about the Performance Company's show.

She called it the most phenomenal show she'd ever seen at the school.

That blew me away. I guess it was better than I thought.

Since we have a tape of the second and third nights, and the third night was (I think) the best, I'm considering doing a showing for the people who didn't get to come (most of the Working cast). Also, an upload to the Internet (for family and friends who are out-of-state and/or couldn't make it) is on my mind. I'll see about getting the tape captured and encoded sometime next month. I'm really low on hard disk space, so it's going to have to go on someone else's computer.

Now I get to study for the next show. Which is next week. At the same time, in the same place. So I've now been to the same theater room on seven of the last eight days. And we're using the same sound system for Working. But that's all part of being in multiple groups within the same theater school.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

Incidentally, there was a huge blogstorm about this yesterday, before it was officially announced and before the site was available. Rex Hammock thinks it might be the highest single-day pageview count for a 404 Error page, as he briefly states in a post entitled "Google's new Not Found feature is really fun". Go ahead, it's worth a click. (Well, Ctrl+click or Shift+click if you want to keep reading this but you already knew that, right?)

Sign-Up Error?

So, it sounds interesting enough that I want to get in on it. Like Google App Engine (my own coverage) from last month, there's a waiting list. (I got into App Engine, by the way, and immediately wasted one of my three indelible applications with a useless test listing I'll never code. There really should be a delete function in App Engine, but I digress...)

Unlike App Engine, though, this waiting list is powered by a Google Spreadsheets form. And this one doesn't work. I get a nice generic error message, which leaves me totally in the dark as to what went wrong. Argh. (It did get fixed though; see update below.)

Until it's working (I'll speculate why it's borked in just a moment), I'll paste my additional info paragraph here, just as an example (who knows, you might want to use it as a template ):

Initially I plan to just experiment with the service and see what it can do, but I think I might come up with a brilliant idea to actually use it for real as part of one of the sites I manage. http://www.swrobotics.com/ comes to mind as another possible site where I'd use it.

So anyway, why might this Google sign-up form not be working?

Since it's based on a Google Spreadsheet, it's bound by the limitations of the platform. Spreadsheets are limited (only one thread of many) to 10,000 rows, and with the publicity this launch got it's completely believable that 10,000 developers already applied. This is the price for Google eating its own dog food (so to speak). I guess in a way it's a good thing that they don't give themselves superpowers in their own services.

Meanwhile, I can't sign up for the waiting list. Oh well, it's not like I'd get immediate access anyway. Being locked out has increased my interest, too, so perhaps using a limited submission system was a calculated move on Google's part to generate even more desire to sign up. Who knows? It's working on me.

Anyone who gets in on it, please let me know what the interface is like from the inside. I'll probably post again if and when I gain access myself, but advance knowledge would be nice to have. (Yes, I will be watching Google blogs, official and unofficial, for more info as well.)

Use Cases

Meanwhile, I can brainstorm. This site already has social features (comments), but perhaps I'd like to do more. A sidebar game or something. Perhaps not, but you get the idea.

The Southwest Robotics website might have a comments area added where people can chat about the team's efforts or robots in general. There's definite potential in that idea. I'll have to take it up with my teammates.

Other than those few examples, I'm sure there a vast number of gadgets that I don't know about yet. Only getting into the service will allow me to really see what's possible. Stay tuned for more opinions as I can generate them.

Update (05/14): OK, the form is working again. It's also been completely changed; the number of fields has at least doubled. So much for just copying and pasting what I tried to send in yesterday.

[Google Friend Connect logo from the Google site, displayed under a Fair Use claim; error screenshot taken myself, site design and imagery copyright Google, also Fair Use claim]

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

Sometimes things are too good to be true.

Remember when I said I'd been accepted to the Musical Theatre Extension at Northwestern? Turns out that was a mistake. Let me explain. (I'm still in the theatre program; just not the Extension.)

In the list of requirements for the Musical Theatre part, there was a request for a video of me singing a solo piece, accompanied. That was never made, and never sent. My mom called the office (I don't like talking on the phone) to ask about it, and they said not to worry about it.

Apparently, I wasn't considered for that program. I made it into the five-week regular program only, which also means I don't need the digital recorder after all. (I can still bring it -- could be useful; it's just not on the packing list any more.)

The woman at the office made a note of my change, but it never got entered into the database, and so the letter was sent with incorrect information. (That's what she said in the voicemail I got today, at any rate.) Oh well, I guess I get more time to relax this way. Two more weeks to not be bustling about campus.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

Lately, there have been several comments to the Scheduled Posts announcement on the Blogger in Draft blog that indicate it doesn't work for everyone.

Personally, I haven't had any problems. I often write my posts the night before they publish, just in case I get a last-minute idea, or am away from the computer in the morning (which is indeed possible). Other comments indicate agreement with my statement. I wonder if the Blogger servers are being a bit wonky...

There were some issues (now fixed) with the scheduling feature back when it was first saved to draft (as the Blogger in Draft team likes to call the act of releasing a feature to Blogger in Draft), but those were fixed a long time ago. I was even experiencing the problem, too. This recent streak of bug reports is weird...

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

All right, down to business. Specifically, what happened last night was that I tried to perform an action on the page before it had finished loading. The tests in Blackboard (at least recent versions of the software) have a bar near the top that contains status information on each of the questions, but it is collapsed by default. Clicking the header makes it open up and actually display useful information. Simple JavaScript, but the action of expanding that box had catastrophic results.

Oh, it expanded just fine; there's no question that it functioned correctly. But that function wasn't isolated. Immediately upon my click, the entire page (well, frame; Blackboard still uses that anachronistic design feature) ceased loading. Now, that was a problem, because the buttons to manage the test are at the very end. Uh-oh.

I had before me 25 out of 29 questions, with no way to save my answers and continue, nor to submit the test incomplete. My curiosity definitely caused a problem. But it didn't have to be like that.

Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of scrutinizing the source code of the page for this post. That would necessitate sacrificing another test attempt (and would require me to send another email to my teacher requesting a reset). I can still theorize as to why the problem happened, and brainstorm possible solutions.

First, the cause. While I can't access the page source, as I said, I suspect there was something in the way the expansion link was constructed that caused a navigation event in Internet Explorer (Blackboard doesn't always play nice with Firefox, in my experience, so I use IE6).

Many JavaScript effects are created using an onclick attribute and href="#". I know that when I click a hyperlink on a page in Firefox, anything still loading on the current page is dropped and the new site begins to load. Internet Explorer probably does the same thing. By clicking the link to expand the box, I may have caused IE to try and find an unnamed fragment on the page; and since even navigating to a fragment counts as a navigation, I probably stopped the page loading myself.

I'm not saying that's what had to happen -- that there is no way to prevent it from happening. I'm merely theorizing. If the function or statement called by onclick returns false, the browser shouldn't navigate. That's what Firefox does, at any rate. So perhaps there was a missing or incorrect return statement in the function call. It's also possible to use another tag, like a <span>, to create the link and style it with CSS. The onclick is valid on every element I can think of, and the superfluous href wouldn't be a problem.

Aside from changing the way that box is coded, there is another easy solution to the problem: The "Save" and "Submit" buttons could be duplicated at the top of the assessment page. This is certainly not the first time I've had this problem; it's just the first time it's happened to me on the initial load of a test. (I can usually go back to a previous page and try again to load the refreshed version of the test.)

I believe this might be considered a race condition, in that the behavior of the assessment page is dependent upon when user interaction begins. Race conditions are nasty things, of course, and they've become the bane of any programmer's existence. I'm new to the concept, though, since I've been fortunate enough to avoid them in my own work. I usually hear about them in the context of JavaScript, come to think of it.

The take-away message from this post is not that Blackboard itself has a big problem. I've gone quite a while without this being an issue (nearly four years, actually). The real issue is that this could happen in a more critical situation, like a Web-based management console for, say, a nuclear reactor or weapons system. (More realistically, flight-control or remote monitoring, but the others sound more dire. An error such as this could cause enough of a lag that an operator would be unable to correct a problem in time and the system could cause a disaster.

In short, the moral of this story is that user interaction shouldn't interfere with critical internal functions in an application, whether Web-based or otherwise. The next time something like this happens, the consequences could be more than a simple locked test.

If you're interested in a story created around a similar event, be sure to check out the fictionalized version of events on The Queiba Wars. CodingExperiments.com has a more general summary of this kind of problem as well, should you be interested in that.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

That permalink problem is really a bummer, since it messes up the site feed and the homepage. To fix it, all one has to do is go into the admin section and republish the post, but such a workaround defeats the convenience of scheduled posts.

Here's hoping that the problem will be fixed, for real, in a timely manner; good luck and best wishes to the Blogger development team!

Update (03/07): Reported as fixed.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

Interestingly, I shouldn't even be having the problem because I don't use FTP to publish. Blogger hosts my site, and the reports I saw mostly mentioned the problem with FTP blogs. Nevertheless, I have had the problem and would like to add my voice to the chorus, in the hopes that more feedback and reports will get Google to fix the problem faster. I've found post scheduling to be a real help, and would hate to see it get yanked because of a trivial bug. Good luck squashing the bug, Google, and all the best for introducing scheduled posts even with this little glitch!

If it will help troubleshooting (this is directed at Google; you can stop reading now unless you want details on when I got the bug), I had the problem on a post I had edited after scheduling, which I don't normally do. If there's different code handling the "save changes" publish action versus the initial "schedule" publish action, perhaps there's a bug in the "save changes" branch/function that is looking for a permalink? I'm just speculating; I have no idea how the Blogger code works.

Update (23:00): A Blogger team member, Pete, has thanked us users for all the reports of this bug -- and noted that it will be fixed in the near term -- in a recent comment (10:01) on the Blogger in Draft Blog post.

Update (02/29): The Blogger in Draft blog announces that this and a couple other issues have been fixed.

Update (03/04): New data, new reports, old status; the bug is not actually fixed.

Update (03/07): Once again, the bug has been reported as fixed.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

There, all done? Good, now I can comment away!

This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy, too. I don't know if anyone notices, but I try to keep my English as perfect as I can here on my blog, in my email, on Wikipedia... The list of places where I write goes on -- and in each and every location, I try to use scholarly-sounding English that won't have me embarrassing my school, my parents, or (most importantly) myself.

Chris says he gets emails like that all the time. I can relate; I see loads upon loads of messages like that on Wikipedia, in online school discussion boards, and forums across the Internet. Fortunately, most of the people I correspond with via email and IM have a firm grasp of the English language, and only make mistakes when they're intentional (say they're ignoring the rules for the sake of typing speed). Only a very few people I know personally mutilate English.

So, I beg the world, please watch how you write. It drives geeks like me, Chris, my friend i80and, and all kinds of other people absolutely crazy to try and interpret sentences like, "r u srsly gnna get widnows vitsa? u cnat possiby b srs abt tht!"

That's my rant for the day, then.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

OK, so on to the point. Zoli Erdos posted about a "Weird Google Blogger Error", with a screenshot. The cool part? <vanity>The URL displayed in it is for one of my posts!</vanity> The bad part: Blogger's displaying errors on my blog, after loading the page. Argh!

So what can you, the reader, do to solve this problem? Well, the best solution I've seen is to clear your browser's cache. Since this is, after all, a geek blog, I'll assume you know how to do that.

Meanwhile, I hope not too many people have run into this sort of error on my site. According to the literature I've read, those error codes are usually limited to publishing. Too many of those might force me to switch to Wordpress, and I don't want to deal with importing right now. Perhaps after the school year. I hope Google fixes the problem.

For what it's worth, Zoli, I'm sorry you're having trouble viewing my blog. I'll pick up my direct line to Larry and Sergey right now and have them straighten out the situation immediately. That is, I wish I could; lowly blogger that I am, I don't have much influence (I've gotten more out of Adobe than Google). Best of luck, and if the error persists (you've probably fixed it, but just in case), try my feed; I don't think Blogger can mess that up.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761