strange – Page 3 – Technobabbles

Archive by category "strange" (Page 3)

Gmail Survey Link Gone

dgw 2007-11-16 - 23:43 2007-11-16email, Gmail, Google, internet, strange, technology 2

Looks like Google wasn’t conducting even a 24-hour survey. The is gone again from the top bar of Gmail. And I didn’t get to convince my mom to take it. Google’s really not going to get many results like that, yanking surveys after under 24 hours. Though they might have been looking for a number of respondents, rather than a time, in which case I was likely one of the first (yay!). I hope they take the suggestions we all gave them to heart. I did realize that I forgot to request a birthdate field in the contact manager, and…

Gmail "User Happiness" Survey

dgw 2007-11-16 - 06:15 2007-11-16email, Gmail, Google, internet, strange, technology 3

Something weird happened very early this morning. My Gmail account displayed a link (“New! Take our survey!”) in the top bar in the red “what’s new” color. I clicked, and it took me to a standard Google survey, complete with free-form boxes for expressing what I did and did not like about Google Mail (the survey absolutely refused to mention the word “Gmail” anywhere). I took the opportunity, of course, to suggest my list of features: Signatures Multiple signatures, associated with different custom From addresses HTML in signatures Putting the signature above quoted text in replies and forwards Read/return receipts…

iPhones Generate iTypos

dgw 2007-11-14 - 17:13 2015-10-29Apple, iPhone, strange, technology 0

A study conducted by Chicago-based usability research firm User Centric reveals that iPhone users make over twice as many typos in SMS messages as users of full-keyboard and keypad phones. Their results also indicated that iPhone users do not get better at using the touch-screen keyboard with experience; users of other phone groups were given iPhones and asked to type a message, and they had the same error rate as veteran (a month or more) iPhone users. Kind of interesting that the latest user interface revolution has flaws over and above preexisting technologies. Perhaps users make errors because of the…

"Numa Numa" Language Fixed

dgw 2007-11-13 - 15:13 2015-10-29errors, internet, strange, videos, w00t 0

Today I checked the PC World editorial in which I yesterday, and noticed that it had been corrected. Instead of saying “German”, the article now correctly states that the song is “Romanian”. Thank you, PC World. I didn’t get a comment response, though.

Google Limits Search Queries to 32 Words? (Short)

dgw 2007-11-07 - 22:19 2011-10-30Google, internet, strange 0

According to Haochi Chen at Googlified, search queries in Google are cut off after 32 words. An interesting little bit of trivia…

No Co.mments For You!

dgw 2007-11-06 - 16:29 2015-10-29complaints, internet, strange 0

As of a couple hours ago and continuing to this moment, Co.mments.com is down with a 500 Internal Server Error. This affects all actions, including viewing the tracking list and adding new items via the bookmarklet. I’ll be using bookmarks the old-fashioned way for now, until they get the service back up. The blog and wiki, meanwhile, are still working, so maybe people can post complaints…

My robots.txt File Suddenly Restricts All Indexing

dgw 2007-11-05 - 01:19 2015-10-31complaints, Google, internet, strange 0

Apparently, the Blogger team (or a hacker [?]) has changed the robots.txt file on this blog to disallow crawling from any bot that obeys the robots exclusion standard. I have no idea why, as other blogs on Blogger (even others I run) continue to have perfectly fine exclusion rules. Oddly, the “Sitemap:” line has been removed, and a “Disallow: /” line has been added, which, as mentioned above, blocks any and all compliant robots (spiders, bots, whatever you refer to them as) from accessing the site. Despite emailing Blogger support late last night (when I discovered the problem) and posting…

School Email Blocking Not Complete?

dgw 2007-11-01 - 20:32 2007-11-01email, internet, school, strange, w00t 0

Interestingly, about blocked sending to external addresses and other limitations on my school email account neglected to allow for one scenario: Forwarding. It appears forwarding to external addresses is allowed, but not initiating a conversation (which actually makes some sense, since mail from said external addresses is blocked). So I am still able to run backup copies of emails from my school account to my Gmail account to protect against the annual account clearing we seem to experience at school. Phew! And it took this long to get an email I had to forward…

"Report Bug" Link Back Again

dgw 2007-10-24 - 01:50 2007-10-24email, Gmail, Google, internet, strange 0

Oddly, the “Report Bug” link just came back to my Gmail account. I really wonder what Google’s up to… It does indeed point to the same place as . Maybe they kept getting complaints about the bug reporting forms being too deeply buried… But that doesn’t explain why my mom doesn’t have it.

"Report Bug" Link Gone

dgw 2007-10-23 - 23:32 2007-10-23email, Gmail, Google, internet, strange 0

Apparently, that “Report Bug” in the top bar of my Gmail account was just a temporary thing. It disappeared this evening. I have no hypotheses as to why it showed up for me and , why it showed up, or why it disappeared. Maybe it was just a last push to get reports from previous bug reporters about any outstanding bugs in the current Gmail iteration before they finalize development on that . My mom’s account still doesn’t have the link. Google can be so weird sometimes…

Category: strange