Pro Tip: Fix your Google Account after Gmail
No sooner was the ink dry on my rant about how Google screwed me over with separate Google Apps and Google accounts than I found a (partial) fix. No, you still can’t merge the two accounts, but you can remove Gmail from your Google Account, thereby putting it back the way it was before Gmail was provisioned.
I found out about it thanks to this article, which also notes that if you add secondary email addresses to your Google Account, you can also log in with those addresses, plus Google Calendar knows to include invites sent to those addresses in your calendar. Pretty cool.
There is, however, a downside. For whatever reason, my anelson at apocryph Google account still has a separate Contacts database from my anelson at apocryph Google Apps account. This sucks because it means I can’t easily use Google Voice to dial my contacts, or Picasa to tag faces based on my contacts.
Yes, yes, I can export from my Google Apps account and import into my Google account, and I in fact have done so, but it doesn’t stay in sync.
Since my new DROID phone can sync contacts between multiple Google accounts, I thought I’d try adding another email address, anelson.goog at apocryph, to my Google account, give it that email address and my password, and see if it would then retrieve my Google account’s contacts in addition to the Google Apps account contacts which it already retrieves, but I’m afraid the functionality is just too smart, and somehow detected that anelson.goog login was the same as the anelson login and since it already logs in to anelson at apocryph it just modified the existing account settings.
This is a big improvement, but the contact sync issue is a real drag. Hopefully I can figure out a solution one way or another.
Pro Tip: Don’t ruin your Google Account with GMail
For years I’ve had a Google Account under my personal email account, anelson at apocryph. It so happens that anelson at apocryph is a mailbox on a Google Apps-hosted domain, so I get GMail-like email capabilities, but as far as Google Accounts is concerned it’s a third-party email address. I thought that was a little odd, particularly if you have different passwords for your Google Account vs your Google Apps email account, but it’s not hard once you know about the distinction.
This worked great for me. When I ran apps like Google Reader, anelson @ apocryph was in the top right corner, and all was well. Then I made a serious mistake. I had been playing with Picasa Web and I really wanted to mess around with the face recognition. I was having so much fun that I wanted to setup a Picasa username so I could share URLs with a meaningful URL. Unfortunately, your Picasa username is also your Gmail username, and since my Google Account was a third-party account, choosing a Picasa username was actually setting up a GMail account attached to my Google Account (but of course none of that was disclosed at the time).
I finally settled on ‘repugnax’ for my username, and then something bad happened. All of a sudden, anelson @ apocryph was a secondary address on my Google Account; the primary was ‘repugnax’ and could not be removed. When I logged in to Google services I had to do so as repugnax at gmail now, and that’s the address that appeared in the top right corner. Argh!
Without warning or recourse, my Google Account turned into a Gmail account. I had to grit my teeth every time I saw that repugnax at gmail address, because it’s so much uglier than anelson @ apocryph. When I assign names to faces in Picasa, none of my anelson at apocryph contacts are available, because it’s using the contacts under the repugnax at gmail account (which of course are empty). The same goes for other google services (like Reader) that use your GMail contacts. These are minor annoyances, so I’ve suffered silently up to this point.
Then I got my DROID smartphone. If you have a DROID you know that step #1 in setup is to give it a Google Account to use. It doesn’t tell you this explicitly, but the account you give it will have a special status as the primary account, and can’t be changed without reset to FACTORY DEFAULTS! Since I don’t use the repugnax mailbox for email, I gave it anelson at apocryph, which (oddly) worked even though it’s not an actual Google Account. I could get my anelson at apocryph email on my phone, so I was happy.
Until I wanted to play with Google Latitude. You see, the Latitude feature of the Maps application on the DROID silently uses your primary Google Account to update your location. But my primary account wasn’t a Google Account at all, but a Google Apps mailbox, so I couldn’t activate Latitude on the account, so it wouldn’t work. Even if I didn’t hate the repugnax account, in order to go back and make it my primary account I’d have to repave the phone, which I wasn’t about to do.
So I manned up, removed anelson at apocryph from the repugnax account, and created a new Google Account under anelson at apocryph. I then migrated my Google Reader subscriptions over, and it’s like it’s 2006 again. Google Latitude works and updates my anelson at apocryph Latitude profile, and I see the proper email address in the top right corner of the Google services I use.
Sadly, my Google Voice account is stuck with repugnax, probably forever. I sent a Google Wave invite to my new anelson at apocryph Google account, but step one is to pick a username, which is, you guessed it, actually code for provisioning a gmail account, so I can’t (or, more accurately, won’t) use Google Wave with my new account. It’s definitely not ideal. Why the hell does Google do things this way? I’ve read lots of complaints about it in the support forums, but they don’t seem to care. Oh, and merging two accounts? Fuck you. Can’t be done.
Given that Google services are free it’s probably a little weak to bitch about them, but I don’t care. This is bullshit and it should be fixed.
Bullshit admin privs problem with Picasa/Google Earth integration
I’m trying to geotag the photos from my brother’s wedding using a combination of Picasa and Google Earth. I’ve done this before many times but now I do all my work from a non-admin account under Windows XP, and I’m running into a problem.
When I click the Tools | GeoTag | Geotag in Google Earth menu item, for some reason MSI is launched trying to find the Google Earth.msi in a temp directory in the admin user’s Documents and Settings folder, which obviously my non-admin account doesn’t have the privs to read. The resulting dialog box says:
The feature you are trying to use is on a network resource that in unavailable.
Click OK to try again, or choose an alternate path to a folder containing the installation package ‘Google Earth.msi’ in the box below.
Of course, the box below contains only the path into the admin’s profile folder, and there’s no option to change it or browse for an alternative. If I click cancel, the box reappears.
I’m running the latest Google Earth and Picasa.
Apparently, I’m not alone. Way back in March, someone reported this same problem, and apparently the PhD’s over at the Googleplex are too busy counting their options to actually fix what is a very basic problem.
I will NOT run as admin to accommodate some shitty admin privs requirement in Google Earth, even if it means I can’t geotag my photos. But I WILL bitch about it at length. WTF, Google? Do you not test this stuff as a non-admin user? Is there some other more subtle cause which I’m not seeing?
Impatiently waiting IMAP support on my Google Apps domains
Ever since Google announced IMAP support for Gmail accounts on the 24th, I’ve been waiting for them to enable it for my Google Apps domains, nullpointer.net and, more importantly, apocryph.org. Yesterday afternoon I logged out and back in to my mail accounts, and lo and behold, my nullpointer.net domain had the IMAP option in the Settings window. Still waiting for apocryph.org, though. How long must I wait? It’s killing me!
Expletives in source code
Source code is in many ways a private hangout for developers. End users and management seldom if ever see the code, and when they do it’s so inscrutable they tend not to linger long.
As a result, developers are able to express themselves in source code with little oversight, apart from occassional reviews by fellow developers. This was demonstrated somewhat amusingly when the Windows 2000 source code was leaked, revealing ample profanity.
Now that Google has released a search engine for source code, open source developers can now be subject to the same scrutiny. It didn’t take long for someone to use Google code search for profanity. Some of my favorites:
- From
xscreensaver-3.02/hacks/xscreensaver-sgigl.c:If it dies, but the window ID is still valid, then that means the sub-process has forked itself (as those fuckwits at SGI are wont to do.) In that case, this process should go to sleep, and set up a signal handler
- From
iproxy-0.0.0/autogen.sh:#Running bash because /bin/sh is a complete piece of shit on solaris #I wonder how long it will take the fuckwits at Sun to wake up
- From
prboom-2.4.4/src/hu_stuff.c:message_on = false; message_dontfuckwithme = false; message_nottobefuckedwith = false;
I’d be lying if I said I’ve not done worse in my code now and again.
Google Browser Sync. Sweet!
Today I was on my way to my Google Notebook when I stumbled across Google Browser Sync for firefox. The idea is you install this extension on all the computers where you use Firefox, and it keeps the settings in sync between them.
This might seem trivial, but it is in fact huge. Cookies, favorites, cached passwords, browser history…they’re all shared with this tool. I just installed it on my work laptop, and can’t wait to put it on my home machine and never set the same config option in two places again.
How did I miss Google Sitemaps?
I run the Drupal module, gsitemap, on apocryph.org. However, I didn’t realize that Google has a separate service, Google Sitemap, in which you register (‘claim’) your site, and tell Google you’re producing an XML sitemap according to their sitemap specification.
The gsitemap module pings Google whenever you update content, which I thought was enough. Apparently, by registering your site, you can view search stats about it, like the searches that match it most frequently, the pages matched most frequently, etc. Useful info to have, to be sure.
So, I went ahead and created a Google Sitemaps account, and went through the setup process. I chose the General Sitemap (as opposed to the Mobile Sitemap, for sites geared toward PDA and phone browsers). In my case, the sitemap is at http://apocryph.org/gsitemap (UPDATE: The module hasn’t been ported to Drupal 6 so the sitemap is not currently available)
After that, I saw my site in the list of sites. In the ‘Site Verified?’ column, there’s a ‘verify’ link, which I clicked. I was told:
Once we verify that you are the site owner, we can provide you with additional statistics and error information about the pages in your site. If you are unable to verify, you can still use Sitemaps and continue to see information about them.
Basically, you verify by creating a file on the site with a random, arbitrary name. Mine is http://apocryph.org/GOOGLEfe136d02f77cc079.html. To do this I just touch GOOGLEfe136d02f77cc079.html on bonzo. Once I did that, I clicked the ‘Verify’ button, and got a green board.
Now I can get some interesting stats about apocryph, such as..well..no one ever looks at it. Thanks, Google.
UPDATE: Apparently the verification file has to stay around; I deleted it after verification, then found when I logged back in a few days later that my ownership of apocryph.org was back to ‘NOT VERIFIED’. This time I’ll keep the empty html file around indefinitely.
Playing with Google Analytics in Drupal
Today I learned of a new Google endeavor, Google Analytics. It’s basically traffic analysis software, mostly targeted to advertisers (in fact, it’s free to AdWords customers), but also useful to bloggers and other amateur content authors. Since I’m not an AdWords customer, I’m limited to 5M page views (per month, presumably); that leaves me with a margin of barely 4.999 million.
At any rate, it requires you to include some Javascript on your site, not surprisingly.
I’m putting in it page.tpl.php, which is the template that governs page display. Google says it goes in head, after meta. As you wish.
Right now the Google Analytics site is painfully slow; it took a few minutes just to open the initial registration screen. Since it’s typically spartan Google fare, I assume this indicates back-end load. This is consistent with other Google betas; Google Reader was similarly unusable in the first days.
Ok, I clicked ‘Check Status’ to force the system to re-check for the javascript, and it’s now in ‘Waiting for Data’ status, which indicates:
Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours.
Wow; I can’t wait that long. Oh well. I’ll be back in 12 hrs…