Can you spot the auto-reply? February 28, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : site , add a commentHere’s the reply I got from Blogger. It’s not explicitly mentioned but this is in reply to my question about labels (The known issues with labels are reported here).
Hi there,
Thanks for writing in. Due in large part to your input and feedback, we have reviewed and recently fixed several bugs on the new version of Blogger. Please check our Know Issues page and Status page for more details on current known issues on the new version of Blogger:
http://knownissues.blogspot.com
http://status.blogger.com
Hmm… Except that these sites don’t mention my problem and the issue hasn’t been fixed.
Please note that Blogger Support does not currently support questions regarding customizing/customized template code or CSS/HTML in general. Please see our Blogger Help articles for some brief tutorials and pointers to more resources:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/topic.py?topic=10274 (New Blogger)
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42433 (Old Blogger/ Classic Templates)
Again, this isn’t actually helpful because I wasn’t asking about how to use templates, I was commenting on how the labels should have been exposed in the Classic templates. The link to New Blogger templates shows they didn’t even bother to notice that I don’t host at blogspot.com and don’t have the option to use New Blogger templates.
Websites and programs that integrated with the old Blogger will need to be updated before they can work with the new Blogger. Check with the particular service provider you’re interested in to find out if they’ve made these changes yet. For downloadable desktop applications, you may need to install a new version of the software.
What a strange comment. I guess some people are using offline apps to update their blogs or something.
If you are still experiencing issues with your blog and cannot find the answer to your question in our Help Center (http://help.blogger.com), please simply reply to this message with the details of your problem. In order to help improve the new version of Blogger as quickly as possible, we’re going to focus our efforts on reading the problems you are experiencing and working on solutions immediately. We’ll follow up with you only if we require more info or if we have additional info to share. If you are providing us with a bug report, please rest assured that we will take action as necessary, even if you don’t hear back from us.
Yeah. Right. Just like they helped me with this reply.
We sincerely appreciate your continued patience.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Nasty system error February 27, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : eve , 2commentsI just had a nasty system error. Somehow, when I rebooted the filesystem got corrupted an a singe file (something to do with 802.11x) got corrupted. However, this caused SystemUIServer to crash, leaving me with no menu bar icons (or associated functionality). It also left me without wireless connections.
Mind you, it took me an hour or so to figure out what the problem was. I tried trashing prefs, removing all sorts of things but to no avail. The biggest hint came from looking in the console output. In the system.log file it told me that SystemUIServer was crashing. The crash log showed me the file that was buggered. I restored it from my last backup and now all seems to be well.
The restart was triggered via Applescript. I have a .command file that sets the fans to full speed, sets the machine to boot into Windows on the next boot and then uses Applescript to tell the system to restart. I previously had it call reboot but that doesn’t let GUI apps shutdown cleanly. Perhaps the Applescript call has it’s own problems?
Here’s what the error log showed…
Link (dyld) error:Library not loaded: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/EAP8021X.framework/Versions/A/EAP8021X
Referenced from: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/InternetConnect.framework/Versions/A/InternetConnect
Reason: no suitable image found. Did find:
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/EAP8021X.framework/Versions/A/EAP8021X: file to short
Update 27 February 2007
It seems something got screwed up with Java too. Luckily, re-installing the latest Java installer (Release 5) fixed that problem.
Isaac has some words now February 19, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : isaac , add a commentHe’s been “speaking” for a while now but in the last week or so he’s started using words that we can understand. He knows there’s a “car” on his shirt. He likes wearing his “shoes”. He likes “wi” (Wiggles). We’ve just hit 2 weeks since his last Losec and like the last two times he’s starting to have issues sleeping (surely he can’t be having teeth coming in 3 out of 3 times!). I was in there and I told him I’d get some water. As I left he wailed, “daaadyyy”.
Fixing the missing task manager icon February 19, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : computers, work , add a commentSo I’ve been using XP Home SP2 at work with the Classic theme (since it’s much more suited to a work environment. I’ve had this problem on and off where the task manager fails to put it’s icon in the system tray. I found a Google Groups thread that highlights the problem as well as Microsoft’s inability to recognize the problem. Note to companies: Make sure your frontline support people don’t insult the intelligence of your customers!
Today I installed some crap that Microsoft forced on me (don’t you just love automatic updates?). Of course, this required a reboot and that’s when the problems started. What had previously been an intermittent problem was now a permanent issue. It seems nothing I could do would get the icon to come back. I tried some freeware app but it’s icon was a bit too different to me and it couldn’t catch Ctrl+Alt+Del so it wasn’t quite as nice as I’d hoped for.
Then I found the real solution, which is to replace task manager with Sysinternals Process Explorer. It can catch Ctrl+Alt+Del (how the heck does it do that?!?). It’s tray icon always works and has CPU load history too.
Forced to upgrade to New Blogger February 15, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : site , add a commentUgh. You’d think people would realise the downside to forcing people to upgrade. Nobody liked New Coke. Why on earth did they think I’d like New Blogger?
If anything on the site is broken, it’s because New Blogger isn’t quite the same as Blogger. The most obvious thing is the login box that got broken but I guess that’s just an annoyance for me ;)
What does an FTP blog look like with New Blogger? Virtually the same as Blogger. I can’t use any of the new layout stuff but I can add Labels to my posts. Labels are New Blogger’s attempt to re-implement my Keywords thing but it’s all done on the server so it’s less brittle. Good in theory but there’s a catch.
The content that New Blogger wants to put on your page because of the Labels is just dumped into the end of the post. More useful would have been the pattern established for all sorts of other things in Blogger. Then again, it’s better than nothing and I can work around it with CSS. The bigger problem is that I have no way to customise the output of the label browse page. That’s the page New Blogger generates for each label that contains the posts for that label. Now to my mind, labels work like Archives and should be handled the same way. New Blogger doesn’t seem to think so. The page either didn’t go through my template or it went through the tag instead of the tag. This means the label browse page has all the post text on it which isn’t what I want. Click the date on this post to see what my archive pages look like. That’s what I want label pages to look like! Of course, there are differences with label pages so it would be even better if there was a tag I could use to customise the output.
I’ve sent a bug but I have doubts that it’ll get anywhere. At least my Keywords thing is still working.
Update 19 February 2007
I don’t know what they did but I’m not longer able to use Konqueror to maintain my blog. Login to Google? Crash. Edit a post? Crash. Sigh. I realise it’s better to support Firefox than to only support IE but Konqueror is a real browser too. It’s even based on the same rendering engine as Safari.
I’ve whipped up some magic around the existing keywords thing so that I can start filling in the labels now and switch over to them once they’ve fixed the display problems. Of course, nothing on this blog ever goes according to plan and this was no exception. I’m using innerHTML to pull out the text of each post. I then run a regular expression over this to find the Keywords bit (which is always at the end of a post). Well, the labels have been squeezed into the post too so I have to remove them before doing the Keywords regexp (I put them back afterwards and use CSS to hide them). Here’s where it gets tricky. After getting a regexp that works I came home and noticed that Safari was borking. After much hair pulling, I finally found that Safari is re-interpreting the HTML when I call innerHTML. I’m not being given the HTML code in the file but something Safari thinks is equivalent. Luckily, it’s just using uppercase HTML elements. That’s easily solved by doing a case-insensitive search. However, it concerns me that Safari might be doing other things to the HTML…