Tag: Google

If all has gone to plan, by the time you read this, I’ll just have returned from a romantic weekend in Paris with Mrs. W. In itself, that’s not particularly relevant to a technology blog but, whilst booking the hotel for the weekend, I found Google Maps incredibly useful. Not just because the search results were integrated with people’s reviews on Trip Advisor and other such sites but also because Google Maps Street View really came into its own.

If you’re reading this in the US, then you’re probably wondering why the fuss? Well, here in the UK street view is not available (Google’s cameras have started to photograph the country, much to the dismay of privacy campaigners) but for me to have a look at our prospective hotels (albeit on a very grey day) was really useful and provided a real-world view (to compare with the hotel website’s slightly more enticing images).

The map shows a link to street view:

And this is what it looks like:

Previously I’d failed to see any use for this technology. Now I can’t wait for it to come to the UK.

On Friday night I wrote a post which optimistically suggested that I’d successfully migrated this site’s RSS feeds from FeedBurner to the new Google FeedBurner platform. Unfortunately many people won’t have seen that post (at least not until after I spent a good chunk of my weekend enlisting the support of known subscribers to try and work out why the primary URL given out for this site’s RSS feed wasn’t working: Thanks go to Bill Minton, Alistair Doran, Garry Martin and Aaron Parker) – it all turned out to be because FeedBurner’s instructions for users of their MyBrand service have a vital step missing…

I’ve made the point before that free online services are not necessarily an ideal solution but nevertheless, many of us rely on them and hopefully my experiences will help out others who are going through the (soon to be forced) migration from the (old) FeedBurner platform to (new) Google FeedBurner.

If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Some time ago, Google bought FeedBurner. That’s not all bad – I’m sure the guys who started FeedBurner were pretty stoked, and for us customers (who, after all, were largely using free services), things got better as premium services like MyBrand (more on that in a moment) were made free.

It was inevitable that at some point the service would be absorbed into Google’s infrastructure and if I hadn’t moved voluntarily in my own timescales (i.e. over a period when I was off work and potentially had some time to deal with any resulting issues), account migration would have been forced upon me at the end of this month.

What’s all the fuss about?

I may not have the largest blog in the world but I’ve worked hard for several years to get this blog to where it is now. With that in mind, I approached this migration with some trepedation but the Transferring FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts FAQ made it all sound pretty straightforward, including this text:

“Will I lose all my subscribers in this process?
You should not lose any readers of your feed during this transition process. All feeds.feedburner.com URLs will redirect your readers to feeds hosted by Google.

[…]

I use MyBrand, the service that allows me to map a domain I own to my feed. Do I need to change anything?
Yes. After transferring your account, you will be sent an email with instructions on how to change MyBrand. You can also get these instructions on the MyAccount page after the transfer.

You will be required to change your DNS CNAME to the Google hosted domain service, the same service that handles custom domains for Google applications like Blogger and Google Apps for Your Domain.

Please note that the CNAME will no longer be the same domain as the domain that serves feeds, but the service level and functionality will be identical.”

That all sounded straightfoward enough, so I followed the migration steps on FeedBurner’s website until I saw a message that indicated successful completion. The follow-up e-mail included this text:

“Important! If you use MyBrand, FeedBurner’s custom-domain service, you need to make a very important change to ensure your feeds remain available to subscribers using your custom domain(s).

To make this change in your Google account, follow the instructions listed in your account’s new MyBrand page: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mybrand”

I followed the instructions (i.e. made the changes to my DNS zone) but, 48 hours later (and after confirming that the name was resolving correctly) I was still receiving HTTP 404 (Not Found) errors when I used the http://feeds.markwilson.co.uk/marksweblog/ URL (i.e. the one that uses the FeedBurner MyBrand service to redirect subscribers to the real location.

The missing step

Double-checking my account settings and the DNS record I had edited, I decided to deactivate the MyBrand service and reactivate it. Some time later (I’m not sure exactly how long afterwards, but not long) the 404s were gone and I was able to check with some of my subscribers that their feeds were updated with posts from after the migration. Whilst I waited for this confirmation, another FeedBurner user confirmed that this had worked for him too but it would be good if the instructions included this step…

Why is this Google’s problem?

To be fair to FeedBurner/Google, buried in a post on the FeedBurner Status Blog is this text:

“4-DEC 2008: Have you recently moved your feeds to a Google account? Seeing a ‘404’ error when trying to view your feeds, and you use our MyBrand service? Try the following workaround to fix the problem:

1. Sign in to feedburner.google.com.
2. Visit My Account > MyBrand.
3. Click the remove link next to your current MyBrand domain(s), and then click Save.
4. Re-enter the domain(s) you removed in the previous step and then click Save.
5. Try to view the feed(s) that were showing 404 errors before. They should now display your content.”

It should be noted though that these instructions don’t work (there is no remove option in the new interface)… and there is nothing more recent in the blog about this.

Meanwhile, the MyBrand page in the FeedBurner account settings is typically Googlite in its tone, basically telling us that we’re welcome to use the service but if it breaks we’re on our own.

“FeedBurner provides no technical support for MyBrand; you must configure DNS settings correctly with your domain/web hosting provider’s help. More technical detail and discussion of the requirements for using this service are available in this Help topic.

It can take up to 24 hours for a new CNAME entry to take effect. If your new feed address isn’t working, have a nice day and check back tomorrow.”

Thanks a bunch Google. My DNS is fine… but your migration process is broken and it seems that you don’t provide any method to report the problem.

Several other people have written about this problem (including one particularly useful post on the whole migration process) so it’s certainly not an isolated case but Google responses are nowhere to be seen on this two-week old post on the FeedBurner Help Group (providing a service without formal support is one thing but monitoring your own help forums is a basic courtesy).

Conclusion

Ironically, the FeedBurner MyBrand service (which let’s me host a FeedBurner Feed under my domain name) that caused this a problem but, because I use this service, many of the subscribers to this blog are using a URL that is under one of my domains (so, ultimately, under my control). This problem may have cost me a good chunk of my weekend but at least I got it fixed and if I hadn’t been able to work out what was happening then I would have reverted to serving the feed directly from WordPress (with the consequential hit on bandwidth and loss of analytics). Imagine if I had a popular blog with a large number of subscribers that wasn’t hosted on my own domain name and the service went belly-up…

Many Google services on the google.com domain will try to detect your location and customise the results using the local language. This caught me out a few days ago when I was using a guest Wi-Fi connection at Microsoft and got the Google homepage in Dutch (presumably Microsoft UK’s Internet access is routed via the Netherlands) and tonight I fired up Google Reader in my hotel room and found it was in German (I’m using an iBAHN Internet connection).

Not to worry – just manually change the top level domain in the browser address bar to use a specific country (e.g. I switched from http://www.google.com/reader/ to http://www.google.co.uk/reader/) and the interface should switch to the chosen locale.

In the past, I’ve been accused of writing too much Microsoft-focused content on this blog and, in my defence, this blog advertises itself as follows:

“Originally created as a place for me to store some notes, this blog comments on my daily encounters with technology and aims to share some of this knowledge with fellow systems administrators and technical architects across the ‘net. Amazingly, it’s become quite popular!”

My daily encounters with technology… well, as I’m an infrastructure architect who (mostly) works with Microsoft products, that would explain the volume of Microsoft stuff around here… but in order to be credible (and retain some objectivity) when I’m talking about Microsoft products, I’m also interested in what their competitors are doing. That’s why I’m also a Mac user and I dabble with Linux from time to time; my website uses an open source CMS (WordPress), running on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (classic LAMP); I keep an eye on what VMware is up to; and, as well as using a bunch of Google products on the web I recently started using Google Apps for e-mail, calendar and contacts.

Since the Microsoft-Yahoo! merger-that-wasn’t, I’ve become increasingly interested in Microsoft’s online offerings and consequently I’m also watching the dominant force in Internet search as they expand into other areas online – that’s why I spent today at the Google Developer Day 2008. Aside from being an opportunity to visit the new Wembley Stadium (I do think they should have incorporated the iconic twin towers from the old stadium somewhere in the new structure), it’s a chance for me to find out a little about the technologies that Google is pushing right now. I feel a bit of a fraud as I’m not really a developer but I answered the registration form truthfully and Google accepted me here, so I guess that’s OK!

Over the course of the day, I noted some brief (and sometimes frivolous) highlights from the various sessions – think of it as a microblog in one post. Where I understand enough of the dev stuff, I’ll follow up with more detail later…

[08.20] Right from the off, it’s been a positive experience. After arriving at the venue almost an hour before registration was due to commence, I was allowed in, invited to have a coffee and some breakfast, and a really helpful guy went and found me my delegate badge. Now I’m sitting here enjoying the free Wi-Fi (and grabbing one of the few seats that’s situated next to a floorbox so I can keep my notebook PC’s battery charged during the keynote).

[8.55] As I sat in the “Space Invaders” room waiting for the keynote session to begin, I was thinking that nnly Google would name the session rooms after classic computer games. Now it all makes sense… I just heard that the keynote will include the first public demo of the Android phone!

[9.10] Someone just changed the SSID on the Wi-Fi and I lost my connection mid-post… arghhh!

[9.30] I now have the rest of my delegate pack… including a snazzy gift-wrapped parcel…

containing…

A little green man… hang on… he’s removed his head – what’s he doing inside my Mac?

(It’s OK, he’s just giving me a copy of all the materials I might need to make the most of today).

[09:59] What can’t Microsoft events be this much fun?

[10:00] The keynote is about to start…

[10:25] This keynote has lots of slides, few words, lots of pictures. I like it. Whatever the opposite of death by PowerPoint is, this is it.

[10:30] Mike Jennings is performing the first European demo of Android – the open source mobile stack.

[10:50] The keynote was an overview of what Google is doing to help people develop for the web. Highlights were:

• The theme for today is client-cloud-connectivity:
  • Making the client more powerful.
  • Making the cloud more accessible.
  • Connecting pervasively.
• Google Chrome is 100% open source (based on WebKit and the V8 JavaScript engine), designed to support today’s rich Internet applications.
• Gears is a browser plugin to enable web application functionality that was previously only available on the desktop.
• Google has two types of API – the various data APIs and those which provide AJAX functionality – both are designed to make Google services programmatically accessible.
• Google App Engine allows organisation to run their application on the Google infrastructure in an attempt to overcome the financial and administrative hurdles associated with traditional computing.
• Android provides a mobile application stack.
• Google Web Toolkit (GWT) allows applications to be written in Java and run in cross-browser compiled JavaScript.
• OpenSocial provides a family of APIs for connecting social websites.

[11:10] Hoping to learn more about Android in Mike Jenning’s session “An introduction to Android”…

[11:15] There’s no code in this session… I should be able to cope then ;-)

[11:25] Mike seems a nice guy but he’s clearly learning this deck as he goes…

[11:30] Into Q&A already?!

[11:50] 35 minutes to go and the Q&A is getting hard for the presenter… what’s interesting to me is that this Google-led presentation has degenerated into a group of developers and users feeding back to Google on things like security, usability, and other common considerations for mobile application development that don’t seem to have been considered. Some of the questions are tough… but that should be expected given the forum.

[12:00] He’s desperate to end this session (twice now he’s asked how much longer to go on for…). Poor guy – I feel really sorry for him the way this session has gone but there was nothing here that shouldn’t have been expected. Hopefully Google has a better idea of the state of the mobile market than this session would indicate.

[12:05] There’s a guy on the front row writing a book: Professional Android Application Development (to be published by Wrox with a November 2008 release date).

[12:20] It seemed to me that Mike was strangled by the Google PR machine but, thanks to his great sense of humour, he still managed to end the session on a high note. Key points were:

• Based on a poll of the room, around 50% of people have more than one mobile handset; 25% of people have no land-line at home; and there was no-one here that does not have a mobile. This should be caveated heavily – this was a room full of geeks – but it is nevertheless an interesting study.
• Android is an open mobile handset project: an open development model; open to the industry (free to carriers/manufacturers/enthusiasts); open to the developer with the ability to integrate at a deep level in the stack (e.g. replacing the dialler).
• The Android runtime environment is implemented in Java running on a Linux kernel. Some classes are unavailable (i.e. those that are not relevant to mobile computing).
• Android should be expected during the 4th quarter of 2008.
• Google appears unprepared for the questions that will be asked of any new platform around security, usability, upgradability – over even why people will choice Android over more established competition. Maybe they are prepared but to quote Mike Jennings, “these kind of questions are over my pay grade”.

[12:25] Ooo! Curly Wurlys on the snack table!

[12:30] I like geek t-shirts – I just saw one which said “Gears – we power the Tubes”

[12:35] In this session Aaron Boodman will be talking talking about Google Gears… let’s hope that he is allowed to say more than Mike Jennings was.

[13:10] Great session – gave me just enough to learn something about the APIs that Gears provides. Key points were:

• Gears is a browser extension which provides JavaScript APIs for web application development, available for Internet Explorer (5 or later), Mozilla Firefox (1.5 or later), WIndows Mobile, Chrome (which is built on Gears) and now Safari. Android will support gears (at the moment it just has a stub API).
• Gears is now a year old and has dropped its Google prefix.
• Gears is not just about offline access to web applications although the initial implementation was about a database, local server and worker pool.
• APIs include desktop shortcuts, file system, binary object access and geolocation.

[13:15] I’ve just managed to sneak a quick peak outside at the stadium itself – it’s very impressive. We’ve been asked not to use any photos that identify Wembley Stadium for commercial purposes but this is just a personal snapshot (actually, it’s five of them, stitched together in Photoshop CS3).

(Someone seems to have stolen half the pitch…)

[13:30] Fooling around whilst waiting for lunch…

[14:50] I thought that my web access was fast here… I just ran a speed test and I’m getting about 14Mbps! This is the best Internet access I’ve ever had at a conference.

[14:55] Looking around the delegates it seems that Macs are pretty common among developers who follow Google technologies! I reckon I’ve seen 2-3 MacBooks for every PC laptop here today (and several of the PCs I saw were running Linux)… as someone who lives primarily in the Microsoft world, this is an interesting experience.

[15:00] Ryan Boyd is just starting to talk about mashing up Google APIs… hopefully I can keep up!

[16:10] That was hard work but I just about held in there… Ryan demonstrated a number of APIs working together, including example code. A few points to note:

• AtomPub is used to define feeds (mostly for blog syndication), made up of entries containing additional information.
• Four methods are applied to feeds (create, retrieve, update, delete) and these relate to the equivalent HTTP communications (post, get, put, delete).
• Standard HTTP status codes are returned.
• Google has extended AtomPub to provide:
  • A data model.
  • Batch operations.
  • Authentication (client login with username and password, AuthSub or OAuth).
    Alternate output formats for non-Atom data (e.g. RSS, KML, JSON).
• The OAuth Playground is a good place to understand how OAuth authentication works – AuthSub is similar in some ways and has been around longer but OAuth is a standardised implementation and should grow over time.

[16:20] My little green man now has some blue and red playmates.

[16:25] Next up, Google Web Toolkit (GWT): the technical advantage, presented by Sumit Chandel. This will also be developer heavy (this is a developer day after all!) so I may struggle again…

[16:35] Just noticed that quite a few people are using sub-notebook PCs here…

[16:50] And I’ve never seen as many stickers on PCs as I have today… maybe that’s a dev thing too?!

[17:15] Into Q&A now, I won’t understand the answers but to summarise the key points from the GWT session:

• GWT allows developers to write AJAX applications more quickly, compiling Java into optimised JavaScript and employing techniques such as deferred binding to ensure that only those elements that are required for the local browser implementation are used.
• Browser quirks are no longer a problem – GWT handles these for all supported browsers.
• With GWT, there are no more memory leaks! A bold statement and actually there may be some where JavaScript native interface (JSNI) calls are made but there should be none for pure GWT applications (read more in Joel Webber’s article on DOM events, memory leaks and you).
• GWT adds history support to AJAX applications with its implementation of really simple history (RSH).
• GWT enables code reuse through design patterns.
• Faster application development is accommodated using IDEs such as Eclipse and other Java tools bust specifically, GWT allows for debugging in bytecode.

[17:20] Just swapped my evaluation form for a t-shirt… my kids will love the Google icons on the front!

[17:45] Google has a new UK developer blog – and they just showed us a cool wrap-up video from the day – hopefully that will be on YouTube later. [Update: here it is, courtesy of Youtube]:

[17:50] Look! A Googler – complete with lab-coat!

[17:55] Mmm… beer!

[17:55] And the fun continues… with giant Chess, Connect 4, Jenga, arcade games (including Pacman and Space Invaders), Mega Blocks… and… somewhat bizarrely, a PHP Elephant!

[18:15] Whilst chatting with Tim Anderson, he made a very valid point that I hadn’t considered whilst I was getting excited about technology – Google is an advertising company and, unlike Microsoft or any of the other vendors that I enjoy a relationship with, they don’t need to sell software – they just want people to use their search, etc. and if their vision of the web continues to develop the ad revenues should keep on rolling in too.

[18:20] Just looked out of the window and saw that the turf is slowly returning to Wembley’s pitch. Only about a quarter missing now!

[18:35] Now that is a good use for the presentation projectors… Wii Sports/Guitar Hero II!

[18:55] Mmm… pizza!

[20:00] I really should head home now!

I’ve really enjoyed this event – a fantastic opportunity to learn more about Google’s developer tools and APIs and, who knows, I may even get around to implementing some of them here (if this site ever gets its long awaited AJAX overhaul). From chatting with the event organisers, I learned that this was the second annual Google Developer Day in the UK and there were just over 500 people here today. Google is looking to run more events as their portfolio expands – possibly even some smaller, more focused, events but, for me, this was the perfect balance between a conference (for which my employer is unlikely to support attendance, based on recent experience) and the shorter events – providing a small amount of information on a wide variety of topics.

Hopefully I’ll be at next years GDD too. As for the Microsoft posts… normal service will be resumed at 9am tomorrow.

For the last week, I’ve only used two browsers on my Windows PC – Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 and Google Chrome beta – and I’ve been really impressed at how these two browsers have shaken up my surfing. There’s plenty of sites on the ‘net comparing the two browsers (so I won’t do that here) but one thing I heard Paul Thurrott discussing with Leo Laporte on Windows Weekly (Episode 73) was the integration of Google Gears into the Chrome browser. I hadn’t realised that Chrome included Gears (although, now I come to think of it, the installation error I experienced when I was installing Chrome referred to Gears) and it is really cool.

Let me give you an example, a few minutes back, I had a power spike at home. The computers stayed on but my ADSL connection was dropped, as was the WiFi connection from my DNS server to the router… I didn’t even notice – I was happily writing a blog post in WordPress through Chrome and it kept on without missing a beat. Only when I tried to surf to some new sites did I realise there was a problem.

But it gets better (credits to Paul Thurrott for pointing this out) – if you click the drop down menu in Chrome with a file icon, you can select to create application shortcuts. This creates a standalone instance of the current page with optional icons on the desktop, quick launch bar or start menu. I now have Gears applications for Google Reader, Google Mail, Google Calendar and WordPress (I’m using the WordPress one to write this post).

(The last time I was interested in things like chrome and gears, I was a teenager and the context would have been my bike…)