Monkeyless

Trying to attach a small GIF to an e-mail message I was sending today, Gmail came up with a red “Attachment failed” message. Really? It’s like 3kb. You can’t attach that? Is Gmail blocking GIF file attachments now for some odd reason? Am I missing some news about a 0-day GIF exploit?

They gave me links next to it to retry or remove the attachment, but no matter how many times I retried it, it always failed. This was a new one. There was also a help link next to it, which takes you to a Google help page about “Advanced attachment errors.” The help page isn’t very detailed:

If you’re seeing error messages while uploading files, make sure you have Flash installed. Visit http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ to check for updates and download the latest version.

You can also use the basic attachment features by clickint the Settings link in Gmail. The attachment setting is located in the General tab.

Yes, Google’s help page really spells “clicking” as “clickint” — somebody’s sleeping on the job over there.

Well, I definitely have Flash 10 installed, and it works fine on other sites. Gmail’s chat notification sound is Flash-based, and that works fine. It looks like Gmail put in new file attachment code with Flash that gives you an upload progress bar and lets you upload multiple files at once. But it just doesn’t work, at least for me.

Going into the Gmail settings and changing it to use “Basic attachment features” instead of the advanced ones let me attach files to my e-mails again. Happy times.

Between the new Flash attachment code that’s clearly not ready for prime time, the typos on the help page that explain how to fix it, and the hours of Gmail downtime a few days ago, they’re just not inspiring confidence these days.

Not to mention that the Gmail downtime led to much confusion on my Blackberry. Google was trying to send my Blackberry to a “sorry, your request looks like an automated request from a virus” page where it was asking me to enter a captcha. That worked fine from the Blackberry’s web browser with Gmail over the web, but not so much with Gmail’s Blackberry app. The application was redirected to sorry.google.com which should display the captcha, but the application apparently never expected to be sent there, and wasn’t able to display it. So I was just locked out of Gmail from Google’s own Blackberry application for a few hours until it cleared up.

Not the best of weeks for Gmail. Let’s hope next week is smoother sailing.

MILD UPDATE: Google has now posted about the new attachment feature on the Gmail blog, but there’s no mention of it not working right. I guess I’m just in some special minority for whom it fails. I feel so special.

This took a surprisingly long time to figure out how to do, so I’m posting the answer here in the hopes that it’ll be easier to find in the almighty Google than the vague mentions on other pages that were tough to find.

I have a bunch of JPEG files that I wanted to open with the Adobe Camera Raw interface in Photoshop CS3. I knew that there was the option to do that from Adobe Bridge, and as far as I could tell from Adobe’s documentation, that was the only way. Unfortunately, both Photoshop and Bridge CS3 use so much memory just to have them running — even if they don’t have any images open — that I didn’t want to deal with slowing down my Photoshop editing with extra swapping caused by having Bridge open as well. And I have a bunch of JPEGs to work on, so I wouldn’t want to open and close Bridge all the time to keep memory usage down.

As it turns out, there are two options to open JPG files in Camera Raw without having to use Bridge at all.
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For anyone else trying to figure out the error “The name server is not sufficient or hasn’t been approved.” from the status section on 1&1′s DNS control panel, I’ll tell you the answer. Or, at least, what worked for me.

I had put in a complete hostname for the DNS servers, and 1and1 came back with this “The name server is not sufficient or hasn’t been approved” stuff. Insufficient and unapproved nameservers? Is that the worst error message ever? How can a DNS server be insufficient, as long as it’s providing DNS resolution? Who needs to approve a DNS server before it can be used? It’s all crazy talk.
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One warning if you want to use 1&1 for domain names: it takes forever to make any simple changes that every other registrar is able to make right away.

Let’s say you buy a domain name and then want to point it to your DNS servers. Simple enough, right? But with 1and1, it’ll say “updating” for about 8 hours, throughout which they’ll keep reporting their DNS servers as the authoritative ones. After about 8 hours, the status will change to “domain update done.”

But that’s a lie. I don’t know why it says that, because it’s not done at all. They still report their servers as authoritative (this is at the WHOIS level querying their server, don’t think I’m just checking my local ISP and that I don’t understand DNS TTL.) And the DNS button is greyed out if I select the domain that’s now supposed to be done updating, so I can’t make any changes to it.

Oddly enough, “domain update done” isn’t a status message that they explain. There’s a helpful question mark next to “status,” but that only gives you the following options:

• Ready – This domain’s settings can be changed by clicking on the available options in the toolbar.
• Update – This domain is currently undergoing an update. Please wait until the domain is ready before changing any settings.
• DNS settings incomplete with registrar – This domain cannot be configured until the DNS settings are complete.
• Waiting for approval – This domain is currently unavailable for configuration. Transfers usually take up to ten days once all the proper forms are received.
• Domain setup error – Please review the settings and correct any errors. You can also reset the domain by selecting it and then clicking on DNS in the toolbar. On the next page click on Reset.
• Other – If the status is not explained here, visit our FAQs for more information

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After my web host tried to upgrade Apache, but ran into a cPanel/WHM bug and had to go back to the old Apache version, I suddenly had a WordPress install that wasn’t working right. I would get the following error whenever I tried to get to any page in the administration end of things:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 55431 bytes) in /home/sitedir/public_html/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 158

My theory is that some default PHP memory limit was changed, but they didn’t respond to my support forum post asking about that. So I had to troubleshoot it myself. Luckily, it wasn’t hard to fix, and here’s what I did.

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Ok, I had pretty much ignored the whole Facebook Beacon privacy controversy that’s been going on over the past few weeks. I kept seeing references to something, and just didn’t get interested enough to find out what was going on. And now it’s too late. No, wait, not too late. Just in time.

So I add something to my queue on Blockbuster Online. I wasn’t expecting to get a little DHTML-ish window sliding in at the bottom of the screen saying that they were letting all of my friends know what movie I just added to my queue. Really? Is that something that people really want?

I know Blockbuster was tying themselves in with Facebook, since on several occasions over the last few weeks they’ve asked me to link my Blockbuster and Facebook accounts for all kinds of nifty cool features. No thanks.

But now Blockbuster is automatically sending Facebook my queue information, even though I never linked the accounts? I guess just because that Firefox profile had a valid Facebook login cookie, Facebook’s Beacon javascript was able to submit the update anyway? Why were they asking me if I wanted to link the accounts in the first place, then? And they want to spread this to as many web sites as they can? I wouldn’t mind if the user controls over Beacon that apparently used to be available were actually still available, but they aren’t.

So I decided that the easiest solution — at least for now, I have a feeling they’re going to give in to Interweb outrage soon enough — was to block them.
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This is a weird one. The MGM Grand offers high-speed wireless and wired Internet connections. Being somewhat security-conscious — and being in town for Black Hat and Defcon — I figured it was safest to use the wired connection so that people couldn’t sniff everything I was doing.

Luckily (apparently) for me, the wired connection didn’t work. I follow the Ethernet cable around to underneath the desk, where it’s connected to a black box with an antenna sticking out of it, and a power plug that’s not plugged in. Sure enough, the MGM Grand’s wired Internet connection just goes to a D-Link bridge onto their wireless network, so you’d only get a false sense of security if you used it. You’re really using an unencrypted wireless network when you’re plugged into that Ethernet cable.

Just something to be careful of.

Interestingly, their network also blocked access to my home computer for the first day I was here. I couldn’t SSH into my home machine, and couldn’t even ping it. But it was up, I was able to SSH to a friend’s Linux box and connect to my home machine from there. So I had to wind up tunneling SSH over SSH so I could use my home machine as an encrypted proxy connection to protect everything. I had to SSH to my friend’s machine, and then tunnel an SSH connection over that connection to get to my home machine. Then I could tunnel my web browsing over that connection.

And then the next day I was magically able to connect directly to my home computer. Weird stuff. Maybe they were blocking my connection to try to get me out of my room and back to the casino so I could give them more money.

I haven’t been able to get into my Gmail account for 40 minutes now, and it’s a lot tougher to deal with than I would have expected. No more Google Chat (or Gtalk, or whatever it’s really called), no idea what e-mails I’m missing. At least I can still get to my Google calendar.

Has anyone else’s Gmail account been down this long also? I’ve been getting some combination of the following three errors every time I try to get into it:

Temporary Error (502)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.

Oops… the system was unable to perform your operation (error code 766). Please try again in a few seconds.

Oops… the system was unable to perform your operation (error code 767). Please try again in a few seconds.

Yes, those last two are almost the same, just one’s a 766 and one’s a 767. I wish they didn’t say to try again in a few seconds when it’s been 40 minutes. Every time I see “a few seconds” I get my hopes up and think that maybe I’ll be able to get back into Gmail soon, but so far it hasn’t worked out.

So, is it just me, or is anyone else having problems also?

UPDATE: Back up ten minutes later, down for 50 minutes total. Looks like I wasn’t the only one. I did lose the chat that I was in the middle of when it crashed, there’s no sign of it in my chat history. Interesting. Or not. At least it’s back. Time to update my local copy of my Gmail account from their POP3 interface. I always get a little worried that my e-mail is all gone forever whenever that happens.

I have several WordPress blogs, most of which are running out-of-date versions of WordPress just because of the hassle of updating them. I know the good folks at WP/Automattic make it pretty easy, but you still have to make a backup, FTP a ton of files up to your server without overwriting your theme, upload, or plugins directories, and run the upgrade script. It’s a hassle.

I have one blog running from Fantastico, and upgrading it is nice and easy. Two clicks and you have a backup of the old install along with your upgraded install. No problems to date. So I wanted to try to get Fantastico to upgrade my other WordPress sites where I installed it manually.

The only issue is waiting a little longer for Fantastico to provide the new version, and for my web hosts to provide the new version of Fantastico. But since I’m so slow at upgrading manually, even with some hyped up security issues, that seems like a lightning fast response time in comparison.

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I was working on someone’s laptop that was running XP SP1, and desperately needed SP2 and some other important patches (and, apparently, needs automatic update turned on.)

I go to Windows Update and start installing Service Pack 2. It’s working on it, working on it, on and on. But it’s not making much progress. Well, the progress bar is about 75% of the way through the install, and it’s now finishing up, or cleaning up, or something like that. But it’s been doing that for an hour or two.

The hard drive is chattering, and stuff is happening, but it’s just not making any progress, so I leave it there overnight. I figure the next morning it’ll either still be trying to do that, in which case I just stop it, or it’ll be done.

But I wound up with an error instead. Just a typical application error and the offer to report the error to Microsoft. Sure, why not. And it then directs me to a Windows Error Reporting web page for more information about the error. That page says:
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