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Wow.

Wow.

 

 

 

A tale of automation woe.  Read from the bottom..

A tale of automation woe.  Read from the bottom..

A Windows 7 deployment image was accidentaly sent to all Windows machines, including laptops, desktops, and even servers. This image started with a repartition / reformat set of tasks.

As soon as the accident was discovered, the SCCM server was powered off – however, by that time, the SCCM server itself had been repartitioned and reformatted.

 

 

 

So I was trying to buy a copy of The Decline of Western Civilization this weekend.

So I was trying to buy a copy of The Decline of Western Civilization this weekend.  Only available copies are VHS tapes for $200 on Amazon (!)

Found this instead...

 

Newcomer Kilovolt Coffee Lights Up West Oakland

Newcomer Kilovolt Coffee Lights Up West Oakland

New food and drink establishments are slowly springing up in our neighborhood, Kilovolt Coffee is the latest welcome addition -- read more from KQED Bay Area Bites: http://goo.gl/GGg5k3

 

Now you too can build your own Zuul Portal.

Now you too can build your own Zuul Portal.

 

Still an empty profile though...

Still an empty profile though...

But not much better than:

Joe Tuman - https://plus.google.com/109949039322333887009

Libby Schaff - https://plus.google.com/110500927796450135344

Bryan Parker - https://plus.google.com/109333654487362962540

At least Parker has a couple of posts there.  Tuman has only 1 Youtube video..

If there are other candidates add them here and I'll share an Oakland Mayor 2014 circle..

 

Broken Bells at the Fox Theater with Julie Lindner

Broken Bells at the Fox Theater with Julie Lindner

 

I've been very impressed with the rapid progress of Sprint Reader I'm up to 650 wpm and can probably go faster with...

I've been very impressed with the rapid progress of Sprint Reader I'm up to 650 wpm and can probably go faster with a little more practice.

Originally shared by Sprint Reader

Language auto-detection done!

Functionality coming soon and paves the way for more intelligent word hyphenation (by language pattern) and maybe, just maybe auto-translation!

Stay tuned.

  Google Translate     

 

Google+  has some common sense content rules in the User Content and Conduct Policy [1]  You'll notice there is no...

Google+  has some common sense content rules in the User Content and Conduct Policy [1]  You'll notice there is no section on censorship based on viewpoint.

The issue described by Eric Raymond below is much more mundane.  It's actually a problem in the way Google+ previews web snippets.  

A couple of weeks ago we introduced the new Article embed type.  You'll notice these posts by their distinctive large-photos with a ragged-edge.  This new code caused the problem.

The markup on theblaze.com uses the http://schema.org/NewsArticle markup.  That, combined with some other factors causes the preview processing to fail.  This issue was reported to us on April 1st and a fix will be released to production early next week.

I opened an issue on our developer site to track this issue since it does affect a handful of other sites that use the NewsArticle markup.  Feel free to Star it to receive updates: 

https://code.google.com/p/google-plus-platform/issues/detail?id=805

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en-US/+/policy/content.html

Originally shared by Eric Raymond

G+ may be engaging in non-viewpoint-neutral censorship of news  articles relating to firearms. 

This link:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/04/04/gun-control-advocates-who-say-more-guns-equal-more-crime-...

results in post blocking when it's either pasted in the link box or pasted in text with the preview image not removed. Others have reported that all firearms-related articles from The Blaze, but not non-firearms-related articles, are blocked.

Something more specific than blocking of firearms-related images is going on, as the Geeks with Guns G+ community would have noticed that a lot sooner than now.

Google has some explaining to do.

 

 

Looks familiar...

Looks familiar...

 

 

 

test

test

 

test

test

 

test

test

 

Don't close that tab or touch that dial!

Don't close that tab or touch that dial!

...heard this morning on KZSU 

 

Seeing this error when launching the extension:

Seeing this error when launching the extension:

Chrome Canary and Chrome Beta channel.  (Haven't tried stable yet...)

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot set property 'id' of null colorpicker.min.js:1

ColorPicker colorpicker.min.js:1

ColorPicker colorpicker.min.js:1

setColourPicker reader.min.js:1

init reader.min.js:1

Consider using 'dppx' units instead of 'dpi', as in CSS 'dpi' means dots-per-CSS-inch, not dots-per-physical-inch, so does not correspond to the actual 'dpi' of a screen. In media query expression: (min-resolution: 144dpi), (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5) 

 

Google Now is doing a killer job identifying people and songs during the Oscars

Google Now is doing a killer job identifying people and songs during the Oscars

Protip: pull down to refresh and get up-to-date info!

 

If you see a "low battery" or "offline" warnings on your Nest thermostat check if you have a "C" wire.

If you see a "low battery" or "offline" warnings on your Nest thermostat check if you have a "C" wire.  I was lucky, there was an unused wire that I was able to easily attach on both ends.

The power stealing from the control wiring is a neat technique, but direct power is better.

 

Check out the BD doodle on http://google.fr/ today.

Check out the BD doodle on http://google.fr/ today.

Originally shared by Google France

M'enfin ?! C'est quoi ce Doodle ?

Le 28 février 1957 apparaissait pour la première fois Gaston Lagaffe, nouvelle recrue de la rédaction du Journal de Spirou telle qu'imaginée par André Franquin.

Aujourd'hui, Gaston fait un stage chez Google France et arrive en trombe sur notre page d'accueil, accompagné de son chat-dingue et de sa mouette rieuse.

Si contrairement à ses collègues Prunelle, Spirou et Fantasio  ou à nous même qui l'avons au bureau aujourd'hui, vous ne connaissez pas Gaston :

• Découvrez comment un Doodle est réalisé grace à ce GIF

• Apprenez en plus sur Gaston avec Google : http://goo.gl/mUI7IM ou sur son site officiel http://goo.gl/2wWxsh

Nous nous excusons par avance pour tout bug causé par l'une de ses gaffes.

 

Some perfect rainy day beats..

Some perfect rainy day beats..

Further blurring the boundaries between electronic music and rock, Ratatat's self-titled debut album mixes Evan Mast's fractured but propulsive beats and woozy analog synths with Mike Stroud's loud, yet somehow subtle, guitars.

 

Thunderbirds meets the Thorn Birds.

Thunderbirds meets the Thorn Birds.

Finally finished this series recently, highly recommended...

 

Listening to this new Information Society release while upgrading all iOS devices to 7.0.6.   Hack, hack, hack.

Listening to this new Information Society release while upgrading all iOS devices to 7.0.6.   Hack, hack, hack.

Originally shared by Information Society

Baked fresh today! Get your full-quality music here: http://informationsociety.bandcamp.com/album/engage-classic-remixes-vol-2

 

Listening to some UK Garage today.  Altavista reference made me smile.

Listening to some UK Garage today.  Altavista reference made me smile.

You won't find us on Alta Vista

Cult classic not bestseller, you're gonna need more power

Plug in the free phase and the generator, crank it up to gigawatts

 

I'm hopeful that the San Jose deployment has a halo effect throughout the Bay Area.  Your move Comcast.

I'm hopeful that the San Jose deployment has a halo effect throughout the Bay Area.  Your move Comcast.

Originally shared by Google

Today we’ve invited 34 cities in nine metro areas around the U.S. to work with us to explore what it would take to bring them Google Fiber. In the coming months, we'll work with each city's leaders on a joint planning process to map out a Google Fiber network in detail and assess potential challenges to bringing 100x faster Internet to these communities. We aim to provide updates about which of these cities will be getting Google Fiber at the end of the year. Learn more: http://goo.gl/tMg6F9

 

Are any of our politicians even trying to get inward investment of this type?

Are any of our politicians even trying to get inward investment of this type?  Twitter moved into a neighborhood (SF mid-market) that's worse than most areas of Oakland.  It would only take a few companies to change hearts and minds...

 

Can we learn from the last Comcast Merger?

Can we learn from the last Comcast Merger?  I hope we can.  This recent NPR interview with Susan Crawford goes into the details.

The big risk here is a larger Comcast can leverage Content to keep new entrants out of the market.

That new entrant has to enter on two levels. It has to build communications infrastructure. But it also has to get access to programming, because 91 percent of Americans have paid TV prescriptions, as well as high-speed Internet access subscriptions. They want both. So Comcast pays much less for programming - because it has so many subscribers, and because it owns one of the big players - than any new entrant would. This is yet another cudgel, another sledgehammer that Comcast can use to keep any potential alternative network competition at bay.

 

Finally some positive news for the stray dogs in Sochi.

Finally some positive news for the stray dogs in Sochi.

If anyone can find a way to monetarily support their work please let me know.  In the meantime I'm donating to the Detroit Dog Rescue, which is facing a similar stray dogs problem.

http://detroitdogrescue.com/

 

Had a Google Now card for the album so I'd say it is available

Had a Google Now card for the album so I'd say it is available

 

Daft Punk may have won some Grammys last night - but when I wanted retro electronic/synth I was pleasantly surprised...

Daft Punk may have won some Grammys last night - but when I wanted retro electronic/synth I was pleasantly surprised to discover Psykosonik via Google Play

Cyberpunk themes, Nintendo  SNES ties-ins and beats reminiscent of Crystal Method The   make this some great coding music.  They'll also be my soundtrack of choice if I ever make another ray-traced 3-D demo.

 

Anil Dash - I'm saddened that someone that I worked with and respect wrote something so out of touch with the...

Anil Dash - I'm saddened that someone that I worked with and respect wrote something so out of touch with the situation that's going on here in the Bay Area.  You seem to believe the media hype that the "techies" are elitist and out of touch and that better "marketing" will help win hearts and minds.

The reality is that tech companies and employees are already doing much of what you advocate for, and doing more of it, or marketing it, won't change the situation.  Avatars, Logos, and signs won't help.  Helping people afford housing will.

Specifically:

Using Voices

Employees and company leaders already advocate for better housing and infrastructure.  Google has succeeded[1] and failed[2] to build housing in Mountain View near it's campus.  Facebook too[3].

Volunteering and Civic Initiatives

Google (and other companies) match donations 1:1 and encourage their employees to give.  There's also the following

  - Google.org 

  - Google for Nonprofits 

  - Supporting local communities via GoogleServe[5]

  - Google sponsored a huge push to fund Kiva loans last year via their own and employees giving.

I am very proud of what's been done here and how Google has made me a better donator and volunteer.

Community Involvement 

Extending benefits like food and day care to people in the community is an interesting idea.  There are problems however -- employee services are at the work places, not in the neighborhood where people's rent are going up.

Plus there are often better ways for employees to engage with the community.  I've met and talked to plenty of people while picking up trash in West Oakland.  Plenty of other people are already very active in their churches, schools and communities.

In Closing...

If every shuttle was banned the problem would still remain.  In the past 10 years San Francisco has built  17k new units of housing while adding 75k residents[6].  This is a complex issue that's not going away soon.  Marketing isn't going to change it.  Getting more housing and helping people worried about paying rent will, even while many are directly benefitting[7].

I'll leave you with the conclusions from Elias Levy's in-depth data based analysis[8] of the situation:

In the end, tech workers are simply a convenient straw man for folks to direct their anger at high rents, which are simply the result of a strong economy, the anti-development history of San Francisco, the city’s limited geography, and market forces.  In a slightly different scenario, the vilified workers could have been in biotech, aerospace, or finance.  So long as the local economy is strong, San Francisco is a desirable place to live in, and the population increases, rents, like real estate, will go up in San Francisco.  At best, we can slow down these market forces and provide a helping hand to those less fortunate to ensure they have some support dealing with these changes.

Full disclosure: I work at Google. I wrote part of this on a Shuttle from the East Bay, and would still be driving if it wasn't available.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Business/google-invests-sparkly-housing-development-mountain-view-calif/story?...

[2] http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/south_bay&id=8731879

[3] http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/10/the-houses-that-facebook-built-are-coming-to-san-francisco/

[5]  http://www.google.com/giving/community/

[6] http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-San-Francisco-creates-its-own-housing-crisis-513...

[7] http://www.npr.org/2014/01/22/264528139/long-a-dirty-word-gentrification-may-be-losing-its-stigma

[8] http://elias-levy.tumblr.com/post/74103701680/san-francisco-eviction-protests

 

All future postmortems will now contain animations.  Seriously though -- this is pretty detailed.. and a bit scary.

All future postmortems will now contain animations.  Seriously though -- this is pretty detailed.. and a bit scary.

Originally shared by Ihab Awad

Entertaining failure chain. :)

 

Epic.

Epic.

Pick your song, then pick your beats-per-minute dancers.

 

Had brunch there this weekend.  Great food, somewhat spotty service, but they're just getting going.

Had brunch there this weekend.  Great food, somewhat spotty service, but they're just getting going.

Originally shared by East Bay Express

How Oakland’s Barkada made a successful leap from bakery-cafe to full-fledged restaurant: http://buff.ly/1ckfSzQ

 

My new morning routine -- remove trash from West Oakland.  Contrast that with the new defacement of West Oakland.

My new morning routine -- remove trash from West Oakland.  Contrast that with the new defacement of West Oakland.

 

Somehow I missed that Klari Reis was posting a new Petri Dish painting every day for all of 2013.

Somehow I missed that Klari Reis was posting a new Petri Dish painting every day for all of 2013.  The entry for December 26th, Poinsettias at Midnight, really captures the season.

Much more at http://thedailydish2013.blogspot.com/

 

Relaxing in Palm Springs.

Relaxing in Palm Springs.

 

Couple more things you might want to look at:

Couple more things you might want to look at:

** While testing I saw a few errors pop up when looking for the _escaped_fragment-= version of pages.  Looks like this:

unknown domain: goodeggs-garbanzo-seoserver.herokuapp.com

** Your pages have a lot of boilerplate in them that can confuse things.  Consider adding html5 header/footer/nav elements. or just getting rid of much of that from your server-side-rendered output.  and....

** Seriously consider adding rel="canonical" -- it's the best way for Google to know the URL you want people to use and it helps to disambiguate your pages.

Regarding mixpanel you can see the unminified JS if you view source here:

  http://www.goodeggs.com/stepladderranch

Not a huge amount of bytes to be saved, but it can't hurt :)

 

Mini postmortem on apache mod_fcgid.

Mini postmortem on apache mod_fcgid.

Notable because it showed up as a Recommended post for me....

Originally shared by Tracy Hurley

We ran into some unexpected server load issues that I tracked down today involving apache 2.2 mod_fcgid. Yay, troubleshooting!

http://www.tracyhurley.com/unexpected-server-load-issue

 

Roo Roo and Tommy (the dog) on yet another trip out.

Roo Roo and Tommy (the dog) on yet another trip out. This morning was brunch at the Universal Cafe with a side trip to Blue Bottle coffee.

A good meal was had by all.

 

Great read.

Great read. I'd also recommend listening to the latest "This American Life" which discusses how your destiny is predicted by where you live. The details on the creation of the fair housing act and riots in the 60s were especially eye opening.

And all of this is especially apropos with the recent Thanksgiving holiday.

Originally shared by Ade Oshineye

"There’s an old saying: ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. There’s a degree to which it’s true, and it certainly seems that the current lot of powerful people are thoroughly irresponsible. I’d like to add another – though it’s deeply wishful thinking. With great privilege should come great humility. Those of us who are privileged – like me, and like Boris – should be able to find that humility. To know that we really don’t know what it’s like to live without our privilege. We can try to imagine – but we’ll never really succeed. And we should know that we’ll never really succeed – and be far, far more willing to listen properly to those who do know it. Most of all, though, we should know when not to talk as though we had all the answers. We should know when to shut up."

 

Dramatic rays over the Eames House numbers at Heath Ceramics.

Dramatic rays over the Eames House numbers at Heath Ceramics.

Bonus: 20% off this weekend on everything.

 

Here's a quick tip I posted to the Developing with Google+ community.

Here's a quick tip I posted to the Developing with Google+ community.  Plenty more good stuff there for publishers and app developers.

Originally shared by Paul Lindner

Youtube and Google+ Embedded Posts

If you embed Youtube videos on your web site you might want to take second look at the Google+ Embedded Post feature:

https://developers.google.com/+/web/embedded-post/

Instead of using a direct Youtube embed try creating a Google+ post that includes the video and your commentary.  Embed that post on your site by following the instructions linked above.

People can still play the video in the page, but now they can also +1, Follow, and Reply to it.  This engagement will make your conversation stand out in the new Youtube.com comments section.

 

Youtube and Google+ Embedded Posts

Youtube and Google+ Embedded Posts

If you embed Youtube videos on your web site you might want to take second look at the Google+ Embedded Post feature:

https://developers.google.com/+/web/embedded-post/

Instead of using a direct Youtube embed try creating a Google+ post that includes the video and your commentary.  Embed that post on your site by following the instructions linked above.

People can still play the video in the page, but now they can also +1, Follow, and Reply to it.  This engagement will make your conversation stand out in the new Youtube.com comments section.

 

Hi widget lovers.

Hi widget lovers.  You may have noticed a new look for the +1 and +Share buttons that are consistent with the Follow and Badge widgets.  We hope you like them.

You'll also notice that they scale up beautifully.  All of our buttons are now using SVG to render the iconography, and the Roboto font for text. There's even some SMIL animations hiding in there too.  All of this is perfect for your new high dpi laptop, tablet or phone. ‡

Please let us know if they're working for you and if you have any suggestions. Thanks for using Google+ widgets!

‡ results may vary on IE8 and Gingerbread browsers.