The Strawberry Project » Google

Problems with iChat and GTalk

breadedcod — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:29:55 +0000

Tinfoil hat time. In the past 48 hours I’ve had problems start to appear between Apple and Google. The first was using Chrome on OS X and trying to access the Apple website, which results in Chrome b0rk1ng.

The second issue has been with iChat connecting to Google Talk.

A quick search for ‘problems with iChat and Gtalk’ tends to give a flood of responses with people having trouble getting connected or, more worryingly, losing connection after things being fine and dandy. I had the latter happen to an account today.

Symptoms:

Constant prompt for password and failure to login.
Nothing meaningful in system logs.

Other observations:

Gtalk in Gmail working fine
Able to login to Google account no problem

Things we tried:

Changing Google Account password – didn’t work
Testing account from another computer – didn’t work
Testing a working/alternative account from original computer – worked

So it looked like it was Le Google and not iChat.

As it turned out, the only thing I could think of as a likely candidate was an account getting locked for some reason, so we tried:

https://www.google.com/accounts/UnlockCaptcha

and lo and behold, it worked. Have no idea why given that no notification was given on the account. If you get the authentication fail problem when you know it’s a good account, you might want to give it a go. Or buy more tinfoil.

So there’s nothing to worry about here. It’s absolutely not something more Machiavellian going on here. No-sir-eee-bob. Everything’s just fine.

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Blackberry Bold Geotagging Photos

breadedcod — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:12:39 +0000

I spent part of yesterday’s ride taking snaps with the Blackberry Bold to see if I could get the geotag feature to work. Here’s the results.

Blackberry Bold photos

As you an see, the additional Lat/Lon EXIF data is working fine and dandy. I’ll have a look at the full Gmaps integration with GPX track data in a bit. DIY chores to do right now

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Gmap Pedometer Route Tracing

breadedcod — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:04:40 +0000

A tweet from Jim Phelps put me on to the Gmap Pedometer, which I’ve been having a quick play with this evening.

The service provides a means of being able to pre-record a route that can be exported to a gpx route in the same way I’ve shown previously. Rather than use Google’s directions service to be able to describe a route, you can simply ‘draw’ it on the Gmap Pedometer service and then export that out for use on your Garmin as before. Now that’s more like it – as provided the high-res imagery is available in satellite view, you should be able to record off-road routes without too much trouble.

A word of caution though. The registration/positional accuracy of the Google data coupled with the accuracy of your GPS unit at any given time may well lead to some pretty large error in positioning. Pretty large meaning, don’t plot any knife-edge routes and expect to be able to follow them blindfolded wihtout mishap. You have been warned!

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Google Gadgets Portlet for Websphere

breadedcod — Mon, 07 May 2007 20:22:57 +0000

IBM have finally released the portlet for consuming Google Gadgets and services within Websphere that I mentioned way back at Lotusphere.

IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets is a JSR 168 portlet that allows enterprise portal users to integrate Google Gadgets for web pages with their portal pages. Google Gadgets for web pages are remotely accessible services that provide access to online content and applications designed to be aggregated into the context of a web page. These include language translators, maps, YouTube videos, and Wikipedia.

Using IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets with appropriate access rights, users can search and select a Google Gadget from the available set of thousands of Google Gadgets for their portal pages and modify the settings of the selected gadget as per their preferences. Additionally, users can specify the number of gadgets to be displayed per page while selecting a gadget.

Reasons we may want to use it in the near future:

User-owned integration of stuff like: Facebook; ~~MySpace~~; Digg; Del.icio.us etc.

Might save reading the Facebook API documentation for a while.

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Maps ‘R’ Us

breadedcod — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 20:19:49 +0000

Right. This is a little off topic related to the Strawberry Project, but I’m quite excited about this one. Google Maps has been a firm favourite for some time (and, to a lesser extent, Google Earth).

There’s a rather neat WordPress plugin for Google Maps available that allows users to bung a map in a post with a line of code, e.g.:

*gmap name=’newmap’ lat=’52.622122′ lng=’0.528545′ zoom=’14′ desc=’Barton Bendish, Norfolk – a great place for deploying your photometer’*

[gmap name='newmap' width='300' height='300' lat='52.622122' lng='0.528545' zoom='14' desc='Barton Bendish, Norfolk - a great place for deploying your photometer']

Which is rather useful.

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