SD card unavailable

I have a Sony Xperia XZ Premium phone that I love, except the camera app likes to give me memory errors ("SD card unavailable") when starting the app. At first I thought my SD card had gone bad, so I bought a new one, and still got the same error. Hmm, maybe the SD card interface had gone bad, so I switched to the internal memory, same error.

After some fiddling I discovered that if the camera app had not been opened in a while, the memory interface probably goes into stand-by mode, and when the camera app starts up it couldn't load the last image from the gallery and times out. The effect is that every time I pick up my phone in a hurry to take a photo, I get this error, but if I'm constantly using the camera, then no problems. Thinking back I realized the problem started occurring shortly after a software update, so it must be a software bug. I can easily reproduce the bug if I let the phone/camera app idle for a long time, or do something CPU intensive such as installing an app from Google Play while opening the camera app at the same time.

Strangely enough, the problem doesn't seem to affect all people, since a web search reveals a lot of people reporting about this issue, but even more people replying that they have no problems and it must be an SD card issue or some other software conflict. The problem seems to be widespread since it happens with all phones, even the Xperia 1. I myself have another Sony phone (XA2 Ultra) that started having the exact same problem after a recent software update.

To workaround the problem I finally decided to use a third-party camera app. Unfortunately I can't seem to find one that works as well as the built-in camera app, they all suffer from over complexity or annoying UI issues (either a case of the developers don't eat their own dog food, or the developers forcing dog food down users' throats). After a lot of searching and trying, I finally settled on Footej Camera. It's simple and fast and doesn't have a lot of UI annoyances, and obviously doesn't give me SD card errors.

Update: Unfortunately even though Footej doesn't have startup SD card errors, it seems to have the same time-out issue from time to time and ends up losing the current photo. I'm going with Cameringo+ for now. Cameringo+ seems to be stable, but it forces full-screen immersive mode which is really annoying since it doesn't let me exit the app easily. The app has an option to toggle immersive mode which does absolutely nothing.

Update 2: I've finally determined the problem really is SD card related. Unfortunately, the workaround seems to be not use the SD card at all, since even with the fastest A1 SD cards it still pops up the error if there's any hiccups while accessing the card. They really need to increase the timeout on the camera app.

Update 3: I give up. I'm now only using the internal memory for taking pictures. Time to buy a new phone.

Chrome 64-bit font rendering

Google Chrome 64-bit dev came out a few weeks ago, and I quickly switched to it. Unfortunately it had a bug displaying Chinese text, so after a few days I switched back to the beta version, but then 64-bit filtered down to the beta version, so I moved back to the stable release. Unfortunately when 64-bit came to the release version, I had to figure out how to resolve it.

Luckily, after some trial-and-error, I found the setting in chrome://flags. The setting is Disable DirectWrite Windows. (Disables the use of experimental DirectWrite font rendering system.) #disable-direct-write

Before:

After:

The strange thing about this display issue is that it can display the Chinese text properly if I zoom in or zoom out. Only the standard text is affected, bold text is also not affected. I imagine something in the accelerated font rendering system accelerates the font display so much they just slip off my eyeballs. Oh, the problem also affects other similar fonts, such as Japanese and Korean.

Update (2014/09/23): As of Chrome 37, the DirectWrite font bug has been fixed. Unfortunately, enabling DirectWrite causes all the fonts in Chrome to be ugly. Sigh.

I'm a computer, not a tablet

I hate Gmail's new look, and I hate Google Calendar's new look even more. I always thought Google is big on the usability front, but apparently they either think everyone's using huge 22" monitors, or everyone's using tablet computers.

P.S. The above is an actual screen capture of Google Calendar's new look from my notebook. None of my events can fit properly on the monthly calendar view.

Request more users

I received mail earlier today from Google announcing support for DKIM for all Google Apps editions. My boss has always complained that he couldn't send email to or receive email from his boss, and the IT people at his boss' company always refused to check their in-house email server for problems and keeps telling me to check my email server for problems.

Occam's razor moment. An in-house email server with hundreds of users vs. Google Apps. What are the chances the problem is on my end? DKIM doesn't really have anything to do with inability to receive mails, but I like to throw acronyms at my boss, so, I enabled DKIM on Google Apps and set my DNS accordingly, and on another tab, I was doing user transitions to the new Google Apps infrastructure. While I was doing this, I suddenly noticed on the Dashboard I can request for more users. The request for more users button was disabled a few years ago when Google Apps started the Premier Edition (now simply called Google Apps for Business) and since I already have 200 users I never actually needed more users. (Unlike new Google Apps users that can only get 50 users, I've been using Google Apps since 2006 and started with 100 users, and I've requested for 200 users in 2007.)

To make sure I wasn't imagining things, I googled and found this TechCrunch article, which is exactly what my dashboard looked like earlier. And just to make sure I'm not dreaming, I immedidately requested for 100 more users.

Yay!

Google instantaneous

I've been having trouble with Google searches for the past week or so, where the suggested items wouldn't disappear when a search is finished and just ends up covering the top results; and clicking on the suggested items in the search bar caused unpredictable behavior. All was resolved yesterday when Google officially brought out Google Instant.

Google Instant shows search results while I'm still typing, which is kinda annoying at first but I realized it's much faster than having to wait for search results to appear after pressing enter. The best thing though, is that when going through additional pages of search results, it's almost instantaneous. There's no longer a delay to wait for the additional pages to load. I like it.

Happy 9/9!

Yesterday's technologies, today

A few days ago, I added Socialwok to my company's Google Apps account. Socialwok is like having a private Facebook or Google Buzz inside my own domain. Yeah, I should be using Google Buzz, but Buzz is only available to regular Gmail, and not Google Apps. I would probably switch to Buzz when it's released for Apps.

Anyway, so I was "training" some of my users on using Socialwok when one of my users complained that he couldn't update his status. The symptom was that when he clicks on the status bar, nothing happens. I logged onto his laptop remotely, and discovered that he was still using Firefox 1.0.

Right. Not a problem, I'll just update it to the latest Firefox (currently at 3.6.3). But then I discovered that he was still using Windows Me! And FF3 doesn't support Windows 98/Me. So... I guess I would use FF2 then. I went to oldapps.com and downloaded the final version of Firefox 2, which was 2.0.0.20.

Unfortunately, Socialwok still didn't work properly. Now clicking on the status works, but the keyboard doesn't respond inside the status bar or any other typing area. I thought about installing Google Chrome, but Chrome also doesn't support Windows Me. Then I remembered reading about a patch that makes FF work on older versions of Windows.

Sure enough, a quick Google search turned up KernelEx, which allows some modern programs requiring Windows 2000/XP to work with Windows 98/Me. Installing KernelEx also requires the installation of the Microsoft Unicode Layer. I've actually had the Unicode Layer for a while, but could never figure out what it's used for, since it doesn't seem to actually allow displaying Unicode.

Anyway, after installing the Unicode Layer and KernelEx, FF3 installed, and Socialwok worked, and everyone was happy.

P.S. It actually took a long time to do all this. My user's computer was so incredibly slow, installing oth versions of Firefox and the system patches took something like 1.5 hours. Plus, in the end, Socialwok still didn't work that well, since it's probably designed for modern displays, and his computer only has a 640x480 monitor...

Come to think of it, I should probably just give him my first gen Eee PC 700, since the Eee PC has a higher resolution (!) display, and is also much (!) faster than his ancient laptop.

Googasm

Shares Of Garmin Ltd. and TomTom N.V. Plunge On Droid Launch-WSJ
Wednesday, 28 Oct 2009 02:41pm EDT

The Wall Street Journal reported that Garmin Ltd. and TomTom N.V. plunged after Google Inc. upgraded its smart-phone software to include a free navigation feature. The smart phone to feature Google's new navigation software is the Motorola Inc. Droid, which was unveiled Wednesday. The phone goes on sale November 6 through Verizon Wireless, which plans to aggressively market the device. In a blog post, Google said its new Google Maps Navigation feature provides turn-by-turn directions based on up-to-date maps and business listings from Google Maps. It will be available to other smart phones through a new version of Google's Android operating system. The news sent shares of the companies reeling.
(Source: WSJ)

Gmail contact chooser

We've been using Google Apps at work for years, ever since the service was first offered. Unfortunately, I was never able to force^H^H^H^H^Hconvince the old^H^H^Hsenior management people into using it, as they're all comfortable with using Outlook Express or in some cases, Thunderbird, on their notebooks.

I still can't believe how bad Outlook Express (and even Outlook) is. I got bitten by Outlook's 2 GB limit per mailbox so incredibly many times that I have all the tools and the fixing steps memorized by heart. Unfortunately, all the senior management love Outlook Express because it has a simple way to click and select contacts that you want to send emails to.

My prayer has been answered, in the form of the contact chooser.

Microhoo

Microsoft partners with Yahoo on long term Internet search deal. Wow!

Firefox 3.5.1 Google Gears again

Strangely enough, when I upgraded to Firefox 3.5.1 it told me that Google Gears is no longer compatible after only two days of being compatible with 3.5. But when I clicked on find updates it couldn't find a compatible version. I had to go to the Gears site and manually install it. Maybe it wasn't updated on the Firefox add-on database yet.

Firefox 3.5.1 Google Gears

Blah.

Firefox 3.5 Google Gears

Google Gears for Firefox 3.5 is finally out. Now I can use my offline Gmail and Calendar again.

Gooverlap

I was just using Google search like every day when I suddenly noticed that the email address normally shown in the upper right corner wasn't mine or anybody I know, and I never use web history. I wonder what could have caused this?


Been insanely busy since coming back from Singapore. My boss retired and the new boss who is still getting his feet wet are asking a lot of us to do new things that the old boss never asked us to. Such as giving monthly PowerPoint presentations of our work progress. I bet I could drive everyone to sleep with my presentation.

Gmail JPEG attachment problem

I was away on vacation for a few days, and of course, something has to break while I was away. Gmail's attachment function broke and I got flooded with help messages. An example below.

This is the original image, taken from a previous post.


When Gmail attaches the JPEG image, it becomes corrupted. And the corruption is different each time. Once in a while it even corrupts the image so badly that it becomes uncompletely unviewable.

Surprisingly enough, the corruption problem even happens with images embedded inside PDF files. I found this out when I tried to work around the image corruption problem by embedding JPEG's inside PDF files, but the PDF files became corrupted as well.

I wonder if it's affecting all attachments?

Gmail has themes

I opened my Gmail this morning and suddenly noticed it was a deeper shade of blue and some of the icons seemed to look different. Just to prove that I wasn't imagining things before my morning coffee, I opened my company's Google Apps mail, and sure enough, Gmail now has themes. Very cool.

On a completely unrelated note, I've been having a lot of trouble searching for stuff using Google. It always complains that the request looks like it's from an automated robot. I wonder if this is related to the great firewall of Thailand.

Google AdSense Account Disabled

What I was afraid of earlier came true. I was out meeting a client and when I got home, I got this in the mail:

Hello FRiC,

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we've decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions about your account or the actions we've taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more information by visiting
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153&hl=en_US.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Although the mail was incredibly vague, I immediately went to the URL in the mail and filled in the appeal form. A few minutes later I received a mail completely written in Thai saying that Google will be closed until September 24. (?!) So instead of seeing the ads there will just be blanks where the ads used to be.

Was it due to people clicking on all those Scientology ads?

Picasa peeking out

With all the excitement over the release of the Google browser, no one is paying any attention to the new Picasa release.

I really like both Picasa and Picasaweb and I've been using Picasa even before Google bought them. Did you know that Picasa is named after Picasso? Speaking of Picasso, here's a Picasso-related clip.

Download Google Chrome here

Google Chrome is now available for download. Many sites are linking to the wrong download page.

Check it out!

Google browser

A lot of my time is spent on Google and Google Apps. So it's really good to hear that Googles is making their own browser. The Official Google Blog has more info about Google Chrome.

I actually use both Firefox and IE, maybe Chrome will be good enough to replace both of them? In fact, I was cursing at Firefox because it doesn't seem to format the interface for CUPS properly when I heard about Chrome. Can't wait to see what comes tomorrow.

Google AdSense

When I first created this blog I moved it from Blogger to Wordpress then back to Blogger again. Both are free and offer similar features for a casual blogger like me, but I wanted to use Wordpress because I could use a shorter name ("ivoid"). Unfortunately, Wordpress doesn't allow the use of Google AdSense with free accounts, so I came back to Blogger again.

According to the Google AdSense policy, I'm strictly prohibited from clicking on the ads placed on my own site. Unfortunately, because I always write about things I like, the targeted ads that appear are always things I'm really interested in, and I can't click on them and I had no idea how to reach the advertised sites. Eventually I found a silly way around this by enlarging the ads so they'll show the advertiser's URL, and I just manually type in the URL without clicking on the ads. (Which is why the ads are so big.)

Besides the ads that I'm actually interested in, I'm also getting a lot of Scientology ads. I bet they'll double now that I've actually mentioned them in a post.

I've heard horror stories about people being dropped from the AdSense program due to invalid clicks. I'm really worried about this because I have an absurdly high Page CTR (click through rate) on one of my sites, probably because people visit the site to look for the particular product that we sell (almost all visitors found the site by Google search), and then click on the ads to find more similar sites.

I'm also not supposed to encourage people to click on the ads, so please, don't click on the ads! :-)