Whoever says Google has poor support is wrong

I use a few of the Google tools available.  When it comes time for my monthly backups of my web stuff, I use Google Takeout.  Google Takeout creates a backup of all your Google stuff and creates one big zip file of it that you can download to your machine.

I had some trouble with it today, it wasn't generating my download file so I sent an email to their support team.  I got an email back in about five minutes:


Hi Rich,

Thanks for your mail.  We're currently working on this issue, we hope to have it resolved by next week.  Sorry for the inconvenience,

--The Takeout team

So I'll try again next week and see if its working as expected.  But overall not bad support for what is essentially a suite of free tools.

UPDATE 11/30/2013:

Another Googler got back to me and said to try again, and sure enough it worked just fine.  Problem solved.  Thanks Google.  Now get back to keeping the NSA from spying on my appetizer recipes in Google Docs.

Using Gmail "Details" link to discover older IP addresses

For one project that I'm working on, they have a very strict firewall setup which restricts SSH access to only internal machines and those temporary machines outside the network that need access ( like if you're working from home ).  So as my IP address changes at home, I need to notify the service that my IP address has changed from A to B.  The service prefers if I can give them both the old address and the new address because they'll take out the old address from the firewall rules and add access for the new IP address ( yes, they are that anal ).  I was keeping this list on a pad by my desk but today I found myself downstairs, away from that pad, so I couldn't find my previous IP address, just the new one.

Fearing that I would have to walk ALL the way upstairs to get that pad, I thought for a few seconds and remembered the "Details" link in the footer of my gmail page.  Clicking "Details" in the footer of gmail will show you the last 10 instances of logins/refreshes to your gmail page.  Sure enough, I was able to find the number 7 entry was from last night and showed my previous IP address.  I copied it into my firewall request and got back to my work.

Google Adsense and Google Analytics may be blocked by McAfee

I can't confirm what's going on but I believe that at least McAfee and maybe other firewall appliance providers recently starting blocking googlesyndication.com in the software of their appliances.  It started happening at work this week where all of a sudden Google Adsense and parts of Google Analytics were unavailable to us.  When I traced it, it was all requests to *.googlesyndication.com, mostly pagead2.googlesyndication.com.  Once we created an entry within our McAfee appliances to allow those addresses through, everything went back to normal.  YMMV.

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Setting up Google App Engine SDK

I've started playing around with the Google App Engine SDK. So far I've found this fellow's posts on setting up Python, Eclipse, PyDev, and the Google App Engine very helpful. He also has a great post on ER-modeling and relational models in Google App Engine.

Check them out.

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First impressions on Google App Engine

From the Google site:

Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.

You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.

Without actually firing up the SDK yet, here are my initial thoughts:

1. Do we trust Google? With our data? With our users? I love the idea of the Google App Engine (GAE), a scalable web app system where you only have to worry about coding your business logic and structuring your models. This is kind of like Amazon’s EC2 on steroids. No sysadmin stuff like with EC2, just coding. However I do not love that Google is already in the web app space themselves and is now marketing a web app space hosting platform. You have to trust them a little bit more then I’m comfortable with. They've already got your users and your data and your code. Don't they conceivably control your business at that point? Maybe I'm being paranoid here.Plus, there’s the lock-in factor. If I develop my app using MySQL as a backend, I know I could with only some minor pain change that backend to Oracle. It’s all SQL at some point. How would you swap out of using the Google DataStore API? It’s a proprietary system with no published standards.
2. GAE is currently only in Python. No PHP love? I realize a lot of Google runs on Python and C++ and that’s what it is in their wheelhouse. But I still consider Python to be a fringe language. If GAE were opened up to support PHP and C#, it would blast off in popularity. Then again, a Python only crowd is a good beta test before the crush of PHP devs comes in.
3. The DataStore API (ie, BigTable) is difficult to wrap my head around. After spending so many years carefully crafting db tables and relationships to get the most bang for my buck, I now have to throw out a lot of that hard-earned knowledge. I need to think in terms of objects (or columns) instead of rows.There are still relationships and keys to keep track of but not in the traditional ways of SQL. It seems like much more of your data fetching is done in code rather then in SQL. The shift in thinking reminds me of my own move to Object-Oriented Programming. I whined like a baby during that phase of my programming development (well, at least I did on the inside).

Hopefully I’ll get some more time to play with this stuff soon and report back.

Google embeddable map widgets

Posted on the google maps blog today is a post about the newly released embeddable maps. Pretty cool. Although the map is in an iframe and not javascript and div like using the Maps API. So for manipulating the map on the page, you’ll still need to fall back on javascript and API generated maps. Here’s a quick example of the new version:

<iframe width="425" height="350" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=disney+world,+orlando,florida&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&s=AARTsJoQ-qdhpkhKjvffh0W1ckknxvCxAQ&ll=28.414918,-81.581769&spn=0.013211,0.018239&z=15&output=embed"></iframe><br /><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=disney+world,+orlando,florida&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=28.414918,-81.581769&spn=0.013211,0.018239&z=15&source=embed" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left;font-size:small">View Larger Map</a><br />


View Larger Map

Zend Framework, Google APIs, Google Reader issue

I've been playing around with the Zend Framework and the Google API. I'm pretty bummed out that there doesn't seem to be any API for Google Reader. I was hoping to use Zend_GData_Query to suck in my starred and/or shared feeds. You can do this using getFeed() but I wanted to include the tags I've put on the entries. But I don't see my tags anywhere in the data, only the original "category terms" if specified by the feed author.

I even tried to do a login authorization with Google using Zend_Gdata_ClientLogin, but the public and private Google Reader URIs threw a hissy fit on me.

Google Gears for offline browsing

I'm a couple of days behind in the news here (darn vacation days!)... but Google Gears is out and promises to shake up website development as it uses browser extensions to offload data down to the client instead of making continued requests to the server.  Of course the catch is that you have to download something first.  But there's already Ajax tools for it.

What do you all think about this?  Hype or hope?

Local time shortcut from google ("time in india")

Another neat trick I found in google this morning. If you need to know the time elsewhere in the world, say the country of India for instance... you can simply google: "time in india" and it will return: India — Current local time: 6:24 PM on Tuesday, February 20 According to http://www.google.com

All your google are belong to us

I'm a google-whore. I freely admit this. I use a ton of their tools. Gmail. Calendar. The personalized search home page complete with widgets (or whatever google calls them, probably googets). Yahoo has the same tools and Ask.com is catching up with some neat stuff but still, google rules. Their tools are just dead simple to use. However, today I realized that their Search History tool is now saving my data for all of the following searches:

• Web
• Images
• News
• Froogle
• Video
• Maps
• Music

That concerns me. Not so much the web stuff because I routinely go in there and clean up the search history. I do this not because I'm searching things that I don't want anyone to know about, but more because I like my search history to revolve around my professional searching on programming and whatnot. It's easier and faster to find things in there that way (note to google, should let users tag their searched and clicked items). What concerns me though is the map history. I've already become anal enough that I don't use my exact address when looking to get driving directions somewhere. I use my neighbors down the street. But now my neighbors address is stored in there. And now when I bring up my contacts in gmail, I can get a map to my friends and relatives houses, but of course then their addresses are in the search history too. I worry about this being some kind of junk mail magnet in the future. Or worse, some kind of google as big brother scenario where they know everything about you and everywhere you go. I may have to rethink my life as a google-whore and my utter addiction to their tools.