blogger chatiness limits whingewidth

Blogger is not a tool that can be ameliorated into something good; it would be better to start from scratch.  One quirk: to add a picture for illustration, a lot of back and forth is required between the web page and their service.  Since picking a file, or picture, is a standard form control, the amount of back-and-forth needed is zero.  Unless the internet connection is fast, consistent, and with no packet loss, blogger fails to bring up the over-complicated dialog that is the next step in selecting your picture.  This is silly.  And the connection here is not that bad -- it's been fine, even fast, for browsing a variety of other web sites.

This does bring up a serious point, which is that web (and other) software should explicitly state the connection parameters it targets, and it should then be tested with those parameters, instead of just over the LAN from the office next door.  You don't have to actually go on the train, you should be able to set up access through some kind of connection quality test router.  If you want to support a typical mobile user, set the nobs on the connection quality test router to 100 kB/s, 5% of packets randomly dropped, 10% of tcp connections randomly hung part way thru, drop-outs of a few seconds per minute, and so on.  Otherwise, you are the nobs.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the persistent idiocy of "privileged ports" on Unix

TCP and UDP have ports.  These are 16 bit; there are 65535 or so per IP address. These protocols don't care to differentiate between the ports.  Elsewhere, IANA presumes to operate a process to allocate "well-known" ports in the range 1-1023, "registered ports" in the range 1024-49151, and to reserve the remainder, 49152–65535, for "ephemeral" ports.  The caller end has to have a port, which is how replies get back within the virtual connection, and these are conventionally picked from the ephemeral range by the OS's networking stack. The whole idea of ports is ridiculous, because it allows ISPs to arse around presuming to decide which services they will "not allow".  Anything that allows IPSs to do anything other than shift opaque packets will allow ISPs to meddle and break things, and due to the Law of Meddling, if they can, they will.  I am currently working around an issue with Claro, a pretend ISP, blocking port 5060, allocated to SI
Read more

google is giving more and more 500 errors

Image
Total state capture and moral bankruptcy are not the only problems facing Google.  They are also giving an increasing rate of 500 Internal Server errors.  This is the sort that means they've messed up, but not in a way that they should have messed up.  On the other hand, they have drawn a lovely picture of a robot falling apart. Today's example is from Google Calendar under calendar.google.com.  I was trying to make an appointment, and now I'm doing this. I remember, in 2018, a friend trying to convince me that 500 Internal Server Errors no longer happened, or if they did it was my fault, and that they hadn't seen any for years, and some other things.  They assured me that they would love to see screenshots of such a rare specimen, which I bored them with for a while.  That friend happens to be a Google employee. Well, there are plenty of others posting about Google Calendar on twitter today, including screenshots of 500 Internal Server errors, so I doubt this one is en
Read more

Guernsey Waste in incorrect bag-rejection horror May 6th, 2024

Image
The rubbish collection folk at my new place seem pickier than at other places on Guernsey. Last week, they removed some card packaging that I'd included in the card and paper (plastic) clear bag, and left it on the lane.  This week, they have attached a rejection label entitled "Polite Notice".  Just like modern software-engineered error messages (see attached tag "extremely_general_error_handling"), this does not give a specific reason why the bag was rejected, but instead lists miscellaneous possible "reasons", leaving the victim guessing, or perhaps trying to follow a process of elimination. In this case, some possible reasons, which the label does not claim to be exhaustive ("was most likely because ..."), and of which none apply, are: (i) "did not have the required payment sticker" -- no, I applied to 90 litre sticker; or  (ii) (a) "too heavy" -- no, I estimate it was 3kg, and I easily supported the bag's weight o
Read more