ttj - Tom Jones

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 t...

Unspecified "protocols", which are not really protocols, tend to require both ends to have the same implementation, often at a similar version.  Real protocols require both ends to speak the same specified protocol.  In real life there are often grey areas, but things like TCP, HTTP, and sort of SSH fit into this category.   It can be surprising how widely-used unspecified non-protocols are.  Three examples for today: rsync, openvpn, and bitcoin.  By their nature, then, all ripe for replacement with something specified. Re VPN protocols, the ipv6 stuff is specified but rubbish, and the WireGuard thing recently added to the linux kernel appears to be unspecified, tho it's probably less coupled to the whims of openssl than openvpn is.   And I managed to get a 500 internal server error out of google's main search page in the process: "This should never happen".