Google notifier for Mac - abandoned

One would think that Google Notifier for Mac would the perfect way to alert a user to requests to chat, especially requests for Google Video Chat.

One would be wrong.

Google Notifier for Mac was "Last updated August 18, 2006". Yes, roughly 50 net years ago. It's clearly one of those infamous abandoned Google hobby projects.

It provides notifications for incoming email and calendar events only. The download page documentation links display Windows Notifier documentation; you have to install it to find out what it does (once you install there is a Help menu with some content).

Scratch that one.

Gmail: be sure you have a working secondary account

I was unable to access Gmail this evening. My password wasn't working.

I can't explain this. I believe I was entering the password correctly. It was nerve wracking; I'd much rather lose both my wallet and my car key than lose my Google identity.

I ended up having to follow Google's password reset procedure. The first step in their reset is that they send a special link email to your secondary account. (see [1], below).

Rigggghhht. My secondary account forwarded to Gmail, so that didn't help.

Fortunately I have control over the secondary account, so I logged in there and changed the mail redirect to BOTH my Gmail account and one of my dozen or so Google Apps accounts. I then repeated the Google reset behavior and the link showed up at my secondary Google Apps account.

So I'm back, which is why I'm able to post this.

After defibrillating myself I took another look at Google's "My Account" settings. Here's what I learned:

1. The secondary email address is specified under the "security question" area. That's not obvious, you click on the "security question" link to get to it.
2. I generally blow off "security questions" since I have a reliable system for managing passwords. In this case though something didn't work. I went back to Google and carefully setup a unique security question.
3. I changed my "secondary email" to a safe destination.
4. The "secondary email" is optional, I presume if you don't set it Google goes directly to asking the security question.
   

The moral of the story is that everyone with a Gmail account needs a secondary email account with real mail storage. So check now and make sure your secondary account is valid.

Oh, and you do realize that if anyone gets access to the secondary account they are in a very good position to seize your Google identity. So the secondary account is as critical as your primary account. So maybe the secondary account should be top secret -- and all email should be deleted from it ....

Damn, but we need to get rid of #$#@$ passwords. I would love to see Google do right what OpenID flubbed (two factor authentication).

Now, I'd like to know what happened to my Google account access in the first place. I assume the problem wasn't related to this transition, or maybe this weird bug ...

[1] Google's password reset process:

To initiate the password reset process, please follow the instructions sent to your xxxx email address.

If you don't have an alternate email address, or if you no longer have access to that account, please try to reset your password again after 24 hours. At that point, you'll be able to reset your password by answering the security question you provided when you created your account.

We use the security question for account recovery only after an account has been idle for 24 hours. We do this to prevent someone else from taking over your account.

If you're unable to answer your security question or access your secondary email account, please complete this form. If you're concerned about the security of your account, please visit our Security Center.

Update 9/8/09: It's been a week or so since this happened and I'm still finding passwords I need to update. I've probably entered my new Gmail/Google Account pw in 20-25 places, and I think I'm only half-done. I've entered it so far across five computers and two iPhones. This is, of course, insane. Unsurprisingly, only obsessives can tolerate changing passwords very often. We SO need to kill the password. Also, following that link to my old post I rediscovered this "gem":

Always keep the verification number you get when you sign up for Gmail. When you sign up for Gmail, we'll ask you for a secondary email address and then email a verification number to that account. This number is the best way to prove ownership of your account, so be sure to hang on to it.

How many people have that bloody verification number?! I'm pretty sure when I signed up for Gmail Google didn't provide those ...

Fixing an OS X Mail.app "updating cache directory" problem

Yesterday Emily's email stopped working.

She reads email on 10.5.6 OS X Mail (mail.app) which sync via IMAP to our Google Apps family domain Gmail service.

I could see things looked fine on the Google side, so I opened the Mail.app activity window and saw it was stuck on "updating cache directory" (Google search link).

It seems this is a fairly common OS X Mail.app bug, but everyone I read had a different "fix".

Mine was very simple. I assumed it was an OS X problem; Apple is notorious for cache issues. I did a "safe boot" (hold shift on restart). That clears out some caches and is the first thing I do for most OS X problems. I like to do a "safe boot" every few months anyway; it's a bit of superstition perhaps.

After the "safe boot" I restarted. I didn't login, I just restarted normally.

The problem was fixed.

Google ends event and public calendar marketing functions

Two or three years ago there was quite a bit of interest in public calendar marketing. Those were the days of meetup.com and eventful.com. I think Apple might have tried something with their now defunct .Mac service (anyone remember Apple's original pre-AOL service?!), and in June of 2007 I signed up with Google Public Calendars to market inline skating events in the twin cities.

The services never took off, though both eventful and meetup are still around. These days Facebook looks like it will own this space -- albeit with severe data lock and proprietary transactions.

I suspect calendar search and sharing will return in a few years, but it's not surprising that Google has quietly [1] ended their calendar search project. This is from a Help entry (some emphases mine)...

Removing public calendar search and the public calendar gallery - Google Calendar Help

We've decided to discontinue public calendar search and the public calendar gallery. These were specialized U.S. English-only features that weren't used as extensively as we would have liked, and proved difficult to maintain over time. We're looking at ways to make it easier to search and browse public calendars, but for now we've removed the gallery and public calendar search function.

Here's what's not changing:

• Public calendars are sticking around.
  • You can still create public calendars, and there are a number of ways to spread the word about public calendars you create or you subscribe to.
  • You can still add a public calendar to your list of calendars.
  • If you have public calendars in your list of calendars, they'll stay there.
  • We'll still list the most sought-after public calendars on a static page, just as we've been doing in other Calendar languages. You can access these calendars by clicking the Add down-arrow button (at the bottom of the calendar list on the left) and selecting Add a public calendar.
• Calendar search is sticking around.
  • You'll still be able to search the contents of any of the calendars on your list -- including any public calendars you add.

I don't mind Google's ending the marketing of public calendars. It clearly didn't work. I will be really annoyed if they end public calendar support altogether, but I think we're ok there.

Interesting to note the language aspect. They really don't want to be english-centric.

[1] I follow their blogs and I sure don't remember any announcement. I only learned of this via another post, I don't know when they terminated the service. Really, this should get an "It Died" blog post.

User image propagation from OS X desktop to Gmail via iChat

This feels like it could be a security issue. It's certainly weird.

There used to be a photo of me that was associated with my Gmail account, it was displayed during Google Video Chat sessions.

Today, while testing iChat, I signed in to my Gmail account from my MacBook iChat client.

Afterwords, when viewing my Gmail account on my PC, I found that the Fast User Switching image from my MacBook had become my Gmail account image -- presumably because iChat uses that image as its default chat image.

The original Gmail account image was gone.

Evidently the "Jabber" transactions that seem to underlie Google/iChat credential exchange also propagated my account image to Gmail via iChat.

It's a good thing I don't have exotic tastes in user account images.

12/25/09: Still a problem. This time I think it propagated via MobileMe until it now shows up in my iPhone as my personal picture! The picture I used to have is gone.

iChat - weirdest computer experience

This was one of my weirder computing experiences.

I was testing iChat AV, connecting my G5 iMac to my MacBook through our wireless LAN. I was surprised to learn I could use our Gmail accounts for identity establishment.

The connection worked. I showed up on both sides of the video conversation, seen from different angles. There was something odd going on however.

The person I was seeing seemed less and less like me. The image was ... drifting ... in time ... backwards.

Soon I was looking at myself on one screen several minutes in the past.

Eerie. I felt as though I was seeing myself in another space-time continuum.

I have a feeling that the G5 isn't going to cut it. I think iChat might have worked with the G5 under 10.4, so I'm a bit suspicious about Apple (again)

I'll try with the AIM account to see if there's a difference, but I think the accounts are only used to locate IP addresses and ports so I don't expect anything to change.

Update: I tried the Bonjour chat discovery approach; it works on a LAN. There was no change -- the G5 pegged the CPU and gradually fell behind. I then set a bandwidth limit on both clients. At 200 kbps the G5 was able to keep up but the image was obviously inferior. At 500 kbps the image was pretty good, but the G5 gradually fell behind, after about four minutes the lag was pretty severe.

I also tried the Chax Input Manager to modify iChat preferences. I wanted to see if I could use it to make it easy for me to access and control my mother's Mac Mini. Unfortunately when I tested with Bonjour Chax prevented a connection. When I removed it the connection worked. Input Managers are often problematic, so I removed Chax.

So the good news is that there's no need for an AIM account any more -- a Google account works well. The bad news is that the G5 is pretty limited and that Apple's iChat doesn't degrade gracefully. Google's Video Chat does a far better job of adjusting to machine and network capabilities, but it's even less elder friendly than Apple iChat.

Update 2: On the same LAN I connected the MacBook to a 5 yo XP box -- an older machine than the G5 iMac with Google Video Chat. Both machines used the superb Logitech Quickcam Vision Pro webcams. (GVC won't run on the iMac, but in theory the iMac G5 and the old dual core CPU in the XP box should be comparable). GVC absolutely spanked iChat -- it was a far better experience. Unfortunately while iChat is not particularly elder friendly, Google Video Chat is absolutely elder hostile!

PS. Apple's Discussion Forum for iChat is for the 10.4 version of iChat AV. Abandonware?

Update 5/30/09: Just to add the general iChat debacle - if you enable any sort of "parental control" for an OS X account, even if you just lock the Dock, then iChat Jabber and Google Talk account options are mysteriously grayed out. No documentation, no explanation. What a steaming pile.

Update 7/13/09: How to configure auto-answer for iChat.

Safari 4: Google compatibility, PPC performance

I've tested Safari 4b OS X for G5 performance (where Firefox is noticeably slow) and Google compatibility (where only Firefox works).

It failed Google my compatibility test. When I pasted text into the Blogger BlogThis! window it rendered outside the window borders.

This is also true of Safari 3, and since I know there are of text pasting issues with S3 and Google's various products I didn't bother with any further Google testing.

On the other hand PPC performance is noticeably better than FF, which is slow in every way (especially keystroke processing). It's comparable to S3 or Camino.

I won't use Safari 4 any more than S3 -- I really need Google compatibility.

Eudora email archive conversion

I’ve painfully moved all the files that used to be on my XP box to the iMac. I’m still using Eudora XP with the files now on the iMac server; performance is quite fine.

The email archives, however, aren’t indexed by Spotlight. Not to mention that Eudora died about two years ago. I can read the Eudora .mbx (mbox variant) files with TextWrangler, but that’s not terribly useful.

So I’m looking into conversion options. I’d prefer not to import the entire multi-GB archive into OS X Mail.app; I expect it would keel over and die.

I used my custom OS X search tool to look for “eudora conversion” and came up with:

• Eudora vCard Export: get the nicknames out
• Eudora Mailbox Cleaner: this is the most used approach and it’s free. Note the warnings “Mail 2.0 introduced a new mailbox format which uses a SQlite database (~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index) in addition to the mailboxes themselves. Until the imported messages are added to this database, the imported mailboxes will appear to be empty in Mail. Select "Mailbox → Rebuild" from the menu in Mail to rebuild each of the imported mailboxes and all your messages will show up correctly. For a little less cumbersome way to do this, you can use the AppleScript included in the download to rebuild all imported mailboxes - please don't interfere with the script's progress until it has finished - the script is using UI scripting which has some issues.”
• Emailchemy: The personal version is $30. It has a wide range of export options.
• eMailman® – Conversion: links to just about every mail conversion option available.

I’ll probably go for one of these four. I want to research a bit more about just what Mail.app’s limits are.

Gmail’s undocumented POP3 download limit

Maybe this is why it’s “beta”.

Gmail’s POP documentation doesn’t mention anything about a message retrieval (download) limit.

In fact, there is one. It’s not new not new; I’ve found mention of it from 2007.

In my case I can download about 340 messages at a time. I think the limit is in place for a few minutes; I’ve been able to download about 3,000 over 9 or so sessions.

I discovered the problem while dealing with another geek tribulation (these things seem to come in multiples). I’d moved my ancient Eudora archive (abandoware) and, when testing it after the move, I saw my most recent messages were from August 2008.

So I tried again – but I was still in August. It took a few tries and cleaning up some other unrelated (but real) problems to sort things out.

Each time I fetch mail I get about 300-340 messages. It’s been that way for years, but I’d always assumed that was all there was. I didn’t spot the problem because I don’t read the email in Eudora, it’s just my local repository. Gmail is where I read and write.

Now I see that I’ve been slowly slipping behind the email wave front. Each time I downloaded I fetched about 300-350 messages, but there were always more in waiting. So the backlog grew.

This afternoon the backlog was seven months, but I’m down to two months now. I should be caught up shortly.

I haven’t noticed any particular limit with IMAP synchronization, so this may be a left over for a service they’re gradually deprecating.

Shame on Google for not documenting this limitation.

Google taketh away: no more calendar editing on the mobile web app

Five months ago I was able to use Google's web app to edit appointments. In particular I could mange invitees, something the iPhones inadequate Calendar.app doesn't do ...

Gordon's Tech: Google Apps calendar on the iPhone - the top secret web display

It's not the OTA blackberry-like iPhone gCal sync we want, but it's something ...

The official update feed from the Google Apps team: New Google Calendar features for the iPhone

... Google Calendar users in the US can now add new events, invite attendees, and see daily and monthly views of their agendas from the iPhone. This release also includes speed improvements for the iPhone interface....

... The iPhone Google App didn't show me the new calendar. I had to use the URL: http://www.google.com/m/a/faughnanlagace.com (our family domain) to see the new calendar.

Today I can add events using Google's natural language interface, but that's it. No editing, no attendees. I sync with my iPhone using the new Google Exchange server interface so I don't know if

1. This is a side-effect of activating OTA sync between iPhone and Google Calendar.
2. Google has permanently terminated this feature.
3. They've shut it down for repairs.

Very annoying.

Stop using Abobe Acrobat Reader

Another day, another huge Adobe security hole ...

Adobe Acrobat, Reader vulnerability affects Mac | MacUser | Macworld

Your first response might be to panic at the disco, but take a deep breath. Yes, the vulnerability affects all platforms, and yes, there are reported exploits in the wild, but don’t worry, Adobe will put out a patch for version 9 by, oh, March 11th, with patches for version 8 and version 7 to follow. Hey, that's only a mere nineteen days from now.

This is on top of their installer disasters.

I removed Reader from OS X 10.5 a year ago, and I've never missed it. Use Preview.

Karelia iMedia Browser - solving iPhoto and video library problems?

Macintouch mentions that Karelia has made iMedia Browser a free "BSD-style" licensed open source app (it's a component of their commercial Sandvox website authoring app) ...

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about Apple Macintosh, iTunes, iPhone and more...

... Karelia Software's free iMedia Browser 1.1.3 is a browser and viewer for photos, movies, music, and bookmarks. It includes support for iPhoto and Aperture image libraries, the iTunes library, GarageBand songs, iTunes and iPhoto movie and video libraries, major web browser bookmarks, Finder folders, and more. This release brings enhanced search (including keywords and comments in iPhoto libraries), a fix for a problem with redundant search results from iTunes, support for much larger iPhoto libraries, and other changes. iMedia Browser is free for Mac OS X 10.4 and up (Universal Binary)...

I'm going to see if this app helps with four problems I have that Apple doesn't care about:

1. My wife wants to be able to browse the family iPhoto library, but it's tied to my user account, not hers.
2. Network access to an iPhoto Library
3. Access to images scattered over multiple iPhoto Libraries. In this case Apple does "care"; Apple product management is obviously opposed to enabling iPhoto library management, probably to preserve Aperture's market.
4. Managing a video library. Apple has a half-baked (asinine, really) approach to video management distributed between iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes and the Finder.

Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro webcam for OS X and XP: I love it

I wrote a few weeks ago about choosing a webcam for some work projects. I ended up ordering a number of Logitech QuickCam Pro cameras; several model 9000 and several Vision Pros. The latter are marketed for OS X, but they also shine on XP.

I've made extensive use of the Vision Pro webcams. Today I compared the image to the built-in webcam on my MacBook and I was so impressed by the superiority of the Vision Pro I wrote one an rare "rave" review for Amazon. It's my first five star review in years ...

Amazon.com: Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro for Mac (Black): Electronics

I've purchased seven of these cameras, 5 for a team at work, 1 use at home, and 1 for my mother's Mac Mini.

Most of the cameras are on XP machines. As mentioned elsewhere these cameras install without device drivers on XP SP2 or later. Unlike the superficially similar but less expensive QuickCam Pro 9000 they do light balance and focus through camera hardware. That means we don't have to deal with flaky device drivers (rarely done well for OS X), and there's less demand on the CPU to manage the device....

... I've compared the video quality of this camera to the pinhole webcam that comes standard on modern Macs. It's light years better. There's really no comparison. It's better in low light, it's better at focus, it's higher resolution, there's far less image noise, etc.

The built-in microphone is superb. We get better sound quality using Google Video Chat and this device than we get with high end conference phones.

I'm a hard consumer to please, but I am very pleased with this camera.

Highly recommended.

Google Apps now includes Google Video Chat

I don't think this was always true, nor do I recall an announcement, but Google has added Gmail video chat capabilities to Google Apps accounts, including the top-secret free accounts.

Update: I was hoping all members of a domain would be "trusted" for Chat purposes, but that's not so. You still need to use Gmail's awkward UI to establish a "trust" relationship (invite to chat).

Also, this must be pretty new, because the Google App admin page still (incorrectly) says: "To use Chat, users must download Google Talk (Windows only)". Not so, Google Apps Gmail chat works fine in OS X.

XP doesn't like my OS X SMB share

XP really doesn't like my OS X 10.5.6 SMB share. I tried copying about 50 GBs of files from my XP box to the OS X SMB share over a 100mbps wired connection using xcopy and robocopy. I'd mapped a drive letter to the OS X share.

Problems included:

1. Time stamps aren't processed correctly. So even though date attributes appeared to copy correctly, both xcopy and robocopy interpreted the dates incorrectly (treated them as older than the XP source files).
2. After processing for a while the transfer would halt, and I'd lose all network connectivity (no ping responses). The usual error message was "the specified network name is no longer available", sometimes I saw "The semaphore timeout period has expired". It looked like the XP network stack had blown up. If I opened up a second terminal session, and just browsed the distant share things would restart.
3. Inevitably I'd start getting "Access is denied" messages with some files. They appeared to be file associated, but I could copy them in Windows Explorer. Once I got the message with a file it was persistent.

Wow. Really bad stuff. Following Microsoft's advice for network troubleshooting I tried setting the ethernet limit to 10mbps but the behavior didn't change.

I've had pretty predictitable problems with simply copying large numbers of files between XP machines using Explorer on many machines, but xcopy and robocopy are pretty reliable.

Something's definitely broken here, but danged if I can figure it out. My best guess is that the OS X SMB share is doing something that's cracking Microsoft's fragile SMB stack, but really it could be a network adapter hardware issue too.

I suspect I won't be able to solve this one easily. I'll try copying the files using the OS X machine and see if things work any better.

Update 2/18/09: I had no problems copying the files using the XP machine as a server and the OS X machine as a client. The date stamps on directories were also correct, I don't think the OS X SMB server sets copied directory dates equal to source directory dates.

My best guess is that the miserable behavior I'm seeing is not a hardware or network issue, but rather the result of bugs on both sides. My past looks into Microsoft's networking protocols have convinced me the "Heart of Darkness" has nothing on Redmond's legacy networking infrastructure. On the other side, I doubt Apple is putting a lot of energy into making OS X into a respectable SMB server.

Update 2/21/09: I’m now seeing crashes of the XP network stack, whether I use the OS X machine or the XP machine as the SMB server. Before the crash I sometimes see transfer rates slow. I can restore the stack by disabling my XP LAN connection then re-enabling it. I uses an new cable to directly connect the two machines (no router or switch) with no change – so it’s not a network problem.

I’m now copying files to an external USB drive which I’ll then move to the OS X machine manually. The process is exquisitely slow on the old XP box compared to throughput over 100 mbps LAN. The average real world throughput on the LAN was 6 Megabytes/sec, on my USB 2 XP connection it’s probably less than 1MB/sec.

I’d love to blame all of this on Microsoft’s SMB and Apple’s SMB implementation – that’s what I thought on 2/18. Alas, that’s too easy. This problem is too severe – and now I’m noticing problems restarting my XP box. It could be some nasty bug/virus/etc, but I actually suspect the motherboard itself is failing.

I’m not sure how old this machine is, I’m guessing about 2003. It is the first computer I’ve owned that died of old age while it was still quite useful.

Update 2/21/09: Now that I've moved everything and have been cleaning up the XP box, I notice I had Windows Search 4.0 set to index an iMac SMB share mapped to a local drive letter. Hmmm. That might put some extra stress on SMB. I'll see how things behave after removing Windows Share (I don't need it now for the XP box, I can use Spotlight on the iMac).

Update 2/22/09: I've been pushing GBs across the LAN using Retrospect Pro 7.1 (Windows) without a problem. I think the hardware is fine. I think the OS X SMB support is probably not immensely worse than native Windows SMB. Now I'm thinking I pushed the envelope a bit far when I had Windows Search 4.0 indexing a remote OS X SMB share.

Update 5/6/09: Replaced my NIC and things look much better.