Technocrank

Google Calendar has been down for me for the past hour and a half.  The most irking thing about it is that I get bounced to this page, which offers no way out or to check back that the Calendar is up yet.  Unhelpful –
à la 1994.

I don’t really know what’s going on here but…I kinda want in on that action.

I’m not in love with Twitter like some – it’s fine.  It’s a thing.  But I think I just coined a name for people like Maureen Dowd who rail against Twitter without a clue.

Slashdot has recently had a few posts involving Openfire and I just have one question: what the heck is Openfire, exactly?  The Openfire website doesn’t tell us anything other than it “is a real time collaboration (RTC) server”.  In the Openfire Support forum, somebody asks this question point-blank and the only useful answers tell the person that they don’t need Openfire.  Can anybody shed any light on this?  Is it just an instant messaging/chat server?  Does it burn coal or use nuclear energy?  Will your attractiveness to the opposite sex increase exponentially?  Come on, how hard can it be to have a Features page?

This isn’t so much about Openfire specifically, but just poor website representation of a product.   This actually happens more often than I find believable.

I don’t know if people still use Last.fm.  I think they do.  At least, that’s what Last.fm’s statistics claim.  Anyway, if you’re an artist or label and you’ve been trying to upload new tracks you’ve probably found recently that their import engine has been sucking lately (i.e. completely fubar’d).  Uploaded tracks won’t appear, or if they do the actual MP3 file is missing (“We don’t have a copy of this track, why don’t you upload it” – yeah, I did – 5 times).  Frequently, after uploading (which depending on your upstream bandwidth can take a while) you get kicked back to the upload page.

Apparently, it’s a known problem and they’re trying to fix it, although their forums are somewhat unhelpful.  I’ve yet to see anything actually completely fixed, though.