Bagel Belly Blog

GMail flakey

I've been having some difficulty reaching google.com and gmail over the last week or so, typically with the sites timing out between 9-10am, generally being sluggish. Other websites work just fine, so I've had to for example use Yahoo! search instead (oh, the horror!).

This morning, it's taken a turn for the worse: I kept getting errors while trying to send mail, and now finally it's completely packed up, and all I get is the message:

Bad Request
Your client has issued a malformed or illegal request

So is this the new version of Safari, the new update to OS X, or Gmail being broken? Looks like it's something Safari-related as the site works just fine in Firefox. But why only today, and not a week or so ago when the Safari update was released, or yesterday when I installed the OS X update?

Technorati Tags: apple, email, failure, gmail, google, mac, macosx, osx, pain, safari

It's oh so quiet

Well, I make that 17 days without a word from me. Some kind of record? Shortly after my last post I jetted off to Germany, where I spent a few days in Cadenberge (Cadenberge, Cadenberge, Cadenberge) and a few days in Hamburg. I also zipped over to Leipzig, for the Softwareforen Leipzig, where I spoke on "LiMo Foundation: collaborative development for the future of mobile". It was an interesting event, and a good opportunity to talk to people from OpenMoko and Nokia/Trolltech, amongst others.

A couple of observations from the traveling part. Whilst Heathrow T5 is shiny, new, white, crisp, empty, and generally quite pleasant to travel through, T2 remains a squalid, shameful, disgusting experience. I flew with Lufthansa, who on the whole are better than BA, but the outbound experience makes me think the killer combination is now BA out and Lufthansa back. By comparison, Hamburg's airport is pretty good. Even though it is relatively small, it packs in a good choice of shops and is clean, bright, and warm.

I took the ICE to get to Leipzig, and that was my first experience on German inter-city trains. It compared favourably with the Dutch experience and the Eurostar, and once again showed how ridiculously bad the UK rail infrastructure is. The only things missing on the german trains were power sockets and wifi, which was especially problematic on my return, when both my laptop and my phone were nearly dead.

And finally, an accolade for Leipzig's rail station, shown in the photo. Some genius decided to put a shopping mall inside/alongside it, which makes so much sense: with a few minutes to kill before my train, I was able to have something decent to eat and to do some last-minute Christmas shopping without leaving the station. I honestly don't know why more places don't do this: it makes it a benefit to get to the station with plenty of time, and provides relief from those tedious waits for delayed trains. In the UK, they could make a fortune!

Technorati Tags: culture, europe, LiMo Foundation, presentations, germany, trains, transport, travel