My tray icon turned orange and I kept getting warnings that my protection was not up to date. Attempts to get the latest update failed with the scary and mysterious error message: “Undocumented Serious Error 0x101a”.

On googling for this, the top result is an official Eset knowledge base article which states that the fix is to uninstall and reinstall the Eset software.

Hmmm, I was hoping there was a less drastic solution. Luckily for me there was. I use Windows XP and just went to the Task Manager and in the processes tab, found ekrn.exe (which is the Eset software) and ended the process.

Hey Presto! My system tray icon was turquoise again and on trying to update I was informed that protection was bang up to date. Fingers crossed, it was just a blip, and Eset will go back to quietly doing its job while I hardly know it’s there.

I would love to report that it was all up and running effortlessly in a few clicks, but there were quite a few niggles! I had to head off to do something half way through upgrading which is not recommended! Aside from that, my web server and FileZilla FTP seemed to be conspiring against me, leading to several zero byte sized files dotted all over the place.

Then, my feed stopped working. The WordPress Feedburner plugin seemed to be aggravating the issue. When I removed it, my feed came back. But I love that plugin! So I went looking at my .htaccess rules, trying to figure them out. My head was too bamboozled by this stage to see a way out. I did not have my .htaccess file configured to let WordPress write to it. As a final attempt, I let WordPress at it and my feed returned even with the plugin active. I’ve no idea why that should have made a difference, but at least everything *seems* to be finally working now. I’m loving the sleek new admin interface too. I had heard good things and it’s quite an improvement. I should have upgraded ages ago for more pressing reasons than a shiny control panel!

In reality probably half my poor neglected blog has been brought down by my tinkering. So, if you spot anything strange I’d greatly appreciate it if you would kindly let me know.

“I can reply to e-mails OK…. I just can’t instigate an e-mail”

Well, it made us chuckle anyway…

At least a couple of posts on the Google APIs newsgroup suggest that I am not the only one having problems with it. However, the group is not very lively at the best of times! I’m a *huge* Google fan (how cool was today’s braille logo?), but it can be frustrating when you run into issues with their beta goodies, due to such limited support resources.

So if you have been having problems with the Google API or, even better, found a workaround please leave a comment! Perhaps the poor old API just has the January blues like the rest of us…

Still, all the freebies are fabulous. I’m looking forward to tarting up my personal Google Homepage with some funky fruits of the newly released Google Homepage API. I might even tinker about with it myself if I’m feeling brave.

In a Monday morning moment, I thought for a second that the lover of white backgrounds, black text and blue underlined links had decided to banish this pink monstrosity from the interweb Fear not, he is actually talking about user interfaces!

The article is very interesting and argues that What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interfaces have reached the end of the road. It was once wondrous to build up a document from scratch in Word, seeing what you would eventually print on screen at all times, while happily making text look pretty as you worked. However, nowadays there is so much functionality packed into common applications such as Word and Excel that it can be hard to know where to start! Many of us (well, I for one… ) end up desperately digging through menus in an effort to complete relatively simple tasks.

Well, Microsoft think they have found a solution! Nielsen links to demo shots of the new Microsoft Office interface, an example of a "Results-Oriented UI":

As the demos show, the most obvious departure from the past is that menus and toolbars are all but wiped out. The focus is now on letting users specify the results they want, rather than focusing on the primitive operations required to reach their goals.

The new interface displays galleries of possible end-states, each of which combine many formatting operations. From this gallery, you select the complete look of your target — say an org chart or an entire document — and watch it change shape as you mouse over the alternatives in the gallery. The interaction paradigm has been reversed; it’s now What You Get Is What You See, or WYGIWYS.

Where Microsoft Office leads, the rest have little choice but to follow, given that this suite of applications is what people are most familiar with. It will be interesting to see how this fresh perspective is received.

Perhaps I will even rebrand my blog to keep up Although, while WYSIWYG may be a rather cryptic moniker to most, ROUI just does not do it for me!

The service is in Beta at the moment (like most Google services!) and as such has limited support. Basically, there are references and lots of help docs, some sample code and a developer’s forum which is not exactly buzzing. The documentation is easy enough to follow and there is a fair amount of it. However, I found that it may not be complete.

I am only using the API with C# in very straightforward ways to gather reports, but I have already come across 2 occasions where following the instructions has not worked.

The first thing I had trouble with was setting the aggregationType for my reports. Although I was specifying:

myReportJob.aggregationType = AggregationType.Daily;

I found that I was stuck with the Summary view!
I only found the solution by chance when I saw a line of code I was missing in a post on the developer’s forum:

myReportJob.aggregationTypeSpecified = true;

I still cannot find this line mentioned in the documentation and it seems weird to me that you need it. Surely you are specifying the aggregation type by setting a value for it?!

I am still looking for a solution for my second problem. To use the AdWords API, you need to have a My Client Center (MCC) account. The idea is that the MCC account links all your AdWords accounts together in a central place. They all still exist separately, but the MCC provides a parent level of access where you can drill down to each account but also perform operations on multiple accounts together. This is useful for search marketing companies who manage AdWords campaigns for multiple clients.

Google recently added reporting functionality to the MCC, so that it is now possible to create just one report in the MCC that includes data for all accounts. Since API usage is limited to a certain quota of operations each month, depending on how many accounts you have and how much you spend, this feature is great. It means that you can just run one report instead of one for each account which is far more efficient. Except I cannot get this to work!

Update: I have seen reports on the developer forum that if you add a line ReportJob.crossClientSpecified = true, then generating a report at MCC level will work.

The relevant Adwords documentation states the following:

If you have registered with My Client Center (MCC) to administer
accounts on behalf of your clients, you can get reports about your
clients’ AdWords accounts. To do this, login without setting the
clientEmail header. When setting up the report job, you need to set the crossClient and clientAccounts fields. Set crossClient to true, and specify a list of the Ids of the accounts to include in the report as the value of the clientAccounts field.

If you set the crossClient field to true and do not supply a value for clientAccounts, the generated reports include all the client accounts

These instructions seemed simple enough, but when I use the following C# code while specifying the MCC account login details, all I get is empty report columns with zero totals:


//#instantiate Report service
ReportService service = new ReportService();

If I specify login details for an individual account instead, I get a complete report which suggests that my code must be OK in the main. Maybe I have missed something in the docs or perhaps there is another magic line of code I’m missing. At the moment, I have to run a report for each account so if you know where I am going wrong, please enlighten me!

A final niggle I have found is that even though I just want to replicate running a Keyword report, I have to run a Custom report to get the info I need. This is because even though you can check a box on the UI to include conversions for a Keyword report, the same option cannot be set in the API, unless the docs forgot to mention that as well. This is a minor gripe, but Custom reports are slightly longer and messier to code as you have to specify all the columns you want etc. It would be nice if the API mirrored the UI. Perhaps when (if?) the service comes out of Beta the 2 will be perfectly in sync.

Overall, it is fantastic that Google have made an API for AdWords freely available and are continually improving and extending its functionality. It is just frustrating when you run into issues and the chances of resolving these quickly is drastically low due to the lack of real time support.

Useful links:

• AdWords API developer forum
• AdWords API support
• AdWords API blog
• AdWords API home page
• Webmaster World AdWords forum
• Digital Point AdWords forum
• SEO CHAT AdWords forum

So now you can press the Tosaigh button instead of Start and rith rather than run your programs! This is the result of a 12 month effort. I’d rather Microsoft had put more effort into making their programs less buggy and more secure myself :p

But each to their own! You can download your free interface pack for Windows XP here.

By the way, for the benefit of those who don’t speak Irish (and for those who can speak it properly!), the title of this post is my feeble attempt at an Irish translation of the old famous Microsoft slogan “Where do you want to go today?” Any corrections would be appreciated!

The best bit is the great customer service. I originally bought my Transcend 512MB key in February. They showed a picture with a pink or purple shade in the photo but only had the blue option available to buy. Tragic as I am, I contacted them to find out if it was possible to get the other colour. Within an hour or 2, they had sent me a special link where I could purchase a lilac one. It arrived a couple of days later.

Alas, by May I was having problems with it. It was not working with most computers and a couple of days later even stopped working with my laptop. The key has a 2 year warranty, but knowing how tricky some places are to deal with, I prepared for another epic consumer battle!
I need not have worried. I contacted them and sent the key back on a Monday. On Tuesday, they phoned me to say the connection was loose and to arrange a new key. On Wednesday morning the new key arrived. I was impressed!

Another good thing about the site is that the company behind it is GoBeyond, who hail from County Kildare. In the age of e-commerce, where I’m scouring the net for a good deal – buying iPod covers from Canada one day and moisturiser from Hong Kong the next – it’s always especially nice when you can buy Irish.

If you are bored you can even sit and watch the counter

Firefox: Blazing a Trail to 50,000,000

My poor laptop, Smurf, starting making lots of noise a couple of weeks ago. Within a few minutes of turning it on, the fan would go into overdrive and stay there. It’s about 10 months old so my one year collect and return warranty is almost up.

So I phoned Dell on Tuesday night. After doing the usual diagnostic tests, the tech support guy said that it would need to be taken in and that someone would be out on Thursday to collect it. Sure enough, Thursday morning the laptop went away. I had been told that it would be returned within 6-7 business days. How was I supposed to survive? But lo and behold, early Monday morning Dr Dell brought Smurf back from the hospital with a new fan and a clean bill of health Given that I had expected to have it back on Friday, I was thrilled.

Now, the only thing was that while they had double checked that the time to collect the laptop was suitable, I received no notification about it being returned. It’s very lucky that someone was home at the time. But I’m not going to pick holes, for once!

And while I’m talking about smurfs, why not find your inner Smurf?
Unfortunately, I’m the boring one as usual!