It's the little things that really frustrate.

I just configured a new alert sound for a class of inbound messages on my phone and realized that many people may not be aware of this trick.

Please forward to Cloud Platform people, as some friendly feedback.

I was tearing my hair out over an App Engine / Cloud Storage documentation problem (and software failings) this weekend, and I thought I'd slip a bug report in where it might do some good.

Here's my StackOverflow question, which thankfully attracted a good answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21649281/gae-python-google-cloud-storage-authorization-problems . The need to manually add the AppEngine app's ID to the cloud storage bucket is specifically contradicted by this page: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/googlecloudstorageclient/activate , which says "Your App Engine App will automatically be given read and write permissions to the bucket".

This was made more frustrating to figure out, because Cloud Storage overloads a single HTTP response code to mean more than a dozen possible failures (e.g. see the list under 403 in https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/reference-status#standardcodes), but the urlfetch library that underlies AppEngine throws this status away (it just returns the integer HTTP error code), so there's no way to use the AppEngine infrastructure to debug the problem; also, there's very weak tooling to help figure out what's going on with authentication, etc, beneath the scenes (this was a problem while I was at Google, as well).

Just a random piece of feedback, but for what it's worth—an afternoon of this kind of frustration, where something's going wrong, but the documentation is missing and incomplete, and there's not sufficient tooling to find out the core issue, so it feels like I'm wearing mittens and can't manipulate the pieces directly leaves me with a strong temptation to dump AppEngine and move back to systems that run on platforms I can introspect and debug.

Mmm, race to the bottom.

Works much better than the official NY Times app. Pair with a paid subscription to NYT puzzles if you wish, or play many other free daily and weekly puzzles. Open source.

The only code I wrote at Apple that made it into a shipping product was the secret about box for System 7.5: a breakout game with the credited developers as bricks: http://www.eeggs.com/items/511.html. It was only live for a very short time, until the iguana flag replaced it. But my legacy lived on (for a short while, anyway), in the fact that the code for the secret about box was in a 'timd' resource.

Googlers — I did a Google Plus circles transfer from my gmail account to a Google Apps account.

Two bug reports: first, near the end of the transfer period, both accounts reported that they'd be suspended for policy violations. I couldn't appeal the suspension (an error #500 was reported).

Second, all my circles are now duplicated. I didn't have any circles in my destination account before the transfer; now I have two copies of every circle I had in my source account, seemingly identical.

If anyone is interested in populating a bug report, let me know and I'll provide some more details.