Is Google Docs still a toy?

Despite the new version removing some limits, working with Google Docs is still somewhat a lottery.
Here's the error of the day, on a chart that always used to work:

I've reported the error, but I've never had a feedback on previous reports...

Revenge of the Nerds?

Does Google favour programmers over users?

I'm writing some code on Google Docs and if I run it from the user interface I get the following error:

"Service invoked too many times in a short time: spreadsheet. Try Utilities.sleep(1000) between calls."

If I run it from the code editor, it runs fine.

Is google docs just a toy?

Lately I'm working on a project involving the spreadsheet application of google docs.
I've chosen it because it's cross platform, it's easy to share, it's scriptable using javascript with little effort.
Things went fine with all the simple test cases, but when I begun using it with real-life data I came into this:

But I'm well far from the declared limits of the application itself:

Google spreadsheets size and complexity limits

Learn how to keep your spreadsheet up-and-running by avoiding size and complexity limits.

Size limits

If you're close to exceeding Google spreadsheets size limits, you'll see a message at the top of your spreadsheet that indicates what limit you're about to reach.

• Number of cells: 400,000 total cells across all sheets
• Number of columns: 256 columns per sheet
• Number of formulas: 40,000 cells containing formulas across all sheets
• Number of tabs: 200 sheets per workbook
• GoogleFinance formulas: 1,000 GoogleFinance formulas
• ImportRange formulas: 50 cross-workbook reference formulas
• ImportData, ImportHtml, ImportFeed, or ImportXml formulas: 50 functions for external data.

Spreadsheets also have overall storage limits. Some spreadsheets may reach these before hitting the 400,000 cell limit, particularly when individual cells have large amounts of text. In such cases, the spreadsheet will go into read-only mode to prevent data loss.

Google forms size limits

These size limits also impact the spreadsheets that collect form responses (for example, if you send a survey). To determine the number of responses that a form can handle, take the number of questions in your form and the number of cells containing other data into account.

Complex Calculations

Google spreadsheets also have complexity limits. Every time a cell is updated, any cell that references it will also be recalculated. If formulas become too complex or take too long to calculate, the spreadsheet will timeout during calculation.

Formulas that increase the complexity of a spreadsheet include:

• VLOOKUP, QUERY, SUMIF, and many similar formulas that take a large range of cells as input.
• Volatile formulas (e.g., NOW, RAND, OFFSET, INDIRECT) are recalculated every time the spreadsheet is modified. If there are a large number of formulas that depend on cells with volatile formulas, they will be re-calculated on each edit, which may slow down a spreadsheet.
• Import-based formulas (e.g., IMPORTRANGE) are recalculated periodically and magnify complexity.

we're talking about a 4000 rows spreadsheet here, and all the scripts works fine on smaller sheets.

Update:
I investigated a little more: it seems that I hit the 40.000 formulas limit.
Quite a low limit: I had to copy some columns and paste back only the values to go on.

Get Smart

Call me envious, but my SSD just broke abruptly.

Dead.

Not even recognized by BIOS.

I had S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring enabled, but I had no signs of the impending doom.

At least mechanical disk usually begin to rattle a little before dying.

The Reboot Syndrome

Shouldn't reboots be an exclusive feature of Windows-based OSes?
It doesn't seem so.
This morning, while driving, I turned on my Yaris infotainment system with the MODE button on the steering wheel.
It turned on as usual with the FM station tuned in. (Bad design here: it was on the USB player when I turned it off yesterday)
I pressed MODE again to switch to USB and bang!

The screen showed the Hybrid logo of the boot sequence.
After that, it correctly switched to USB.

Note:
QNX should be a crash resistant OS, able to reload only the offending module.
Reboot was really fast, barely the time to think "what's that?" and the system was back on line: however it's not an excuse...

How buggy is iOS 6?

I've upgraded my iPad to iOS 6 a couple of days ago.
It seems a mess to me.
The new maps have a long way to go to be on par with Google's.
My iPad doesn't lock anymore when I close the cover.
The podcast app is both installing and installed.

Safari's bookmarks sometimes vanish.

Goodbye Euro?

It's since 2002 that euro is a running currency, but it seems that RaiNews24 still hasn't updated its broadcasting font:

Oh, wait... maybe they know something we don't know yet?

Another weirdness of Google Maps

This a StreetView snapshot from Legoland. The face blurring algorithm has blurred out even the LEGO-built Mount Rushmore faces.

This could be either a tribute to the quality of the LEGO models engineers or an epic failure of the Google algorithm, since the real Rushmore itself is not blurred.

VMware Player & USB

While on the go, I use an HUAWEI Mobile Broadband E1692 HSDPA USB Stick for 3G connection.
After some time that I wasn't using it, it stopped working. No error messages, it just won't get recognized any more in the USB devices. Nothing at all, not even an unknown device, just as if it wasn't even plugged in.

After some fiddling I recalled that I had installed VMware Player. Just as I removed it, the USB stick returned to life.

Note that I wasn't using it in a VM, but directly on the host. And there weren't any VMs running nor the player itself running.

I suspect, as the player can redirect USB ports to the VMs, that some kind of USB device filter was installed by the player that prevented the USB stick to be seen by the host OS. It seems to have affected only that particular stick, as other USB devices were running as usual.

USB car audio crash

All of a sudden, the Sony car stereo of my Ford C-Max refused to read the USB Flash Drive I've been using for more than a year.



The USB stick was untouched for a long time, no new tunes were added and I don't even remember the last time I've pulled it out of the plug.
The display was struck on the name of the last song played and every attempt of changing song resulted in an endless "Loading Data" screen.

Even the classic joke of exit and re-enter the car, gave no results :-)

The USB stick was perfectly readable on a PC, songs were not corrupted and played flawlessy on my home stereo.
I even reformatted it and loaded back all the songs, but the result was the same.

As a last resort I tried another USB stick: the car stereo went back to life, and after that, even the original USB stick worked again.

\n

There's an ongoing census here in Italy right now.

I've just sent my form using the website of the Italian statistic institute.

Here's my receipt:

I presume that the "\n"s are just a tribute to Dennis Ritchie in the day of his passing.