Saturday, May 26, 2012

Mandelbrot fractal viewer

One of the first things I did when I got my computer was to render the Mandelbrot Set fractal. This was centuries ago, and I did it in C using DOS Borland-C++ and its fabulous (for me at that time) graphics library. I played a lot plotting lines and points on the screen those days. I don't know why exactly but this program has been always in my heart, maybe due to the colorful images it gave me:


Google+ deleted all my blogger images, oh my

To be fair, I deleted them, but Google+ helped. I was thinking in updating this blog with some pseudo technical posts when I noticed all my blogger images were gone. Kaput. Done.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/embed/?place=topic/google-plus-discuss/hJHmhE7mcg0/discussion#!topic/google-plus-discuss/hJHmhE7mcg0/discussion

  • So basically I signed on this kind of Facebook clone called Google+ just for the kicks and gigs with my Gmail profile.
  • I saw a lot of images there that I never uploaded (now that I recall they were from my blogger account! but it was past midnight and I was asleep)
  • I deleted these Google+ images without remorse, Who else could have uploaded these images to my Google+ account? hackers are scary... or most likely it was just some glitch in this new Google+ thing.
  • Behind the scenes my Blogger images were deleted FOREVER. It seems images were never placed on Blogger itself but in Picasa, I never used Picasa so I didn't know.
  • Google+ linked the blog images from Picasa to my Google+ profile, when I deleted these images I was deleting the blog images, the trouble is that they must have anticipated this basic use case, I mean: Where is my gigantic popup blinking in red saying "DELETING THESE IMAGES WILL DELETE FOREVER YOUR BLOG IMAGES?". So there is no recovery I heard.

Kind of troublesome for me because I don't know where are the missing images (many are forever lost, I did them for the post) but catastrophic for many bloggers that had hundreds of images in Blogger. This blog of mine is rarely updated and has very low activity, however I can tell I have invested some time getting everything right, the images were created, edited, re-sized, recreated, etc, etc. Losing that time makes me sad, I can't imagine the amount of time lost for the users that have lost hundreds of images with this.

It's a very ugly blunder, and it makes me wonder where are all the great usability engineers of Google working these days. In the bright side I saw some improvements and work done in the blogger editor and statistics that were missing the last time I used the site, so I hope that everything is not lost.

Now, about this blog, well, I'm not feeling like restoring the lost images, I'll put the ones I can find at hand, but if not and you are really curious about some one that is missing drop me a note, sorry about the inconvenience.