Category Archives: Technology

Posts related to technology in general

Migrating users from Kerika+Google to our own storage

Technology,

We don’t offer this as a regular service — because it involves some special back-end work that can be a little time-consuming — but we recently helped a bunch of users migrate their accounts over from Kerika+Google to the new version of Kerika that lets you sign up directly with us, and have Kerika store your files instead of linking Kerika to a Box or Google account.

This is the version that you sign up for when you click on the left side of our Sign Up page:

Sjgning up directly with Kerika
Signing up directly with Kerika

 

With this option, Kerika stores your files for you using our new integration with the Box Platform.

Migrating away from Kerika+Google to this new platform helps our users save money: they could discontinue their use of premium (paid) Google Apps which they had adopted only to use as a sign-up mechanism for Kerika.

Handling this migration isn’t something we do for everyone, but this is one of our oldest customers. :-)

 

Bug, fixed: handling non-English characters

Technology, ,

This is kind of annoying and embarrassing, but a while back a bug crept back into our code that made non-English characters appear as question marks.

Embarrassing because we have fixed this bug before. More than once.

This time around the bug crept back in while we were taking care of some other feature, and unfortunately it was one of our (Chinese-speaking) users who spotted it before we did.

Our own team is multilingual (3 languages) but we work almost exclusively using English, so this was one of those rare scenarios where we didn’t use a particular feature of Kerika and so developed a blind spot.

Sorry about that.  The good news is that the fix is retroactive: any non-English characters that you had previously entered will not appear correctly, without any work on your end.

Bug, fixed: holding down the Enter key while editing project descriptions

Technology

Thanks to one of our long-standing Kerika users (over in Gdansk, Poland) for spotting a bug that we have fixed: if you held down the Enter key for “too long” (which is kind of a vague description, we know) while editing a card’s description, some junky HTML text would appear:

Card description bug
Card description bug

 

It was an odd timing issue that we hadn’t noticed before. Thanks for helping us find this bug!

You can now Copy and Paste Lines

Technology, Usability,

In a recent update, we added a minor new feature: you can now copy and paste lines even if they are not used to connect any other objects on a Kerika Whiteboard.

We always let you copy and paste lines that were used to connect other objects, like in this scenario:

Copying objects connected by a line
Copying objects connected by a line

 

But now you can also copy and paste freestanding lines (i.e. lines that are not anchored at either end on anything else), like this:

Copying a freestanding line
Copying a freestanding line

 

The fact that copying/pasting freestanding lines was not possible before was actually a conscious design decision on our part, but looking back we can’t figure out why it seemed like a good idea at the time :-/

Bug, fixed: Confirmation emails were not working correctly

Kerika, Technology,

Our thanks to Larry Smith from EduTone who initially alerted us to a bug in the process of signing up as a Kerika user: the confirmation email sent by Kerika wasn’t working well, particularly if the user used any browser other than Chrome.

For example, clicking on the confirmation email and having Kerika open that link using Firefox or Chrome produced this kind of behavior:

Safari problem

The problem was related to a recent decision we made to use Polymer for parts of our website.

It turns out that Chrome had a different sequence for loading the Polymer components than other browsers.

In Chrome the sequence is

  1. webcomponent-lite.js
  2. element.vulcanized.html
  3. build.min.js
While in browsers like Firefox the sequence is
  1. webcomponent-lite.js
  2. build.min.js
  3. element.vulcanized.html

Our build.min.js file needed components that were loaded only when element.vulcanized.html was loaded, which meant that the sequence in which these files were loaded by the browser was important, and  different browsers were loading these files in different sequences.

We fixed this bug: Polymer has a method to ensure that all imports are ready before the page is rendered.

This has been part of the learning process for us as we adopt Polymer more for our website redesign (which is underway, and should be unveiled by Christmas), and also consider using Polymer to rebuild the Kerika app itself!

Bug, fixed: sometimes email replies to chat weren’t working

Technology,

(Thanks to our users in the Washington Professional Educator Standards Board for helping us find this bug.)

We recently discovered a rather quirky bug that was causing some chat, when replied to as emails by the recipient, to not get sent properly.

Here’s what is supposed to happen, and what went wrong:

  • If you are assigned a card, on a Task Board or Scrum Board, you will get email pushed to you whenever any other Team Member (or Board Admin) chats on that card. This helps you stay in the loop on the most important items on a project board: the ones you are currently assigned to do.

    (Board Admins have the option of getting all chat, on all cards on the board that they manage, pushed to them as emails, if they want to really be in the loop with every conversation that is going on in the board.)

  • When chat gets pushed to you as email, it shows up looking just like regular email, and you can reply to it wherever you are dealing with your email: your desktop, laptop or mobile device.
  • When you click on the “Reply” button in your email client, Kerika automatically changes the address for that reply to be the URL that points to the specific card (or canvas) that’s being referenced in the chat.

    Here’s an example of chat email:

    Chat example
    Chat example

    And what clicking on the Reply button does:

    Replying to Chat Email
    Replying to Chat Email

    In the above example, although the chat email came from Cheryl, the reply is being sent to a special address:
    “Card-nj3j@kerikamail.com>”

  • This email is received by a server that listens only to chat replies. When a chat reply is received by the server, it checks to see who the reply came from.
  • Since only Team Members and Board Admins are allowed to participate in the chat on a particular board, the Kerika chat server tries to make sure the email is coming from someone who is authorized to comment on that particular card or canvas.

    (This helps reduce the possibility of spam email appearing inside your Kerika conversations.)

The problem we found is that some email clients, e.g. the native Mac Mail client, handled the “From:” and “Sender:” fields differently from other email clients like Gmail.

In the case of Gmail, Google places fills in both the From and Sender fields, but in the case of Mac Mail, only the From field is filled in.

For now, a temporary fix is to have the server look for both the From and Sender fields, but longer-term, as part of a server re-architecture that we are planning, this problem will get solved differently that further reduces the possibility of spam.

Google Apps last Friday

Kerika, Technology

It looks like we were on the bleeding edge of Google’s problems last Friday (Oct 9): fairly early in the day, Pacific Time, we started seeing authentication failures from Google related to our Kerika+Google users.

The exceptions shown in the Kerika server logs were clearly pointing to problems on Google’s end:

Google Errors
Google Errors

 

What was a little frustrating for us — and our beloved users — was that Google itself didn’t seem to be acknowledging any problems until fairly late in the day:

Oct 9 Google Apps status
Oct 9 Google Apps status

By this time — almost noon, Pacific Time — dozens of Kerika users had been affected. We tried to let folks know via Twitter that there was a problem, and continued to monitor the situation through the day:

Google eventually acknowledged the problem as it became clear that it was widespread.

By mid-afternoon, the issue was largely cleared up, at least as far as Kerika was concerned, although it is possible that other apps, which also use Google for authentication or Google Drive for storage, were affected for much longer.

Once again, our apologies for everyone who was affected.

Google Authentication Errors

Technology

We are currently seeing a bunch of errors from Google with respect to their authentication service — which lets you login to your Kerika+Google account using your Google ID, and they seem to be affecting a wide range of users.

Here’s a sample of what we are seeing:

Google Errors
Google Errors

 

This error normally shows up when a user is logging in with a Google for Work ID, e.g. Google Apps for Business or Google Apps for Education.

What’s surprising today is that we have seen at least 1 user with a regular Gmail address have this same problem, which is theoretically impossible.

Right now there’s not much we can do but wait this out. The problem seems to be small enough that Google is not even reporting it on their Google Apps Status Dashboard. :-(

Bug, fixed: Team Members weren’t getting notification emails when they were assigned cards

Agile & Scrum, Technology, ,

Our thanks to Tatjana and Steve from Ducks Unlimited in Canada, who helped us track down a bug that was stopping notification emails being sent properly when a Team Member is assigned a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board.

(Board Admins were getting these emails when people’s assignments changed, but not the Team Members themselves.)

We fixed this with our latest release.