Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Sunday 9 March 2014

My Linkedin Account Is Dead, And Why Is Google Being Stupid?

I tried to delete my Linkedin account a while back, but I still get a lot of "invitation to connect on Linkedin" emails. I plan to never connect to anyone on Linkedin ever again, so whoever wants to connect, please don't be offended when it doesn't happen --- it's not about you.

Linkedin, I despise you for your persistent spam.

PS, I'm visiting Taiwan at the moment and wondering why Google uses that as a cue to switch its Web interface to Chinese even when I'm logged into my regular Google account. Dear Google, surely it is not very likely that my change of location to Taiwan indicates I have suddenly learned Chinese and forgotten English.

Comments

Anonymous
Funny you mention this now - I'm in the process of supporting the translation of a web-based product into Japanese, and specifically, I'm implementing the detection of the user's language. I assume the Accept-Languages HTTP header is the technique you'd prefer?
Robert
I don't know how reliable Accept-Languages is. It may be that the first time a user loads the page, IP-based language guessing is more reliable than Accept-Language. My point here is that Google should track language for each user account.
Anonymous
In practice, it would probably be sufficient for us to have a fixed locale configured on the server - it's an internal application rather than a public-facing one, so we can somewhat assume that all stuff speak the same language. But making it switchable isn't too much more effort, and getting the locale via Accept-Languages makes it easy to switch for demo and testing purposes...
RichB
Does visiting http://google.com/ncr help? ncr = no change region
Robert
That helps for Google searches, thanks. It doesn't help for, say, Blogger.
Anonymous
Blogger works with ncr too. Just append '/ncr' at the end of blogspot.com and sure enough it won't redirect you to your country's version.