The Beginning

20080117 - A New Rant

Not a great year last year, so not many updates. Here's a new one though...

So, it turns out that Swindon Borough Council Parking Administration are fans of Belgian Surrealist painting. Particularly "The Treachery of Images" by Magritte. But they seem to have missed the whole idea of surrealism and decided to implement his ideas in reality. I present to you:

The Treachery of Signs

This reason this comes about is that I just paid another parking fine (the first was a couple of years ago and is worth a rant of it's own really). I arrived back late on a Tuesday before Christmas to find that there were no spaces in the bay in front of my house. Or in the bay before that. But there were some in the bay before that. Being in possession of a Residents Parking Permit, and having just driven past the Residents Parking Zone sign, I parked in said bay. Silly Me.

I arrive to use my car on Friday (not using my car every day) to find I've got a Penalty Charge Notice taped to my windscreen. "Ah" thinks I, "there's been a mistake. Well, these things happen". I phone up the council on the Monday to query it, to find out that not all bays within a Residents Parking Zone are for Residents. Each bay has to be marked as a Residents Parking Bay for it to be for Residents. I suggest that maybe they ought to take the Residents Parking Zone sign down, since it could be considered misleading. They say it has to be there to let residents know where they can park. I say it doesn't let residents know where they can park. And things go downhill from there.

I sent an email with my queries: remove sign, fix wording on the permits and provide a street level map of where residents can actually park, and a request for them to drop the fine on the (flimsy I know) grounds that it was a mistake caused by misleading signage. After careful consideration the council have decided that the signs are fine, the information given to residents is fine and they only give out maps to the hard of understanding. Being in a bad mood I'm taking that as in implication that I'm a dolt for even asking for one. Oh, and the fine stands.

Now, my gran worked for St Helens Council. And despised them. Some of that might be expected to filter down through the generations, and it probably has. But I was feeling moderately neutral to Swindon Council. They're trying to sort out recycling (that reminds me, I should write about the wheely bin sillyness going on) and the town centre regeneration might make things nicer. But honestly, how can you defend a system that has the parking bay right under the Residents Parking sign not be Residents Parking. Maybe my gran was right after all.

20070519 - Not Ranting

Just two quick things. One is a possibly interesting trip to Kyrgyzstan I'm off on to help build a house. Pictures will be posted if:

• If can get linux and my old laptop IrDA port to play nicely.
• If we have mobile coverage.
• If the mobile coverage allows gprs access.

The second is that since this is a vanity site I ought to mention a start-up I'm helping. Mpos is a pipe organ company whose main aim is to build combination pipe organs, mixing electronic organs and real wind-blown pipes to create a single exciting musical instrument. When using the latest digital organs we can create an instrument with more life than the electronic alone, but blended together so that you stop worrying about which stop is electronic, which is pipe, and start to just listen.

We're that good, honest. And currently in Worcester Cathedral. Which is nice.

Adverts over, now back to the previous rants...

20070326 - More Rants

Just a quick preamble here that the moral of the tale is to not have a complete trust in what a computer tells you.

Ok, so I only update this to rant about things to anybody unfortuante to stumble across this. Todays rant is directed at Orange. 3 were insane control freaks, but I've now found that Orange are just incompetent. A couple of years back I was with 3 on a cash back deal. After getting fed up with their inability to just let me on the internet using their network I went back to O2(or Cellnet as I like to call them) on another cheque back deal. I spent a pleasant year with them with things just working. I went to China and the gprs stuff just worked so I was able to read the bbc news site. Other than a billing mistake whilst I was in Hong Kong they were good.

Then the 12 month cheque back finished. Now, these deals assume you're getting a new 12 month contract, and for reasons which escape me you can't transfer your existing phone number between monthly contracts with the same company. So I phoned O2 and got my PAC code (after explaining and they offered me a good deal, but not free). And gave my PAC to Orange.

Oops.

On Wednesday 14th March my O2 SIM card stops working. Fine, as expected. And my shiny new Orange SIM stops working. Fine, as expected. Then is carries on not working. Ah.

And carries on not working. Hmmm.

And carries on not working. Grrr.

Phoning Orange customer service from a non-Orange phone (07 number!) I find that they'd been having problems with number porting since the Monday and were working on it.

They knew there was a problem and carried on anyway. Wow, I'd love to listen to the decision making there. You're busy disconnecting people, but unable to reconnect them, leaving them in a limbo of no phone number attached to their SIM card. And you carry on doing it. That sounds fairly incompetent.

My shiny new (less new now) Orange SIM card finally starts working again a week later on Thursday 22nd March. A week out of contact. Which might have been nice except it ended up with me unexpectedly spending a week away from home without a toothbrush. And a wasted 200mile round trip. And lots of stress and worry for people trying to contact me and just getting through to the Orange answer phone (which I mention to point out that this wasn't O2s fault).

A week! Even more incompetence.

Carrying on this litany of incompentence, I then go to Denmark at the weekend. Before the number porting fiasco I had been sent a text telling me roaming was enabled. Guess if my phone worked in Denmark? I you guessed yes then you're missing the point of rhetorical questions and this rant. Of course it didn't.

Oh, and GPRS access wasn't working.

So, today I phone up Orange customer services. There being no option for 'make a complaint', or 'I wish to report a problem with the Orange network' I press #0 a number of times and get to speak with a person. First we deal with the number porting and me wanting at least a refund:
"Call accounts and billing next month, I can't deal with this."

Next we go for the roaming:
"Roaming is enabled on your account, what phone do you have?"
"Nokia 7600, it's worked in France, Spain, Germany, China, Hong Kong, Morocco"
"It should be ok for roaming. It must have been networks in Denmark."
"Well, all my friends (none on Orange oddly) on Vodafone, O2 and others had no problems."
"We can't guarantee other networks."
"It wasn't other networks. It is Orange."
"Roaming is enabled."
"Look. The phone works abroad. Other peoples phones worked in Denmark. My SIM card didn't work. The system is lying."
"It says roaming is enabled, it must be something else."
"The system is wrong. I suspect the number porting made a mess of things. Could you please turn off roaming and turn it back on again?"
"Ok, but it won't change anything. Anything else I can help with?"
"GPRS not working."
"I'll just transfer you."
"Sigh."

So, we may or may not have roaming working again, on with the story...
"Hi, I understand you're having problems getting a Nokia 7600 to connect to gprs."
"Yes. I get service not available when I try to connect."
"Ok, I'm going to send the settings..."
"Sorry to interrupt, but I've already had the settings sent from the Orange website."
"Oh. Is this an Orange branded phone?"
"No."
"Well GPRS is enabled so it must be a problem with the settings on your phone, and since it's not an Orange phone I can't really help any more."
"Look. It's not the phone. It's worked on 3, O2 and on Orange before the number porting went wrong. Could you turn the gprs off and on again?" At this point I was getting a bit shirty..
"Ok, I'll believe the settings are correct and turn the service off and on again, but it is on already."
"Ok, fine, thank you."

So, I receive a text telling me my services have been updated. And, miracle of miracles, GPRS now works. So the system was lying. And no one I spoke to would believe this was possible. And it won't be passed up the chain that the system can lie. So a bug won't be fixed and the system will continue to get gradually more crufty, more unstable and the downward spiral of reliability of technology will continue. We're doomed.

But never mind. My hammer still works.

20050303 - Rants

Busy recently, but I've just been irritated by enough stuff today to start ranting.

I got a 3 mobile phone recently. On the plus side it was cheap. Very cheap. There're one or two downsides though. Firstly, it's a Nokia 7600. Yes, it looks stupid. Yes, the keypad is, unbelievably, more hideous than the usual layout for typing. I'm not too bothered about those though (well, I am about the keypad, but I knew about that when I ordered the phone). No, the single most irritating thing about this phone is that you can't turn off the shutter sound.

That's right, every time you take a picture a cacophonic caricature of a camera shutter noise echoes out to be heard by all around. Now, let's say you're inside a quiet church and want to take some pictures of a pipe organ. Just how useful is the built in camera going to be? Eh? Nokia? Why? WHY??!? Good grief, in earlier versions of the phone you could turn the sound off. This means some poor engineer somewhere has been made to spend time making the final product less useful. That's got to wound the soul of engineers everywhere.

So, ways around this. Easiest is that when you're making a call the camera doesn't have access to the speaker. So, call your voicemail and take quiet pictures to your hearts content. I've also taken the phone apart and am trying to figure out a neat way to disable the speaker when the shutter button is pressed. It's easy enough to just disable the speaker entirely, but that means I'd have to rely on vibrate and loose the speaker phone.

Next, we have the complaint about 3. Does anyone remember walled gardens? Well, the people at 3 do, and must have thought they were a good idea. When I was with o2 and using my rather fine Nokia 7110 I could use WAP to toddle along to google and check up who played Bilbo in 'The Lord of the Rings' (I lost a pint on that one. Incidentally, WAP is probably worse than you thought it would be, but better than you think it is). Can I do this with the insane control freaks that I'm with now? No.

No, instead I get the chance to pay to download the latest tat from the music charts. Fools. Does anyone know why they can't just give me access to the internet? Hmmm? Three?

Continuing, though now getting a bit tenuous and stuff that wouldn't normally rile me quite so much. I'm installing the Nokia software that came with the 7600, and thought I'd read the 'End User Sicense Agreement'. Apparently I'm allowed to make one backup copy. Hmm, fair enough, bit of a pain if you normally make two backups because you're paranoid (hi). Just leave it out of the normal backup process, ok.

Only on to 'magnetic media'. What? So, no CD, DVD or CF backup then. And I don't have a tape drive, or enough floppies. I bet some of you are wondering what CF is doing in the above list, and so am I now. See, whilst most of my CF cards are normal memory cards, one is a microdrive. Sooooo, I'm allowed to copy the Nokia software on to my TypeII CF card, but not on to my TypeI CF cards. Gahhhh.

Oooh, and my 'archival backup copy' can't be installed or used on any computer. Now, I've absolutely no clue about anything legal but 3(a) in the EUSA seems to clearly say that I'm not allowed to use my backup copy in the event of needing to use my backup copy. Grrr.

I think I'll stop now, except to note the bit at the end, where I've just agreed that any previous representation, say from advertising, has no bearing on what I actually find. Nice get out guys. I hate the world sometimes.

20040524 - Back off holiday

'bout time I did something here, so I've added a couple of MuVo² pages and some stuff from Japan.

20040119 - BT/Yahoo/Openworld aren't very good

Good Grief

Here was me thinking that experience, economy of scale and a big advertising campaign would mean that BTopenworld/Yahoo/Whatever could provide access to the internet. Maybe even a mailserver that worked.

I've now downgraded from a subscription account with Yahoo/BTInternet/Openworld to pay-as-you-go. Since I didn't get an email asking me to carry on giving them money for old rope, I thought I'd send one explaining why I didn't want to accept their substandard service. It didn't even generate an auto response, so here it is for the world to see:

Hi, I'm downgrading my account from Anytime to Pay-as-you-go, and getting a broadband account with another isp. Since no one has emailed to ask why, I thought I'd tell you anyway:

1. Your website.
   • Your front page looks dire in Mozilla. Styles are not being applied to the fonts correctly. The strange thing is that this only happens on your front page (http://www.btopenworld.com/default), subpages look fine (http://www.btopenworld.com/mybtopenworld). (I've just checked this before sending, and the really bizarre thing is that /homepage looks ok, it's only your default 'portal' that's broken)
   • Weak encryption on 'Change Payment Details'. Is there any reason why you use 56bit encryption for logging in to the payment details page (https://account.btopenworld.com/selfcare), yet you can use 128bit encryption for changing personal details (https://register.btinternet.com/cgi-bin/load_page?page=/selfhelp/chperspwd.html). That seems to be the wrong way around, although it'd make even more sense to use 128bit on both.
   • Not just not supporting non-ie browsers, but being actively hostile. When trying to change personal details using Mozilla the log in page loads, but then automatically forwards me to a page telling me to upgrade (ha!) my browser to Internet Explorer. What are you doing that isn't supported by any browser other than ie? My guess is that it would work fine in Mozilla, but I don't want to have to go to the trouble of making Moz lie about what it is.
2. Customer Support
   • Not responding to queries. I have emailed technical support and customer queries about the above issues before, and have heard nothing back except for auto reponse emails. It would have been nice to get a real response, even if it was a terse reply along the lines of 'no one else has any problems with this'.
   • Usage hours. If you're tracking the number of hours used by Anytime users why don't you just allow them to see the number of hours left, no matter how many? This feels like you're hoping they'll lose track of time and end up having to pay to dial up.
   • Billing emails sent as html. Given that spammers use html mail with embedded pictures to track valid email addresses, do you really think I'm going to read my email in anything other than plain text? Looking at the message source there's nothing in there that needs html anyway.
3. Email
   • This isn't really your fault, but it's another reason for leaving. I'm currently receiving over 100 spam emails per day. btinternet.com is obviously a popular domain so the spammers are just going through a list of <name>@btinternet.com, of which mine has been found. Spam filtering is good, well done there, but I still have to check for false positives.
   • Intermittent service. This is probably caused by the volume of spam you have to handle, but given that you are a large attractive network for spammers you should be able to build a network capable of handling the load.

So, those are the reasons that are actively driving me away. In case you're wondering what reasons are attracting me to another isp...

1. Web
   • More space
   • cgi/sql/php support
   • hosting of registered domains
2. Customer Service
   • Quick response from a real person after initial query
   • A very nice online ticket tracking system that seems to get things done.
3. Email
   • virtual addressing (<anything>@mortier.isp.co.uk)

And all that for less than bto/yahoo ask for their broadband offering.

I'm going to keep a bt account (pay-as-you-go) so that I can keep my email address. On the off chance that things don't work so well at the new isp, I'll have another look at bt in a year.

As a service provider you've not been too bad (I've been able to dial up almost all the time). However you need to improve all the other things (website, email, customer service) that distinguish you from other isps.

Cheers,

Paul.

20040102 - Update

Still trying to get things looking right, and I've folded on my decision not to bother writing for ie, take the menu bar on the left for instance.

• first problem was the height of the iframe, I wanted to use percentages which need to be calculated from the containing box, in this case the body. But ie doesn't give the body a height by default, so I have to. After reading the spec I'm not sure who's correct, but Mozilla worked fine: it assigns the height of the viewport to the body.

  Oddly, if you assign a percentage to the body, ie6 sort of works, so it must have a height of the html tag to calculate the height of the body. But it can't have a height for the html tag otherwise it'd be able to inherit the height anyway. Weird.

• So I've got percentage heights working, except with body assigned a height of 100% ie6 decides to provide a scroll bar allowing the contents of the menu bar to be scrolled by a few pixels. No idea why.

  However, making the height 98% removes the scroll bar. I think it's making 100% bigger than the viewport, which then effects all values calculated from it. Which is silly.

• So I've got rid of the scroll bar in ie6 and things look good in Mozilla as well. But now if I make the viewport small they both present a scroll bar when the windows gets too short. Fine and good. However, Mozilla redraws the menu bar allowing for the narrowed width, avoiding the need for a horizontal scroll bar. Ie6 just pops both scroll bars over the top of the existing content. Again, I'm not sure which is correct, but Mozilla does what I want it to.

  Speaking of which, I'm clearly missing something about 'scrolling="yes"' as part of the iframe tag. Mozilla seems to ignore it completely (which, to be honest, is fine since it redraws the contents anyway) and ie6 only puts up a vertical bar. Which isn't quite what I want, but at least it doesn't now put the scroll bar over the top of the contents, so it doesn't need the horizontal scroll bar later...

• Final ie6 irritation about the menu box. It doesn't support fixed position, but it doesn't really treat it as absolute either. For some reason this means that it ignores top : 2% and so misses the little white gap at the top. It works if I use absolute positioning, but then it isn't always present, which it the whole point.

  Use something other than ie, please...

20031215 - Look Ma! No Frames

(Well, actually an iframe, but close)

So I've finally got down to writing myself some proper webpages. All in fancy html4.01 and css2ness. This does mean you'll be needing a browser that supports css2 better than Microsoft Internet Explorer, which could be a problem for you. But this is my webpage, so whilst I've done a little bit a munging to make things appear as I wish in Mozilla, I'm going to ignore the other 90% or so who use non-standards compliant browsers. Sorry. Honest.

What are you missing you might ask? To be honest not much. I'm not going out of my way to break ie6, and in fact have done a little fiddling so you can read this. I even replaced <object> with <iframe> for you. All that's missing is:

• Stationary background picture when scrolling
• All background picture visible even when contents of page less than the window height
• Stationary menu bar on the left when scrolling
• Short text descriptions and last update dates appearing in the menu panel when hovering over links
• The warm glow of using a browser that doesn't give people writing webpages according to the standards kittens

And that's about it. I think I'll make this into a diary like page for all my rants. Enjoy. Beneath here is the old web page, should all get rolled into the new...

Eerie: Strange; Weird.

"I'd like to do a walk around Wiltshire sometime"