Whilst I understand you’ve been around some considerable time, and that you do have journalists to fire, you do need to know your nag screen is incredibly annoying. It’s probably also not helping with your ad impressions either.

Sure, it might only take a minute to sign up – but it’s really not worth it for me. It’s actually quicker just do add your entire domain to my DNS Block List.

That way I don’t have to see your annoying sign-in page ever again.

Have fun with that print media business. I hear it’s a raging success. Oh, wait.

Sincerely,

Will

First of all, whilst it’s only something minor – it’s probably a good idea not to try and corner me whilst I’m (obviously) chatting with other people, and not you. 

When I mention that I happen to be sitting with workmates, and my manager/team-leader, that should be an indication to back off with the pitch and leave it for another opportunity.

If I’ve also said I’m enjoying the work, and that I get to work on some cool stuff (even if I can’t mention the clients/projects) – patronising the company I work for isn’t really a point in your favour.

However the killer would have to be mentioning how you’re engaging in (in my opinion) shady business practices, and isn’t-this-really-cool-that-we’re-screwing-the-system-for-our-clients. 

That’s all!

Since the last post on this (on the 13th of Feb) I basicly gave up on calling iiNet – I’d already spent a fortune in mobile costs listening to their hold music, and was just waiting for them to get back to my support-enquiry email. (I never did get a response to that)

However, last Friday (22nd) as I was going to bed at about 1:30am (Okay, so technically Saturday morning) I noticed that my DSL Router was saying it had sync. I normally check the router panel when I get home, so I must’ve missed it that night. I stayed up about an hour setting up a bunch of tests to see how fast/stable the connection was. I left these tests to continue running whilst I slept. When I left home on Saturday at about 9AM it was still running, and I was feeling somewhat optimistic that it might continue to work. Of course, Murphy was listening, and when I got home at around 5pm, I had lost line sync once again.

Sunday I called iiNet again, this time because their Toolbox said there should only be about a 7min wait. The tech guy tried a few things from their end, but once again no success – and said he’d put the request through to their Fault Manager who would try to get VisionStream to narrow down the timeframe.

Come Monday morning, I get a call from Christy at Vision Stream, “Is Wednesday suitable for you?”. Grr. Same situation as last time Christy called me! Looking at the iiNet Toolbox – what do you know, a 45min or so wait on hold, again. Instead of doing that, I try another tact – go straight to the top.

So, I write a pleading email to Michael Malone, the Managing Director of iiNet. He’s quite active on Whirlpool’s forums, and makes his email available there. I give a bunch of possible ways we could try and work together, such as asking for the first/last timeslot on the day, getting a call an hour or two beforehand, and even offering to pay for a Saturday callout if necessary.

Tuesday I get a call from Rebecca at iiNet regarding the email, she’s called VisionStrem and tried getting them to go with any of the options I presented – no luck. I think up one last option – asking the Tech to call me as he’s starting the job before mine. Rebecca thinks it might work, and goes back to VisionStream.

Today, (Wednesday) Rebecca calls back – VisionStream won’t go for it, despite having escalated it up the chain of management there. Apparently VisionStream started quoting sections of the Telecommunications Act to her, and stating that “we treat all customers equally”. However, the VisionStream manager has agreed to commit to a particular timeslot (9AM-12:30PM or 12PM to 6PM), AND to get the Tech to call an hour beforehand.

I ask Rebecca what the chances are of switching to a regular ADSL2 service (and having the line connected as a standard phone again) – apparently it can be done, but I’d be the first to have tried it. And the time it would take would probably be somewhere up around a month, assuming everything went according to play.

So, for now Rebecca is sending the case back to VisionStream, and getting them to commit to providing a 9AM-12:30PM timeslot for this job plus the hour-before call.

Here’s hoping that VisionStream can come through on this!

Side Rant:
VisionStream’s comment to Rebecca that they treat all customers equally, is rather stupid. Yes, they treat all customers equally poorly. VisionStream’s view is apparently that All customers’ time is worth nothing, and they obviously have nothing better to do.

Surely someone at VisionStream can see that doing this just gives them a really poor reputation.

(with apologies to Dreamhost for nicking their headline AND public domain photo)

December 13th: I get the word from the real estate agent that I’ve got the unit. Immediately sign up on the iiNet website for Naked DSL.

December 19th: iiNet respond to my application with the message “Service Address Not Found”.  I contact iiNet and ask what that means, turns out they need a phone number.

December 21-22nd: I move in.

December 24th: I finally go back to my apartment, plug in a phone and find out the number. I give that to iiNet, they re-submit.

December 28th: I get an email from iiNet with “Service Address Not Found” again. I call, they do some quick tests – the number doesn’t show up in their access to Telstra’s provisioning systems.
I call Telstra to get the phone connected, it’ll take several days because as it turns out, it’s on the Optus cable network. Appointment made for January 4th.

January 4th: No Telstra guy.

January 8th: I get a call from a Telstra guy: “Umm,I’m at the premesis now…” me: “Well, you wern’t 4 days ago when I was there…”

January 9th: Telstra call back to reschedule, and say has to be all day. I ask for Saturday timeslot if that’s the case, sure – January 19th. Ugh.

January 19th: Line connected. But after the Tech leaves, I find out the line is a Silent line, and 12722123 to find out my number doesn’t work.

January 21st and 22nd: Too busy at work to call Telstra before their Sales centres close at 5pm.

January 23rd: Call Telstra, get my line number. Go sign up again at iiNet.

January 30th: Email from iiNet: DSL Connection will be on Feb 5th, but I don’t need to be home (because provisioned line).

Feb 5th: No line sync. iiNet connection email says might take a few more days.

Feb 7th: Still no line sync. Call iiNet, on hold for ~30mins (on my mobile) – Guy says it looks like my entire DSLAM is down. But, (good news for me) they work on Saturdays (9th)- so, give a call then or Monday.

Feb 9th: (Still no line sync) Call iiNet, on hold for another 30mins, guy says Telstra have to fix it, and they don’t work on weekends, but should know more Monday (11th)

Feb 11th: (Still no line sync) Call iiNet, on hold for ~45mins. Guy says they’ve added my name to a list to send to Visionstream, and they’ll call to let me know when it’ll be fixed.

Today (Feb 13th): Visionstream calls me at about 10 am  –

VS: “We’re calling to make an appointment for your ADSL Installation”
me: “err.. don’t you mean fault repair?”
VS: “Oh, I don’t know… So, will Friday (15th) be ok?”
me: “Uhm, What time?” 
VS: “You’ll have to be there All day”
me: “Oh, no, that’s really not possible, any chance for a shorter time period?”
VS: “No, sorry – you can leave a key with a friend family member and they can be there instead”
Me: “Err, no, I really can’t.”
VS: “Okay, well, we’ll send this back to iiNet then”
Me: “Fine, I’ll call them” 

I call iiNet, left on hold for 45mins.  I explain the situation,

“Well, you’ll have to be home then”
me: “But I understood the issue to be with your DSLAM, not with my line – everyone else on the exchange was down”.
“No, that’s been rectified, you’ll have to be at home for them to fix the issue”.
me: “Well, that’s just not an option for me at the moment.”
“Let me talk to a senior, see what we can do”
Me: “okay”
(5mins hold)
“We’ll try rebuilding the port, but, that might not help”

I get home tonight, and, well… they’re right, it didn’t help.

So, ~3hrs in total of calls on my mobile, and I’m still no closer to having proper internet access on. I’ve sent a ‘support form’ in telling them that if they can’t narrow down the appointment timeslot to 3-4 hours, then just to cancel my account.

I suppose if they go ahead and cancel, I’ll be able to get the line reconnected (and if necessary, do it on a Saturday), then I’ll get normal ADSL2+ with someone else. Which has far less chance of f’cking up.

Seriously sucks.

Addendum: I’m not blaming iiNet that they can’t fix something when I’m not home – I’m just saying that the whole process of getting internet access is a disaster. It’s now over 2 months, for something that should have been fairly simple.  If the Telcos stopped playing bullshit politics, we’d all be in a much better situation.

Since day one, I’ve pretty much been regretting the decision. Most of the issue comes down to the fact that Facebook has no way of actually stopping people from sending “invites” to add whatever the current fad-application is.

Many folks don’t see it as a problem, and don’t remove your name from the list of people to spam when sending out one of these invites. The result is that when I log into Facebook, I see a half-dozen or more Invites.

Because I can’t use the Facebook interface to block these, I’ve gone ahead and just simply started removing and blocking folks that do this.

This, to some, is considered an outright hostile act. Sorry folks, but I really don’t give a damn whether you’re “Interested”, or want to know what Simpsons character I am.

Until the time when Facebook lets me block all application invites, I’ll be continuing the remove-and-block tactic. 

The short answer is that Dreamhost are “variable”.

I’ve been a Dreamhost customer for about 3 years now, and I’ve seen some pretty wild thing happen.

They’ve had several major power outages which took down their entire datacentre. They’ve had significant network issues for a period of months. They had a major data security breach where someone managed to get several thousand usernames and passwords. And, to top it all off – they recently overcharged about half of their customers by several million US peso dollars. (It would have been up around 10 million, if it wern’t for a bug in their software).

Oh, and it’s probably worth mentioning that as I write this, all my sites are down, because the servers they’re on are being driven from one side of LA to the other.

Given all of the above, most ordinary, sane people would probably be shouting “run for the hills!” at the top of their lungs. And, in many cases people would be  quite justified to run as far as they could from Dreamhost.

Here’s the thing, however – apart from the power issues (and the scheduled cluster move mentioned) my sites have worked just fine for the most part. 

Yeah, there’s been times when a server has been down, or when some sort of glitch has slowed things down – but lets look at the big picture here for a second.

Dreamhost’s business is to sell reasonable quality webhosting, with large gobs of disk space and bandwidth, at a very cheap rate.  I pay something like USD$20/month (on the old plans) for my Dreamhost service. 

What do I get for that USD$20/month?  I get to host 30-something sites, occupying 20GB of disk space, and transferring about 150GB per month. No, that’s not the limit, that’s what I’m actually using. This month. Dreamhost have absolutely no issue with me using a lot more than that – even if I went to TWENTY times that, I’d still be well under the limits of my account.

I also get the security that someone else will take care of the servers, and keep them patched and secure. In the event that something goes wrong, I can lodge a ticket and have someone else fix it at 3am.

So, does that mean I’d recommend Dreamhost to everyone? Heck no – there’s heaps of situations where I wouldn’t recommend Dreamhost.

Any time you answer “yes” or even “maybe” to the question “Will this being unavailable impact my business?”, you need to be looking at a managed hosting solution with a proper contract/service level agreement.  Don’t pass go, don’t collect $200, and definitely don’t try reselling this to your customers.

Dreamhost are also not suitable for a variety of “big” applications/sites – despite the label saying you can get 5TB of bandwidth and 500GB of disk space, actually using all of it is possible only under very specific conditions. Most of the time, anyone running a site that is that popular is going to be using so much of the resources on their server that they’re going to be causing issues for other users on the same server.

It’s like the speedo on your car, if you’re actually hitting 240KPH or 30,000RPM, something is going very very wrong, or is about to.

So, with that out of the way – I am actually starting to look for some dedicated server options – not because I don’t like Dreamhost (I do) – but simply because I want to do other things that I simply can’t do with Dreamhost.

My options are limited, because I want to be able to manage the server myself, I need a reasonably large amount of disk space and bandwidth quota, and I need to run Windows.

What are your experiences with Dreamhost, and/or dedicated hosting?

Last week came news from the UK of the latest attempt by these organisations to stick it to ordinary consumers for something which is, really, fairly innocent. What’s the problem? Some employees of a car repair company played their radios a little bit too loud.

The Performing Rights Society (the UK’s version of the RIAA) is seeking £200,000 (AUD$450,000) in damages for this obvious heinous crime.

Seriously, there needs to be a complete change in copyright law. For a long time these large organisations (and don’t kid yourself, they are giant corporations, not struggling musicians) have been steadily edging out what we would all consider fair use. It should not be a crime to listen to the radio at work, or to play a CD for friends at a private party. 

The way things are structured at the moment, it’s better (financially) for me to drive a car at well above the legal speed limits, placing people in serious danger - than it is to play a radio a little loud, or to share a song with a friend.  This is not the way things should be. We need to say enough is enough, and tell our elected representatives to change these obviously stupid copyright laws.

Click through to read this collection of rantings…

First Rant: Three’s Online Store

I’m leaving Telstra, so I’m losing access to the staff plan. Plus, I’m moving to Sydney, and won’t have my own place for at least a month or two. So, I need a new mobile, and having some sort of broadband would be great.

After going through all the available options, I think Three’s $29 Cap, plus X-Series Gold would be the best bet. 

I get onto the Three website, and decide to purchase online (for an additional $50 credit). I select the phone and plan I want, and  enter all my details (including my medical history and what I ate for breakfast for the last 4 years). After clicking submit, I get an error message saying “Please complete all required fields marked with a red asterisk”. I go back over the form, but can’t immediately see anything incomplete (there’s about 80 questions on the page). 

I pull out Firebug and review the Javascript, that quickly points me to this handily displayed error message: “Please tell us the time you have lived at your current address”. Which I had set to “5+” years.

Except that it still wants you to select the number of months too. Given I’ve been here for about 8 years, I don’t know how I can fill that in correctly.

Anyway, in the mean time – I’d taken too long to fill out the form, and so it’s forgotten what I’m ordering (hint guys: don’t use sessions for big-ass forms, save the details to DB or cookies or form variables). I go back to the start and fill in all the forms again.

This time, I get through the process Ok, confirm my order and…

Sorry, ThreeStore cannot process your order at this time. To order now:
- Call 131 683
- Visit a Three Store

Just to rub salt into the already gaping wound: Their phone sales line isn’t available at 7:30PM on a Saturday night. 

Second Rant: Valve / Steam and Offline Mode

I think Valve make a few really great games. Their online game distribution and community system Steam, is a really great concept. It’s just that the implementation has… lets just say room for tmprovement.

My main gripe with Steam is that it’s very network-dependant. Folks in the US might have a higher broadband penetration, but they still don’t have internet everywhere. Steam’s Offline mode is provided by Valve so that you can play Steam-protected/distrubuted games when an internet connection isn’t available.

The problem is that Steam Offline mode doesn’t work, unless you specifically set it to start in Offline mode. And this is only possible to do if you have an internet connection. Valve support insist that it will start in Offline mode if you have it set to remember password, and log on automatically – but experience has proven them wrong.

Clicking Start in Offline Mode gives this little gem:

Third Rant: Melbourne Skybus’s Website.

A few weeks ago I was organising my itinerary for going to Paul’s Wedding. Due to a quirk of distance most of that Journey will be on a V-Line train from Melbourne out to Drouin.  But, to get there I needed to use the Skybus service from the Airport. They don’t list timetables, and instead insist that you use a search based function. This doesn’t work quite so well, as can be seen in the screenshot I took at the time:

Last Rant (for the moment):  Vista, or specifically it’s behaviour around Sleep mode. Plus a quirk regarding multi-monitor displays.

I have a reasonably new Dell laptop, and I run Vista. For the most part, this is a happy setup – but there’s a few strange quirks. 

Quirk #1: It (sometimes) doesn’t go into Sleep mode when the lid is closed.
This is semi-random, and unless I ensure that the thing has actually gone to sleep I will occasionally pull the laptop out of my bag 2 hours later to find that it’s trying to bake itself in my laptop bag.  It doesn’t seem to matter if I have external things plugged in (like power, mouse, drives, etc) or if I’m running in a particular power mode.

Quirk #2: Upon opening the lid after putting the laptop to sleep, it will occasionally refuse to do anything.
The laptop comes out of standby, turns on the screen and Wifi/Bluetooth, and spins up the drives… but thats it. I don’t see anything on-screen, and I have tried leaving it for 2+ hours. I have to force the power-off (it won’t gracefully shut down or go back into sleep mode.  Vista appears to be doing *something* (as evident by disk and limited network activity) but doesn’t grace us with the knowledge.

Quirk #3: After forcing the laptop to power off, without shutting down (Usually after the previous two) – Vista plays silly buggers by reading/writing huge amounts of data to disk, and also occasionally using 100% CPU indefinitely too (NT Kernel and System uses 100% CPU – yeah, both CPU cores).

This is something very strange. It appears that it’s doing some sort of ‘cleanup’ after a forced shutdown, but it also appears to be reading all the files on the drive (eg: photos, videos, etc).

Either way, the only thing that fixes it is killing the power (it won’t shut down nicely, and it’ll stay in this broken state indefinitely too), NOT logging on, waiting 30+ mins until disk activity stops, and then logging in. Failure to wait until it’s finished thrashing the disk, means that you won’t be able to connect to a wireless network (wired only works if you’ve got a staticly configured IP), and all apps will run slow (due to disk thrashing and 100% CPU utilisation)

The other two quirks are annoying (particularly if your battery has been used up in the process of baking the laptop), but the last one really pisses me off (usually because it happens right when I want to do something).

Quirk #4 is related to multi-monitor setups.

I have a rather nice Dell 24″ LCD Display at home, and I usually plug this into the laptop so I can play movies/etc on the external display. Also, because of the physical arrangement – the external display is actually above the laptop.

So, I like my display setup like this:

So I can drag things up to the external display. Unfortunately, for some reason Vista keeps forgetting these settings. For the first two weeks it kept resetting to display at the right hand side, and also not extending the desktop. Now it seems to remember the setup – but it will still randomly reset this. Very annoying!

Currently, there’s four situations it supports quite fine:

- No Proxy
- Proxy, without Authentication
- Proxy, with BASIC Authentication (using specified username/password)
- Proxy, with NTLM Authentication using your current Windows Account (aka Windows Integrated Authentication).

The problem comes you’re in this fifth situation:
- Proxy, with NTLM Authentication using a specified username, password and domain.

Initially, I was using code like:

WebClient client = new WebClient(url);
client.Proxy = new WebProxy(proxyurl, true);
// if proxy-auth required:
client.Proxy.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(proxyusername, proxypassword, domain);
// ...etc


But, this fails with “407 Proxy Authentication Required”
The crazy part is that it actually is doing NTLM authentication, but it appears to be attached in the headers for twitter.com (!?).

So, I tried using WebRequest, and also HttpWebRequest and specifying proxy-keep-alive.
I also tried setting the .NET Default proxy to my specified proxy or just adding authentication credentials.
But, still nothing appears to be working.

Almost all the solutions online are using the DefaultCredentialCache – but that really doesn’t help (I tried), because I’m not logged in as the user that I want to authenticate as. Cretaing a new CredentialCache and adding the details to that – still no help.

All in all, very frustrated!

If you want to have a crack at solving it – download the SmitterR2 source and check out Smitter.Core.TwitterService.GetStatuses (in SmitterClasses\SmitterCore.cs).

There’s currently a line like:
using (WebClient client = BuildWebClient())
Ignore/remove it and create your own WebClient/WebRequest/etc to test on. That’s the first (network) function called when Smitter starts up, and is pretty quick to return a result one way or another.

Just make sure you’re using a proxy which requires NTLM / Kerberos Auth, and isn’t on the same domain as your current account. Any other situation seems to work A-OK.

If you can solve this, I’d be much in your debt.

Reserved seating is, in my mind, meant for places where there’s either a need for people to sit in specific seats. Or where most, or all of the capacity of the place is being occupied. Think planes, coaches, or sports stadiums.

So, when I went to the local Greater Union Cinemas, I was surprised when I was asked where I wanted to sit when buying my ticket. Given I was already running 15 minutes late to the film (10 of that due to the slow process of actually waiting in line for the 6 people infront to get served), I just said “Wherever”, not knowing that they were actually serious about this seating business.

I got into the theatre, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, and sat at one of the first seats I could find. They wern’t great seats (off to the side) – but hey, Donkey, Shrek, and Fiona were already on screen. I did note that the cinema was 3/4 empty – and that there were plenty of seats infront, behind ,and beside me.

About another 10-ish minutes afterwards, I saw someone walk past me (given I was sitting in the second-from-the-end seat), and then walk back out.
A few moments later, theres a manager beside me “Sir, you’re sitting in someone elses seat”. I was a bit stunned/confused, given the large number of empty seats around me – and replied something like “Uhh, there’s an empty row infront and behind me”. But the Manager persisted “Sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to move”. Given I was missing the movie, I couldn’t be bothered arguing over it and got up and moved the next row down.

Heck, if the mother and daughter who wanted to sit there had been disabled in any way, or I was sitting in specially assigned seats, or I was just in the way of them getting to the rest of the group they were with, I wouldn’t have had any issue moving. But, no, there wasn’t any reason I could see – it was just a pedantic manager and (presumably) mother.

Windows Vista’s Scheduled Tasks & Windows Update
I really like Windows Vista. There’s a whole bunch of small things that add up to make it a real pleasure to use.

There are two things, however that do drive me up the wall.

The recommended option in Windows Update is for it to download and install items for you automatically. It’s a good idea too, after all – having most users be in charge of which critical updates get installed isn’t usually the best way to keep a PC secured and up-to-date.

The thing that really annoys the crap out of me, is that it will automatically reboot your computer, regardless of what you had open or what it was doing. So, if you were, say, downloading a large file, or processing a report – your computer reboots, and unless the software is designed to resume from it’s last point – you’ll have lost all that effort. This is especially annoying if you’re trying to download/process some data in an after-hours/off-peak timeperiod. Because Windows doesn’t return you to the point at which it rebooted (technically infeasable without security issues) – the software can’t resume from it’s last point.

The only work around I’ve found is to disable Windows Update from installing updates automatically.

Scheduled Tasks
Another thing that’s kinda cool about Windows Vista (and possibly XP too, however I never experienced it) – is that Schedule Tasks can wake the computer from a sleep, hibernate or even shutdown mode – as long as the computer still has power.

The most visible example of this is Windows Media Centre. It will wake the computer automatically to record TV Shows, which is good – however it also wakes the computer to update the TV guide. At 3am. Some people happen to have cases which in certain circumstances can vibrate, seting up a resonance in the desk which amplifies the sound of the vibrating case. So, everyone in the house, at 3am, knows the computer is downloading TV guides. Resulting in the power cord getting yanked out.

A more, err, sociable setting would be to wake it during the day, if the guide hadn’t been updated in the last 4 days or so.