random

While I was at OOW2010 my sister Julie was diagnosed with skin cancer. Just after I got back to the UK some scans revealed it had spread to a number of places including her brain and stomach. She started a course of treatment and we were all hopeful, but we knew the odds were stacked against her. On Saturday 9th April she died at the age of 48.

When Julie was 11 a boy at school was annoying her. She took a swing at him, missed and punched the guy standing next to him. The guy she accidentally punched was called Mark. He became her boyfriend, then later her husband and now, after 37 years of being together, her widower.

Cheers

Tim…

I mentioned in a previous post that I was planning another customer services rant and here it comes.

A few weeks ago I decided to buy a new server from SCAN Computers. Let me start by saying I’ve used SCAN lots of times in the past for components and they’ve always been great. That’s one of the reasons I decided to use them for a pre-built system. I picked the relevant configuration (2x Xeon quad, 24G RAM, 6 Hard drives etc.) and paid my cash. What followed left me with a rather bad taste in my mouth…

• When I ordered the kit I was given an estimated delivery date of 2 days. I realized this was a rubbish automated message, but I later received a mail to say they were busy and couldn’t start the build for another week.
• After some more time, I was contacted and told they couldn’t start the build for a little longer because they were waiting for Intel to deliver the server motherboard and chassis.
• Once the build started I received an email as it passed each checkpoint. Once the build was complete it went into QA, then I received no more notifications.
• After 7 days I got pissed off and phoned them to ask what was going on. I was then told the build had failed QA and they were trying to rectify the issue in conjunction with Intel.
• After a few more days I was contacted and told they couldn’t get all the hard drives I ordered. I agreed to have it delivered with just 5 hard drives, rather than wait an unspecified time for the missing disk to arrive.
• The refund for the missing hard drive has still not arrived at my bank.
• The next email I got was telling me the server had failed to be delivered because they couldn’t get hold of me. Admittedly, my account had an incorrect mobile number on it, but the land line number was correct. I received no calls on the land line on the days when they allegedly tried to call. They also didn’t attempt the delivery without contact, even though the address on my account was correct and I was in on the day in question.
• The delivery was finally made 5 days after the first “failed” delivery.
• I opened the box and found there was no DVD drive installed. I phoned SCAN to ask what was going on. It seems the option “Use DVD Writer included in chassis”, actually means, “No DVD Writer installed”. I kicked up a fuss about this and was sent a DVD drive for free, which I had to install myself. The DVD drive came the next day, along with a data cable, but there was no converter cable for the power, so I had to go out an buy one.
• The lack of a DVD drive didn’t stop me starting to use the server. I just did a network installation of Fedora 14. In doing so, I noticed the RAID configuration was incorrect. I asked for a RAID 1 system disk and all the other disks just to be left alone. Instead the additional disks were in a RAID 0 set. It took me quite a while and a couple of phone calls to realize that in order to access the RAID configuration, the BIOS had to be switched out of silent boot.

So it’s just short of 2 months down the line, lots of phone calls and a refund for a missing disk still outstanding…

I would like to mention the server itself is awesome and the individuals I dealt with in customer service were nice enough, but the whole process has aged me. When you are sitting in the SCAN phone queue the hold music tells you that you’re a valued customer and SCAN are transparent and aim to provided the best customer experience possible. I think not…

Would I recommend them? From a kit perspective they are cool. You can choose the components you want (within reason) and it has been put together and cabled well. Unfortunately, the kit is only part of the issue. The whole experience has been really poor…

Cheers

Tim…

WordPress 3.1.1 has just been released. Here are the changes. Happy upgrading…

Cheers

Tim…

The subject of parental participation in kids clubs came up in conversation today and it reminded me of the 90-9-1 rule and a recent post about the usage of Twitter.

I’ve been involved in a number of clubs and classes since University, and in recent years I’ve been witness to the clubs that kids of my friends and family attend. In most cases, they follow a similar pattern. There are a very small number of highly motivated people who keep the club functioning. A slightly larger number of people who hang around in the periphery, stepping in from time to time to help out, but shying away from any formal commitment. Finally you have the vast majority of people who do nothing but drop off their kids and let them get on with it.

Sound familiar?

I’m sure you’ve seen a similar pattern yourself in clubs, online communities and even in companies you’ve worked for.

Cheers

Tim…

Followers of the blog will know I’m a big fan of UltraEdit. I have a multi-platform unlimited upgrades license, so I run it on Linux, Mac and occasionally on a Windows VM.

I noticed today that version 2.1.0.3 was released for Mac and Linux about a month ago. Not sure how I missed that on the update notices. The changes for Mac are not that big because it was already at version 2.x, but the Linux version had been hanging around the 1.x for some time now and was missing a lot of functionality compared to the Mac version. This latest release is a pretty big catch-up for the Linux version and it now contains pretty much all of the functionality I use on a regular basis.

Both the Mac and Linux versions are still lagging behind the Windows version in terms of total functionality, but who cares about Windows…

Cheers

Tim…

I have two big customer service rants coming. This one is related to Virgin Media and the next one will be about SCAN. I’ll hold back on the second one while I wait to see if they do the right thing.

I had Virgin Media installed on 9th March and I am completely happy with the cable broadband service, but they were unable to take on my phone line because of capacity issues. That resulted in a complete mess over the billing of my service because of the way Virgin Media process discounts on bundles. I contacted customer services and after a lot of messing about the billing situation was resolved to my satisfaction.

A few weeks later I was notified of my first bill and it was completely wrong. I got in touch with customer services and after a very long time the issue seemed to be resolved AGAIN, but I was told I would be contacted by midday the same day for confirmation by a manager. It is now 6 days later and I’ve not received a call. In that time I’ve been phoning trying to get it resolved.

I’ve just got off the phone and I’ve been assured it is sorted now, but I know it will all be a steaming pile of poo next month when the bill is sorted again.

Each person I’ve talked to has been fine, but the whole process and the systems involved are terrible. It stinks. In no way can this be called good customer services. It is a complete nightmare.

Sometimes bad customer service is because the people answering the phones are morons. Sometimes it is because the procedures and systems they are working with are idiotic. It comes to something when the person on the other end of the phone is unable to tell you how much you will be charged because the systems they are using are so convoluted with a variety of possible discounts that may or may not be applied…

So in conclusion, Virgin Media customer services is a festering pile of donkey crap…

Cheers

Tim…

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you will know I fell down the stairs last night. My office is upstairs and I often put mail on the stairs to remind me to take it up. I also have a habit of walking around the house with the lights off in the evening. These two factors combined beautifully yesterday and resulted in me launching myself down the stairs with a couple of empty mugs in my hands. The initial assessment was left knee and right elbow were sore and I had some small cuts on my hands and arms from the shattered mugs in my hands. As the adrenaline wore off I noticed more cuts and various bits of my body started to ache.

Everything is OK this morning. My left knee still feels a bit dodgy, but all the cuts were so fine they are barely noticeable now. Apart from that, it’s just an all-over body ache similar to minor whiplash. Fun, fun, fun…

Cheers

Tim…

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you will know I fell down the stairs last night. My office is upstairs and I often put mail on the stairs to remind me to take it up. I also have a habit of walking around the house with the lights off in the evening. These two factors combined beautifully yesterday and resulted in me launching myself down the stairs with a couple of empty mugs in my hands. The initial assessment was left knee and right elbow were sore and I had some small cuts on my hands and arms from the shattered mugs in my hands. As the adrenaline wore off I noticed more cuts and various bits of my body started to ache.

Everything is OK this morning. My left knee still feels a bit dodgy, but all the cuts were so fine they are barely noticeable now. Apart from that, it’s just an all-over body ache similar to minor whiplash. Fun, fun, fun…

Cheers

Tim…

After suffering for far too long with poor ADSL performance, I finally ditched my TalkTalk ADSL service and replaced it with cable from Virgin Media. A couple of years ago I was getting 8Mb on my ADSL line. In recent times I’ve been struggling to hit 2Mb. The breaking point came when one of my former colleagues sent me a picture of his speedtest.net result showing a 30Mb service on a day when I was struggling to get connected.

I went for the cheapest service Virgin Media offer. I’m paying for 10Mb and I’m actually getting 10Mb (who’da thunk it). I figured that things have been so slow recently, 10Mb would feel rapid and sure enough it does. No doubt in a few weeks I’ll be bitching about it and want to upgrade…  :)

The change over left me with one little issue. My Virgin router is down stairs, but my wired network is upstairs. That problem was solved today when a man in a van dropped off a present from Amazon in the form off a Buffalo Wireless-N Nfiniti™ Dual Band Ethernet Converter. I plugged that into my switch upstairs and Bob’s your uncle, I now have a bridged network.

The MacBook Pro and iPad have once again been relegated to scrapyard side of my desk and I’m back to using my main desktop. Aaahhhh Linux…

Cheers

Tim…

In a thread on the OakTable mailing list, James Morle pointed out that Oracle’s Web Conferencing software was IE only. A point that has been mentioned by Jake from The AppsLab a number of times in relation to his need for a Windows VM on his Mac. The discussion turned to the relative browser share and multi-browser support. This post is a minor rearrangement of my posts to that thread.

Before I launch into the body of the post, keep in mind I am talking about complex (typically GUI style) apps with a specific purpose that run from within a browser, not just general web pages!

The breakdown of browser stats from my website over the last month was.

• Internet Explorer: 42.32%
• Firefox: 38.68%
• Chrome: 15.19%

Which is pretty similar to those figures quoted in the summary on Wikipedia.

• Internet Explorer: 43.55%
• Firefox: 29.0%
• Chrome: 13.89%

That surprised me because in the past I’ve always found my stats for IE much lower than the general stats quoted. I’ve always assumed this was because Oracle geeks try out alternative browsers much more than the general public. Most “normal” people I know use IE. Most geeks I know don’t. Now they seem to match. Does this mean more regular folk are moving to Firefox & Chrome, or is this all being skewed by browsers on mobile devices?

The stats for mobile devices are shown here, but I am not sure if these get included in the general stats also. If so, I would expect some of the Chrome hits to be coming from Android devices and some of the Safari hits to be coming from iPhone and iPad devices. If that is the case, then using the general browser market share stats may not be too clever when deciding the impact of whether to support a specific browser for your app. Maybe OS usage is a better option.

Looking at the OS usage stats on Wikipedia, Windows is still kicking butt on the desktop, so all these people have access to IE as well as their preferred browser.

• Windows XP (41.15%)
• Windows 7 (26.35%)
• Windows Vista (14.57%)
• Mac OS X (7.07%)
• iOS (iPhone) (2.20%)
• Linux (1.65%)

Compare that to my site, where Linux is the distant second biggest OS.

• Windows: 90.56%
• Linux: 6.37%
• Macintosh: 2.33%
• iPhone: 0.21%

For a browser-based app you expect to be run from the desktop, forcing people to use (or have access to) IE is not that much to ask. The vast majority can, if pushed, switch to IE for that specific task.

I don’t think you can lump mobile and non-mobile into one pot. Mobile apps have so many constraints to consider that they will invariably be treated as a separate project that must *definitely* be multi-browser compliant or a native app.

Browser-based apps that are intended for desktop users are different because about 90% of the time (according to the stats) they will be used on a Windows PC, having access to IE.

Obviously, your intention should always be to build apps that are multi-browser compliant, but depending on the nature and purpose of the specific app, having to open IE to run it will have zero impact on the vast majority of users (both home and business) until Windows loses its desktop dominance or the desktop ceases to exist…

Going back to the app that started this thread, Oracle’s Web Conferencing, is it a problem that this is IE only? Well it’s a pain for me because I’m a Mac and Linux user, but it’s not insurmountable because I can use a VM. I’ve never needed or wanted to use this functionality from a mobile device, so the IE constraint hasn’t affected me in that respect. In this case it’s very much a business app, so the vast majority of users will be sitting at a Windows PC. With that in mind, this is one of those cases where the IE constraint is annoying, but acceptable.

Cheers

Tim…