Category: Internet

OddsNPods.co.uk – Pretty Shite

On Wednesday 12th December I placed an order with OddsNPods.co.uk, whom I’d come across during a price comparison using Google. That was my first mistake. The item was a Christmas present for my girlfriend and I believed that by ordering almost 2 weeks before Christmas I was giving them plenty of time to dispatch before the last posting date (they say they post at the latest the end of the next working day).

By Friday I was starting to get worried that my order was still “Awaiting Dispatch” so sent a message via their contact form (ticking the “Urgent” box). On Monday morning still nothing so I called the number on their web site to be greeted by a foreign-sounding lady.

“Hello?” she said. Puzzled by the lack of a company-branded welcome, I went on to say I was calling about an order that hadn’t been dispatched to find out what was going on.

“What company are you calling?” she asked.

Getting suspicious now I asked her “What company is this?”

“I can’t tell you that information.”

WHAT?! Alarm bells were ringing now. I asked if this was OddsNPods and she said “No, it’s a different company,” although it didn’t sound like a company at all.

A quick google search revealed that OddsNPods were related to DataKits.co.uk, a company with whom some people had previously had problems (despite a supposedly good rating on Kelkoo). The WHOIS for OddsNPods revealed they were indeed part of DataKits but had hidden their phone number from the whois results because “The registrant is a non-trading individual who has opted to have their address omitted from the WHOIS service.”

I fired off an email to their email address (bypassing the online form this time), telling them if I’d heard nothing by the end of today I’d be taking matters up with my credit-card company, and then fired another email off to Nominet telling them to update their WHOIS entry (they’ve since done this and now show the address of OddsNPods.co.uk as: 9 Frensham Road, Southsea, Hampshire, PO4 8AD, which seems to be a residential address to me).

As of11:53 their web site seems to be down.

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/tmp/mysql.sock’ (11) in /home/oddsnpod/public_html/includes/functions/database.php on line 19
Unable to connect to database server!

Not reassuring!

Anyway, come Tuesday afternoon (pretty much a week after I placed the order) I finally heard back and they asked if I still wanted it. I said if they could send it out first class the following day to go ahead with the order and they did. It arrived on Friday, safely in time for Christmas. It seems it’s not a scam after all but this “company” has serious customer service issues. Despite their good prices I’d think twice.

Driven to Plus.net by Awful Tiscali Service

After a long time looking I’ve finally left Tiscali with whom I had broadband and phone for over 2 years and I can’t believe I lasted that long.

Terrible Tiscali

For the last 6 months (probably a lot longer) I’ve not been able to do anything but basic web browsing and emails from mid-afternoon until about midnight, each and every day. This means no Peer-2-Peer downloads (I couldn’t use the BBC iPlayer, for example, and I’m fairly sure Channel 4’s On Demand service uses the same technology). It means no online gaming on my PlayStation 2 or, more recently, my Nintendo Wii. For other users it seems they have problems with PC gaming.

I’d be a little annoyed that Tiscali offered me “unlimited” 2MB broadband and then deliberately restricted the speeds during peak times. I’d be quite a lot more annoyed that they weren’t even honest about it at first, denying that they used traffic-shaping. But the fact that their traffic shaping stops me from using a lot of these services altogether (they say it’s a problem, I’m not sure whether it might be deliberate) is an outrage. Tiscali’s forums have seen reports flooding in from other users being affected and yet this has been ongoing for months.

As if that’s not bad enough, Tiscali “customer service” staff don’t want to know. In fact, Tiscali don’t even want you to contact them, so they make you call a rip-off 0871 number. This would be fine if I needed advice about what to plug in where to get my broadband going, but why should I line their pockets by calling their premium rate number to report a network problem that they have caused?

Pastures New – PlusNet

Anyway, as of Wednesday, I’m out. I’m now with Plus net on a 90-day trial (offer runs until 20/12/07), so we’ll see how that goes. At least they’re honest about their traffic-shaping and say that they limit speeds from P2P software during peak hours. That I can live with, as long as it’s not blocked altogether. They also have an 01 geographic number so I know I can phone them if I have a problem and not run up a big phone bill doing so. Since it’s a trial, if their traffic-shaping is anything like as broke as Tiscali’s I know I can leave without penalty. My main worry is that their 8GB package won’t be enough since it covers both uploads and downloads during the day (8am to midnight). Hopefully I can get any big downloads I need done overnight (downloads from midnight to 8AM are unlimited – they don’t count towards your allowance) and even if I can’t, I can find out without worrying about being stuck in a 12-month contract thanks to their trial offer.

This probably sounds a bit like an advertorial (I would get a referral bonus if anyone did sign up from my site) but the whole thing all sounds a bit too good to be true, when you factor in that you can get a free Static IP and a user survey by Uswitch.com rated them number 1 on customer satisfaction as well.

I’ve only starting with Plus.net 2 days ago and the speeds don’t seem tremendous (but still better than the 1.5-ish Mb/s I was getting with Tiscali) so I can’t say too much about my own experience yet, but as a company they’re already looking a whole lot better than Tiscali. I’ll post a follow-up after I’ve had a couple of weeks to find out how good they are.

If you decide to sign up, please make sure and tell them you were recommended by “ferson” (no quotes). Cheers.

Microsoft Want to Own You

Installing Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D plugin for Firefox (yes, they wrote something that works in Firefox) I was reminded of one more reason why I hate Microsoft.

You’d think with all the anti-competitive suits being filed against them they’d get over this, but apparently not.

Have a look at what’s presented to you when you install the Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D plugin.
Microsoft Want to Own Your PC

Yes, that’s right, when you install Virtual Earth 3D, Microsoft try to take over your home page and default search engine: two completely unrelated services. If they must give us the option then fine, but they have the boxes ticked by default and that is where I believe they cross the line from opportunistic cross-selling to scummy, underhanded manipulation. Not that it’s a big surprise, they do the same thing with their Windows Live Messenger product. This is an even more blatant example of what they’re trying to do here, which is using their strength (and in the case of Messenger, dominance) in one market to try and dominate in another.

If it takes another legal case to sort this out then it should be done, but Microsoft should be fined and forced to pay legal costs. The previous controversy over their bundling of Media Player in Windows obviously hasn’t taught them anything.

“This generation does not want an archive of music” – Vodafone

Vodafone‘s head of internet and content services made this bold, and rather hasty, claim in promotion of MusicStation, Vodafone’s new subscription music service, which offers unlimited music downloads – downloads which all become useless the inst ant you stop making regular monthly payments to Vodafone.

“This generation does not want an archive of music. We offer unlimited music on a rental model – no-one has done this in the marketplace, and certainly not the iPhone.”
Al Russell, Vodafone’s head of internet and content services

Maybe this blogger, in his early-to-mid-twenties, is too old not part of whatever Mr Russel means by “this generation” any longer, but the last thing I want is to pay over £100 a year (£2 a week) and have nothing to show for it at the end should I decide to change networks. I’ve always avoided subscription-based download services like Napster for exactly this kind of reason (even they now offer Napster Light: a pay-per-download service). I will use it if it’s included free when I happen to take out a Vodafone contract (which I might have to if they’re the only network to get the N95 8GB which I desperately want, just not at £50 a month!), but MusicStation will not be a factor in my decision.

Perhaps Vodafone should take a look at the experience of Bango who manage, among other services, The Sun newspaper’s download service.

Trusted brands are keen not to be tarred with the subscription brush. For example, The Sun newspaper that uses Bango to power the pay per downloads on Sun Mobile, print “No subscriptions – No hidden charges” on its ads to reassure consumers it is not a subscription service. Mobile operators have also expressed a desire to move away from this type of payment as subscriptions are a major cause of consumer dissatisfaction.
Network for Online Commerce – Pay-per-download gaining popularity…

The ‘archive of music’ as Mr Russell describes it, is the modern equivalent of the CD collection. It doesn’t make a difference if you only listen to the CD once in 5 years, you keep it because you can.  It comforts the inner-hoarder in all of us. The long and short of it is, I think, that we do want it.

The push for subscription based downloads has nothing to do with what Vodafone’s (or anyone else’s) consumers want, it’s all about the interests of the big service providers and record labels, and any push towards this should be resisted. It will by this consumer anyway.

BT Marketing People Are Evil

There is a sick practice in marketing in telecoms that is much worse than the misleading speeds issue Ofcom and the ASA have recently been looking at. Let’s face it, anyone who knows what a Megabit actually means is likely to realise the quoted “up to” speed means very little in real terms. No, a much bigger issue with the broadband industry is misleading price claims, which have been a pet peeve of mine for some months now. BT are not the only ones guilty of this, but from what I’ve seen they are the worst offenders – employing similar tactics for other products, like their mobile plan.

BT Broadband Advertising - misleading?Without the slightest hint of shame, BT advertise their unlimited option 3 broadband service is advertised on their site, on a page comparing their three plans, as “From only £18.99 a month”. Normally you expect a catch when you see the words “from only” preceding a price, and that’s fine if you’re adding extras on top of a basic plan, but here, the advertised price is essentially a headline-grabbing lie. Contrast with Virgin Media, who advertise their headline introductory price first, but immediately followed by their regular price (and applicable conditions) given virtually equal prominence.

You see, when you click on “more about option 3” (the ads for other plans or ‘options’ all contain similar lies) you’re taken to a page explaining that it’s really £18.99 for just 6 months of an 18 month contract, then £24.99. Basically, I don’t see why BT (and others) should be allowed to get away with advertising a price of £18.99 for a service that actually costs £22.99 a month over the minimum term and obviously more if, as BT would like, you stay on the plan at the full price once that term has ended. Worse yet, the “order now” link takes you directly to the Option 3 sign-up page without the slightest hint that you’ll be paying over 20% more than you they told you. I wonder would they actually let you complete the registration without informing you?! (I got as far as them asking me for my MAC number).

Continue reading “BT Marketing People Are Evil”

nerd. links – Fix Firefox/Flash CPU Thrashing

I love FireFox, both as a web browser and as a web designer. I love it because it works, I love it for adhering (much better than IE ever will anyway) to web standards and I love it for the handy plugins that you can get.

I hate it though, for thrashing my CPU to 99% whenever I load some pages with flash animations in them. UnitedWebHosting which, as of this date, hosts this site (though probably not for long) is one that’ll do it. Today, I went to ZDnet UK only for a couple of Intel ads to do the same.

It seems like a bit of a joke that a company the size of Adobe (the makers of Flash: they write the plugin, not Mozilla) haven’t managed to resolve this, fairly major, bug. I’m sure they know about it, I mean different people seem to have been talking about since at least January last year.

FlashBlock inserts placeholders for Flash animationsObviously while FireFox is hogging 99% of your CPU there’s only 1% to share among the rest of the programs you have running, so Outlook and the rest didn’t have much of a hope of doing anything at all until I killed the FireFox process in task manager. As this wasn’t the first time this had happened, I decided to go hunting for a solution – which brings me to FlashBlock (hat-tip to The Idiot).

FlashBlock uses JavaScript to replace flash animations in web pages with placeholders (an empty square with a flash logo in the middle). Don’t worry though, clicking this will run the flash animation if you really want to see something (e.g. if you visit YouTube or another site where the primary content is encoded in Flash files). In fact you can even specify a ‘white-list’ of sites in which flash content will run automatically.

nerd. links – Flash is Evil

I’m graduating on Wednesday and have been looking about town (Belfast) for somewhere to have a meal afterwards to celebrate with the family. I’ve been round a few places (Yum looks like the favourite at the moment) and now Bourbon has been suggested. “Good idea!” I thought. I’ll just check their menu on their web site.

Unfortunately that’s easier said than done. It’s all fine until you hit the back button to go back from the Set Menu to the A la Carte one. You see the site is a wholesale abuse of Flash and it reminded me of an 8 year old article called Flash is Evil. The article may be getting on a bit, but every word’s as true now as it was then.

Flash has it’s uses and designing entire web sites (particularly web site navigation) is not one of them.

Server application unavailable: installing IIS on .NET 2.0

I feel so dirty, but for a project I’m working on at the moment I have to use ASP.NET instead of PHP; “why?” is a question for another day. Anyway, I’ve installed IIS before so that wasn’t a big problem… or so I thought.

I already had the .NET 2.0 framework on my XP machine so went straight to installing IIS (5.1 comes with XP Pro). It installed easily enough and my hello world html file was served without any major problems (actually that’s not true, before I copied my own files across I tried to check the IIS default pages served ok only to discover, through more googling, that if I used IE instead of Firefox that annoying box asking me for a password would go away).

Now my ASP.NET issue. I got a Server application unavailable error message in big red letters when I tried to run any .aspx (ASP.NET) scripts and couldn’ t figure ou t for the life of me why. The Event Viewer, where IIS errors are logged, gave little more by way of help: Failed to initialize the AppDomain:/LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT

Err… What?! I worked out that it wasn’t affecting html pages, just ASP ones – and only .aspx ones at that, suggesting it was .NET-related.

As it turns out the problem was that I had installed .NET before IIS. It’s easy enough to fix, but it took 20 solid minutes of googling to find the solution in a Microsoft community newsgroup (and then realise that I’d have found it already if I’d just read to the bottom of a 4 year old forum post I’d already found).

Anyway, what you need to do if you’re getting this “Server application unavailable” message is navigate to your .NET directory (something like C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727) in a command prompt and run the command aspnet_regiis.exe -i which will register ASP.NET with IIS. If that still doesn’t work, there’s always PHP.net 😉

BT Admits 21CN’s True Speed

Anyone who has read my previous posts here may have gleaned that I have a certain disdain for big companies over-hyping their own products. Having seen so many instances of BT coming so close to telling outright lies as makes no difference, I was understandably sceptical when I heard BT claims that their 21st Century Network (21CN) would give users broadband ADSL speeds of “up to 24MB/s.”

Sure enough, what do you know, it turns out I was rightly sceptical. Buried in a statement from BT’s CTO announcing that BT would not implement traffic shaping, was an admission that you would need to be practically in the exchange to achieve that kind of speed and a prediction that real speeds would be somewhere in the region of 8-12MB/s. So basically we’ll get roughly the speeds that BT (and other ISPs) have been telling us we can get for a year or more now ? Wow. That’s right up there with

From just £9.99 a month
£9.99 a month for first 6 months, £17.99 a month for the next 12

Don’t you just love marketers?