taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

I’m waiting for a replacement battery from Dell, covered under warranty. Dell service have been great, but UPS, not so much…

On Monday (25th June), after a little back-and-forth to establish that the battery was faulty, I got a mail from Dell saying:

The Part (Battery) will be with you tomorrow pre 17:00 (Next Business Day). Please note that you will require to return the faulty part at the same point of time, the courier person would not be delivering the part until you return the defective part.

Great! That’s good warranty service. I’m happy.

So I wait… and wait. Finally, 2 days later, today (Wednesday 27th), at 17:45, a courier appears to pick up the faulty part. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the replacement with him.

I go online to see what’s up via online tracking, and see this:

So, what, the street name is “INCORRECT” despite one UPS driver having no problem? I suspect someone just couldn’t be arsed.

I rang up UPS, provided a hint, and it seems the delivery is now rescheduled for Friday. So much for “next business day” delivery! Lucky the laptop works on AC without the battery, otherwise I’d be quite annoyed.

I wonder if I can provide feedback to Dell about this? There’s a possibility they might switch courier company if they get enough complaints about crappy service. It also makes me wonder if there’s any decent international parcel delivery service in Ireland. At least UPS haven’t yet required me to schlep over to a “local” depot 5 miles away to pick up the package myself, like An Post does…

Tags: an-post, couriers, delivery, ireland, post, postage, suckage, ups, ups-suck

I don’t know what’s going on with An Post, the Irish postal service, these days — I’ve been having some pretty bad luck with them.

For my birthday, I was lucky enough to be given a Thingamagoop — it took a while (hey, they’re hand-made) but was shipped on Nov 7th from the US. Bleep Labs accidentally shipped me two, apparently, but only one has arrived — on Nov 16th, 9 days after shipping. The other one’s still AWOL nearly a month later.

I then ordered something from Sendit.com on Nov 17th, as a birthday gift for Nov 30th. It was shipped from their Belfast offices on Nov 18th, and still hasn’t arrived to date. Sendit were champs, however, and refunded the purchase as soon as I rang them on the 30th (I’d recommend their services, no problem).

Finally, SpamAssassin was lucky enough to win a Linux New Media Award 2006 for ‘Best Linux-based Anti-spam Solution’ — nifty! As part of this, a (physical) trophy is apparently winging its way from Germany, and was apparently shipped on November 27th. Guess what: no sign.

In other words, in the past month, 75% of the parcels sent to me seem to have gone AWOL. All I can do is hope that they’ve just been delayed, rather than suffer a worse fate. In particular, I hope that trophy turns up — it’s the only physical award we’ve ever received :(

Can anyone think of a good avenue to track these down? The website seems pretty negative, and what I’ve heard seems to be along the lines of ‘turn up at the sorting depot, cross your fingers, and see if they’ve been misdelivered’. Ick.

Tags: an-post, dublin, ireland, post

Patents: An anonymous contributor writes:

‘I just received this letter and these pre-addressed postcards in the post this morning. I was surprised when I saw the envelope, because I’d never received anything from the BSA before. It turned out that they had extracted my name and address from the European Patents database, because I registered a software patent once. So a lot of these letters have been probably been sent out.

According to the letter, from Francisco Mingorance, the draft directive is being turned around to ‘rob small businesses of their intellectual property assets’.

I find it hard to see how that could be true. However the BSA’s letter has an important message you should heed - it is critical to contact your European representatives (your MEP and your country’s Commissioner) within the next two weeks. Let them know that the European Union should curtail software patents for once and for all.

Get out your best stationery and write to your MEP at the address given on this page.

Make sure your message is short and clear. SME’s don’t benefit from patents. Few patents are held by SME’s and the cost of applying for, maintaining and defending them is crippling.’

jm: I would suggest noting that you support the position of rapporteur
Michel Rocard MEP, and/or the FFII — details here. Please do write!

• scanned JPEG of cover letter
• scanned JPEG of some of the postcards

BTW, the contributor also offers: ‘if anyone is interested in doctoring up the BSA postcards, I can provide the hi-res scans.’ ;)

Tags: bsa, contributor, european, jpeg, letter, mep, message, patents, post, sme, software

Tech: Excellent post from Colin Charles here:

Which brings us to an interesting point. Computers today are largely based on metaphors that the average urban bloke understands. Like we have a desktop, to represent our workspace. How do we transpose such an idea to someone in a rural area? What about a blinking cursor, in a language like Urdu that has no translation? They’ve resulted in calling it a ‘firefly’!

That’s taking Danny’s ‘eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm’ comment even further…

Tags: bloke, desktop, excellent, idea, point, post, someone, tech, today, transpose, workspace

Web: Dive Into Markdown — a great post from John Gruber about editable-text-to-HTML formats (he’s the author of Markdown):

… my actual workflow looked like this:

1. Write in BBEdit.
2. Preview in a browser.
3. Switch back to BBEdit for revisions.
4. Repeat until done.
5. Log into MT, paste the article, publish.

Eventually, it dawned on me: this is madness. The primary advantage to using a computer for writing is the immediacy of editing. Write, read, revise, all in the same window, all in the same mode.

Totally agreed (although note, I’m using my own, very similar, EtText instead of Markdown ;). But this weblog is 100% EtText-driven, instead of HTML — I just throw an email at it, and it publishes it. I don’t think I’ve used the web interface in months.

Which reminds me — I really should steal some ideas gather inspiration from Markdown for EtText at some stage. ;)

Tags: author, bbedit, dive, ettext, html, markdown, post, preview, web, workflow, write

Green: There’s been a bit of chat on the intarweb recently about a new high-tech fuel source that avoids the fossil-fuel trap, namely thermal depolymerization. Here’s a couple of links that are relevant:

• MeFi: original post
• MeFi: thinking about the figures
• BioDieselNow forums

Sounds possibly useful although: (a) is there enough biomass produced to produce fuel in useful quantities, and (b) I bet it stinks downwind of that. ;)

Tags: biodieselnow, bit, couple, depolymerization, fuel, green, intarweb, mefi, post, source, trap

Patents: The Washington Post gets it. ‘The country “needs to revamp not just the patent system, but the entire system of intellectual property law,” said Andrew S. Grove, chairman of Intel Corp. “It needs to redefine it for an era that is the information age as compared to the industrial age.”‘

BTW, one thing people say is that software patents are fine, as long as the technique is novel and new. What that misses is that novel, new techniques quickly become commonplace and standard infrastructure; consider image/audio/video compression, general compression techniques, cryptography, and so on. Those were all high-tech, super-complex schemes 5 years ago. Nowadays, we have JPEG, gzip, openssl, ssh, and all these other standard tools that are just part and parcel of our basic infrastructure. In software, ‘new and novel’ becomes ’standard infrastructure’ remarkably quickly, and that’s what’s driving software innovation.

Tags: age, compression, country, infrastructure, novel, patent, patents, post, software, system, washington

Net: So it seems Kerry Packer has announced a Netflix-like service in Australia, Homescreen.

In essence, you pay a flat fee per month, log on to a website, select a whole batch of DVDs, and they post the first 3 out to you. You can keep them as long as you like, then post them back in pre-paid envelopes; once they arrive at the nearest depot, they post out the next 3 on your list.

This works very well — in the form of Netflix at least. I can vouch for the coolness of this; pretty much everyone I know who has a DVD player has joined Netflix. It’s just great having 3 DVDs on-hand for whenever you feel like watching one.

Of course, it requires that the serivce have a decent selection of goods, including some good ‘classics’. From the sounds of things, Homescreen may be failing on this point.

Also, it requires a reliable postal service. But if they can do it in the US, they can certainly do it in Australia or any European country ;)

And I’d bet Ireland has a whole huge DVD-player installed base, given the oft-quoted factoid that there are more PlayStations per capita in Ireland than any other country outside of Japan.

Irish entrepreneurs — get cracking! ;)

Tags: country, dvds, essence, homescreen, kerry, net, netflix, netflix-like, packer, post, service

I’ve been reading Crooked Timber recently; a good literate weblog. Today’s interesting post, from Kieran Healy: Frustration is not a Strategy. Well worth a read for some context on today’s Middle East, and the fundamental problem with those ‘kill ‘em all’ proposals that keep cropping up from the hawks.

Blogs: Nathan Cochrane, Aussie journalist for The Age and writer of a very interesting weblog — has won quite a lot of money on a TV gameshow! I think the term is ‘goodonyamate’, if I recall correctly ;)

(Pity he couldn’t have fixed the BlogShares listing first though.)

Tags: context, crooked, frustration, literate, post, read, strategy, timber, today, weblog

Boca (Raton, FL) stamping itself spam capital (Palm Beach Post):

‘Boca Raton is stamping itself worldwide for millions of Internet users flooded in spam as the ‘world spam capital,’ said Steve Linford, director of the Spamhaus Project …

‘We’d rather be known for our parks and quality of life,’ Boca Raton Mayor Steven Abrams said.’

Found via spamNEWS.

Tags: beach, boca, capital, internet, palm, post, raton, spam, the, worldwide