tonywhitmore.co.uk  

Well, Scan.co.uk have refunded me the £15.26 for the wireless keyboard and mouse that I returned to them.

The last e-mail I had from them was on the 10th October asking to send them a cheque for £20 + VAT so they could send the non-working keyboard back to me, and that I had to reply within 7 days. Well, I replied the following day re-iterating my previous points, and also pointing out that the signature appended to their e-mails meant that no-one from Scan had officially responded to my RMA request. Then silence. For two weeks.

So I e-mailed them on Monday evening and got a reply on Tuesday that the “item was put in for a refund on 14/10/05″. Nice of them to e-mail and let me know that they’d finally seen sense.

I’m satisfied with the outcome from this little affair, but it really shouldn’t have taken over 7 weeks to resolve this issue. I hope it makes them, and other companies, think about how they describe products on their website, their trading practices and the wording of their e-mail signatures.

I’ve recently become a member of the OpenDocument Fellowship, which is a volunteer organisation that exists to support and promote the use of the OASIS document format for office applications. It’s a document format with an open specification, and is used by default in OpenOffice.org v2.

The current campaign is to get Microsoft to introduce support for OpenDocument in their Office suite. Microsoft have said publicly that they will do so if there is a demand – and now it’s time to show them that demand! There is a petition hosted on the OpenDocument fellowship website where you can sign up as an individual or on behalf of the company you work for, giving the number of machines for which you are responsible. There are over 85,000 machines represented on the petition so far, but it needs more!

The redoubtable Sparkes has started his online geek t-shirt store, nerd.ws. There are some interesting new designs there, plenty of retro computing ones, and a fair few “standards” too.

Particular favourites of mine are Dent 42, a turin-shroud-like RMS and a LUG Radio one.

I use VMWare Workstation. It’s one of the few non-FLOSS applications that I run. I look forward to Qemu being as fast, feature rich and as easy to use so that I can switch to it instead. But until then, VMWare it is.

Maybe I just missed the reports, but at some point recently VMWare have released VMWare Player, a free (small “f”) application for Windows and Linux that allows you to “play” Virtual Machines created by any of their commercial products. There is even a collection of virtual machines available for download and a feature comparison chart.

Why bother commenting on this product? Obviously it slashes the cost of basing your infrastructure and desktops on virtualisation technology. But that’s very much a corporate angle. The impact on the FLOSS community could be more interesting.

VMWare Workstation is pretty expensive, enough to put most people off buying it. But this player is free. For redistributable OSes, people with full VMWare Workstations can create Virtual Machine for others. I can see projects making collections of Virtual Machines containing different Linux distros, BSDs etc available for download. You could essentially provide a fully configured development environment for your project in the form of a VM. Even those running Windows could contribute by developing under a Linux VM. Or for web applications that are tricky to set up, VM images could be distributed with everything set up just ready to go. All the complex configuraion could be done by someone who knows what they’re doing. Get the player, get the VM image and off you go.

I always seem to have a stack of magazines kicking around waiting for me to read. In fact, I have too many – it’s been too long since I picked up a novel. I regularly get delivered Private Eye, Physics World, Doctor Who Magazine, Sightlines, Linux Format, Linux User & Developer and Personal Computer World. I’ve also flicked through some recent issues of Linux Magazine and it seems to have grown up a lot and they contained a lot of feature articles that appealed to me.

Now, there are obviously quite a few computing magazines on that list. And there isn’t one that is 100% ideal in my eyes. LXF is often sloppily proof-read and a lot of their articles are quite basic. LU&D is in danger of disappearing up its own backside on occasion with overly analytical articles, but has great opinion columns. PCW is so Windows-oriented that most if its contents aren’t relevant, but they are introducing more FLOSS-based content and do review general PC hardware, unlike the Linux magazines.

I can get a lot of the magazine’s content (or equivalents) from online sites, but it’s nice to have dead tree media sometimes. Something to read on a train or for a few minutes before bed, without staring at the backlit rectangle of doom. Ideally, I’d like someone to put together a service that allows you to pick and choose the parts of particular magazines that you actually want to read. You might even end up paying slightly more than the price of a single magazine, but significantly less than the cost of all those individual subscriptions over the course of a year. I’d even accept a dozen pages of adverts to keep the cost down.

In it, I’d have:

• The news pages and hardware reviews from Personal Computer World
• The Hot Picks, “What on Earth”s and some of the tutorials from Linux Format
• The opinion columns and news from Linux User & Developer
• The feature articles from Linux Magazine

Now, if someone could set this service up, that’d be just peachy. And then e-mail me when it’s ready. Thanks.

Being able to host services at home on the end of a broadband connection is great until those services start to get noticed by some of the less bright ‘net users out there. I have no problem with my site, wiki, gallery etc. being spidered by search engines and being Googleable. People might find something of use on there one day. I also accept that should any of the content generate too much legitimate traffic I’ll have to move it elsewhere. However, recently I’ve noticed a lot of bandwidth getting used for long periods of time. Use of top and tail -f /var/log/apache/access.log has shown that some anti-social individuals are deep linking to pictures in my gallery. These are generally photos of the cats, and large ones at that. Several megabytes a time, in fact. (Two in particular have linked to a huge image and then resized it to a couple of hundred pixels each way.)

Now, I’m happy that Bailey and Gizmo are so cute that they’re admired by people all over the world. But I want my bandwidth back! The general web guru that is Graham Bleach pointed me at the Apache mod_rewrite guide (search for the section headed “Referer-based Deflector”). This little tip gives me the ability to redirect any incoming requests from a given referer to any other destination. At this stage I toyed with being very evil (I have my BOFH shirt on today too!) and redirecting the image requests to tubgirl or similar. However, I decided to be a slightly nicer person and created a small image file to use instead. This small image is hosted on the webspace provided by my ISP. So although the initial HTTP request and the redirect information come up and down my line, nothing else does.

Hopefully this will relieve the strain on my bandwidth and might educate a few people into changing their ways.

An accomplished diplomat who can virtually do no wrong, you sometimes know it is best to rely on the council of others while holding the reins.

There are some words which I have known since I was a schoolboy. “With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” These words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie — as a wisdom, and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged.

Apparently.

OK, just posting content that other people have blogged about is the lasiest form of entry. But I’m going to do it anyway.

Aquarion blogged about this video of John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell playing a cracking track. It’s a 55MB video, but it’s worth it.

Kevin Smith has posted a photo of the return of Jay and Silent Bob in Clerks 2. I’m really looking forward to that flick.

Well, I’ve had another e-mail from Scan. Their left hand doesn’t seem to know what their right hand is doing. I can’t believe that they’ve wasted so much of their staff time on a £15 product.

This e-mail, like all the others they’ve sent me, bears a “signature” that entirely negates the validity of the e-mail. I don’t want someone acting in a “personal capacity” to deal with this issue, I want someone acting in a professional capacity and representing the company! It’s not hard to work out really.

They really do seem to be turning out as a company of prize muppets. So far I’ve dealt with Mrs. E. H. Norris, John, Mark R, Micheal W and now Immy.

Antony Whitmore,

Scan Computers
27-28 Enterprise Park
Middlebrook
Horwich
Bolton
BL6 6PE

10 Oct 2005

RMA 121193

Dear Antony Whitmore:

Despite a notification letter being sent to you on 26/09/05, our records sho=
w we are still waiting for a no fault found payment of =A320=2E00 + VAT=2E

This payment is charged for testing your equipment, which was found not to b=
e faulty=2E

Please reply to this letter immediately and no later than 7 working days wit=
h your payment details so we may clear your outstanding RMA=2E

Failure to do so will result in your goods being disposed of to an auction v=
alue, without any further notification, so we may recover our fees=2E

Please reply to this letter to resolve the situation=2E

Yours Sincerely,

Immy
Returns Dept

Immy
Scan Computers

The set of characters in the subject uniquely identifies your query=2E When=
replying to this email please ensure that these characters remain unaltered=
=2E

This message is entirely the creation of its author in his or her personal c=
apacity and any views expressed in this message are the views of that author=
=2E Accordingly, Scan Computers Intl Ltd shall not be nor become liable in a=
ny way, whether contractually, tortuously or otherwise, in respect of anythi=
ng stated or depicted in this message=2E Please also note that this message =
shall not constitute an offer or an acceptance or be legally binding upon Sc=
an Computers Intl Ltd in any way=2E

“Samuel James Hovind Garwood was born at 12.20am on Wednesday 12 October weighing just over 9lb. Mother and baby are both well.”

Congratulations and love to Samuel, Heidi and Chris.

We’ve also got a present for Samuel.


Domain Name:
samgarwood.co.uk

Registrant:
Samuel James Hovind Garwood

Registrant’s Address:

THE REGISTRANT IS AN INDIVIDUAL WHO HAS ELECTED TO
HAVE THEIR ADDRESS OMITTED FROM THE WHOIS DATABASE

Registrant’s Agent:
Plusnet Plc t/a Force 9 Internet [Tag = FORCE9]
URL: http://www.force9.net

Relevant Dates:
Registered on: 12-Oct-2005

Name servers listed in order:
ns1.force9.net 195.166.128.16
ns2.force9.net 195.166.128.17
ns2.plusnet.co.uk 212.159.13.150
ns1.plusnet.co.uk 195.166.128.17

WHOIS database last updated at 21:20:01 12-Oct-2005

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