Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

First of all, such heresy as was rumoured back in January has been put to rest. I remain as ever a Sony Ericsson fanboy. And not just because the contract was £5 cheaper than going with an N95 or P1i. But because I’m old and afraid of change.

I have however officially requested my PAC code from Vodaphone. Much as Kieran ran into problems when he wanted to upgrade his phone when his last contract expired I phoned up Vodaphone to complain that none of their price plans on their website were available from the upgrades process.

The patronising call centre worker explained (well more confirmed my suspicions when I proposed such ideas) that they were only available to new customers. To be honest I thought such practices had now died out but apparently not. I explained to him that the packages being offered to me were “just rubbish” so he passed me through to their promotions department.

Properly implemented CRM systems shine through as always as I began talking to the girl in promotions by giving her my phone number, confirming my full name and address and other security details even though I’d already done that twice this call (once with the automated system when you phone up and once to the guy in upgrades).

She managed to throw me together 150 minutes and 500 texts for £25 a month. However given o2 were offering the slightly more appealing 400 minutes and 1000 texts for not much more I decided to officially abandon Vodaphone in favour of o2. No doubt I’ll be telling a similar story in 18 months time.

Guess who I’m on the phone to. It’s not hard. It’s the same people I am always on the phone to. UK Online. A somewhat ironic name it would seem. And opening itself up to derogatory word play but someone of any interlect.

Our connection isn’t just dropping, it’s just entirely going away and not coming back. Normally they do a tone test which magically starts it working again but even after that it died again tonight and support have nothing else to try.

After this happened yesterday advanced support refered me to their advanced support team (who don’t work this late) and who were supposed to re-adjust my line this morning. But didn’t. And are now scheduled to do it tomorrow when they arrive at work.

When someone first suggested we hire someone to manually ferry packets from the exchange and back I thought they were joking. Now I’m just wondering…

My Windows desktop (Inca) stopped displaying things like filenames. They just disappear into blank test whenever you try to open a file.

My Linux desktop (Zapotec) refuses to play DVDs despite now having the codec installed.

My file server (Olmec) won’t boot if I initialise some of the hard drives into an array. Individually they work fine, if I plug them into the motherboard’s SATA connections. But if I try to run them through my really expensive RAID controller the computer complains of a boot failure even if I just put one into a JBOD configuration.

My Linux server (Nazca) is a write-off because I installed Webmin and Webmin now refuses to remove itself or allow me to run any kind of updates.

My laptop (Toltec) can’t even make 3 hours battery life anymore.

One of my web servers (Jennifer) is just being really, really slow despite my restarting like every service on it.

So, back to this plan for us to all run away and become pirates…

I’m currently trying to report an issue with my VPS. I can’t though because ServInt’s support site is down.

Seriously, why is it so hard to find a reliable host?

I was moving away from PowerVPS as I’ve had a few problems with them recently including hostnames and root passwords mysteriously changing in the middle of my trying to set up my new VPS. But I’m not getting any further with ServInt. Bare in mind that these are the two most well respected VPS companies in existence. So it’s hard to draw any conclusion other than than I am cursed.

Consider some of the fun problems we’re currently tackling. Most of the websites in the network use nsx.mazedev.com as their nameservers. These are registered with the domain registrar and so are seperate to the server which hosts mazedev.com itself. Yet if you take that server offline, all domains that are not .com or .net (such as .co.uk, .info and .org) stop resolving. Yep, get your head around that one.

Meanwhile I still can’t get any work on my project done, run my website backups or generally access anything at Burchett Place because of our connectivity issues. The replacement modem was supposed to arrive today, after all I ordered it middle of last week and payed for next day delivery. It hasn’t turned up. I can’t phone City Link because eBuyer haven’t given me a consignment number and I can’t phone eBuyer because they are closed for new year.

This results in me not being able to go home and do some revision because I need to be here with internet access to resolve these issues I am having with all the websites which is now starting to cost me lots of money, money which I don’t have. Still, who really wanted a degree anyway?

Many people are probably in bed by now.

After all it’s 1am on Christmas Day morning.

Of course most people didn’t have to drag their ass out of their nice warm bedroom at 11pm Christmas Eve to go spend 2 hours trying to bring the internet back online so that they could get on with doing some of their final year project for their degree which requires remote access.

As it turns out, I’m not in this group of most people. Nor have I actually got anywhere with the time I’ve spent unless you class ensuring I don’t get enough sleep before getting up tomorrow as getting somewhere. Personally, I don’t. But maybe I should as it would ensure far more victories in life for me.

So there is some quality time down the drain now it’s just a case of waiting to see how much money goes down the drain as well. Of course that’s a joke - it’s going to cost far more of my valuable time to sort it out than has been taken up so far. Happy holidays everyone.

Ok, don’t get me wrong, I don’t support the introduction of ID cards. I know the reasons against ID cards, I agree with them and I don’t need you to list them for me. But all this overkill paranoia about them is forcing me to play devil’s advocate. Consider this…

• We already have an identity document system, it’s called a passport. Like an ID card it costs you to get one, like an ID card you need one to open a bank account and like an ID card you are in trouble if it falls into the hands of a criminal.
• ID cards aren’t some crazy system the government has dreamed up to invade our privacy, lots of countries including many European nations already have them - Spain, Belgium, France and Italy.
• It’s not even the first time they have been introduced in the UK, we have had them twice before.
• The act of parliament to introduce ID cards has already been passed so it’s too late to stop them there.
• Who cares if someone gets their hands on your personal details - they’ve already got them off that missing CD anyway

We’re currently working our way through the second SY33 coursework but like the first, it’s a pointless exercise. It doesn’t test your understanding of anything to do with SY as we have to do things like consume the Yahoo Search web service - all the code for which is provided by Yahoo in their developer’s library. Your actual task in this coursework is trying to work out what the coursework wants you to do. That is a task which turns out, is very difficult.

Yet again the author of the coursework spec is unable to grasp numbering (it’s worth noting I believe the specs had different authors so no one person is to blame). The first coursework had two sets of concurrent numbering systems while this numbering system starts at 0 instead of 1.

The real issue though is how unclear the coursework spec is. It randomly jumps between instructions, setup information, hints, etc. You have to spend a lot of your time picking out the actual spec from the spec itself. Once you have, most of it doesn’t work. You spend more time trying to get the setup instructions working so you can do the work than doing the actual work itself.

To demonstrate my point, I started writing my coursework in gedit but got a load of errors. The solutions didn’t help, the only other solution I got, and I got this repeatedly is, “oh, use Eclipse.” So much for the school’s policy of avoiding a focus on specific software. I did but this just produced more errors. There are loads of extra classes you needed, Dan kindly email them to me but it didn’t help. I then added all the ones Si told me I needed, still didn’t solve the problem though.

We ended up concluding that I had identical code to Si and Dan’s so it couldn’t be my code. Kieran eventually traced the error down to the WSDL2Java tool not producing all the files I needed. So I spent some time looking into that but in the end found that I did have all the classes.

Eventually, at around 2:30, it just started working randomly. This left me way behind even the people that had just turned up that day to do the coursework. I eventually managed to get everything else sorted and moved onto servlets around 3:30ish.

That was another mission. 5 hours I spent trying to get them to work. Kieran spent a good few hours on it too. It never did. Because of lack of time in technical coding? Nope, of course not, but because setup was yet again the mission it shouldn’t be. We were having to compile everything in Java 1.4 for some reason. This produced an endless string of errors that resulted in me spending all night in the lab and still not getting servlets working.

Wrap-up consisted of having to answer the few questions and also print out a copy of my readme file to include in the physical hand in - why? What purpose does that serve? This detailed how to get it running like they had any chance given pretty much everyone got beaten down into using an IDE because it was such a mission to get it working from the command line (although I did eventually manage this in the late hours of the morning).

Seriously, what is the point of this coursework? To test my patience?

• The University of Toronto Press publishes a journal named the Canadian Journal of Linguistics
• Journal papers require a needless amount of special formatting
• Weka isn’t a particularly useful tool
• Don’t be fooled into thinking because you’re taking a DB module, the software you will be using will support databases
• Don’t assume that because you are on a computing degree your modules will be anything to do with computing
• Don’t assume that because you are on a computing degree your assessment will be based on technical knowledge
• Don’t assume that because you are a third year computing student they won’t try and teach you how to use Google
• If a module leader explicitly tells you not to use CRISP-DM, don’t believe them
• Data mining happens, and I quote, “by magic”
• Data mining has no value and isn’t useful in language research
• Data mining has no value and isn’t useful, period

Before I start I’m going to state a few things. I’m going to say something that’s a bit out there, a bit controversial and a bit, at first glace, counter-intuitive. But never the less I am going to put the proposition forward.

Private profiles and turning Facebook into MySpace.

There, I said it. It seems crazy at first, after all the point of Facebook is that you are connecting with your existing real world connections and that it isn’t just an open directory of internet aliases.

But the fact is, this recurrent doom that people keep talking about has failed to materialise. They let Leeds Met onto Facebook, nothing really went wrong. They let the whole world onto Facebook, I’m not going to pretend I am pleased about that but it didn’t turn Facebook into MySpace. They added applications and yes they are very annoying, but you choose to list the people as friends that send you the application invites and you can say no. I do. It keeps my profile nice and clean, it’s still Facebook.

Private profiles however, I would argue are doing some damage. What I truely loved about Facebook was that each university had it’s own network and you could pretty much move freely around that network. You could see new people’s profiles, see what mutual friends you have in common, see the connections. Private profiles prevent you from doing this.

This hysteria about keeping your profile private is ruining the Facebook experience and turning Facebook into the jungle of uncommon ground and paranoia that is MySpace. It’s a slippery slope my friends, a slippery slope.

How hard is it to get an internet connection?

A lot f***ing harder than it should be!

You would think that in London you get get an internet connection but apparently not. The hostel, which we picked because of it’s wifi access, didn’t have it’s wifi access working and none of The Cloud’s wifi hotspots would give me an IP address despite many, many attempts.

I had to resort to getting my emails at 9.6k using my phone as a Bluetooth modem which I had the pleasure of paying for which took half an hour of fiddling with to get it to work including disabling G3 and this just failed to work all together on Sunday during my repeated attempts.

Then I finally got home to find UK Online was down AGAIN and it took me 15 minutes to get that back online just so that I could finally get an SSH connection to get my server back online!