Chris Worfolk's Blog

PayPal are quite restrictive over what they think is appropriate and inappropriate uses of their service (ie, they just don’t like certain industries), so if you work in those industries you have to use someone else. Someone like Payza.

Unfortunately, if Payza aren’t a scam operation, they seem to be doing their very best to look like they are.

Earlier this year, AlertPay (the original name of the company) re-named to Payza – because re-naming is always a good sign things are going well. Whenever I have filed support tickets with them it has taken weeks for them to get back to me, and indeed getting verified look literally months!

Elsewhere, there are no shortage of complaints. Google has loads of results for Payza sucks, so much so that the operators of the company even felt the need to start up PayzaSucks.com as a counter site. They also have dozens of complaints registered on the Better Business Bureau .

Then, today, they sent an email round saying that they were stopping all deposits to UK based accounts. It said they would notify us when this was back online, but failed to provide any timescale for this – days, weeks, months, ever? Who can run a business on this? It felt very much like when Fult Tilt poker had their licence suspended and ultimately closed.

If they are a legitimate company, then there are some serious questions that need answering…

• Why does it take them weeks to respond to support requests?
• Why do so many requests for support go unanswered?
• Why have they repeatedly lost their licence or payment processing abilities?

Clearly, you can’t run a business on a payment processor that emails you with 12 hours notice that they will be disabling your ability to receive payments, especially when it comes with no indication when, or even if, the functionality will ever be restored.

No wonder MasterCard shelled out a third of a billion pounds for DataCash, they’re probably the closest you can come to a trusted online payment processing provider.

Viv held her birthday party at Blackhouse, and despite having our photography course, we finally made it down there at 9:30 – still in time to order some steak! We both had the posh surf and turf, which was great, but I wish I had ordered a proper steak with hindsight.

You would think that having come from a photography course I would be able to take a good photo. But you would be wrong.

If you’re running Mac OSX Lion and trying to update your locate db, you may get the following error message.

-bash: updatedb: command not found

You can call updatedb by using its full path instead.

/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

You could also create a symlink in your bin directory which would then allow you to just call updatedb as normal.

For this month’s Humanist Community of Leeds, we went for meal at Miah’s Kitchen. Next month we’ll be meeting at The Reliant for a meal – feel free to join us!

One of the problems with the new AirPort Utility, 6.0+, is that it doesn’t have a DHCP clients table. This is obviously ridiculous, as anything claiming to be a router that can act as a DHCP server needs to have one, so I phoned AppleCare to sort it out.

They first asked me for the product’s serial number. But the problem is, this is genuinely invisible.

It’s below all those big symbols. Can you read that? I certainly can’t. No matter how close I move my face (human optics lacking a zoom function after all) and my eyesight is pretty good. Luckily, I managed to find it via AirPort Utility.

After some digging with first line, and some more with the senior I was passed through to, they eventually sorted it out for me – fair play to them as they basically spent twenty minutes talking me through how to bypass all of Apple’s security lockdowns to get the old software installed that does have the functionality.

Unfortunately by this point I had been on the call almost an hour, at a cost of £10 to myself, but they did at least solve the problem.

A week later, this photo had gone.

This week saw the first meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire for this academic year. We run in academic years due to our venue following an academic calendar (it being an education centre and all, though with it being an adult one, that still seems a little strange).

It was rather manic with me having taken over as treasurer. Lots of people wanting to pay and I’m still not clear on everyone’s name in the society, so we ran out of time in the end and I’ll need to hand some of the membership cards out next meeting. All in all, lots of money collected though, which is the important thing.

The talk was interesting, Dr Bruce Turnbull talking about synthetic biology, but I had heard it before, as he had already given the talk at Leeds Skeptics earlier this year.

As part of my push to attend more conferences this year, and get out into the real world, I recently attended PHPNW12, a PHP developer conference that took place in Manchester.

I arrived on the Friday night and checked into the hotel across the road from the conference, the Britannia. With it’s sweeping balconied staircases it felt like I was in a 70s horror movie. The floors creaked and the light in the corridor outside my room flickered on and off constantly – indeed, it rather ruined the mood when they fixed it.

The Friday night featured a hackathon, though not feeling too well due to the tail end of a cold, I spent about 20 minutes hacking, then ate my pizza while I checked my emails for an hour and headed to bed, not to emerge until 12 noon the next day when I felt a bit better.

The talks were on the whole good – there was a real range in there, some had really interesting topics but due to their lack of experience presenting talks, where rather dull. Others were confident and entertaining speakers who despite presenting quite dull topics (caching is not going to be mega interesting) presented brilliant talks. On balance, I would certainly prefer them to focus more on speaker quality over topics next year.

On the Saturday night there was a social including dinner, at which I spent quite a bit of time getting to know some of the other people at Sky – I didn’t realise they were going as I hadn’t gone with Sky, but it was great to see some familiar faces there.

Overall, I found I learned a lot from it. If I can bring back just a few ideas to my own business then it will have been worth the expense.

Staircases in the hotel. I also tried the new panorama function on iOS6, on it’s side:

If you’re trying to install ThoughtWorks’ Go Server on CentOS (or indeed any Linux variety), you might run into a problem where it says you need JDK installed. Indeed, even if you have OpenJDK installed it may continue to complain.

This is because they have not officially approved OpenJDK yet, so your two options are to a) installed the actual JDK or b) to install OpenJDK to at least the version required (1.6 at time of writing) and then force the installer to ignore dependences. This can be done using the following command.

rpm -i --nodeps go-server.rpm

Providing you already have OpenJDK installed, this should work fine.

I’ve started using a spare computer monitor as a TV in my bedroom so that I could hook it up to my laptop and stream programmes onto a bigger screen when I wanted to.

However, it’s irritating having to cable everything up, so I purchased an Apple TV to stream directly to it. So far my experience has been on the whole positive, with a few drawbacks.

Set up was reasonably easy, and now I have it up and running, on both my laptop and my iPad I am able to select AirPlay mirroring and begin mirroring my screen onto my TV; it also sends the sound.

That said, not everything works perfectly. Here is how it looks so far:

• Videos in iTunes mirror though there doesn’t seem to be a volume control I can activate from the iPad
• TVCatchUp mirrors but without any volume control
• BBC iPlayer mirrors from my iPad, and lets me control the volume with the iPad volume control
• 4od blocks mirroring from my iPad
• NFL GamePass mirrors from my iPad and lets me control the volume
• Sky Go blocks mirroring from my iPad

It is worth noting that even though Sky think they’re being clever by blocking AirPlay mirroring on the iPad, I can just open up the video stream in a browser on my desktop, full screen it and AirPlay mirror my entire laptop screen.

The built app apps for Apple TV are pretty useless though. They don’t have any apps for iPlayer, 4od, GamePass or Sky Go (and even if they did, I can only have two devices on Sky Go anyway), so I can’t imagine I’ll be doing much with my Apple TV than mirroring a different device to it.

It would certainly be nice if I could use it as a standalone box to watch things on, but until they open it up for third party apps, I can’t see me getting much use out of it that way.