WoW not IPv6

Well, lots of talk on mailing lists and so on, and I got the impression it was greyed out on mine because it runs under wine... But it seems the official comment is:-

Q: "Now that there is an option to use IPv6 addresses in World of Warcraft"

A: "No there isn't, it's just there for future use.  There will be an announcement when it's ready but don't expect it soon."

Stop buggering about Blizzard!!!

What to do today?

Well, it seems that Royal Wedding is going to be on TV all day. Even if there is a channel that is not covering it, then that is not going to happen on any TV here it seems and I am not one to argue :-)

The beer festival starts at 11:00, so that is one idea.

I could go do some work maybe. I have actually managed quite a bit of work over this week.

I could try and actually play some WoW. I have not touched it in months (apart from checking the IPv6 and cursing that wine does not do it).

I do need to keep a close eye on the Internet today. We do not know if it will be dead, or if it will melt. I am not sure anyone knows. This is not like any event we have seen before. The killer is people who are having to work streaming video to their office (that happens on sporting events). Tricky one.

Strangely my day is not planned down to the second, like some people's today :-)

Beer6

A beer festival with IPv6!

The Reading Beer Festival is under way. Seeing as we are doing some WiFi, I had to go along last night (some times this is a fun job).

We have not done much in the way of events yet, so it was a bit of an experiment. There are several more much busier days to go, but so far it is looking good. With thousands of people in a couple of tents we had no idea if that means dozens on thousands of people using the Internet. The good news is that most people were drinking beer and cider rather than using gadgets, so the answer is nearer the hundreds than thousands and so far it looks like it is all working as planned.

We have about 30Mb/s coming in to the site, with 2Mb/s uplink, and 3G backup. The Ruckus access point seems to be pretty good, and means we have 5GHz as well as more conventional 2.4GHz WiFi with 802.11a/b/g/n all working.

Judging from the DHCP server, we are seeing a lot of iPhones and Android phones and some PCs and all sorts. Mostly phones. A few iPads, which can in fact use the 5GHz.

I was able to use facetime to video-call with no problem, so looking good.

Interested in feedback from anyone that goes and tries the wifi.

Sonim 6 bites the dust

This time not charging. So, lets wait for sonim No 7... Ho hum.

IPv6 WoW!

Apparently Blizzard have released a patch today that supports IPv6.

They seem to have been sensible with an IPv6 controllable option which is greyed out if you have no IPv6, unticked by default if using toredo or 6to4, and ticked by default if you have real IPv6.

The patch notes confirm this. I'll be testing later when I get home.

But cool - at least someone is on the ball now - well done Blizzard.

3D projectors?

Well, I was pondering what it would take to do a 3D projector. It is pretty simple if you take a "side by side" image format. You can do it all in optics.

You would need a simple lens to double the width and a pair of mirrors to overlay one half on to the other. You would have to use a non polarising technology like DLP or some such (not LCD) and add polarising filters to each side. Then simple polarised (cinema style) glasses will work without all the usual flicker you get.

But doing a search it looks horribly like projectors are going down the "shutter glasses" route. Why? It just makes more expensive active glasses that are less comfortable to use and gives horrid flicker effects. Projects *can* use polarisation which LCD TVs cannot easily do so why are they not doing this. Oh well.

Sounds like a plan...

It is increasingly the case that getting work done needs input from, or testing by, or some other interaction with, other people. This makes perfect sense when I have a team of people in the company. I used to have to do it all myself when it was just me, but not any more.

Sadly, not only is this long week a perfect opportunity to get work done without all those annoying customers ( :-) ) pestering me, but it seems most of the people I need to get the work done are also away. Arrrg. I suppose they are entitled to some time offer (damn nanny state :-) ).

Anyway, I have address picking back on the broadband ordering pages (without James's help), and even managed to get some synchronous dialogue services to BT WLR3 (without Paul's help). Well, technically Paul did help via irc a bit, and James did make a few comments through my study door last night. So fair play.

Maybe I need to give up on the whole "getting some work done" and lock myself in a room with some lucazade and gliclazide and World of Warcraft on a 30" Apple monitor and some Bose speakers... I really must sort 3D WoW some time... I wonder if novatech are open today... Hmmm

Fun week

Well, two bank holidays for a start.

It also seems that the world and his wife have gone off to warmer/drier/saner countries on holiday too. Lets hope so. Half my staff are off.

Reading Beer Festival should be fun - we are involved in providing staff there with Internet connectivity and maybe a public hotspot as well.

According to the diary it also looks like I have another IPv6 talk as well on Thursday.

Busy busy busy.

All natural ingredients

You see this a lot on adverts these days, but it got me thinking. What does it mean? Where is the line drawn? When is something "natural" when talking of food products?

Making food - mixing ingredients, cooking them, etc, is all about basic chemistry, so you cannot really rule out the products of basic chemistry from "all natural ingredients" can you. The making of those ingredients is just part of the process of making the food/drink and itself uses "natural ingredients". Indeed, some foods and drinks use a biological process in production (e.g. yeast or bacteria). Things like bread, cheese, and beer spring to mind, so you cannot really rule out things made in that way.

That means things like MSG which can (AFAIK) be made by basic chemistry from wheat, or using a bacterial process, must be "all natural ingredients" too, surely.

At the end of the day, what exactly is not made from things which occur naturally?

How do people responsible for checking the accuracy of adverts decide?

Ha, did Apple forget they make iPads too?

TV advert states "If you don't have an iPhone you don't have iBooks", and goes on to list many things that you don't have if you don't have an iPhone...

If lists many things that my iPad has/ I don't have an iPhone. So, well, basically a false statement.

Maybe they just forgot that they make iPads as well?

Summer storms

What is fun is that we can tell the weather is being fun because of the session restart levels on DSL lines. Crazy..

https://clueless.aa.net.uk/stormtrack.cgi

OK, silly to say that just before an LNS switch over, but you'll get the idea in an hour or so.

How to organise a piss up at a beer festival?

OK, we should be doing some connectivity for the Reading Beer Festival next weekend (royal wedding weekend).

Hopefully we will have some public access wifi. We'll see. We have not done a lot of event stuff before so this is a bit of a pilot. I am probably routing a /20 IPv4 and a /48 IPv6 for it. No NAT in sight. NAT at a beer festival is like pissing the beer!

The main idea is for Internet access for the event staff, but public access should be interesting. Trying a ruckus AP as a hot spot. I think next year we need to plan for more widespread wifi usage, but hard to predict the usage.

No end of attempts to get BT to put lines in to a field fell flat on their face. Eventually we got the BT account team to sort it (well done Chris), just in the nick of time. Costing a fortune as ever, but next year we may be able to do more directly via Openreach. Dual redundant DSL with dual redundant 3G backup. Fingers crossed.

The downside - someone will probably have to be on-call to attend a beer festival and one of us will probably have to be there every day... Oh the hardship. :-)

Who am I?

Well, we got a call earlier in the week and it was rather odd about my brother-in-law.  Everyone thought it was a stroke, but apparently not.

Apparently it was Transient Global Amnesia.

Well wikipedia to the rescue:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_global_amnesia

But I mean, WTF. You mean people can, randomly, for no good reason, just lose their short term memory for a while. That is mad.

Apparently he just did not know what was going on, found the number for his sister in his phone, but was unclear on anything. I'll hopefully meet up with them some time soon and get the full story.

But seriously, WTF.

P.S. Turtles have it figured out man.

To AV or not to AV

Personally AV makes perfect sense to me, though it does not really solve some of the problems with electoral systems.

For a start, the idea that the population at large can make a sensible decision on who would run the county is just not sensible. Whilst there are a lot of people that can think about things rationally, and given accurate impartial information, can make a sensible informed decision, the majority cannot. Sadly most of us decide based on what the media feeds us and what our peers think, and decide based on that. We decide on a party, typically, and then tick the box for that candidate. We are not picking a person to represent us - we are picking someone to count as a number in the battle to make a government. Even intelligent people do not have the experience and training to decide how things should be run as the decisions the government makes are complex and very different to typical normal life. It is mad that we let untrained people become MPs and run the country in the first place! It is not a sane system. The truth is though that democracy is about the best system we can come up with and certainly better than the alternatives that have been tried (well, in my opinion anyway).

So, AV or not AV? Well it seems clear to me that AV is fairer. It is hard to see how anyone could say otherwise. Simply saying "this is my first choice and this is my second choice" seems sensible to me. People often have a preference for 2nd choice, or perhaps more often a preference for who they definitely do not want to win, so will give the other candidates as a 2nd choice.

Of course, if we get AV, and you don't like it, you can always just mark the "1" candidate. You don't have to have a 2nd choice. You can chose to have your vote thrown away if it is not for the winner. If you don't like that idea, then you definitely want AV!

At least with AV there is a good chance that anyone who does win was actually voted for by more than 50% of the voters even if not as their 1st choice.

The other possibility is that you can have a proper choice of candidate. Right now you would never see more than one candidate for any of the parties as that would split the vote. With AV you can, and I hope we will see that. A lot of people vote for a party and not a candidate - wouldn't it be nice to pick the person as well - to decide which of the candidates for your chosen party you think can do a better job, and put the other candidate for the same party as 2nd choice?

Lets see how it goes. I wonder if I should put Yes:1 No:2 as my answer to the referendum ? :-)

The Future

Of course, today's xkcd is a classic where far more research has been done for a comic strip than any normal person would consider.

I did wonder how IP would be described one day, knowing how badly news reporting is done and how historic events decades apart get merged in to one...

"The IP (short to 'iPad') was invented by the military as a way of sending messages called 'tweets' and was quickly adapated to send pornography and (for some reason) videos about pirates [see Johnny Depp]"

Kids these days!

I never had it like this. No fair.

(I did have a Tandy TRS-80 with a black and white portable TV attached).

Strange key on my new keyboard? (pic)

Very odd, does not seem to do anything. I don't think I have had a keyboard with one of these on it before...

The good news is that Unicomp are doing the IBM style buckling string (noisy) keyboards with USB interface at last, albeit only the black ones. Actually, I think this one is slightly quieter than before.

Anyway, I have a nice laser that should be able to make short work of that strange new key... Or maybe there is a 3D model of the keytops somewhere on the internet and the use of a 3D printer could make me a new one. I'll have to play.

Glad to see some sense at last.

EU court gives opinion that ISPs should not be forced to filter or block stuff.

http://falkvinge.net/2011/04/14/european-court-of-justice-to-outlaw-internet-filtering-esp-for-copyright-enforcement/

Time to PANIC, APNIC

The first RIR has run out only 10 weeks after IANA ran out.

http://www.apnic.net/community/ipv4-exhaustion/graphical-information shows one /8 left. That means they have effectively run out of IPv4 addresses as all ISPs can now get is a single last block of 1024, which for most will be next to useless. No more "normal" allocations.

This is pretty major. There are several steps to running out of IPv4 with the first being IANA in February. The next step is RIRs running out which has now started, and then after that LIRs (ISPs) running out.

APNIC running out means that no ISP can now get any normal allocations in the APNIC region. It means that ISPs will be forced to do nasty things with IPv4 NAT and make use of IPv6. We can expect the use of IPv6 only web sites and other services aimed initially at local markets where IPv6 users can access them.

When there are any significant places on the Internet that are IPv6 only (and not just www.loopsofzen.co.uk) we can finally address the head in the sand ISPs that say "We have plenty of IPv4s left". People like Virgin who seem to think it is not important for their customers to access IPv6 endpoints in the Internet will have to wake up!

It matters not how many of those old legacy IPv4 addresses you have if there are parts of the Internet you cannot reach using IPv4!!!

Digg

Then end is nigh... APNIC first RIR for fall!

APNIC have 1.03 /8's left.

When they get to below 1.00 /8's they have in effect run out or IPv4 addresses as each ISP can then only get one more block of 1024 more addresses.

If they are not in to that by tomorrow I will be amazed.

Now is when we will see that region deploying IPv6 only services and the rest of the world better catch up damn quick.

Remember, whilst the RIR running out is not quite the end, as the ISPs have space, it means no news ISPs in APNIC getting usable amounts of IPv4, and the ones that have IPv4 now will have told APNIC what then need for 3 to 6 months and so should run out themselves quite soon.

P.S. Slightly amusing that the spell checker on the iPad turns APNIC in to PANIC...

A&A B2B XML gateway and IPv6

I am keen to progress the idea of a B2B gateway for dealing with A&A.

The first stage is to put a front end on clueless that allows people to get an XML of their existing services, and send it back, modified, with new lines, ceased lines, domains, VoIP numbers, mobiles, all sorts.

Then it presents a formal XML order for anything chargeable which is then confirmed by XML.

A proper B2B XML gateway allowing chargeable and non-chargeable changes by automated systems.

Then we make a new javascript XML front end ordering system that uses it.

All good stuff.

But why not make all of that IPv6 only?

That would mean there is a real, serious, business application that is IPv6 only.

All of the idiots spouting "We have plenty of IPv4" will finally get the message when their customers say "we want to use the A&A B2B gateway and cannot"....

Well, we can hope.

Work progresses on the design.

Comments welcome.

Sonim XP2 Spirit No.6 for my daughter!

Well, sonim are sticking to their promise and replacing the XP2 Spirit phone we have if it breaks, which is good news.

They are clearly designed to be used by construction works or miners or the like, but not minors perhaps. A 15 year old girl has proved a challenge. It is because she broke every phone I got her that I got the sonim, and even with her ability to break it, this has proved a good buy.

The only bad news has been the slow response of their support people, which I think we have got on top of now, and the slight build quality we have encountered which may just be bad luck.

1. Display fault on arrival (replaced by retailer).
2. Battery cover broke (replaced by sonim)
3. Stopped charging (replaced by sonim)
4. Case broke apart (replaced by sonim)
5. Arrived with cracked case, see pic (to be replaced by sonim)
6. ?

I wonder how long this will last.

Reverse court action?

Anyone can take someone to the county court if they have a claim from them. You each get to have their say, and a judge decides who is right. This is a good system and surprisingly cheap.

I sometimes think we are however missing something though.

You cannot take court action as a defendant. You cannot force someone in to court as the claimant.

Why would you want to do this? Well, to decide an undecided matter and to remove uncertainty and risk. If someone could take you to court and does not then you have that hanging over you, possibly for 6 years, and it causes stress and uncertainty. If someone is chasing a debt you think you don't owe then getting it settled once and for all is good.

In such cases it would be really good if you could take someone to court as a defendant. To pay the court fees to get them to make their case, or to forfeit any future right to take the case against you. To force their hand. To get a decision now, win or lose, and to know where you stand.

The other thing that is missing is a way to pay for a court decision - sort of like suing yourself - you pay for the courts time to decide something that could happen. i.e. you have a business plan that involves something you are unsure of - pay for the courts time to be devils advocate and decide a case. County courts do not decide legal president as such but would be a good reference for a real case later. It would allow you to understand how the court would consider something and act accordingly.

Just an idea.

No progress on ponies

Or moon on a stick
Or porting mobile numbers in
Or IPv6 data on mobiles

I'll say when - stop asking!

07

Yay! We have 07 mobile numbers from OFCOM, at last. Well, technically *we* don't. For some reason OFCOM allocated them to a subsidiary company regardless of what was put on the application, but OFCOM make daft mistakes like that :-)

It will be some months before we have call routing, and may be patchy from some networks initially. Inbound SMS will be a separate issue and may take a different amount of time! We'll try and get this all sorted and let people know when they can have 07 numbers.

The 07 numbers allow you to have incoming calls to the mobile for no charge. At present the 01/02/03 numbers have an inbound call charge. The 07 mobile numbers will only be available where they are associated with a SIM though. However, we hope to be able to offer the normal call diversion, also ring, and so on as normal and we are awaiting confirmation on this point from OFCOM.

Just to clarify, even if diverted to a land line or SIP, and hence saving us money, there is never any pay out on incoming calls. The numbers are intended for mobile use.

You cannot order 07 numbers until we have them working on most networks, so please be patient.

But good news - thanks OFCOM.

P.S. we do allow multiple numbers and even prefixes on the CLI and dialling to allow you to mange separate numbers, so people can have 07 mobile and 01/02/03 geographic on their mobile at the same time if they wish.

P.P.S. They have now allocated them correctly to us!

Running IP course on Thursday

Not had a lot of interest yet, but should be running it.
Any last minute takers

http://aa.net.uk/support-training.html

Basically covers IP from the ground up including IPv6 - one day crash course - meet the orc!

autotrader.co.uk and other URLs?

Well, I have seen some adverts being a bit strange suggesting visiting facebook pages or the like rather than quoting proper URLs.

Are the public at large really so thick that they cannot handle a simple URL?

Today I saw an advert for autotrader.co.uk with an image (see pic) that shows someone putting "autotrader.co.uk" not in the address bar, not as a URL, but in to a search box.

Why? What the hell is the world coming to?

App ideas?

Looking to play with apple apps - trying to get No.1 son in to some s/w development and slightly easier if it is fun. We can then get him on to more serious things.

One thing I wondered was an app that connected to an irc channel and posted location updates, and saw location updated from others and placed them on the map in real time. So anyone who opts to join the channel sees everyone else on the channel on the map in real time if they are on-line.

I have seen some things like this, but the idea of using an irc server to distribute the data is probably new. It makes it easy to integrate with other things. I suspect technically something like an XMPP server with location based status data is better though.

I may have to have a play - or rather get James to have a play :-)

Interested in other ideas for fun apps - so please make suggestions.

Census fail

The census man passed us by!

No query on "orc polisher"
No query on little bobby tables.
No query on >4 GSCEs but <5 are A*-C

Just asking about un-occupied neighbours house...

Disappointed. What is the point of fighting the man if he does not fight back.

:-(

iPAP

Slight surprise this week...

Getting data SIMs working better has been fun... proper username/password authentication as well as routed legacy IPv4. One day IPv6 I am sure...

But the systems did not cope, and one point that was in fact my bad was the handling of PAP. It's the 21st Century FFS - who does PAP?!?!

OK, and aside for the less technical: When you specify a user name and password for something it is quite common for that information to have to pass through several layers of communications to confirm you are who you say you are. You dont ideally want people to over hear that. There are two main ways to do this:-

CHAP:  (Challenge/Handshake Authentication Protocol). This involves cryptography, but basically means that you (and your 'device') know the password you provided (unavoidable) and so does the far end that is doing the checking. Nobody in between can see it or reproduce it later. In simple terms, imaging you have a Who goes there? whats the password? scenario. Instead of saying the password is "sesame" which someone could over hear and then come along later and repeat, you have "What is password 42?" and the answer is "sesame". Then later someone else comes along and is asked "What is password 69?" and they do not know as it is a different answer that is requited. Yes, cryptography is way more complex, but you get the idea - a challenge is given and a challenge specific answer is returned which can't then be used by someone else.

PAP: (Password Authentication Protocol). This is the Whats the password? and the reply "sesame". Someone can repeat it later. All those involved in passing on the messages get to know the password and could use it themselves. Messy.

Technically PAP as one advantage that the side doing the checking can use a hash, so they do not themselves need to know the password, but can check it is right. With CHAP they have to know the password to check it. But it is only the endpoints in CHAP so way safer as generally the logic is the end points trust each other.

So, turned on, and all falls over, my iPad will not work, and why?

Given a choice, an iPad will use PAP on the mobile data side!

WTF? Anyway this has lead to some reading of RFCs and some work on the LNS and a hurried test and release of new code, which works, and data SIMs work. PAP now works on the LNS... :-)

WTF do apple prefer PAP to CHAP?

Why?

OK, my address is not too secret as it is listed on companies house, but clearly some people try to protect my privacy on-line.

So battle.net shows my address like this, showing house number, obscuring street name, but showing full town and postcode.

I wonder why, as they know it is me they are showing it do anyway, but do they not understand that a postcode in the UK narrows it down in most cases to a street or part of a street, e.g. 20 to 30 houses, so obscuring the street address is totally pointless?

So WTF do they do it?

So other telcos have nice single points of failure too?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-cuts-web-access

I have to say "scavenging for copper" sounds so innocent. Not like someone was actually digging up telecoms lines to sell the copper and was thwarted by finding a fibre inside, or anything like that :-)

Meta-non-conformist?

I am slightly(?) non-conformist, as you may have noticed, and so owning unusual things (like an orc) is all part of that.

To me, personalising things is also part of it. Hence engravings on laptops, and so on. The fact I have a nice 35W CO2 laser helps with that, obviously. When I had a car, I had a personal number plate, and so on.

Now, my friend Kev is also a non conformist, and a pedant (more so than I!).

He does not have personalised number plate, and would not dream of having things engraved or personalised at all. Obviously entirely his choice and an area on which we agree to differ.

But I think what he is doing is taking non-conformism to a whole new level though. I think basically he does not want to be like all those other non-conformists out there. A sort of meta-non-conformist perhaps...

:-)

1's complement, if only I had a time machine...

I hate 1's complement arithmatic at the best of times, but the way it is done for IP, TCP, and UDP is slightly special even then.

It is a shame you cannot go back in time and fix some of the little and stupid things in life. See http://xkcd.com/567/

Basically, in 1's complement arithmatic a value of all 0's and all 1's are the same value giving two possible answers for "zero".

With checksums used for IP, UDP, and TCP, you make a 1's complement 16 bit sum (based on the checksum field set to 0x0000), and then store the inverse in the checksum. This means to check it you do a 1's complement 16 bit sum and check for an answer zero (i.e. 0x0000 or 0xFFFF).

That sounds so simple, but....

UDP has a special case. It allows (sensibly in my view) the option of "no checksum". This is where the fact there are two zeros is actually handy as you can use one of the zeros as a rogue valid to mean "no checksum". UDP uses 0x0000 as that value.

The problem is that the checksum algorithm does not prohibit the use of 0x0000 for TCP and IP checksums, which it so easily could have.

What is worse is that typical checksum calculations would never end up with 0x0000 as a total (unless all source bytes were 0x00) as it would not wrap 0xFFFF to 0x0000 without a carry set and hence going to 0x0001. This means that typically a checksum as stored (inverse of the sum) will use 0x0000 version of zero, normally. I do not think this is in fact mandated and the exact algorithm for how you do the 1's complement sum is not defined, and in 16 bit 1's complement 0x0000 means the same as 0xFFFF, so a sum algorithm that normalizes the answer to only use 0x0000 (and hence store 0xFFFF) would, in my opinion be valid.

The problem is that some systems do normalise the answer and some do not, so you encounter both 0x0000 and 0xFFFF in the real world. What is worse, is some stacks will check the checksum by working it out and comparing, rather than by working out a checksum including the stored checksum and checking it copmes out as (one of the values of) zero. So in fact some systems fail if 0xFFFF is stored in the checksum field rather than 0x0000.

This means, in effect, IP and TCP only ever store the 0x0000 version of zero, but for UDP you have to use the 0xFFFF version of zero instead as 0x0000 means "no checksum". I wonder how many stacks generate 0x0000 and get away with is as it just means 1 in 65535 packets are unchecksummed and so not checked. I bet that happens!

As a result the checksum generation and checking have to be different for UDP and for TCP/IP, which from a coding point of view is a total pain in the arse, especially when making NATing systems that adjust checksums in a generic way and now have to check if the packet is UDP or not to do their job.

It is further complicated in IPv6 by mandating that UDP 0x0000 is not allowed, but still the expected version of zero for IP and TCP! Arrrrrg.

In case you had not guessed, this meant a slight snag in the NAT code on the FB2700. Nobody had noticed for something like 6 months because it is pretty subtle in its effect, and more importantly FB2700 users are mostly sane enough to avoid NAT at all costs. Turns out I made the same mistake on the FB105, and only did not remember this stupidity because Cliff fixed it for me 9 years ago! I do now remember the same symptoms though, I just did not take in the implications properly I guess (that or I am losing my memory, which is more likely I expect).

If one (competant) person designed and coded this, they would have made it consistent for all uses of the checksum. The use of 1's complement as such is not that bad, and the availability of a rogue value is nice in some ways, but the inconsistent usage is a nightmare. I can only assume it is "design by committee" syndrome. IMHO the whole lot should have mandated one level for integrity checking at the packetisation over any medium (i.e. Ethernet) and not had checksums at IP or TCP/UDP anyway, but that is just my opinion.

Oh well...

iOrc2 (pic)

OK, having lost the original artwork, I have done a new photo, and new outline, and looking pretty good. Not in /tmp/ this time :-)

Don't put files in /tmp/ if you want them later

The orc artwork, for some obscure reason, was in /tmp/

Well, I expected it to be a one off.

Now those nice people at apple have replaced my cracked iPad2 I have to engrave it again, and, well, it has gone.

How bloody stupid. Nothing is ever a "one off". I should know this.

Humph.

Nice apple

Well, those nice people at apple have sorted the iCracked broken iPad1 for me, and are looking at my cracked iPad2... And they have replaced that too... Yay!

Very nice people at apple...

Sonim support staff cannot view web pages!

OK, sonim are seriously dragging their heels here with over a week just waiting for a returns number. This is not good service.

What is even more bizarre is that they apparently cannot view web pages. They asked what the problem was and I sent a URL for a picture of the damage. They asked about the IMEI I quoted, apparently having problems so I sent a URL for a picture of the serial number label with all of the details to be 100% sure I was not mistyping it.

It takes them a day to reply to that, and then they say they cannot view external links.

I have offered to sell them an internet connection that does allow them to view web pages. But what kind of Draconian company has email but not web acces?

Madness.

Your email address is too unusual!

So what sort of dick heads are "breathing space"?

They wont sell me a new air con unit unless I tell them my normal email and phone number and simply cannot understand that the ones I told them are my normal they cannot cope.

They said my email address was unusual. Well, yes? In fact all email addresses are so unusual that they are unique. They totally failed to understand their system did not check against the actual rules for an email address but something totally made up.

There was no question that it was valid as they were emailed me on it. As is typical their contact pages accepted the email address that their order page would not.

As for the phone number, it is checked by the card validation process. I know, because we had to get the bank to make sure it was listed some time ago. The address is checked too, so why the hassle. Arrg.

Why the hell turn away business?? Mad - no wonder the economy is in a mess.

iPad2 is way fragile (pic)

The number of times I dropped my iPad and no problems, dented auliminium case, but glass intact...

Dropped iPad2 around 1m on to wooden floor. Case not dented but glass is smashed.

Arrrg.

Basically I was folding the cover over the top, as you do, holding iPad with one hand and moving cover with the other. The cover detached (magnets) and as this was unexpected I droped the iPad on the floor. Crack.

It's Friday?

So, two hour wait for a table at TGIF...

But hang on, outside, they have a sign showing the opening times for different days of the week, and it is next to a sign that says that here it is always Friday...

But... Surely the opening times should be

Friday
Friday
Friday
Friday
Friday
Friday
Friday

April fool

Well, I was tempted to post an article on how our favourite telco had confirmed that they now have redundant hot standby routers in their network... And then later in the day explain it was an April fool's joke. After all, that is not going to happen is it :-)

OK! Some people have too much time on their hands...
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/looflirpa/e8bb/

Ha, and more... IPv4.1
http://packetlife.net/blog/2011/apr/1/alternative-ipv6-works/