hintofsarcasm
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Archive for Technology
August 30, 2009 at 20:46 · Filed under Technology
Brands of the world, it seems that whoever you have employed to manage your social networking presence does not know what they are doing and you need to sort it out, now!
I am finding more and more that certain brands are monitoring keywords using Tweetdeck or similar applications to reply to tweets either with a sales pitch for their similar product or even to try to redeem themselves in a “pro-active customer service” move.
The first point that I must make is that if you’re going to take the latter stance, appoint somebody who knows the product and is familiar with twitter etiquette. I recently had my broadband company reply to a rant about their service, to which I replied to them with the issue and didn’t hear another thing for a week. I then commented on this lack of response, after-all, they contacted me, and they replied, quite snappily I might add, insisting that they had DM’ed me. Well, anyone who had been using Twitter for more than 24 hours would know that you cannot send a direct message to somebody who does not follow you. And why would I be following my ISPs customer service department? So of course, I didn’t get their DM.
When I did get a response to my technical question, their response didn’t make any sense. Apparently my “IP address email addresschanges daily”. The question I asked them was about the LAN IP addresses that their router gives. Duh.
Another experience was with UPS who clearly monitor the use of “UPS”. Unfortunately it seems that only their US branch use Twitter so when I complained by way of a tweet to the world and they contacted me, they clearly didn’t look at my location before offering assistance, as when I replied with my issue they said they couldn’t help and to call the UK call centre (by this time I had already).
Other companies monitor for use of words that are attributed to their product, or even their competitors company names in an attempt to poach customers. This may all be fine, as long as they are offering you a comparable service or product – not something that is 3-4x the price or isn’t in any way the same.
Twitter can be a great way to get your companies names onto the computer screens of customers or potential customers, as long as it is executed properly. The rules of the real world still apply in Twitterland. It may be a new way to be in contact, but that shouldn’t change anything.
My top tips
- Your brand is not my friend. Do not pretend that it is. Don’t @ me after randomly finding me through keyword searches offering comment only to lead up to a sales pitch.
- If you’re going to offer customer service by twitter, offer to take my telephone number and call me. I’m sure that most issues cannot be sorted out in 140 characters.
- Know how Twitter works. Don’t DM me when I can’t receive it because I don’t follow you. Oh, and don’t @ when you mean to DM, that could be disastrous.
Follow me on Twitter.
Popularity: 3% [?]
August 20, 2009 at 09:56 · Filed under Technology
I downloaded the Windows 7 RTM last week using my MSDN subscription. Great OS. Not going to get into a review right now – I’m sure you can find many of them.
The one thing that was annoying was that Firefox was crashing, pages were taking an age or not loading at all, especially javascript heavy websites like Gmail or Facebook and after moving to Google Chrome for a week and complaining a lot on Twitter I decided to do something about it.
First I loaded Firefox up in safe mode. This cleared up the problem. Then I found from a Windows 7 forum that apparently some add-ons (extensions) don’t sit quite right with Windows 7. This seems plausible, especially since I’m using the 64-bit edition. So I disabled all of my extensions and switched them back on – one by one.
Low and behold, luckily I went from bottom-to-top as the offending plug-in was … Skype Extension for Firefox. With this add-on enabled the browser grinds to a halt almost completely, eats all memory and stops JS from working almost entirely.
So if you get this problem, check for this extension, disable it and let me know the results in the comments. I can’t be the only one experiencing this, surely?
Popularity: 5% [?]
December 19, 2008 at 01:02 · Filed under Technology
The BBC has launched a new version of their iPlayer. Previously only really available for Windows (though we could watch using a flash video player in-browser), it uses Adobe Air, which is cross-platform. This brings the iPlayer to Mac and Linux, finally!
The iPlayer desktop; currently still in labs, but now available to the public, can be run on any platform that is supported by Adobe Air, which is most. Adobe Air has been revolutionising application development of late, bringing innovative programs to Mac, Linux and Windows users without having to create three completely separate distributions. My favourite other application that can be found on all of my computers, Windows, Linux and Mac is the Analytics Reporting Suite for Google Analytics, is a great example of how Air really is making cross-platform programming a reality.
Bringing iPlayer content to more platforms will guarantee the BBC a bigger audience. Their rivals are nowhere near as advanced as they have been forced to become by the BBC Trust. Channel 4 and Sky are still stuck with Kontiki and ITV have their in-browser flash player which you have to be online to watch. Hopefully the new Adobe Air based ‘iPlayer desktop’ will coerce the BBC into seeing their Kontiki based player for the memory-hogging, cpu-munching bohemoth that it is and drop it completely.
Innovation is what has driven the BBC for the past 6 decades and the release of the iPlayer desktop is the proof that there really is somebody in the organisation that is still thinking ahead; still thinking that they don’t have to be limited to a bought-in ready made package that is limited in so many ways (not just that it is Windows only).
So, Linux, Mac and Windows users (yes, you can join in too!) rejoice at the release of the iPlayer desktop. Download it. Show your support. We have whinged and moaned and campaigned for this for long enough, now that we have it, use it! Windows users download it too, embrace Adobe Air and kick Kontiki to the curb, your processor will thank you for it.
Download iPlayer desktop
Opt-in to iPlayer labs
Popularity: 12% [?]
December 15, 2008 at 12:22 · Filed under Technology
You may have noticed some very odd things going on around the site over the past week or so. This is because I have moved this website from a Linux box, which has been very good to me over the past 4 years, to the dedicated Windows server that I got up and running a few weeks ago for Pineapple Boudoir.
Popularity: 11% [?]
December 3, 2008 at 15:50 · Filed under Technology
Pineapple Boudoir is a startup that sells lingerie, candles, sex toys and other products, aimed largely at women.
The first challenge was to design an infrastructure to support the web-application and cart.
Having previous experience with Windows and the .NET environment we decided to follow this route, based on Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0Â and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. At launch we are running SQL and IIS on this single server, although we intend to run SQL on a separate server in the near future, as growth should warrant.
The server is a Dell PowerEdge with 2Gb RAM and an Intel Itanium processor. It’s racked at BlueSquare 2 in Maidenhead, Berkshire, a brand new facility that went live in May 2007 with a 20GBit resilient Ethernet ring. The server also sits behind a Cisco hardware firewall.
A shopping cart application was next on the list to be found, or else designed bespoke.
A small open-source project called nopCommerce came to our attention. It ticked all of the boxes and the support is very good, as the project is still small enough to receive personal responses from the developer.
The cart software is written in C# with ASP.NET 3.5. It uses DAL (Data Access Layers) and modules for payment gateway integration, including Paypal, Moneybookers and Authorize.net.
It has an impressive back-end which can handle products with multiple variants, some of which are required, like size or colour and some of which are optional items which go with the product, such as batteries.
With knowledge of C# and ASP.NET this cart is extremely easy to customise and modify, either to add custom code to change how the page displays, like the Lightbox effect on the product pages, or to change what functions are performed in the background, like showing ‘featured products’ on the homepage.
Pineapple Boudoir launched on December 1st 2008.
Popularity: 15% [?]
October 2, 2008 at 20:42 · Filed under Technology
Apart from the Windows Cloud stuff there were some other speakers and demos that interested me, including a neat use of Silverlight at the Hard Rock Café website which you may have seen before as it has been bounded around as the pièce de résistance of Silverlight 2 since about March this year.
When you click that link you are presented with the Hard Rock Café memorabilia website, in the middle you will see an image that can be ‘Deep Zoomed’ into and each different node (item) can be interacted with separately. The resolution on the pictures of the items is amazing and the detail to which you can zoom in to is awe-inspiring. I have just spent a few minutes reading a contract drawn up for a Beatles performance in 1965, the text is so clear and takes no time at all to load, according to the speaker (whose name I forget, sorry) image optimisation has been a big part of the development of ‘Deep Zoom’ in Silverlight 2 in an attempt to deliver the best quality content to the widest range of users, narrowband and broadband of all speeds. This is definitely something that I can applaude as when I find myself on the road and using my 3G data stick I still want to view high resolution pictures in order to send them on or post them to the web but find myself hanging around, usually having to start again more than once after passing through tunnels, for what seems like an age for rich content to load, which is more than mildly frustrating.
The hot topic of the day however was Hyper-V and OS virtualisation.
All but two Windows Server 2008 editions come with Hyper-V services built in. If you don’t know what Hyper-V is, let me try explain it as quickly as possible so that we can move on;
You have one server. Hyper-V can then split this server into two (or more) “virtual” servers which means two servers running on one piece of hardware. To anyone but the sysadmins they respond and look as two completely seperate pieces of kit, but they aren’t. (Something VMWare has actually been doing for years)
The whole point of all this is that, if it suits your business model, you could potentially chop your server and datacentre spend into tiny little pieces and make huge savings. Servers these days are so powerful and often only a small percentage of that power is utilised, so one could easily gobble up three others and still have power (CPU, RAM, etc.) to spare in an emergency.
For example, if you had four file servers each running pretty steadily at 10% utilisation, why buy 4 pieces of kit that are only going to be using 40 out of 400% when you could buy one piece of kit that would use 40 out of 100% and do the same job? It’s the choice between paying £10,000 for 1 server or £40,000 for 4, in the end they’ll both be doing the same job. The green freaks amongst you too will be happy, because only 1/4 the power is being consumed.
OK. Maybe that’s a little simplistic, but you get the gist of what I’m trying to say, right?
Of course, it ends up introducing other problems such as single point failure, but even if you ran it as a high-availability cluster then you’d still be saving 75% on your hardware bill by only buying 2 servers instead of 8.
Also, by happy coincidence, Microsoft Hyper-V Server (notice no ‘Windows’ as there is no GUI) was released yesterday, October 1st as a free download and is free to use by anybody. It doesn’t support clustering, it doesn’t have a GUI, it doesn’t support high-availability clustering, in fact, it doesn’t support very much, but, it would be great in a development or testing environment.
During these times of recession and depression and smaller purses Hyper-V may have just come at the exact right time for Microsoft to maximise profit. Way to go Steve.
Popularity: 16% [?]
October 2, 2008 at 16:51 · Filed under Technology
I travelled across to London yesterday to attend the Microsoft Technet event, ‘Technologies to change your business’, the keynote speaker was Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.
He came on stage at around 13:15 and proceeded to do his usual thing, he’s a great public speaker and very knowledgeable about the company that he is running and what they are doing now and what is coming from them in the future. He must have to read hundreds of updates daily from the R&D labs just to keep up with it all.
During the proceedings, between talking about virtualisation and Windows Mobile he mentioned something, for what I think was the first time, about a new operating system that was going to be announced in 4 weeks, which is going to be called Microsoft Windows Cloud, or as he put it, ’something better than that’ by the time the announcement comes out.
Tied with the announcement today of Amazon’s intent to run Windows Server on their EC2 service it looks like Microsoft may be entering the supercomputer OS market for the first time, is this where ‘Windows Cloud’ comes in? This was all brought up in the Q&A including the the need to have datacentres across the globe if the service really did take off, Steve B did say that partners would need to be sought to provide the datacentres as Microsoft building and running them all would not be viable, which is probably true.
We wait to here further information about ‘Windows Cloud’, I’m just glad that I was there, in the second row, to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.
Popularity: 15% [?]
August 18, 2008 at 19:27 · Filed under Technology
After probably six months or so of being out of action, I finally decided to take a look at the bug that was causing comments on Hintofsarcasm not to work.
I realised that I made a decision some time ago to change the name of the comment post script, wp-comments-post.php to something that the spam-bots could not get their hands on so easily and install a captcha.
When I removed this captcha system in favour of a hash based JS plugin I completely forgot that I had set all requests for wp-comments-post.php to redirect to Google, so, after deleting the file and re-uploading it a couple of times, checking out the database and the form I finally got a lightbulb above my head and remembered the redirect. Duh.
So, you can all go ahead and start commenting again. That means you, Dan.
ps. InsideCardiff.com is making a comeback.
Popularity: 13% [?]
February 26, 2008 at 18:38 · Filed under Technology
Since I don’t drive, whether I eat or not is reliant on a supermarket delivering to my door.
As part of an advertising campaign by ASDA earlier this year, statistics from the independent grocery shopping website mySupermarket.com were used to prove that ASDA were cheaper than Tesco on hundreds of items, despite an identical television campaign by Tesco claiming the same about them compared to ASDA just a few months prior. In fact, the Tesco price checker is still online and claiming to have 2274 items cheaper than ASDA, so, with two of the major players sending conflicting messages, who actually is the cheapest supermarket to shop from?
According to mySupermarket comparisons, when shopping like for like, ASDA is the cheapest of the 4 supermarkets (Tesco, ASDA, Sainsburys & Ocado (Waitrose)). This is probably the fairest comparison to use, as when taking into likening ’similar’ items (ie. own brands), there can be big differences, in size and weight or in quality which make the matches inequitable.
I had never considered using another supermarket, I was stuck well in there with Tesco, believing that they were the best value, plus of course their service wasn’t too bad, but then after some bad experiences (three failures to show, in fact), I made the decision to investigate alternatives, which is where mySupermarket came into the frame.
When shopping initially signing up with the website, you have the ability to import your favourite items (items you have bought before) from Tesco.com, you then choose from these and it will fill your trolley, all the while keeping a running comparison total from other supermarkets. If you are choosing own brand items, it will choose comparable own brand items. As you can see in the above graphic, my shop at ASDA will save me a cool £40 over my usual choice. This is a grocery shop for a single person for about three weeks, so the savings could potentially be much higher if you are shopping for a family.
Low prices aren’t the only thing to think about when making your grocery choices, because of course, if your driver regularly turns up with items missing, broken or just doesn’t turn up at all, wasted time, effort and eventually the need to go out and buy products elsewhere could completely negate the point of shopping around in the first place.
In summary, using this website could save you a small fortune, but do choose your supplier carefully, I have not used Sainsbury’s or Ocado, but I did switch to ASDA for my February shop and was quite pleased. With only a few missing items, which the difference was quickly refunded to my card, I shall be using them again this month. I don’t feel the need to rush back to Tesco.com any time soon. Being the biggest doesn’t necessarily make them the best.
Popularity: 33% [?]
December 11, 2007 at 12:36 · Filed under Technology
Just when we thought that Facebook could not put a foot wrong, rather like Google of the first five years, they overstepped the mark with Beacon and now James over at The Laboratorium has come up with interesting reasoning to condemn Facebook and Blockbuster for breaking the law by collecting and distributing video rental information in an ‘opt-out’ scheme, incriminating stuff. And if the sums of Mark from Mashable are anything to go by, the two companies could be in some substantial trouble if the any number of people decide to start class action lawsuits.
Popularity: 22% [?]
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