Older blog entries for dwmw2 (starting at number 153)

Hi David,

It appears that Andrew and Arnold Ltd use IP ranges that are registered as Swedish - this is why you can not view BBC content.

The BBC policy is to only serve broadband content to users who have a UK registered IP address.

Sorry for any disappointment.

Best wishes,

Gina
PC Broadband


[Querying whois.ripe.net]
[whois.ripe.net]
country:        GB
...
Muppets. Is there actually anyone with half a clue left at the BBC? There seems to have been a mass exodus of clue a year or two ago, and it's all gone to pot.
Zaitcev asks: "why in the world does OLPC use OpenFirmware?"

I'm inclined to agree that an after-boot firmware interface is unnecessary; I don't see the point in keeping OpenFirmware alive after the system is booted -- but OpenFirmware does seem to be a good choice as the boot firmware. It's a lot smaller and easier to deal with than Linux-as-bootloader, which we were using before. We only have 1MiB of NOR flash to boot from, and L-A-B was too big. OpenFirmware does the job very nicely.

It's also been a godsend when we've been bringing up the hardware. We've designed entirely new chips for OLPC, and have been working with FPGA versions of them during their lifecycle (the final build with the ASICs of everything should happen this week). Debugging that hardware with OpenFirmware is like magic -- especially if you watch Mitch doing it :)

Heh. Why do I find it so ironically amusing that the SPF morons, after trying to retroactively redefine the way that email works after a few decades of history, are now whining that their own silly scheme is itself being misused; just as their own incompatible idiocy goes against the way we've implemented RFC821 and then RFC2821 all these years.

SPF was always a bad idea; the fact that other nutters are abusing SPF records to mean something other than what the original set of nutters intend them to mean, and thus lose even more perfectly valid mail in the process, is just tragically funny.

Wheee. With a little bit of hacking to provide NPTL support in qemu, nspluginwrapper can now run the i386 flash plugin inside firefox on PowerPC machines.

The colours seem wrong-endian (just as when we run the standalone flash player in qemu-i386), and on some content it'll crash after a couple of clone() calls so I suspect the TLS stuff isn't quite right -- but it's getting there...

I am shocked and dismayed that the Pope has offered an apology for the fact that he quoted a mediƦval text in an academic lecture while discussing the relationship between religion and violence. There was no need for such an apology, and to offer one merely promulgates the trend of political correctness which increasingly blights our lives; restricting our right to speak freely in both private and public communication without fear of reprisal.

I am so offended, in fact, that I think I'll go down to the local church and firebomb it. That kind of behaviour should ensure he retracts his original apology, and apologises instead to those who think like myself -- right?

Aug 18 10:19:56 sage postfix/smtp[7785]: 583A53A756: to=<dwmw2@infradead.org>, relay=phoenix.ipv6.infradead.org[xxx.24.250.200], delay=3, status=bounced (host phoenix.ipv6.infradead.org[xxx.24.250.200] said: 550 relay not permitted (in reply to RCPT TO command))

Yay for Postfix brain damage! Pick an IPv4 address out of thin air and pretend that it belongs to the IPv6-only primary MX host for the domain you're trying to deliver to. Then find that the host you chose doesn't relay for the domain in question, and thus declare that all mail to that domain is undeliverable.

I think freedesktop.org still has an explicit route set up for my mail because of this problem too.

$Reasons to stick to Exim++;

Despite chasing them again a fortnight ago, Travelocity still haven't refunded me for the tickets which they cancelled on me. I contacted the credit card company this morning, and we'll deal with it as fraud.

Joy. Upon arriving home and looking up my credit card statement, I find that Travelocity/Lastminute didn't even refund me for the flights which they cancelled after claiming that they couldn't use FedEx to deliver the tickets to me.

These were the tickets, you may recall, that Travelocity/Lastminute eventually did FedEx to me at my hotel when I rebooked -- despite the fact that their Mr Bablani Ritesh had assured me that it was not possible for them to do so. So they've been paid for the tickets twice.

FedEx get bonus fuckwit points too, for failing to deliver to the hotel, for failing to take my telephone number because it wasn't a US number, and for refusing to have the driver call me when he was about to deliver the package even when I did give an alternative local number.

Apparently FedEx drivers aren't capable of calling the recipient a few minutes before their arrival (such that the recipient can make his way back from the conference centre to the hotel to meet the driver). This is because they "do not carry telephones".

I did ask the lady to whom I was speaking if she was actually calling from the 21st Century.

She said no.

18 Jul 2006 (updated 18 Jul 2006 at 16:05 UTC) »

This week's prize for the absolute worst customer service by a non-telco has to go to Travelocity/Lastminute.com.

Last week, I realised that I was going to have to take a detour on my trip home from the Kernel Summit and OLS, and I booked some extra airline tickets with travelocity.co.uk. They were to be picked up from YOW airport on Sunday. Nice and simple, you'd think.

Yesterday, I received a phone call from a gentleman by the name of Bablani Ritesh, from Travelocity. He claimed that it was not possible for my tickets to be made available at the airport as planned, and he had no option but to cancel the booking and refund my payment. I objected strongly to this, and suggested that FedEx would manage the task of delivering tickets to my hotel, but he refused to do this, claiming that the tickets had 'cash value' and could not be sent by courier.

I asked him to send me email to confirm this, and set about looking for alternative flights.

Not realising at this point that travelocity and lastminute.com are in fact the same company now, I went to lastminute.com and booked the same set of flights. Lastminute.com are entirely happy to send tickets by FedEx, although the field in the confirmation page which should have shown me the FedEx tracking number was concerningly blank. The FedEx form had refused to accept my telephone number for some reason, so if there was a problem, it wasn't clear they'd manage to contact me.

I then received the mail which I'd asked Mr. Ritesh to send, noticed that it was from a lastminute.com address, and remembered that the two companies had merged. I now feared for my new booking, since now I was relying on lastminute.com delivering my tickets by a method which they'd already insisted was absolutely impossible. I replied to Mr. Ritesh's email, explaining my concern, giving the new booking number, and asking what to expect -- asking if his earlier refusal to have my tickets delivered was merely because he was being unhelpful, or whether I should expect problems with my new booking too.

The email bounced -- he'd sent me email from an address which doesn't seem to accept mail! I forwarded the bounce to postmaster@lastminute.com asking for assistance, but nobody bothered to reply.

I then tried to use the enquiry form on their web site, but no answer seemed to be forthcoming to that either, so I telephoned instead. I spoke to a lady called Christine, who was unable to give me the FedEx tracking number immediately and reassure me that the tickets had actually been sent. She assured me that she would call me back within 5 minutes, though.

She failed to call me back, but eventually I did get a response to my enquiry through the web form. I do, thankfully, have a tracking number now and I can see that the tickets have reached the sorting facility in Ottawa already. I'm just waiting to see how they manage to screw it up now -- I half expect them to refuse to deliver to the hotel unless I'm there personally to receive the package; which will be hard to arrange since their form was too broken to accept a phone number starting '+44...'.

I have to say that they've really raised the bar for unhelpful and obstructive customer service. Refusing, point blank, to deliver tickets by either the pre-arranged method or by FedEx -- when that is part of the perfectly normal service that the company provides -- is quite impressive. Well done, Travelocity. When coupled with a total failure to communicate -- refusing to accept phone numbers, sending email from broken addresses, failing to return phone calls or email, you could almost be a telco.

Addendum:

Date/Time: Jul 18, 2006 10:57 AM
Activity: Delivery exception
Location: OTTAWA, ON
Details: Incorrect address

Daily faxes to Vodafone on +44 1635 45713 (sic) finally elicited a response from someone who could even manage to remember who I was when I replied to their email, which is an improvement on the muppets in their normal customer service department.

The good news is that they have finally agreed to cancel the 'outstanding balance' which presumably they know they would never have actually managed to recover had they been stupid enough to take it to court. Unfortunately, they are still refusing to remove the 'default' from my credit record.

I have gently reminded them that to demand money for unsolicited services is a criminal offence in the UK, and suggested that they might like to reconsider the latter. I've also contacted the credit reference agencies to check what's actually been recorded, and to note that it's disputed.

Despite Demon's previous similar behaviour when I cancelled a dialup account last year, they gain a few points back in my book -- firstly by at least managing to hold a coherent conversation about it and by backing down a lot quicker than Vodafone, and secondly by running the tpc.int fax service for (AFAICT) the whole of the UK, which meant I didn't have to muck about with Asterisk and SpanDSP for sending faxes -- although I really ought to play with that again some time. I'm sure I had it receiving faxes at some point in the past.

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