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About Me
Welcome to my personal site here on MyReviewer.com!
In it I hope to talk about everything from what cute thing my dog did this week, the latest rubbish I saw on TV, video games I recently played, and new features I'm working on for the website.
But mostly I'll be whining on about things nobody is interested in, and rounding off each entry with some clips I liked on YouTube.
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Train2Game Spammed My Inbox
Sunday, 15th November 2009, 12:51
So yesterday, I got yet more spam in my inbox, amongst the usual crap pretending to be from banks I have no accounts with, and Nigerian scams (it is quite sad to have a type of scam named after an entire country, I feel for the innocent populous there) I got an unsolicited email from a company called Scienta Data Ltd, under the trading name of Train2Game.
"This email was sent to you using data that has opted in to receiving information from third parties" it said, well bollocks to that I say. I am, and have always been, religious in my ticking (and not ticking) of checkboxes that opt out (or don't opt in) to third party emails. Because I hate spam, I get enough genuine mail in my inbox without having to deal with some company trying to sell me crap I have no interest in, and in my opinion actually don't believe is remotely capable of delivering anything like what it promises.
You see this company is flogging distance learning in what it calls "Computer Games Developer and Designer" courses. Yeah guys, I'm sure people doing this course will earn £20-£25k in their first year and get a "secure future" with "transferable skills." Actually no, I am pretty sure that you won't, all you will be is a fair few quid worse off.
Trouble is, everyone thinks they can design a great computer game, much like they can do a better job of managing our national football team. This sort of course (and the marketing behind it) just seems to me to feed on that niavety.
Want to know more about Train2Game? Read more on the wonderfully bitter Sega obsessed site UK Resistance who were apparently threatened with legal action for bitching about this company, or read about them on NewRetro.
Anyway I digress a bit, my real annoyance here is how stupidly pointless UK anti-spam leglislation is. Firstly it doesn't cover spam sent to anything other than private addresses, secondly I've complained to the authorities through official channels about spam I am getting to my personal address (which was farmed years ago from a gaming website that stupidly made them public) yet they never fine anybody.
That's the problem, if the worst that can happen to you as a company (or even an individual if you are one of those annoying sellers on ebay who thinks just because someone bought something off you they can spam you as well) is someone says stop sending emails to this person, where is the deterrant to be respectful of people's right not to receive unsolicited email? The law is supposed to allow the government to fine you, but I've never heard of it happening, so it is about as useless as those signs which tell you letting your dog crap on the park can result in it costing you money.
This Week's Videos
Everybody loves a bit of Shatner, so here is a bit of Shatner.
And secondly, because I like a bit of science, especially pretty what-would-happen-if kinds of science. An old ripped-from-VHS video of two smoke rings colliding.
Posted by Robert John Shepherd
Comments on this Item
Add Your Own CommentHow Losing Our ADSL Broke Our Websites
Wednesday, 21st October 2009, 16:41
This is a cautionary tale, ladies and gentlephones, one which begins either late Friday night, or early Saturday morning, a few weeks ago, the exact timings are unclear. It may not be the most exciting story, nor is it the sort of revolutionary epic which inspires a new generation to rise against the hypocrisy of its government and reinvent politics of its time. It is however entirely true, and living through it was bloody annoying.
First a recap, at the beginning of September we began moving our websites from our own ageing servers which sat in a rack at TelecityRedbus in Docklands, to new rented machines at UKFast. We managed to migrate all our email, DNS and websites to the new machines with very little problems. So far, UKFast have been pretty much what every IT person wants from a hosting company.
Our actual domain names have been hosted with Easyspace for a fair few years, we originally had our main one on Demon but moved it to Easyspace after having problems with Demon's hosting of it. I seem to recall that whole fiasco peaked on a Friday with someone on their tech support promising to do something domain related, and then sodding off home for the weekend instead.
The Day We Lost The Internet
So this brings us up to about Friday last week, when we had two DNS servers running, our primary at UKFast, and a backup secondary running on my ADSL line at home. Everything seemed to be fine, until that is local contractors took out a few hundred telephone lines in my local area at the weekend. We have a lot of phone lines into this place of work, two of them were completely dead, one of those carried our Business ADSL connection.
What is a Business ADSL connection? Well generally one considers paying more money for the same thing as a domestic connection, but with the word Business in front of it, means if things are broke then they need to get fixed sooner rather than later. Needless to say this was also on a Business phone line, so you'd think the worst case would be 24 hours of downtime?
Think again! The damage done, cutting off hundreds of local people, would take best case 7 days to fix, but may even take up to 10 days. That's 10 days without internet access, the phone lines we rely on for our businesses, thank you very much BT, thank you very very much.
But our contract is with Demon, we still have other working phones in the house, maybe they can help us? Well the best they initially offer is to move our ADSL to another phone line which will take 7 working days. How is that any help? After talking to 5 different people for quite a long time, eventually they have a better offer, they can do it in 3 days but we have to pay about £150 and get locked into a new 12 month contract with a company we've been toying with leaving for the last few years because their support has gotten so bad.
Time to change ISPs, so long Demon, you used to be good (apart from the domain incident) and we've been with you since our very first leased line all that time ago (15 years is it?), but now your support has become so terrible and unhelpful if any issue pops up I despair at having to ring them.
A little tip for any budding ISP support people out there, if the person ringing you up is IT literate, do not repeatedly ask them to ping microsoft.com or power cycle their router when they ring up to report a line fault. And even if you insist they ping something for you, don't tell them exactly how to open the start menu, and browse for the command prompt.
So I ring up Zen, they can also do it in 3 days for an additional £150, which appears to be BTs standard charge. Since it was BT who are responsible for us having to do this in the first place, it seems BT will refund us that charge at a later date so all is good. Incidentally, a few friends of mine use Zen and find their connection excellent for gaming, and their support top notch.
Zen must be doing really well, because both times I ring the sales line they answer with a mere hello, no mention of the name of the person I'm talking to or any offer of how they might help me. Someone send these people on a training course, I wasn't even sure I'd gotten through to sales when they picked up. Unless they really are doing so well they can afford to be so nonchalant towards new customers.
So How Does All That Kill a Website?
A good question I hear me ask myself, what has websites hosted in Manchester got to do with our ADSL in London? Well, come Monday morning I'm reading threads on the photography forum my World of Warcraft guild (which includes many good friends) uses. It seems some people can't see a picture I posted that is hosted on our new servers.
Well that's odd, so I check the servers everything appears to be up and running. But also something even worse is apparent, I've been checking the traffic stats on Google Analytics almost daily the last week or two, checking to see if recent changes we made to our sites for search engine optimisation are having the effect I intended. Since Sunday our traffic has dropped to nearly zero, what the hell is going on? This is all I need, not only am I struggling to access the internet with a make shift 3G dongle due to no ADSL, trying to sort out our ADSL, now I have this to deal with?
I check the servers, they all seems fine, I get friends to check them and they have trouble resolving the domain names. It's a DNS issue, I bloody hate DNS issues, mainly because they can be troublesome at the best of times. Looking back, here is what I think happened...
The root domain servers think we have two domain name servers on ns0.reviewer.co.uk and ns1.reviewer.co.uk, despite me changing them a few times on Easyspace (who host our domain names) to ns1 and ns2. Now ns1 is currently at UKFast, with ns2 being on my ADSL at home, the latter obviously down and out of the game at this point.
However that should still be okay, the secondary backup server on ns2 is just that, the backup server. ns1 should still be accessible. At least it would be, if the root domain servers really thought that ns1 and ns2 were where they should be. It turns out that Easyspace's system for changing them may be buggy, or perhaps there is some other mystical process here I don't understand.
These root servers had wrong information for the reviewer.co.uk domain, which is the most important we own because not only does it host our most high profile and high traffic websites, primary email addresses, and so on, it also contains the ns1 and ns2 entries that all our other domains (such as MyReviewer.com) rely on for their DNS.
They believed that the name servers were at an IP we used in our racks at docklands (now down because of the move) and a backup on my ADSL at home (also down) and no amount of trying to change them with Easyspace's control panel would fix it. It seemed for the last few weeks, the ONLY name server which was working sat on my ADSL line. So even though at some point in the future I would have noticed and fixed this problem, for now the internet thought our backup DNS server was our only server, and death of our ADSL killed that.
As our domain data on name servers around the internet started to expire, traffic began to drop, amazingly one single person from our forums still resolved the old addresses. I don't know why or how, but he had become the Omega Man.
So anyway I sent a critical support ticket in, which takes them bloody hours to even reply to, after which they just send a mail asking me to confirm what I was asking them to do. I'm sorry guys, but when you are losing emails, website traffic and money, you do not want to spend 6 hours waiting for somebody failing to help you.
At this point I took the only sensible option available to me, bearing in mind it was now past 1am. I forked out £15 to have Easyspace transfer the domain to UKFast, despaired at the fact this could take 3 business days to happen, and went to bed. When I woke up, the domain transfer had gone through, and I could use UKFasts system to enter one correct nameserver entry. Minutes later traffic began flowing to the site, mail started appearing, and all was once again well.
Now what have I learnt from those few days? Nothing new unfortunately, but I can offer the following advice. If you have a service that you care about, make sure you are responsible for as much of it as you are competent enough to be responsible for. Then make sure anything out of your control is looked after by people who care, and you have some way to contact them.
This Week's Videos
Been a while since I did some of these, so here we go! First up The Axis of Awesome 4 Chords, which is a good lesson in how diverse a selection of music can originate from the same four triads.
And as I like to have related vids in these updates, here is the other side of the music coin, good old fashioned dancing. What better reason to dance for than Jesus?
Posted by Robert John Shepherd
Comments on this Item
Add Your Own CommentThe Sanctimonious Self Righteous Tossers of the Internets
Friday, 4th September 2009, 17:55
It's a strange thing the Internet, so much of it is available for free, that we get used to that fact. The moment you even suggest that something previously accessible to everyone will become chargable, pretty soon posts start to appear on forums everywhere which span from, "I won't be paying, I'll go somewhere else" to the inevitable gleeful addition of, "well I never went there anyway, it's rubbish."
Although usually when I state they say the word rubbish, what they really write is the word ****.
Now all this is fair enough, and somewhat typical for standard internet banter. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of originality or any constructive contribution to the subject matter, would enable me to write an automated self content generating forum. It would be easy, just take some basic comments from the odd left wing liberal and the (often more prominant) right wing biggots, and substitute in whatever happens to be the topic of the day.
I often suspect people are the same everywhere, with most well balanced forums representing an accurate microcosm which well reflects the world at large. Of course from this I naturally exclude the BBC's Have Your Say discussion pages, the House Price Crash forums, and pretty much anything related to the Daily Mail. Still, there is a nice antidote to all this reactionary, ignorant, racist, stupid, retarted, unfunny crap, and that is spEak You're bRanes, so it all evens out in the end.
Which sort of brings me on to something I did 6 months ago, the results of which sort of even suprised me a bit. See, I play World of Warcraft a fair bit and over the years I've been developing and extending an addon for it called MinnaStats. One version of it was downloaded over 100,000 times, which isn't insignificant, so I had an idea.
If say even half that many people were really using and enjoying it, maybe a tiny proportion of them would chuck me something like £1, or $1 or whatever tiny little amount was their equivalent in whatever country they used it in. I wasn't asking for a lot, just a contribution towards the ridiculous amount of hours I'd spent making the thing.
When people first used the addon, it would pop up a window telling them I'd spent a lot of time on it, and it would be nice of them to throw me the sort of money people don't think twice about losing down the back of the sofa. If they lied, and said they had contributed, it would never bug them again, otherwise it would bug them once every so many times they logged into WoW.
Well, six months on, over 45,000 people have downloaded it, and I have received precisely three donations, one for £5 and two for £10. So basically nearly everyone who is using it, was content with just clicking whatever they needed to do to stop it nagging them. And I'm completely fine with that, I was never demanding people handed over any cash, merely suggesting they might want to if they really liked the addon and felt like saying thank you.
Three people who use it, the ones who actually donated, went way beyond what I suggested, which seems to indicate that the sort of person who actually wants to contribute towards the costs of things they like, are very generous people.
What I didn't expect was the equal number of people who went the other way, people who felt not only did they have the right to feel affronted by the mere cheek of me even suggesting they give a single penny of their extremely hard earned cash to benefit someone other than themselves, but that they should tell me about that fact.
Someone called Mack55 said, "Downloaded this addon, but before I had a chance to really evaluate it, I received two unsolicited popup messages from developer asking for donations. So, I deleted this mod and will look for something without those annoying requests for money."
This is the sort of person I can only describe as a tosser. I have spent well over 100 hours over the years working on this addon, and yet he somehow thinks I did that entirely for the purpose of then putting out my hand in front of his own person to cheekily demand he gives me cash. What a twat.
Oh, and some other guy wrote to me to say I was violating the T&Cs for addons by asking for donations. I think he's just talking crap really, I'm pretty sure you can't charge for an addon and I'm not doing that I'm giving it away free. But the self righteousness of these people really makes me laugh.
All of this reminds me, I really should finalise and realise the next version...
Posted by Robert John Shepherd
Comments on this Item
ChangesPosted by Mark Oates on 5-9-2009 19:34
Ah, you've hit on the Great Problem Of The Internet there, haven't you? Culturally the whole internet is a free meal, and everyone expects everything on it to be free or at least a great big bargain. Look at the bargain bucket threads that pop up whenever a company makes a pricing error and the number of dodgy geezers who come out of the woodwork to exploit the error and flog the items they've bought cheap on eBay for a fortune. And when the loophole closes, they scream they're being cheated.
Honour contributions are a losing battle. The free meal mentality is at its worst with shareware. Personally I avoid shareware, but that's because I'm uneasy about bandying my credit card details around the web after a number of incidents where dodgy security nearly cost me a considerable amount. I'd like to support the developers, but I'd like to see a safe way of doing it (and I have grave doubts about Paypal).
ChangesPosted by Stuart McLean on 5-9-2009 20:25
Actually I think the whole thing is symptomatic of a generation used to getting everything for nothing. Brion Gysin once said 'People are Sh***s Darling' and he had it about right. When you asked for VOLUNTARY contributions people read that as 'FREE'. If people can get away with it then they will. Conscience doesn't come into it for most people in this country. Recently, Liverpool council tried to ape the Copenhagen thing of filling the city with free bikes. Just take one when you need one and park it up somewhere when you arrive. The only rule...don't take it outside the city boundaries. It works a treat. However, in Liverpool it took less than two days for all the bikes to disappear. 
Having said all that, in a slightly superior manner, I have never made any contributions to sites that I have used that ask for voluntary contributions. I guess we all think that someone else will be taking care of that... sorry!!
ChangesPosted by Rich Goodman on 9-9-2009 17:57
We tried the free bike thing in Loughborough way back in 1992, and they all got nicked or trashed within a week or so. They were all reconditioned and painted bright yellow, not exactly attractive thieving propositions. But that never stops anyone!
ChangesPosted by Mark Oates on 9-9-2009 20:47
People would nick a dog turd if they thought they could flog it.