Never Eat Shredded Wheat
Posted by Ceri Davies Wed, 02 May 2007 19:45:00 GMT
Another quote that will remain unattributed for fear of my life:
“Once you have used the moss on a tree to work out where North is, how do you find out where West is?”
Good service from Kenwood
Posted by Ceri Davies Wed, 02 May 2007 16:48:00 GMT
Max is getting close to the age where he’ll be wanting solids (other than his own fingers, which he’s constantly chewing on at the moment) so I decided to buy a food processor. I went with the Kenwood FP533
When it arrived, the drive shaft was missing. Not suprisingly, nothing works without that bit. On the inside of the box, there was a number to call in this eventuality. The first thing to strike me about this number was that it was just a normal landline number - not a lo-call number or a premium rate number, but just a normal phone number.
So I called it. There was a menu with three options, the third of which was “press 3 to speak to a person”. I pressed it, and was told that they were experiencing a high volume of calls and I might have to wait, so I was surprised to be answered straight away by a chap who took 60 seconds to write down the model number, the name of the missing part, my name and address and then said that he’d put one in the post and I should have it within a couple of days.
I can imagine that this is how calling a company used to work about 20 years ago, and it rocks. Thanks Kenwood.
Update, May 4th: Arrived today, cool.
The very hungry caterpillar
Posted by Ceri Davies Sat, 28 Apr 2007 23:21:00 GMT
“What is brain freeze?” asked Stef as she fought her way through a refrigerated apple juice induced ice cream headache.
“Oh, I know”, she continued, “it’s because of the caterpillars in your head, right?”.
Back to work tomorrow...
Posted by Ceri Davies Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:01:00 GMT
Aw, damn.
My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?
Dear Vodafone, please bugger off
Posted by Ceri Davies Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:20:00 GMT
I decided to cancel my Vodafone account, so I submitted a question via their website asking what I needed to do. They replied and said this:
Further to your query regarding the termination of your airtime account, we confirm the following: In order to terminate your airtime account, we require 30 days cancellation notice in writing as we are unable to accept termination requests via email. This needs to be forwarded to us at the address noted below: Vodafone Disconnection Department Vodafone Ltd PO Box 549 Banbury OX17 3ZJ On receipt of your cancellation notice, a confirmation letter will be forwarded to your account address, to confirm the receipt and that your cancellation notice has been accepted. If you require any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact us Kind regards Julie Doe[1] Vodafone Customer Services
So in good faith, I wrote to them at the above address, asking for a Porting Authorisation Code (PAC) so that I could move the number to another provider. At this point, I thought that they would send me a letter confirming receipt and the date on which the cancellation would take effect. I’ll clarify that I was under this impression not only because that’s what they told me they would do, but because it’s common courtesy.
Instead, they started calling the mobile telephone concerned, up to 12 times per day (at which point we stopped counting; they didn’t stop calling), trying to speak to me.
Now the telephone isn’t used by me; I just pay the bills. It’s Stef’s phone, and she has rather a lot on her hands at the moment, looking after Max 24 hours a day.
So I wrote to them again:
Hello, further to enquiry xxxxxxx, where I was informed that in order to
close this account I needed to write to you, I wrote to you to close the
account and request a PAC.
It was not pointed out that I would also be required to endure a barrage
of calls to the telephone.
It is my understanding that your retentions team have been calling this
number up to 10 times per day; please stop this. The telephone,
although I pay the bill, is used by my girlfriend who is currently
nursing a 4 week old baby full time and does not need this harassment.
You will not be able to speak to me by calling the above number, so do
not try. Please issue the PAC number and confirm the notice of
cancellation forthwith.
Many thanks,
Ceri Davies
They replied, saying that they were rather sorry about that, giving me my PAC and closing:
Please note that I have put a note on your account "not to call the customer" and I please be assure that you won't be getting any calls from Vodafone.
I’ll grant you that the language isn’t great there, but I was happy with that.
So when they phoned again an hour later, I figured that it was just a delay with this filtering through, because I’m forgiving and stupid like that. Three more phone calls later, I picked up and advised them that I already had my PAC thanks and had been told that the account had been marked “do not call”. At this point, I was told that they couldn’t issue the PAC and that whether the account was marked “do not call” was completely irrelevant unless I was prepared to hand over my postal address right now; if I didn’t, they would continue to call until I did.
What, in the holiest name of fuck, is up with that?
[1]Not her real name. That was Anne.
#define EHOLYCRAPWOULDYOUQUITALREADY 103 /* Dude... */
Posted by Ceri Davies Tue, 13 Mar 2007 14:50:00 GMT
From the installation notes of a popular high availability solution:
# mkdir /.ssh
# chmod go-w /
# chmod 700 /.ssh
# chmod go-rwx /.ssh
They’re thorough, at least.
Looking for CD vendors
Posted by Ceri Davies Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:51:00 GMT
Dear lazyweb,
I’m finally coming to terms with the fact that I have lost my copy of Chicane’s Far from the Maddening Crowds, which is easily the best record I ever lost.
I need an AbeBooks equivalent for music (or some kind soul to just buy me a copy from Amazon!); pointers please.
LDoms nearly ready
Posted by Ceri Davies Sat, 03 Mar 2007 16:16:00 GMT
While I’m on the subject of Sun, it looks like LDoms is reaching the release date. Cool.
Note that this document says that the only operating system that will currently run in a logical domain is Solaris 10 11/06 (aka Update 3), but I know that Kip Macy has been working for some time on getting FreeBSD working and I believe that it does.
Blah, blah, Solaris Cluster
Posted by Ceri Davies Sat, 03 Mar 2007 15:52:00 GMT
Where I work, I look after three highly available clusters running Veritas Cluster Services on Solaris. The hardware is old enough that maintenance is becoming prohibitively expensive and we’re therefore planning to buy new hardware over the next six months or so. Veritas tried to hold us over a barrel over support costs not so long ago, and so this seemed to be a good time to investigate moving to a different HA system.
The obvious choice for me was Solaris Cluster 3.2 (or Sun Cluster 3.2 as it was called at release). It had originally seemed that what I wanted to do would be suboptimal, although the release of 3.2 completely fixed all of the issues that existed with the setup that I had wanted to implement.
Mmm, free
Additionally good is that Solaris Cluster is free to run, even in production, although it must be relicensed (at a reasonably rate) if you wish to buy support. It also supports a large variety of server and storage hardware. Therefore it was no hassle to just download the software and crack on with testing; one barrier to adoption nipped in the bud.
What, no host-based packet filter?
After testing out the design that I had envisioned, it seemed that everything that I had wanted the software to do was in there; the only fly in the ointment was that the IP Filter packet filter was not supported. It worked for some scenarios, but the lack of official support would have been a problem for us.
At around this time, the QA manager for Solaris Cluster, John Blair, happened to post a blog entry introducing himself on the Sun Cluster Oasis[1]. So I asked him about the IP Filter situation.
Ask, and ye shall receive
Less than six weeks later, IP Filter is officially supported for failover services. That’s an amazing response time. I’m not even a paying customer.
Professional services
Even before discovering this little nugget, I proceeded to obtain quotes for the licensing and support costs for Solaris Cluster 3.2. As I mentioned above, they’re quite reasonable.
However, I was told at this point that there was a requirement for Sun Professional Services to come in perform the installation and configuration of the cluster before support could be obtained, and this was far from reasonably priced. At this point I was pretty angry and a little disappointed; I’m a big fan of Sun and couldn’t see why they would throw away customers like this.
I went far enough to complain about it publicly, although it was later pointed out that there was an option for a simple installation validation which is much more reasonable and by pointing this out I hereby absolve myself from the FUD-spreading.
You coming or what?
At this point it’s still not clear that we’ll end up running Solaris Cluster on these platforms, but I’m hopeful that we will. The design that I want to implement slots right in to the Solaris Cluster design and the implementation is therefore very simple and easy to understand (and, by extension, it’s easier to document, which is more the point for me!).
The title of this post is a small admission that I may be starting to sound like this around the office, sorry guys :)
[1] Note to Sun Marketing; there’s some rebranding to be done here :)
Article on bigadmin
Posted by Ceri Davies Sat, 24 Feb 2007 13:27:00 GMT
I wrote an article for Sun’s BigAdmin a few months ago. Due to a backlog of articles, it was only published a couple of weeks ago, but Sun gave me double the usual number of free stuff points in compensation for the delay.
What’s extra nice is that my article has been up on the front page of Sun Developer Network for a couple of days now. Not because it’s particularly brilliant, I think it’s just “put a BigAdmin article on SDN” week.
Still cool though :)