Author Archives: Jethro Carr

Vodafone Customer Satisfaction

Unfortunately I have to make yet another negative blog post, thanks to the charming customer service at Vodafone NZ.

When I took my business full time, I upgraded my prepay account to a regular 24-month contract Vodafone Talker plan in Sep 2008. This is a pretty non-exciting phone plan with included minutes, txts and a few other extras, the main reason for choosing it is that I didn’t want to have to worry about running out of credit when doing lots of business calls.

The plan didn’t come with any good discounts or cool new hardware, it was just a regular phone plan.

I recently decided that I’d like to get an Apple iPhone 3G 8GB to replace my aging blackberry, as well as providing me with the opportunity to develop my own software for my phone. :-)

Vodafone sell the iPhone device itself at $979.00 if the phone is purchased without a contract. However, if the phone is purchased on a 24-month, $60 per month contract, the price drops to $450.00 – an amount I can cover with my new toys budget.

So, I decided to buy the iPhone for $450.00 and replace my existing contract with the $60.00 per month iPhone plan – this would surely be as simple as walking into Vodafone and signing a couple of forms or something.

HOW VODAFONE MAKES SOMETHING SO SIMPLE, SO HARD

1. Whilst Vodafone will replace my existing plan with a new iPhone plan, they will not give me *any* credit on the iPhone itself, and I would have to pay the full $979 retail price!!

Naturally this seems crazy that as a loyal customer I have to pay more whereas a new customer would get all the discounts!

2. I can break out of my existing contract for $160 – so I could break out, and then sign up to the new iPhone plan and get the phone for $610 once the cost of the break fees are added – that’s $369 cheaper than buying the iPhone at full cost!!

Of course as their salesperson pointed out, I would loose my existing phone number and (I quote) “Vodafone frowns on such a practice”. Vodafone FROWNS on such a practice? What the fuck does that mean?

I FROWN on Vodafone’s inability to provide quality services and support to their customers, I really don’t care about their opinions on customers working out ways around their stupidity.

3. Upon telling the Vodafone employee that I might as well just wait for Telecom to release the iPhone on their new XT network, cancel my plan and sign up for a better deal with them, his response was (actual words) “Well, go do it then”.

WHAT I’M GOING TO DO

So thanks for the advice Vodafone employee, I will go and do it then. When Telecom bring out the iPhone on the XT network, I will cancel my Vodafone account, get my number ported to Telecom (so no need to get new business cards) and get an iPhone on their network!

In the past I had to use Vodafone to get international roaming, but with the new Telecom XT network, I now have a choice, and I choose to go to a firm that isn’t treating their customers like crap.

Oh, and I don’t mean just canceling my mobile account – I also mean when the 24-month expires on my Vodem, I’ll move my 3G connection to Telecom.

So Vodafone is going to lose $110 per month of my business to start with…

But that’s not all, they are going to lose:

As many people as I can possibly convince to leave Vodafone, and I’ll actively recommend people away from Vodafone wherever possible.

Any chance of future business from me – as my company grows, I don’t think I’ll be sticking with Vodafone…

Hell, I’ll even pay more if I have to just to get better service – the Telecom people I spoke to at their store were very helpful and willing to assist in moving away from Vodafone in any way possible.

OTHER VODAFONE CRAP

This isn’t the first time Vodafone has annoyed me with their stupid crap – here’s some more fine examples:

Their inability to merge the two different accounts I have (Vodem and Phone), because my phone was originally prepay, the account can’t be merged!

The fact they charge $1 each time you want talk to customer support – and the only time when I want to talk to customer support, is when there has been some kind of mistake on their part!

The fact that they force all their customers onto 24-month contracts unless you want to pay large excesses on the plans.

As a side note, the Vodafone staff at Warring Taylor St were very helpful but restricted by Vodafone’s polices (and had no iPhones in stock, so directed me to Lambton Quay).

The employee that I spoke to at Lambton Quay was rude and didn’t care in the slightest that they had just annoyed a customer so much I was going to change provider.

So congratulations Vodafone, I walked into your store wanting to spend more money with you, but came out wanting to find *anyone* else to spend my money with instead.

Fuck Relic Entertainment/THQ

Normally I’m quite a calm relaxed user, able to handle even the toughest problems dished out by computer software without losing my cool… Unfortunately this weekend has driven me to a new level of annoyance thanks to the joys of a WW2 strategy game called “Company of Heroes” developed by Relic Entertainment and published by THQ.

This game is a particularly fun multiplayer RTS which ensures many hours of amusement when played at a LAN party and overall is one of the best strategy games I’ve played in some time.

When I originally purchased the game, it’s DRM simply consisted of a product key and requiring the disk to play – whilst annoying and pointless, this was something I could put up with.

However, in their infinite wisdom, the developers decided that it would be a good idea to lock this product down even further to inflict as much pain as possible upon their paying customers in the name of anti-piracy.

Over time they have pushed out updates making their product more and more unusable by the legitimate customer and driving me crazy.

And so, I give you the tale of woe that is the Company of Heroes customer experience.

USING THE GAME
In order to play online, or to EVEN START THE GAME you must have the game updated to the latest release at all time.

If you just want to start the game and have a LAN or single player game, it will force you to download the latest patches before you can play – regardless whether or not the patch is 100MB or 1.8GB (yes, 1.8GB patches do exist).

I can understand the need to patch in order to be able to play online – there is the security reasons as well as simply needing to have the same API version as the other players. However, forcing the user to update in order to be able to play locally is totally ridiculous and causes a lot of messing around simply to handle developer stupidity.

It is possible to trick this to allow you to play without updating by pulling your network connection or writing some firewall rules to block the connection back to the game servers, which will then cause the game to prompt for the install DVD, but it’s all hassle that shouldn’t be required.

Of course, that is assuming that the disk verification actually works! I had to reinstall CoH, and now whenever I start the game, it claims that it “could not verify media”.

Oh, did I happen to mention that this error happens regardless whether I even have the disk in the drive or not? It appears to me that it doesn’t even bother to check the media and just fails.

I suspect that if I was to connect online and authenticate with the relic servers it will work, but what happens when my internet is down again?

Currently my DSL is screwed (* long story about another equally inept company) with the only fix being my new cable internet connection going live on the 18th. How am I supposed to use this product meanwhile? What about users with only occasional internet access – overseas troops, travellers, or the poor people who still have to use dialup?

PATCHING
I understand the need for patching, I’m even pleased that Relic have decided to support the product and regularly fix issues, tweak features and maintain the product.

However, I’m not please that I have to deal with shit such as:

1. Huge patches of 1.8GB due to new expansion content being deployed via patch.

This happens so that non-expansion players can play with other expansion players and – in theory – players can upgrade to a purchased expansion by entering a product key from the newer release.

However, they managed to fuck this up, so that after I installed the original CoH, applied *all* patches and then entered my product key for the Opposing Fronts expansion, it unlocked only part of the content.

In particular, I found that there were no voice files or campaigns installed from the expansion making the game rather limited.

So I actually need to install from the expansion disk instead of the original disk – but when I do this, I can only play the original content when I have a working internet connection, when offline the original content is hidden as the product key is only associated with my online login.

This was the reason I originally tried to reinstall, in order to try and make both the original and expansion content work whilst offline. I guess I’m asking for too much…

2. Incredibly slow patching when applying.

Seriously, how does it take 15mins to install 100MB of patch?? The main game installer is slow enough that I can go take a shower & sort out the laundry to find it still running when I return and the patches just seem to continue this slowness trend.

3. MISSING PATCHES!!

This point is very, very, frustrating. I have a local copy, of EVERY. SINGLE. PATCH. released by Relic on my file server. They total close to 3.8GB

However, I do not seem to have one mysterious patch which is required after I reinstall the game using the Opposing Fronts expansion disk.

Once this mysterious 114MB patch has been installed, it will then allow me to install the rest of the patches that I have locally. However, this patch does not exist on their website at cohpatch.relic.com, meaning I can’t stick it on my file server for future use.

The only way I’m going to be able to install this patch is to use the in-game downloader and then packet sniff the traffic with tcpdump or wireshark and see what URL the patch is being downloaded from and save a local copy.

I can solve this, but it’s just a PITA and could really be avoided if they didn’t force patches onto users so much since I don’t often use the online play features.

4. Product version lies

And to make product patching even more fun, the version number lies. Under the control panel, I can check the version of the game that is installed.

According to the support information, I have version 2.0.0.0 installed when I’ve done a clean install from the original company of heroes disk.

But hang on, this is the same version that I have installed when I install from the CoH Opposing Fronts expansion disk instead – they can’t both be the same version!

If I then try to patch the install using the orginal disk, I can patch with EN_2101_2201_Patch.exe. However, this patch won’t work if I attempt to patch the install from the opposing fronts disk.

So what is the *real* version of the application? They can’t both be version 2.0.0.0, since they exhibit different behaviours. And how come patch 2101 to 2201 works with version 2.0.0.0??

FUCK RELIC ENTERTAINMENT/THQ
I’m a legitimate owner of both the original game and the expansion, however there is no way I am ever going to buy another Relic/THQ game ever again after all this crap.

I suspect if I just pirated the game, I would not have had any of these stupid problems and would be happily playing it right now.

So I’ve wasted several hours trying to make this product work and I’ve ended up at a stage where the game flat out refused to start with an error about being unable to verify the media, even after a clean reinstall and reboot.

I love the game, but it’s horrific DRM and update “features” have certainly given me a sour taste – I can recommend to anyone considering playing it to skip the retail version and go straight to a pirate download site. After all, Relic must be keen supporters of piracy, as I can think of no other reason for their product to be so terrible towards paying customers.

Update for March

Wow, it has been a busy month! I really need to try and update my blog a bit more frequently to stop it from getting stale and requiring a large update to be posted.

AMBERDMS BILLING SYSTEM

After the initial release of the Amberdms Billing System 1.0.0 on 18th Feb 2009, there were several hundred downloads and a number of companies signing up for the trial service.

I recently released version 1.1.0 with a whole bunch of new features, including PayPal support, service usage alerts and better documentation.

I’m currently working on the next release which is focusing on the following:

ACID compliance in all application areas.
Taking the current SQL-Ledger migration program from alpha to stable and preparing migration documentation.
Reoccuring Transactions.
File import abilities.

I’m also currently investigating the work involved in developing migration applications from various proprietary products such as MYOB, as well as the idea of integrating the Amberdms Billing System with various e-commerce shop applications.

NEW PLANS!

I have recently added new plan options to the hosted version of the Amberdms Billing System, including a basic FREE plan and an entry level 100MB plan for only $10 + GST a month.

That’s a low cost accounting system run by professional engineers with no proprietary lock in! Remember, for every new customer, I can purchase more junk food and spend more time adding even more great features, so PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD! :-)

For details about these new plans, read through the announcement online.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

I will also be announcing some exciting new Linux server solution offerings from Amberdms in the next week or so, with some great offerings for small-mid sized companies.

If you want to get information about new products and releases from Amberdms, join the low-traffic amberdms-announce mailing list.

Otherwise, I shall blog them here in due course.

TWITTER

If you are on twitter, follow me and get regular updates on what I’m up to.

Unfortunately, I had just gotten over my email addiction but now Twitter has come along to get me addicted to something new… :-(

INSTANT MESSAGING

I now have an operational jabber/XMPP server. If you want to IM me, you can at message be at jethro@amberdms.com by using any XMPP service such as Google Talk, your own server, or a free account from jabber.org.

Hard drives hate me

After fixing up my laptop yesterday, installing the spare HDD and reloading everything I suddenly find that my spare HDD is faulty. :-(

At first the laptop would just randomly lock up or pause for periods of time, but today it failed badly. With luck, I was able to get the documents for the last 12 hours I had been working on to a USB stick.

I know that it’s the HDD rather than the laptop, since this spare HDD had caused similar problems on the spare laptop, but I think I triggered the real nasty stuff when I loaded about 40 GB of my data onto it giving it a big work out.

I’m back up and running using my spare Libretto U100 laptop, but have had to place an order for a new 1.8″ HDD to put back in my primary unit. (about $580 NZD – ouch!)

I’ll end up with my production laptop working with a new HDD (hopefully another 3 years life!), a working spare laptop to lend to my brother and an additional spare mainboard, RAM & chassis from the scrapped Libretto.

What a hassle! Good thing my backups are frequent and working. :-)

RIP beloved hard drive

I had a whole pile of “fun” today when my Libretto U100’s HDD suddenly died at 1pm right in the middle of preparations to release my company’s new open-source billing system product on the 16th of February.

Fortunately as I had done a backup just last night, I only lost about 3 hours work, but it was still quite an annoyance as it took about 10 hours to replace the hard drive, pull all the data off the backup server and restore the operating system.

Most of the complexity comes from the very small size of the laptop and the fact that the only way to remove the HDD is to remove almost all parts of the motherboard & expansion cards inside.

Fortunately I had spare components from another Libretto that I had scrapped for parts – without that the problem would have been much more serious, since it only takes 1.8″ IDE HDDs which aren’t that easy to get and can be rather expensive (one Toshiba parts supplier quotes about $500 for a replacement 60GB drive).

The I/O performance on the laptop had been getting pretty bad over the past month and I was starting to suspect drive problems so the failure wasn’t a huge shock, it just came at a really annoying time.

I’ve had 3 years of almost 24×7 use out of the laptop, including carrying it all over the place on almost a daily basis, so I’m pretty pleased with it’s life span overall.

I think my next purchase will be one of the new 64GB IDE 1.8″ SSD drives to get a much faster, reliable laptop – considering that whenever I notice slowness on my Libretto it’s due to disk I/O, a SSD should be a worthy investment to extending it’s usable life.

Update for Feburary

AMBERDMS

On the 18th of February, I release my new open-source accounting, service billing and time keeping product, the Amberdms Billing System.

This program has been written from the ground up by me for use by small & medium businesses, with particular focus on supporting the needs of IT businesses, including consultants and ISPs.

Take a look at the Amberdms website for further details about all the exciting features. :-)

In other Amberdms news, the amount of consulting work is increasing and I’ve also started offering budget NZ-based virtual machine services which is also helping to grow Amberdms into the next corporate empire. ;-)

LIBRETTO

My libretto is now back in fully working form. After replacing the hard drive, I had been suffering from instability issues where the machine would randomly hang and crash.

I believe I have tracked these problem to a BIOS issue, as after I reset all the BIOS options back to factory defaults, the issues resolved themselves.

Still, this caused many wasted hours and lots of annoyance.

TWITTER

Everyone keeps pestering me to create a Twitter account, so I have gone and created one. Follow my exploits at www.twitter.com/jethrocarr.

Time will tell if getting Twitter was a good idea… I had just gotten over my email addiction, so I’m not sure how safe I’ll be with Twitter.

The uptime that was not to be

I just arrived back in Wellington today after a week away at linux.conf.au 2009 in Hobart, Tasmania. More on the conference in future postings, but I can summarise it as “awesome” meanwhile.

This particular posting is a tale of how my file server was cursed to lose it’s uptime:

Whilst I was away there was a large power outage in Wellington, across the entire city including the CBD and Suburbs for about 30mins.

My trusty home file/xen server kept on running without a problem on UPS, but it seems that it could not escape the fate of being taken offline due to power issues…

I arrived home this afternoon and noticed that the server was making more noise than normal, due to the intake dust filter being a bit clogged.

I took off the front panel, cleaned out the dust filter and began to put it back on, when I knocked the fan filter metal across the fan speed control circuit.

A spark later, I realised I had shorted the exposed fan control circuit at the front of the case which promptly caused the PSU to cut power to the server.

The server survives the Wellington power outage, then dies and loses my uptime when I simply clean out the dust… just typical…. :-(

(Fortunately after re-plugging the mains cable the server came back online successfully. Phew!)

Update for January

LINUX.CONF.AU
First up in 2009 is the most important event of the entire year – linux.conf.au – which will be held in Hobart, Tasmania. If you will be attending, you can see my flight details on the wiki.

I will be staying at the uni accommodation as usual. Whilst a hotel would be a bit nicer, the uni accommodation always ensures you end up hanging out with heaps of other awesome geeks.

AMBERDMS
It’s now been 3 months since I left Prophecy to work on Amberdms fulltime. During this time I’ve been doing a very large amount of programming and I’m scheduled to release my first version of the Amberdms Billing System under an open-source license by the end of Jan – hopefully before I go away to linux.conf.au.

This billing system offers a wide range of features, including:

Double-entry accounting
PDF invoice generation
Various financial reports and tools
Timesheets & billing for hours worked
Data-usage billing – ideal for ISPs or other service providers
Migration utilities from SQL-Ledger.

The code is all written in PHP and I’m preparing developer documentation to assist 3rd party integration and encourage community contributions.

THIS BLOG
I haven’t forgotten to add an RSS feed, just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Will try and make some time to add it in Feburary.

HIGH-HA SERVER SETUP
At the moment I have a server being shipped up to Auckland NZ and my old production server in Napier is going to be upgraded to Centos 5. This will provide me with two identical servers to be configured in a geographically distributed cluster to provide high-availability for my software-as-a-service products.

This will be going live in January before I release the billing system – will probably write up some articles about problems and challenges I deal with and the design used.

Update for October

It’s been a busy 6 or so weeks since I left Prophecy to work on Amberdms – enjoying it immensely with plenty of exciting projects and other work.

Currently I am on holiday over in Australia on Brisbane’s Gold Coast for about 1.5 weeks just relaxing, then will be returning for a few months of intense coding work before heading off to linux.conf.au in January.

Amberdms’s corporate domination progress

Most of my time has been going into Amberdms developing the Amberdms Billing System, which is an open-source combined accounting, billing, invoicing and customer/service management system,

At this stage, the PHP framework for it and other Amberdms web application products has been mostly completed, along with many of the basic functions for customer, vendor, product, project management as well as timesheets, user/staff management and some of the double-entry accounting features.

I have been developing quite a powerful frame work for my web applications which I plan to release as a separate software

I am aiming for an initial beta release by the end of November. Sometime between Nov and Jan I need to org anise my server upgrade to CentOS 5 and configure a geographically distributed high-availability cluster to ensure constant uptime for email, phone and all web applications.

linux.conf.au

I have booked my trip to linux.conf.au 2009 in Tasmania arriving on Sun 18th and returning on Sun 25th. I’m certainly looking forwards to the trip – linux.conf.au is always exciting with new ideas, great presentations and plenty of social interaction with like-minded individuals.

It should also provide me with a chance to promote Amberdms to people, and to assist me in this, I will be going as a professional delegate to get the extra networking session.

As usual, I will be staying at the uni accommodation booked by the conference – it’s cheap and it also provides a great way to meet and hang out with other attendees.

Linksys SPA942 display string issues

I’ve recently built an Asterisk pabx to run all my phone systems for Amberdms. In testing I found everything to be working correctly, with the exception of my Linksys SPA942 desk phone.

The phone worked fine, except for when it received calls, the caller would not be able to hear anything, and the call would disconnect after 15 seconds everytime.

Further testing found that:

Calls from the Linksys to any phone (internal or external) worked fine.
Calls to & from software-based phones on the same network segment as the Linksys worked fine.

Whilst one-directional audio is typical of NAT issues, this wasn’t the case since the network was fully routed between the phone and the PABX.

After performing a packet dump on the local router, I found that the dumps showed RTP packets arriving at the phone from the PABX, but the phone was not returning any, meaning that the phone was not sending anything back!

After a long period of debugging, I enabled “sip set debug” on the PABX and found the following message in the output:

set_destination: Parsing <1000> for address/port to send to
[Aug 30 21:17:31] WARNING[14315]: chan_sip.c:5845 set_destination: Can't find address for host '1000'

I had configured the phone with the display string of “Jethro Carr <1000>”, and it seems that the “<1000>” was being interpreted by the PABX and used for the address of the phone – which explains the weird “can’t find adddress” messages I was receiving.

After changing the display string to just “Jethro Carr” the problem was resolved!