by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 24, 2009 | Uncategorized
So I use Hetzner a lot for my machines, I’ve about 10 to 15 of their machines now across various clients and am mostly quite happy with them. They provide a service that matches the price – ie. good enough.
One area of their service though really grates me, they give you old machines, when those machines fail they replace them with other old machines similarly for drives etc.
On more than one occasion now have I had hard drives fail only to see them replaced with other shitty drives. Each time they claim the drives are well tested and each time they pull the old ‘it could be the cable’ trick and then replace the machine and the drive.
Since this has happened to me every single time I’ve changed a disk so far I have to wonder if this is everyones experience?
From where I sit its simple. They made a choice to take out drives reported broken by someone, they then test it and put it back when their tests fail to find any problem, they do this to save them money knowing full well that drives will fail and all they’re doing is shifting the risk onto their clients, while the clients keep subsidizing their expansion.
So given this is the quality of service they’re aiming at, surely once this policy bites a good long standing user offering some kind of payback for the inconvenience would be good business practice? Apparently not.
This is pretty poor, even after complaining to them they swapped my chassis and again put a disk with > 6000 hours under its belt in my machine.
So I guess you need to be pretty sure your softraids are setup properly when you want to use this company, their support stand is clear:
I’m sorry but we don’t promise anywhere that we built always new hardware into our servers. I can only ensure you that all hardware is always well tested and without any problem before we build it into a server.
Ie., screw you, we don’t care for any evidence and repeated failures, and we take zero responsibility for our equipment, we’ll just keep taking your money.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 2, 2009 | Uncategorized
I was quite excited about the new UK edition Wired. I’m not anymore.
I got my first exposure to the Wired while in school in South Africa, I think the ones we got were months behind the time and stupidly expensive, but hey we had no internet so it all seemed awesomely futuristic and ahead of its time.
The thing though that always stuck in my mind about the US edition Wired were the ads, I can clearly remember ads for Harleys, or weird american Fugly cars, even from the editions I read back in school, the ads were of products we never saw in South Africa, they were kewl, done in a style unlike anything we saw there and all just seemed so, idylic.
Fast forward a few decades, I still buy the US Wired now and then, and I still only remember the ads? Few months ago I bought one, I can clearly remember the ads for Dexter and Californication, but can’t really say much about the magazine content otherwise, eventhough I read it end to end and felt interested, even drawn to it at the time. I recall something about malware peddlers? who knows.
Why is that from a magazine that costs 6 pounds I don’t remember anything of substance other than the ads? It’s because they were different from what I see on the tube, in the cinema, on the tv, on the billboards, they were off far-off kewlness.
Enter Wired UK. The editorial content is still pretty shoddy, the signal to noise ratio is still shockingly poor for a ยฃ3.90 magazine literally filled to the brim with ads, except, now they’re the same shitty ads I see on the Tube, Train, Cinema and TV.
I read the whole thing, a day on I remember some vague predictions – one prediction sticks to mind, male birth control only around 2021? I dont think so – but mostly I remember how the ads pissed me off as instead of interesting, they’re just dominating and a reminder that I paid too much for something whose main purpose clearly is to sell ads.
I’d pay ยฃ12/month for a Wired UK without the ads, someone need to develop Tivo for paper.
by R.I. Pienaar | Mar 19, 2009 | Uncategorized
I had a thought recently when dealing with Apple and Microsoft on warranty fixes just how different things are, thought I’d sum up my experiences here:
Dell
I had a 15 inch Dell laptop, 3 year extended on-site warranty that I purchased to cover any issues. During the time I had the laptop it all worked well except the battery died after about 2 years.
Contacted Dell about this, they pointed out batteries are consumables and so not covered, that was expected. The kicker though was that I couldn’t even buy a new battery from them because since they only covered batteries for the 1st year, and the machines has been off the production lines for more than a year they simply stopped making them.
2 year old laptop, 1 year left on it’s warranty and it was useless, awesome.
Microsoft
My Xbox 360 is showing the dreaded 3 red lights of death, Microsoft has admitted the problem and offers a 3 year extended warranty for this problem. I went to their site, saw I can book the machine in online for fixing, after filling everything in the page said it’s not available in my country, contact support.
Contact support, tell them the problem and clearly point out I have filled in the form and that I am in the UK and thus not covered by the service offered by the form. Support droid points me back to the same support page, but warning me that its not covered in all countries and that I should contact them if I am not covered.
I’ve gone through this little circle jerk 4 times now, each time with the same circular logic applied by the drones, I’m about to just towel fix the 360 or upgrade to a 360 Elite.
Apple
I have a black 1.5 year old macbook, it’s pretty sweet but so far I’ve had a HDD and a battery die on me. It too is on 3 year extended warranty.
The HDD dying was inconvenient, I had to book in with a Genius but they swapped it witout question or cost, I just had to reinstall my stuff – easily done with time machine. I walk past an Apple Temple daily so no biggie there, they kept to their time schedules and the booking went smooth as can be, 3 days later my macbook was fixed.
When the battery died they first said its a consumable and not covered, I pointed out it died suddenly and not gradually and so it must be a fault rather than consumption. They posted free of charge a new battery, and paid for the old one to go back. The next battery arrived the next day without fault.
So all things considered, so far the Apple tax has proven a absolute bargain to me.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 19, 2009 | Uncategorized
I’ve not posted here for a while, been insanely busy but today those lovely people at Cogent kicked me out of my blogging slumber with a shocking display that I simply had to share.
Cogent for those who do not know is a very large Tier 1 ISP, known mostly for many disputes with other ISPs about peering, it has become so bad that in the UK at least they are basically a complete no-go zone for anyone.
I’ve previously delt with Cogent when a client signed up for a few mbit of Cogent bandwidth on the basis of a ยฃ5/mbit pricing structure, they soon realised that you get what you pay for. Even between racks in the same Data Center you could not reach each other without first hopping over to Europe. I’ve attempted to resolve this at the time with Cogent and the other ISPs and both confirmed that it is essentially a waste of time. Cogent said they can’t speak to the ISP in question since most of the UK ISP industry can’t stand them. The other ISP basically laughed out loud about being ‘suckered’ into buying Cogent bandwidth.
This is confirmed elsewhere, search the Renesys Blog for Cogent and you’ll find a lot of information about Cogent, mostly bad news. From an article on their blog about Cogent in the UK you will see this:
Firstly, Cogent has a fairly serious Europe problem right now. They
have been aggressively attacking the European market for a few years
now and making some solid headway. They bought a couple of carriers
(Lambdanet Spain and France, Carrier1 in Germany among them), ruthlessly
integrated them and then proceeded to undersell the market by a factor
of 50-80%. This has made them many enemies.
As a result of this approach to business, Cogent has much less
effective peering in Europe than do many of its larger competitors.
Most of the European PTTs refuse to peer with Cogent anywhere on the
European continent. Recently, some large US carriers (among them
Level (3) ) seem to have adopted a similar approach. This means that
when Cogent sells capacity in Europe, it is forced to drag that
traffic back to the US to hand it off to its peers here. Of course
that means that if the ultimate destination is European, the traffic
has to travel back. This is a burden on both Cogent and the European
carrier and, of course, the customers on both sides. But it’s
unlikely to change because of just how much hate there is for Cogent
among European networkers.
This basically confirms my experience with Cogent and those of many I have spoken too. As such if you choose to support Cogent you will basically be forced to:
- Buy a lot of other bandwidth since if you’re hoping to serve UK customers, Cogent is a terrible sole carrier to have
- You will need to invest in extra hardware, extra admin time, extra complex routing infrastructure and additional overhead on your teams
- You will forever be at the mercy of everyone who hates Cogent, you will find your self randomly falling off the internet, randomly de-peering with vast swaths of the internet and basically the whole thing will be a pain in the behind.
For these reasons, everyone who I know with Cogent bandwidth use them as last resort backup carriers, they are cheap and basically shit, but ok enough to use as a backup when everything else failed.
Over the last few years Cogent has contacted me direct via email to attempt to sell their wares, always the threads end withe me saying something along these lines:
Furthermore we’d prefer to use companies who do not directly
contact us with marketing material, please remove us from your lists
for future contact.
Today again one of my clients got a mention on Techcrunch which resulted in more spam from Cogent, again to an email address totally unrelated to my business activities, not listed in whois records for the client or anything like that. The sales person even had the nerve to copy the email that the above quote is from in his mail to me asking if I can have a conference with him.
My response was the usual, no we don’t deal with spammers, you were told to leave us alone now please stop bothering us. Which resulted in an amazingly pushy email from the sales person, quoted below:
No doubt that writing when being asked not to is, well, borderline. That
said, it is both of our responsibilities to make sure that all options
are explored. You need to confirm that you are aware of all vendors
information, and mine includes getting it out there.
.
.
Admittedly, this is difficult to resolve via email. However, if I didn’t
think that we could compliment your service, I wouldn’t persist.
This is just amazing, this person really think he can presume to tell me what my responsibilities are, what I need to do, and that I have to indulge his blatant b/s.
After I again pointed out that they were asked to stop mailing me and I pointed out that they were using a private email address held by a UK citizen and as such under the data protection laws they need to stop contacting me when asked, they once again mailed me demanding further information about my customers. They really are on par with simple Viagra spammers.
Does anyone really think this kind of heavy handed tactic gets them business?
The worst part of it is the ISP who currently provide a large part of our b/w are Cogent customers, Cogent Sales people do not think twice to approach clients of their clients and try to undercut them – effectively trying to steal their customers business away from them.
Why would any business support such a company? I would not, I would effectively be negligent in my duties to my clients to ever recommend these clowns for anything since they are just a nightmare waiting to happen.
by R.I. Pienaar | Mar 12, 2008 | Uncategorized
Previously I posted about my iMac 17″ that I got, that was January 2006 well I have now upgraded to a bigger mac, this time a 24″ iMac Core 2 Duo Extreme with 2GB RAM.
I still have the 17″ and will keep it, it’s replacing my really old AMD Linux Desktop on my desk but the 17″ has been getting a bit long in the tooth with Parallels, MS Office, and all sorts of other stuff that I have been doing on it as I am now working full time from home.
Previously I bought at the bottom of the spectrum and the machine lasted well, but I was hoping to keep it as my primary machine for at least 3 years. I guess my needs have increased though so this time I bought at the top end of the range and will upgrade it to 4GB RAM soon, just not from Apple as buying direct from Crucial will save me about 200 pounds.
What immediately annoyed me – to the point of cramps in my hands and general unhappyness – were this amazingly crap thinline keyboard that comes with the machines. I soon started looking at other options and found no 3rd party Mac keyboards but did notice that Microsoft keyboards have a utility to configure the various additional keys etc so I took the plunge and got a MS Natural Ergonomic 400 keyboard to replace my very old MS Office keyboard.
I am extremely pleased with this keyboard, everything works as it should. The configuration utility lets you configure every key on the keyboard and everything is mapped correctly as expected. Even the function keys like ‘new’ works by sending ‘apple key-n’ etc right out of the box, this is the case with all the MS keyboards on the market today so I can happily recommend any MS keyboard to mac users.
The iMac itself is lovely, I am really happy with it. Speed wise the Core 2 Duo Extreme chip has made a huge improvement, with Parallels running Windows the machine idles at about 2% while I have Firefox, Netnewswire, iTerm, several Terminal.app, Adium, Skype and all sorts of background stuff going, really cannot have asked for more from a desktop machine.
by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 29, 2007 | Uncategorized
Some of the UI decisions that Apple made with Leopard is questionable to say the least. The ones that gets to me are:
- The menu bar is semi transparent, thats just lame as your background wallpaper makes the menu harder to read. An annoying fix is to add just the right amount of black or white pixels in a strip at the top of your wall paper. This does not solve the problem if like me you move between laptop monitor and external display being primary depending on your location.
- The glassy dock takes a lot of space and just distracts, all the reflections and stuff makes the very faint dots even harder to spot. A working fix can be found here. See below for a screenshot of my fixed dock.
- The starry desktop background that came out of the box looks unprofessional and badly done, its also too busy and distracting. A very easy fix here.
On the software front, OpenVPN were having some issues, Tunnelblick already has a fixed version out. Site is currently down though.
