October 2008 Archives

My current mobile phone contract has finished so I'm looking around for a new phone. This means that I've spent some time over the last few days looking at phone company web sites. And it seems that although they might be selling cutting edge technology, phone companies still get their web sites built by the same idiots as most of the world. I came away distinctly unimpressed. Here are a couple of the best examples.

My current phone is with O2. Whilst I was on their site I wanted to contact their customer service department. They provide a web form for this on their site. I went through a couple of filtering forms (what kind of customer are you? what is your query about?) until finally I had a text box where I could enter my question.

I had quite a complex query, so I typed rather a lot - three or four paragraphs and a few hundred characters. I then pressed the 'send' button. Only to be told that my text was too long. That's all it told me, mind you. There was nothing really useful like telling me how many characters I was allowed to enter or how many characters I needed to remove. Just a stern warning that my text was too long. I snipped and abbreviated for ten or fifteen minutes and eventually I managed to sneak in under the wire and submit my query.

It's 2008. People expect a little more sophistication from a web site. Twitter manages to give me real-time feedback on how many characters I have left in their 140 character text box. This is really quite basic Javascript. There's no excuse for making a customer do all that extra work. Even a message telling me how many characters I was allowed to enter would have been more useful that what I got. You also have to wonder why the limit was imposed. Do they really store customer queries in  database with 255 character limits on the text fields?

So that's a failure at the technical level. The technology is available to give the customer a far better experience than the one they currently get but O2 are, for reasons I'd love to hear, not using it. My other example is a failure at a far higher level.

Today the Google phone is launched in the UK. And T-Mobile have an exclusive contract to sell it. They've made quite a big deal about it. I registered for information about the phone on their web site a couple of weeks ago and I've been getting email from the regularly telling me what is going on. Their Oxford Street shop opened at 7am today to allow people to buy the phone early.

For a few weeks, their web site has proclaimed that the phone is "coming soon". And as I type this, almost six hours after the phone went on sale, the web site still says that the phone is "coming soon". There are plenty of pink buttons inviting you to register for for more information (not sure why they insist on calling it "pre-registration") but nothing saying that the phone is actually available or letting you order it online.

I'm not sure who is failing here. Is it that the marketing department didn't include the update of the web site in their planning? Or does the software running their web site only allow updates over the weekend? Or has the person who was supposed to make the changes called in sick today? However this failure was caused, I suspect it's costing them a few sales.

I'm planning to go into my local T-mobile shop and Saturday and play with the Google phone to see if it justifies the £40/month they want me to spend on it. If it isn't (and that's a lot more than I'm currently playing, so it'll need to be bloody good) then I'll get a Nokia E71 from the Carphone Warehouse next door. I'd order it direct from O2, but they've apparently decided not to stock it. And don't get me started on the rant about how they're not stocking any decent phones in case that affects sales of the iPhone...

Update: Kai has a horror story about buying a Google phone. Apparently you don't need to pay the £40/month tariff. And on the phone yesterday, O2 told me that the E71 will be available in the middle of next month. Decisions decisions..

Last June, writer Ariane Sherine wrote an article on Comment is Free complaining about the amount of religious advertising on the side of London buses. As part of the research for the article she calculated that it would take about 4,500 atheists donating £5 each to get together enough money to have an atheist advertising campaign on the side of a bus. This idea caught on and a pledge was set up to try to make it happen. This original pledge failed, but the idea had taken root and several people started beavering away to try and turn the idea into a reality.

The campaign relaunched today. This time, some recalculations have been done and the project team have worked out that they for £5,500 they can get adverts on 30 buses for four weeks. Richard Dawkins is involved and has said that he will match all donations up to a limit of £5,500 - effectively doubling the purchasing power of the campaign.

The donations page on Just Giving went live this morning. When I gave my donation at about 10am the total stood at about £4,500. As I write this, it's approaching £15,000.

The response has been phenomenal. Atheists obviously really want to get their message out to more people. It looks like the campaign will be able to put posters on far more buses than expected and therefore reach far more people than they hoped for. This is obviously an idea which has struck a chord with a great many people who are tired of being presented with religious advertising which largely goes unquestioned.

So it looks like it's going to happen. The adverts will probably start appearing on buses in the next few months. They will say "There's probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life". The "probably" there is to satisfy the bus advertising people that they aren't leaving themselves open to accusations of blasphemy. Seems a little weak to me as the religious adverts make the most ridiculous claims with no need to back them up in any way.

If these adverts raise a smile then it will have been worthwhile. If they stop just one person from taking a religious advert too seriously then the campaign will have been a great success.

The campaign are still accepting donations on the Just Giving page. Most people seem to be giving £5 or £10. Please consider giving a little bit to the cause.

Sherine has a another piece about the campaign on Cif today. The story has also been covered by the BBC and the Times. I expect it to get more coverage tomorrow, once it becomes clear just how successful it has been. I can't wait to see how the Mail covers it.

Now. Who's up for trying something similar in the US?

It's a strange world when you have to rely on the House of Lords to throw out ridiculous legislation from a Labour government. But that's exactly what happened yesterday as the Lords voted against the government's proposals for 42-day detention of suspected terrorists. Pretty much everyone in the country now agrees that the proposals were draconian and unnecessary. Well, with a couple of notable exceptions. Firstly the Home Secretary has drawn up a single clause Bill which she will present to Parliament should the opportunity ever arise.

And secondly, the Sun is pretty angry about it this morning. I picked up a discarded copy on the tube this morning (discarded by a BBC employee getting off at White City) and was able to enjoy the full force of Rebekah Wade's ire in today's The Sun Says. For those of you who can't bring yourself to visit their web site, I reproduce it in full below.

A GOLDEN opportunity to make Britain safer from terrorists has been shamefully spurned.

The House of Lords has scuppered a Bill that might have saved many lives.

How al-Qaeda must be revelling in the knowledge that Britain is more concerned about possible infringements of civil liberties than of taking the war on terror to them.

Holding terrorism suspects for 42 days would be a vital tool for the security services as they unravel criminal conspiracies of unprecedented complexity.

Its opponents argue that the country’s against it. Nonsense. More than 100,000 Sun readers voiced their support in 2005 — when Tony Blair wanted 90 DAYS, not just 42.

David Cameron’s Tory MPs, against their natural instincts, fought any detention beyond 28 days simply for opposition’s sake. There were plenty in their ranks who secretly backed 42 days.

Tory Lord Tebbit, himself a victim of terrorists, rightly asked yesterday what his party will do if they win power and find they need 42 days. How will they possibly argue for it?

As he also pointed out, the injustice of holding an innocent person for six weeks can be rectified. The injustice meted out to an innocent person murdered by terrorists cannot.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will now have to force through emergency 42-day legislation the next time a major suspect is held.

And the Tories will have to back her - they cannot risk sabotaging a case for political advantage.

Anything that makes the Sun as angry as that has just got to be a good thing.

About ten days ago, I took delivery of a new toy - a Dell XPS M1330 laptop. I spent last weekend happily repartitioning and installing Fedora Linux and I was planning to write an entry this weekend about how well I was getting on with it.

Except, I'm not. It's stopped working.

I did some stuff on it on Tuesday evening. And then put it into hibernate mode and stuck it in the corner of the room. I started a new job on Wednesday and I've been a bit busy all in all, so I didn't pick it up again until last night.

To find that it didn't work at all.

This isn't, I pretty sure, something that has been caused by the partitioning. The system is completely dead. I don't even get to the BIOS boot screen. I just get a power light glowing feebly for a couple of seconds. The battery is fully charged and I've tried switching the machine on using both battery power and mains power. Nothing makes any difference.

This afternoon I posted a message on the Dell community forum and I've had a response from someone, but their suggested workaround doesn't seem to work. It seems I'll need to get in touch with Dell and send it back to either be fixed or replaced. Which is all a bit of a pain.

And that's not the only problem I've had. I watched a DVD last night and the quality of the picture wasn't very good. And it wasn't the DVD that was the problem. Other disks did the same thing. It's a problem either with the DVD player or the TV.

As you can see, the problem looks a bit like a glitch in the matrix. I get a dozen or so equally spaced parallel lines of interference on the screen. They fade out as a scene goes on but come back again if something moves across the screen or when the scene changes. I have many inputs going into the TV and currently it's only the DVD player that's giving this problem. The DVD player is plugged into the composite input on the TV, so I need to swap a few plugs around to see if the fault stays with the DVD player or switches to whatever is plugged into the composite input.

I hate it when technology goes wrong. And having two such expensive pieces of technology break on the same day only compounds my hate.

Maybe I'll just go back to reading books.

p.s. A small prize to the first person who leaves a comment telling me what film I was watching.