Lee Packham

This video is just a nice cartoon of Darth Vader calling up Apple about the problems with his new iPhone. It’s rather comical.

As mentioned previously, I got a text message telling me I hit 500MB of Mobile Data usage on my phone this month. I was bored in hospital, hence the usage. I tweeted and blogged about it… and today it resulted in a phone call from Sukhi on the Web Relations Team at Vodafone UK.

We did the usual going over the complaint and a few important things came out:

• Vodafone did have a communications plan for the change. However, it centred around an insert to go in with the bills. Which, as I’m not on paper billing I didn’t get. Therefore, I had zero communication of the change. Sukhi agreed with me that it wasn’t acceptable that I had to go find out on a forum that the Twitter guys linked me to just to find out the detail of the change. I should of got a formal communication.
• There is a training issue around how customer services deal with people calling up after receiving these text messages and she will notify the relevant managers to get that addressed.
• There ‘was’ an iPhone app – it’s still in development which allows iPhone customers to get details of their data usage. There are no current plans of an Android app. However, I have now found an app called NetCounter which appears to do at least a rough estimate of usage.
• Sukhi was able to tell me how much usage I had. However agreed with me that there is no way to easily find out as a customer. She actually logged in to see her own unbilled usage to verify that it not possible to get a summary – which it isn’t.
• A request to get the data usage added to the unbilled summary has been put forward and we’ll see where that goes. At least they’re trying – I know it’s hard for a large corporate to move forward on this sort of stuff.
• I will NOT be billed for this extra usage. The text message is the beginning of a 3 month process of warnings which ends up leading to being charged when you go over the 500MB.

Overall I felt it was a productive call. Vodafone, or at least their web relations team, are happy to admit where there are failings. That’s one up on a lot of companies – like Orange UK – who will just tell customers they are wrong.

Sukhi followed up with an e-mail after the call. A nice professional touch that. She, after the call, found that you can CSV export your unbilled usage. With a bit of macro trickery in Excel, it would be feasible to get one’s total usage. Still not ideal – but hey, it shows initiative on her part and thus was appreciated.

Griping on Twitter DOES work. Vodafone is one of a growing number of customers that actually has a social media plan that isn’t centred around making money but more about improving themselves. They should, seriously, be congratulated on that.

Today I got a nice text message from Vodafone (see inset). As followers will know, I was in hospital for a week this month. As such, my mobile data usage would have been a lot higher than usual. When I signed up for Vodafone 5 years ago, Mobile Data was ‘unlimited’ – apparently that is no longer the case – they never actually gave me notice of my contract randomly changing… common with mobile phone companies, so we’ll ignore that point.

However, I go over this new ‘limit’ for the first time ever. I think – alright, I’ll give them a call and explain the situation and I’m sure it’ll all be fine.

I call up.

Sit in the queue for 10 minutes (I don’t mind that to be fair).

The person I get through to is confused. I have three phones on my contract with Vodafone and she can’t even work out what device I’m on about after giving the number over… twice.

Once she works out what device I’m on about, I’m put on hold…

Apparently the message I got is a warning and I have nothing to worry about. If I go over next month I’ll be charged 50p per 25MB over the 500MB data limit that was never in my contract in the first place.

That’s not really fair now, is it? If it wasn’t for the SureSignal (I live in a metal lined building and thus get zero reception inside), I would be seriously considering leaving Vodafone and pulling all my devices with me.

It’s not the random contract change. I understand that mobile data costs a lot of money and that’s just fine – I’ve never gone over 100-200MB, even on my iPhones – so to be honest that isn’t a problem. It’s not even the fact that I’ll be charged if I go over next month. It’s the fact that the text message doesn’t cover that at all!

The call ended with me being told I can check my usage online… Err, don’t know what planet she lives on, but the Vodafone eBilling site gives no summary of Internet usage and mixes in the itemisation with text messages. As such, I have no idea how much data I have used – at all.

All in all, bit of a poor experience.

Apple have opened up a new section on their website devoted to HTML5 demos stating that:

Standards aren’t add-ons to the web. They are the web. And you can start using them today.

Only, their idea of ‘They are the web’ is a little off:

As Google Chrome is based on WebKit and Safari is really just an older (maybe more stable version of WebKit) there is absolutely no reason to do this!

Turns out that new employees at Google are no longer given an option to run Windows according to FT.com.

New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system. “Linux is open source and we feel good about it,” said one employee. “Microsoft we don’t feel so good about.”

Wow. Makes sense though. More and more, Windows doesn’t fit into the desktop world and the only companies left on it are those stuck on it due to legacy issues.

FT.com / Technology – Google ditches Windows on security concerns.

Let’s face it. The only reason people use MSN is because, everyone else uses MSN. Everyone also uses Facebook – in fact arguably, more people use Facebook than MSN.

This week, Facebook started offering Facebook Chat over Jabber. What does this mean? This means that you can use Adium (OSX), Pidgin (Windows) or even iChat (OSX again) to talk to your Facebook buddies. There is no longer any need to log into Facebook and chat in your web browser or use the bloated MSN client from hell. As a point, I haven’t used the official client in years, Adium offers it perfectly well.

Either way, I’ve been using it for a few days now. It’s much more stable than they hacky approach that had been taken before and means that communication tends to be a lot smoother. It’s refreshingly cool.

So a call to everyone, stop using MSN. It’s bloated, horrid, ad/spam ridden (especially on Windows). Uninstall it, leave it alone – the friends you have on MSN are highly likely your friends on Facebook already. Let’s get this non-standard, horrid closed system outta here!

If you want details on how to do this, Facebook has a page on their site detailing how to set up the various IM clients out there.

I also just realised… this is my first truly opinionated blog post! Scary.

The Palm Pré is a nifty little phone. However, the fact that you can view PDFs on it, albeit useful, is under scrutiny as it appears Palm failed to check the licenses of the software they were using.

When working on closed/embedded projects that you distribute, the GPL requires you to make you application open source as well – the LGPL requires you use the library in a DLL/.so form – it’s all fairly simple. License checking is time consuming but worthwhile as it means you end up with a product that you have at least tried to protect from potential lawsuits.

That also said, open source developers should consider dual licensing (a bit like Nokia with Qt). This way, if a large company wants to use your code, you make a reasonable amount of money out of it to fund the GPL/LGPL versions.

Doing it that way may well mean breaking Stallman’s view of the world – but there is his view… and the way the world actually works.

Lawsuit alleges Palm Pre violates copyright – Artifex, copyright, gpl, GPL violation – Techworld.

Stories like this enrage me. Why? Let’s take a look at the story’s strapline on the front page as of right now:

A patient with swine flu and other health problems has died, a Scottish government spokesman has confirmed.

Right, so a patient, who has flu… you with me so far? Died. Ok, that’s fine. The important detail is also included near the top of the story:

The patient, who had underlying health problems, is understood to have died while being treated at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley.

Of course, the general public will ignore the bits I have bolded here. It’s written as a scare story with the facts only mentioned in passing. The media, already known for blowing things out of proportion, are just at it again. It’s a well known fact, even with normal Flu variants, that if you have underlying health problems, the risk of complications is high. Nice one BBC News, I notice you failed to mention that little detail.

BBC NEWS | UK | First UK swine flu patient death.

This is quite amazing. No more using World Pay then.

Visa on Friday alerted the world that RBS WorldPay and Heartland Payment Systems are not on its list of payment card processors who are in good standing with industry-mandated standards for data security.

via Visa yanks creds for payment card processing pair • The Register.

Important non-technical post! On the 14th June, 2008 – I got married to Christy whom I have been engaged to for about 18 months.

A small excerpt of the speech I gave:

“Christy, you can’t help being lovely… you can help becoming my bride. Today I married my best friend – the woman I laugh with, live for and dream with”.

Here’s to many more years of happiness!