2Clix sues Whirlpool for forum posts

Software company 2Clix has decided to sue Whirlpool (an Australian online news, forum and community site), for “false and malicious” forum posts about 2Clix’s software products.

Essentially it appears Whirlpool’s users have been critical of 2Clix in various threads, with such gems as:

As a user of 2Clix for over 2 years, and the primary IT support person for my company – I would advise you to AVOID this program at all costs.
and
We installed 2clix and ended up throwing it out two weeks after going live. This company has many problems and I would strongly recommend that any potential users look else where.

While 2Clix had a go at defending themselves on the forum, it seems they’ve also decided to sue the forum’s owners. Maybe they got angry that one of the threads is the top hit in Google. If the case gets anywhere, it could obviously have repercussions for other online communities, so it’ll be interesting to see where it goes.

Update Thursday: This story has hit the MSM.
The Age: Firm sues forum to silence critics
ZDNet: 2Clix scores own goal with Whirlpool case
Computerworld: 2Clix sues broadband forum for “false and malicious” threads
…and and more

Update Wed 2007-09-19: Media reports that 2Clix drops the lawsuit, but it’s not official yet.

Old mags

ZZap! 64Back in the day, we couldn’t just jump online to find out what was happening in the geek world. No, we had to go down to the newsagent and buy a magazine.

Along with emulators for many old platforms, increasing numbers of old mags from the 80s and 90s are now available online.

Commodore: Australian Commodore and Amiga Review (via Dan). ZZap! 64. Lots more at the Amiga Magazine Rack

But the ultimate in technical mags for Commodore machines would have to have been The Transactor.

Acorn: The Micro User, Acorn User

Sinclair: Crash

There’s plenty more out there (including some sites that just index the old magazines, rather than provide actual scans). Well worth an explore to nostalgically relive your favourite computer platform.

Does Second Life have a limited lifespan?

While some are suggesting Linden Labs is suffocating Second Life, and holding a meeting (in Second Life, of course) to discuss it, others are wondering (and I’m among them) why companies are marketing in Second Life given the tiny population and small numbers of sales for those who’ve tried it:

The virtual branded locations that sounded so impressive in the pages of BusinessWeek are basic and devoid of visitors. … American Apparel has all but given up on its virtual store, citing the criticism it has received and “insignificant” sales.

Is it like a Gold Rush, and they have to stake their claim before someone else gets it? Maybe, maybe not… but shouldn’t the priority of marketing people be to push their product where there’s an actual audience?

If SL is really becoming so deserted, I wonder if it has virtual tumbleweeds?

Reviews that aren’t

You know what I really hate?

Googling for “product X review” and finding bazillions of web sites that purport to be reviews of product X, but which in fact are just shopping web sites which have manufacturer’s information, or possibly a “story” written word-for-word from a press release, and nothing else.

Oh sure, some of them might have space for a product review, if some hapless customer wants to donate their time and effort into writing one. But if it’s [obscure shopping site] then why would anybody bother?

And some might have comparative price listings from various retail and online shops. With reviews… of the shops.

No wonder I end up looking on amazon.com (where there’s enough customers who actually care about writing reviews to make it worthwhile) or epinions.com, but both being US-based means they don’t cover some models available in other countries.

Can we get Google to somehow sort the wheat from the chaff here? Or will some non-US sites rise from the rest and get a critical mass of reviewers?

Oh, and can anybody tell me if the Epson C59 printer offered today on Zazz is a cheap and cheerful (if ugly) bargain, or a foul demon waste of my hard-earned $50?

Risking your irreplaceable images

Oh no, George is at it again:

Q. I want to archive family photos and slides from our hard drive onto a DVD. However, I have read that home-burnt DVDs and CDs can have a short shelf life of about five years. What is the best technology to store 1-5 GB of irreplaceable images?
B. McGregor

A Manufacturers claim life spans of 30 to 100 years for DVD-R and DVD+R discs and up to 30 years for DVD-RW, DVD+RW. Your advice about a five-year life may apply to a CD that has not been burnt, as in that state the storage life is much shorter. For archiving you should use a premium-quality product, which in my opinion is Verbatim as they come out on top in almost all independent reviews that I have read.

No no no no no. You don’t tell someone who wants to store irreplaceable images that it’s fine to chuck it on a DVD, and blindly believe the manufacturer’s claim of the 30 years plus lifespan. The technology is not yet nearly that old, so while theoretical lab tests might claim that, in my book it’s not conclusively proven, and plenty of people have had problems.

If the files involved are genuinely irreplaceable, the message here is to make sure you don’t rely on one copy, or even on one medium. You make multiple copies, in a format that is futureproof (JPEG probably being the best for photos), distribute them widely (for instance with different family members) and check and copy them regularly onto new media.

You sure as hell don’t burn a single copy and chuck the DVD in the cupboard and hope nothing renders it unreadable.

Cheap hardware fails: film at eleven

I was wandering through my local Coles supermarket last night and found a $40 M-TV brand SD Set-top box. I figured that sounded like a good deal so bought it. It plugged in, tuned up, worked well and supported my 16:9 TV. It proved that the digital reception issues I’ve been having are not the fault of the TV cards.

This morning the sound had almost died. Very quiet, and with popping and such overlaid.

In the hardware industry, this is called “infant mortality“. If the cost of handling returns is high, you try to catch the early failures by running a burn in test. We did that at my first job, because we were experiencing massive infant mortality rates – they all worked fine right out of the box, but run ’em for a day and poof! they were dead. So we built a rig to have them scan a barcode over and over again, and software to capture the results and check for accuracy. Shipped a bunch of duds back to the manufacturer, who smartened their game up, and stopped pissing off our customers.

I guess STBs sold by supermarkets don’t have high return handling costs.

Real Estate Websites Suck: Part 2

Everytime, every single time I’ve tried to use Real Estate Websites for real-world stuff they come up short.

Searching, the basic function of the Real Estate Website, just doesn’t work.

I want to buy a house in a suburb. Not a unit, not a duplex, not an apartment.

So I search for houses, and blocks of land. And included in the result set is a semi-detached home. How the hell am I meant to bulldoze one of those? Is this ability to call a semi-detached house a free-standing house unique to only one website?

One site, Domain, doesn’t let you specify that you don’t want semis, so, of a fashion they can be excused. Except they’re missing a feature the other sites give you. So, Domain sucks.

The other two sites, RealEstateView and RealEstate.com.au both suck because they include properties I specifically told them to exclude. “Oh,” I hear you say, “it’s not their fault. The agent put in dud data.” This would be an excuse if the listing fees were a few bucks. But for hundreds of dollars, they can afford to have someone on minimum wage spend a few minutes sanity checking each listing, or they can have text matching algorithms running over the listing looking for words like “detached” and flagging that entry for review because “house” listings ought not include the word “detached”. For example. Or, heaven forbid, allow the users of the site to report misleading listings for subsequent correction. That would be nice. No more million dollar homes turning up in my sub-$600K search.

Part 1 of this (rather long) series of rants was sent to all three websites. None responded, other than with auto-responders. They all suck so much!

Twitter to WordPress to Facebook

(Skip the lecture, go straight to the instructions — but note the update.)

I’m yet to be convinced that microblogging (eg Twitter, or those status updates in Facebook) is genuinely useful. Maybe, maybe not. But I’m willing to try it out.

Problem is of course that if you use multiple services, you don’t want to be having to update them all individually. If such a concept is going to work, you’ve got to be able to update once and have it cascade to everywhere.

Facebook has an app to push updates out to Twitter. Which would be fine, but for those outside North America, you can’t update your Facebook status from anywhere except within Facebook. (North Americans can use SMS from a mobile, but others can’t.) Okay, so maybe you’d want to do it mostly when in front of a computer anyway, but I do like about Twitter than you can update from anywhere… anybody can SMS a number (it’s based in the UK, so for me it’s costing 50 cents… so I’d better not go mad using it) so no fiddling with mobile web access just to post an update. Twitter also takes updates via IM (such as GTalk and Jabber). I also like that it’s open; people can see what’s going on without registering.

I normally hate words like synergy and leverage and convergence, but that’s what’s gone on here. Alex King has written code that updates WordPress from Twitter every 15 minutes. Christian Flickinger has written code that updates Facebook using PHP, with a hack using the Curl library (since Facebook doesn’t actually accept inputs like this) that logs into Facebook’s mobile web page and does the business.

And Blake Brannon has put the two together, so a Tweet (that’s Web 2.0 talk for a Twitter post) will cascade to your WordPress blog, and then on to your Facebook status.

Neato, huh? Now that really is leverage. If it works. Which it does for many people, but it didn’t for me. I was having problems with Blake’s code; probably an issue with my Web ISP’s configuration. I ended up splitting it off to a separate WP plugin, which was messy, but allowed me to use the code in isolation, and figure out the problem.

It may be an issue that only affects particular versions of PHP or Apache or something — I’m no expert — but the problem was the Curl call couldn’t write to the cookies file. Creating the my_cookies.txt file and making it writable (777) and modifying the code slightly to specify where the file lived solved it. Another issue involved Curl being unable to use the FollowLocation flag, but it turned out this wasn’t needed.

I also ended up with Blake’s (modified) code in a separate file to Alex’s, rather than inserted into it as Blake intended.

So in summary

Update 2007-08-31: Blake’s been told that automated access into Facebook is against the Terms of Service. It’s unclear if Facebook will actively go chasing those who use or distribute code like this, but it would seem to pay to be cautious. Sorry.

  1. Download Alex King’s Twitter Tools and put in your wp-content/plugins directory
  2. Download twitter-wp-fb.txt. Put your Facebook details in where shown, then put it into your wp-content/plugins directory
  3. Create an empty wp-content/plugins/my_cookies.txt file and make it writable (777)
  4. Go into your WP Plugins page and activate both Twitter Tools and WP/Twitter to Facebook
  5. Go into the Twitter Tools config page and enter your Twitter credentials
  6. Cross your fingers and post something in Twitter

I think that’s all the steps. Good luck.

Thanks to Blake for his assistance on this. And to Alex and Christian, whose code this is all built on.

NAS on an old PC

So having now got my new PC set up, the old one is to be converted into a NAS server to hold all the kids’ home videos, photos and all our other files that need sharing. (No, I’m not in the fiscal mood to go and buy a Microsoft Home Server.)

There seem to be a few different free or cheap options.

Requirements? Well the machine I’m looking at is an old P3-500 with 192Mb RAM (though I may be able to scrounge some more for it). RAID 1 would be nice (though I’m going to have to check my drive sizes), for some redundancy. Web interface definitely good. User-level permissions so the kids can’t accidentally delete my files.

FreeNAS appears to be very lightweight, and run well on old hardware. This review gives it a good rap, though the people who have commented on it give it mixed reviews. It’s still a beta product (quite possibly a perpetual beta), which makes me somewhat wary to entrusting my files to it. I tried it out. Despite its beta status and small volunteer dev team, it seems quite polished. Boots up fast, and bleeps when it’s ready, which is handy if sitting out of the way, not plugged into a monitor. Haven’t actually created any shares etc yet, but will keep playing.

OpenFiler seems to need more resources (256Mb, they say) and seems to boot a bit slower — about 90 seconds in my test on the old box — but appears to be more mature and fully-featured, with commercial support options behind it.

There are other cheap (but not free) options such as NASlite, though it’s a little hard to judge if it would work on my old hardware, and there doesn’t seem to be an evaluation copy available.

ClarkConnect comes in a freebie (community) version, and also has a whole bunch of other groupware features, as well as things like firewall and print services. Probably a bit over-the-top for my needs, though you can choose just to install the stuff you need. Print services might actually be quite handy.

And of course I could chuck on any Linux distro I chose and configure it with Samba (as per the APC Mag article last month that got me thinking about this). Which would mean I had a full Linux installation to muck about with when I wanted, and/or host dev tools like Apache and MySql on. Though it sounds too much like hard work to me, and it might be a strain on the old box.

What other options should I look at? Or should I just stick with FreeNAS, which appears to be the most promising so far?

One interesting comment I read: that for home use, old PCs (that may not have been designed with modern power conservation in mind) may suck down a lot more power than the average dedicated NAS device. Good point, hence I want a quick boot time so the box doesn’t need to be left running permanently.

Handy link: How to: Install FreeNAS

Office 2007 first impressions

Admittedly I’ve only been using it for a short time, but here are my initial thoughts about Office 2007.

What I like about Office 2007

What I don’t like about Office 2007

  • the new navigation means there’s a learning curve… and half the time old-style dialogue boxes and such popup, showing that really the redesign is only half complete
  • severely limited colour schemes that break the Windows preferences
  • Outlook seems slower – clunky, in fact, sometimes. And keeps complaining it was closed unexpectedly, even sometimes when it wasn’t.
  • Outlook does strange things while writing emails, for instance removing a signature from the text when changing the account you’ll send it from.
  • have to save in the old format when sending files around, as I can’t assume others have the compatibility pack

Real Estate Websites Suck: Part 1

Oh God, Real Estate Websites Suck harder than an Electrolux. One little thing after another, they just suck. Today’s example: Search. Senario: I’ve decided to move closer to Daniel, so I want to live in a particular street in a particular suburb.

RealEstateView
I went to www.RealEstateView.com.au, and that worked, of a fashion. I searched for a keyword (the street name) for my desired suburb. No results. Which is fine, it’s a big place and a small street. But how to stay on top of the market – I know, get emailed when a new property turns up. Unfortunately, if there are no results you can’t get emailed in the future. If you get no hits, rather than being offered the chance to be told about this stuff when it comes up, you get told to search again. EBay deals with this problem just fine; you get to save the search and get emails if anything shows up. RealEstateView doesn’t.

I thought I’d outsmarted the website. I signed up for a search that did succeed, with an intention of editing it. I got the email, it said

If you did not request, or do not want, a membership in the
ViewALERT email system, please accept our apologies and
ignore this message. You will be able to de-activate your
membership by clicking the de-activation link on your first
ViewALERT email.

Great, so I can’t edit the search until the search finds something new. Garh!

Defeated, I moved on to:

RealEstate.com.au
Which failed horribly. I couldn’t even do a keyword search. Can’t limit my searches to a single street.

I could get it to email me alerts, with the same crude search terms as on their website (price, bedrooms, suburb). The confirmation email included my username and password. Great. Ten years we’ve been doing this shit, we’ve managed to figure out that’s not how confirmation emails ought to be done, you’re meant to email a link – click on it and it’s clear you’re a human. But no, here’s your details in cleartext. What dickheads.

Next:

Domain
Same problem.