Ordered some goodies from the GoogleStore website about 3 weeks ago. Unfortunately, one of the items I wanted wasn't in stock, but GatewayCDI couldn't tell me how much it would cost to ship the order for the in-stock items until everything came into stock 3 weeks later. When they finally told me that the shipping would cost almost half as much as the goods, I cancelled the order.

This is the sort of idiocy that happens when a company outsources its services. GoogleStore had some cool goodies on their site, but due to their dire customer service and excessive shipping costs, they've lost a sale.

Having worked in e-commerce, I can say that it is not impossible to calculate the shipping costs on-the-fly - there is no reason why they couldn't have told me the shipping costs as I placed them in my shopping cart.

GoogleStore: dump GatewayCDI and either do the e-commerce in-house, or find a better outsourced e-commerce solution with cheaper shipping.

Decided to add a bit more to my blog customisation to gradually move away from Minima Black, one of the default Blog*Spot templates. I initially chose Minima Black, because I find pages with white backgrounds too hard on the eye.

However, I don't want my blog to look just like all the other Minima Black-based blogs out there, so I added some animated .gif's, courtesy of Flaming Text. Then I coded some JavaScript that is called when the <$BlogItemTitle$> meta-tag is used in the template, referencing either <Rant> or <Rave> in the blog title. Now I have a customised blog title, stating if the blog entry is negative (rant) and/or positive (rave).

Finally, another part of the script keeps track of how many rants and raves I have posted (in the current blog index) which is displayed over on the right-hand side-bar.

More lameness from Spike TV, this time from their Wednesday night offering, Casino Cinema, which featured John Landis' classic comedy Trading Places. Despite branding themselves "The First Network For Men", Spike aired the heavy-cut version of the film, removing any and all references to profanity and nudity.

To make matters worse, Casino Cinema stops after every 7-8 mins for a commercial break and/or feature on gambling, which totally detracts from the film. What could have taken 2½ hours (with commercials) actually ended up lasting 3 hours.

Bravo! on the other hand, screened it uncut and with limited commercial interruptions tonight. Maybe there are stricter restrictions on what American channels can show - if so, it's ironic that US channels can't show US-made films uncut.

Decided to get back into a little programming this weekend, just to keep my coding skills from going rusty.

I found a neat little Flash scrolling text banner generator (on another Blog*Spot page) from here. Great for displaying static messages, but what about something dynamic - what about my hobby server's uptime?

I wrote a little PHP script, called by the system crontab every 10 minutes, to create an external .js file that uses document.write to load the .swf file with params, all of which is executed when this page is loaded.

Initial results worked really well, but of course the plain old uptime output from my hobby server was a little boring, so I found and used a combination of nifty PHP scripts to find and parse the system uptime into another format. Then I added the ability to record the highest uptime value and report back the current and highest uptimes so far.

The end result may not be that much to most people, but very satisfying for me all the same. You can see the banner over on the right side-bar, after the Archives section.


Update 2006-01/31: looks like someone was interested enough to tag this post on blinkbits.com.

Read an interesting article in The Toronto Sun a few days ago, mentioning how unbelievable some of the forensics are in CSI (presumably also refering to CSI:Miami and CSI:NY). I have to say that the producers do stretch the science to incredible lengths on a routine basis. And not just the science, but also the technology.

Don't get me wrong - CSI is one of the very few shows that I like. But in at least two episodes (one in CSI, the other in CSI:Miami) they have used ridiculous-looking IP addresses - something like 4xxx.5xxx.4xxx - not even IPv6. If the producers are worried that someone is going to try and DDoS the on-screen IP address, yet still want to give some air of realism, for goodness sakes use something that at least looks semi-legitimate - use a CIDR/8 that hasn't yet been allocated by ARIN.

Of course, as each series rolls on, it does become harder to come up with new ideas and story-lines to keep the audience interested, but if there's no intention to make even a passing attempt at realism, they may as well set CSI in the 24th century and pretend that all these high-tech research techniques exist in a sci-fi, sorry CSI-fi, world.

So, the Sony Root-kit debacle drags on. According to The Toronto Star, Sony is making token gestures to its loyal customers by offering 3 free downloads or a replacement CD with a measly US$7.50 plus 1 download. And that's just for Sony's US customers - Canadians may not even be open to the deal.

Not that I can remember the last Sony BMG label CD I bought - I used to think that the artist is more important than the label, but now I'm going to check every time on the rare occasion that I buy a CD. Oh, and when we bought a new TV this Christmas, I made sure it wasn't going to be a Sony either, so that's another CA$300.00 Sony has guaranteed itself to lose out on. It can sometimes be hard not to sound like a techno-snob, but when something like this happens, it's important to use non-technical language to show how bad a company has been, just so that friends and family can appreciate and participate in the boycott.

The actual purveyors of the original malware was a company called "First 4 Internet", which fits in exactly with one of my theorems: never trust a company that uses the number "4" in place of the word "for" in its domain name. I hope that First4Internet gets slammed with the Computer Mis-use Act over this. It'll be nice to see heads roll, now that big business has gone way too far in its contempt for privacy.

Perma-link to Mark Russinovich's original blog, outlining the root-kit.
Link to related news stories on theregister.co.uk.
Link to a CNET news story, listing other clients of First4Internet: Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and EMI.
Link to a BBC news story, referencing the original blog by Mark R.
Link to an interesting article, clearly demonstrating that the ruling Liberal party of Canada is easily bought off by big business, when it comes to [not] protecting the privacy rights of its citizens - Sarmite Bulte MP.
Another link to class-action suit info.
Yet another link referencing boycott of Sony CD's (why not boycott everything made by Sony?) and which links to an on-line petition.