RyuKent on Life

Rarely do I write my opinions on such subjects, but today I want to vent my anger at the Alan Johnson. Apparently, Islam4UK have been banned under terrorism laws and membership in the UK now carries up to a 10 year jail sentence.

Now I do not support their activities and I strongly believe what they do is highly insulting to the bereaved families of servicemen is wrong, but should you make membership of a group who has an unpopular opinion illegal? Is this not an affront to our civil liberties. Could you criminalise amnesty international for criticising the government? I understand that actions could be deemed illegal and even seeking to cause distress to the families by verbally abusing them criminal, however membership of a political group alone? Shocking.

What is needed is common sense. Separation should be made over the nature of the illegal act and the group of which some members have performed. What about people who chose to join but would not commit acts of terrorism? They are not criminals simply by membership. Many people consider the  policies of the Labour party offensive. This is a slippery slope to the erosion of our freedom of democracy.

The iPhone on O2 in and around central London at busy times like 5 in the afternoon simply doesn’t work. On 3G at least, you have to wait half an hour for a connection and even then, receiving any kind of data is like pulling your hair out. It seems now, O2 have actually apologised but all this is hot air if they’re not going to do anything about it. What is the point of spending £45 a month for a service you cannot use at the one time you really need it.

What gets me the most though is the fact that while using 3G I have to wait 20 minutes to even receive texts and frequently people who call me are greeted with the answerphone despite my phone being on and in signal.

New York have taken a novel approach. Apparently Apply have actually stopped selling iPhones to people with NY zip codes. Is it really the case that our 3G networks cannot handle this much data? I never seemed to have a problem using the Three network. Loads of people are using Three USB dongles without this kind of issue. It seems strange to hear AT&T would prevent people from buying iPhones rather than investing in their network.

Disabling 3G and falling back to EDGE only seems to help, but does mean you are stuck with a much slower transfer rate. To me this is preferable to no transfer at all. I had thought of taking out the tethering plan. I will think again. go on O2, sort your network out, or at least stop selling more iPhones that don’t work in London like AT&T!!

This post is a great list of Linux reference sheets. There are over 25  quick reference guides to use. Worth bookmarking!

This is a quick note to tell the world how much I appreciate good customer service and especially that offered by O2 broadband. Having previously suffered at the hands of Tiscali who have fittingly joined the evil that is Carphone Warehouse, I was presently surprised to be treated like a human by the O2 team.

Little things like receiving texts when you order is going through and being able to check the status online made all the difference. They checked that I was on the right package and genuinely seemed to care. This is a commodity that is becoming all too scarce in this country. People just simply don’t take pride in their jobs any more and don’t care about customer service.

Sure, everybody wants cheap, but at what cost? Having being conned into a terrible deal with Tiscali where by my 10 days cancellation period expired before my service was even connected (it took 2 weeks) I can safely say that I will never get involved in another year long contract with a company that doesn’t take customers seriously.

Which brings me ironically back to O2. Has anyone else noticed that at around 9am and 5pm, despite having great signal strength in the London Bridge area, it is simply impossible to use the 3G network? I mean yesterday it took me over half an hour to send a text. Checking train timetables on my iPhone just didn’t work. I’m not alone here and it is definitely not a handset issue as everywhere else is no problem.

Clearly O2 have overstretched their network. I’m n0t sure if they can do anything about it because of the limit in spectrum available, but I would seriously consider changing networks (when Orange and Vodafone become available) based on this. There’s no point in having a phone that you can’t use. Have emailed them and will await the reply. I look forward to posting it here.

Since iTunes 9 was released many programs such as iTunnel have stopped working. Despite various posts claiming they have been updated, I simply couldn’t get them working. However, there is a new program that is fully iTunes 9 compatible and allows you to transfer files to and from your iPhone over USB. It comes with a lovely looking GUI and does not require SSH to be set up or any complicated configuring.

i-FunBox can be downloaded here. It is very easy to use. One word of warning – I couldn’t connect just after I installed iTunes 9, but then restarted windows and it worked fine. This is definitely the best USB iPhone connection software I have used!

It seems the reasons that the PS3 slim won’t have the OtherOS option are not as we expected. Seeing as Sony make a loss on these machines and can only recoup the costs by selling games and peripherals, it does make sense that they don’t want people buying hundreds to use in PS3 cells. Those people don’t buy games or peripherals. Sony just lose out.

But apparently this is not the reason that the new PS3 has had its linux capability removed. According to this post on the official Sony linux site, by a Sony employee, the reason is that the hypervisor drivers were too expensive to maintain.

“I’m sorry that you are frustrated by the lack of comment specifically regarding the withdrawal of support for OtherOS on the new PS3 slim.

The reasons are simple: The PS3 Slim is a major cost reduction involving many changes to hardware components in the PS3 design. In order to offer the OtherOS install, SCE would need to continue to maintain the OtherOS hypervisor drivers for any significant hardware changes – this costs SCE. One of our key objectives with the new model is to pass on cost savings to the consumer with a lower retail price. Unfortunately in this case the cost of OtherOS install did not fit with the wider objective to offer a lower cost PS3.”

So there we go. Maybe in the future we will see this option return. Lets all keep our fingers crossed. In the mean time, lets all go out and buy XBOX 360s as they seem to offer better value for money with a larger range of games should we get no linux love from Sony.

Note to Sony: Linux would have made me buy a PS3 slim. Now I’m buying from your competitor.

OK, I know this has nothing to do with anything, but I found a really cool guide showing you how to make a Super Mario mushroom from an ordinary radish. I feel I need to share it with everyone! Guide here at annathered.

This morning I got an extremely annoying email telling me that Google Checkout has stopped accepting Maestro cards and that I should register another type of card to carry on using its services. Actually I was quite angry. Maestro is one of the most common cards in use in the UK and certain banks do not offer an alternative unless you change your account. How many people will change their whole bank account just to use another website?

It was also quite annoying that there was no explanation. After digging around a bit, I did find answers. Apparently Maestro is now insisting that all transactions use SecureCode. This is the system that asks you to use the predefined password when making a purchase. Unfortunately it is really not very secure as you can quite easily reset your password using a date of birth which can be acquired from a whole host of social networking sites, but that is another story.

Verified by Visa, which is the Visa equivalent is still optional. The SecureCode system takes away a lot of the responsibility of the card company covering the cost of fraud as it is much harder to claim that your card was stolen when they also know your password. Google didn’t want to put users through this extra step and probably didn’t want to pay the higher fees and so, to avoid loosing revenue and potentially putting themselves at greater risk of liability in the case of fraud, decided that they could just stop accepting the Maestro and stick with Visa. In the long run, perhaps it is unlikely they will lose much business and have probably calculated they stand to lose less than if they had taken on the more arduous terms MasterCard were imposing. It seems unlikely that they would have inconvenienced so many users without carefully considering it.

It has also been suggested that SecureCode is not compatible with a number of services such as WAP and as such would limit the channels payment could be accepted by. I don’t really accept this as a good reason for dumping the service though as you could just restrict maestro users on that channel and allow everything else, while still allowing us to use the standard web based system as normal.

HSBC are rumoured to be moving over to Visa too. It seems Maestro is not so popular as it used to be. Perhaps the charges have become proportionally uncompetitive. RBS / Natwest will still offer it as standard though. I think it very unlikely anyone will want to move banks. If a significant number of people have to stop using the service, competitors such as PayPal could well take some of Google’s business. In PayPal’s case, you can fund transactions using direct debit, thus avoiding the card issue. IT remains to be seen whether Google too will start offering this service. Personally, I would like this as you could incorporate the correspondence logging system of Google with the convenience of PayPal. In my opinion and through experience, Google checkout offers better customer service.

Something that has always annoyed me is that there are so many video standards out there and that they are nearly all proprietary systems owned and pushed by one company or another and inevitably restricted in one way or another. Or worse, expensively licenced.

Another thing I hate is that because of this lack of any real standard, it has become necessary for a while to either have a number of different players installed or as the case usually is now, for them to be packaged up inside a flash interface, each with a different UI, none with the easy ability to access the underlying file to download or manipulate and all relying on having flash installed.

I love Flash when it’s doing its Flash thing, but I hate not being allowed it on my iPhone and I really think that Flash is not what videos should be. There is a reason why all websites are not just large Flash files. There is a reason why all website images are not Flash files. Flash has been used to get round the inconvenience of not having a decent standard for video, but really is second best to an ideal solution where all browsers have the inbuilt capacity to play, download, even edit, tag and scan a universal video format.

So along comes HTML 5. Everyone’s happy, we are on the verge of reaching a consensus about OGG Theora and Vorbis for our standards. And Apple and Nokia ruin it. They moan about the fact that the company who created OGG Xiph.org being able to patent it. Yeah, but it is still an open standard. It is still open for people to implement in the way they want. It is still free to adapt and use in every possible device without licensing issues. It is pretty good as far as quality is concerned. What else currently offers such greatness?

I’m convinced the companies who are blocking it’s adoption are doing so merely to srve their own self interest. Apple wants you to use quicktime, they control quicktime. You have to pay them to use it and download their software with their annoying ‘lets install Safari’ crap. But why should I use quicktime on my settopbox, on my Linux desktop. Why should I pay to use restricted software when a perfectly good open and free standard is available? Sure it might be organised by one organisation but it’s a hell of a lot better than what I’d have to live under were I to try and use MP3 or Windows media format.

I think it’s really sad that we’ve lost a great opportunity to move the internet forward to a universal standard that would mean people don’t have to install a whole load of crapware applications designed to peddle other paid services. An opportunity to have all internet videos to work on the iPhone instead of proprietary YouTube only. An opportunity for a thousand developers to make a thousand embedded devices that would all play the same videos. There are people who are simply not skilled enough to deal with the mess that internet video gives us right now. How many grannies understand that you need to download RealPlayer to play real videos and that won’t work in Windows Media Player which they need to play Windows Media files which won’t play on their DVD player. This is unnecessary!