Jul 25 2008

Bloggerwave Issues Once More

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 6:00 pm

As you may remember from my last mention of Bloggerwave, they were a little behind in keeping up with their payments. They managed to pay $60 of the $70 that was owed. As the other $10 is from late last year, and I’ve not received any response from them at all, I’ll not be holding my breath.


However, moving onto new issues, bloggers who visit the Bloggerwave site in a FireFox browser will find they are unable to select and therefore copy the image url required for each task. You can either switch to Internet Explorer, or save the page, and open it up in Dreamweaver/FrontPage/Notepad to extract the requried information. A more fundamental error in their system however is found when new bloggers register with their system. When you try to accept a new task, the screen you are taken to does not display any information at all. IF you already have previous tasks completed in their system, this problem does not arise, however as all new members will obviously not have any tasks already in the system, you hit a brick wall. I’ve sent the company another message (after testing the issue with a friend who had just signed up), but their past history of communications makes me believe that the best I can hope for is for the issue to be silently fixed at some point.

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Jul 16 2008

PPP Weren’t Down!

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 2:33 am

I meant to update the situation since my PayPerPost And SocialSpark Down Again? post. It turns out the problem was at my end, as many other sites were also not available. The sites resolved OK, but they just hung with the connection established, not even timing out. After running through the obvious preliminary checks, I asked Ira to contact our pseduo-ISP, and check what the problem was. Nothing at all apparently, the fault must lie with our setup.

I sent this letter, and was happy to receive a reply, quite quickly, on a Saturday afternoon!

(his name removed),

I believe you spoke to my wife, Irina, earlier today. These are the details of the problems we have, I look forward to hearing the solution.

Are our current internet problems because we are on the restricted speed connection right now, as we’ve gone over 10Gb?

This has been happening since Wednesday, possibly one or two days before that.

Problems include…

1) The following sites not working –

http://support.microsoft.com/
http://bitcast-b.bitgravity.com/websitedown/index.html
http://payperpost.com/
http://socialspark.com/opportunities

None of those sites will load, it just states ‘waiting for (name of site)’ constantly. All sites load if I use a web proxy service to test them.
Other sites load ok, the ones given are just examples I’ve noticed so far.

2) MSN Messenger can not connect, but Skype is OK.

3) BitTorrents cause complete failure with the internet connection – ALL downloads/uploads, not just torrents will stop for 10-20 seconds, start again for 10 seconds, then fail again in a loop. This has always been the case, not just since Wednesday.

Attempts to repair or specifically identify the problem…

Confirmed that no proxy server is set, Automatically Detect Settings unchecked, used both FireFox, Internet Explorer 7, Pocket Internet Explorer and NetFront.
I tried the same things on my wife’s laptop, with both a wired LAN connection and WiFi. Exact same problems occur.
I tried the same things on my PDA, using WiFi. Exact same problems occur.
I obviously tried restarting the PCs & the router (a Netgear DG834PN).
I checked the MTU is not set too high (currently 1492) and therefore causing strange fragmentation problems.
I removed the DNS servers I had assigned (OpenDNS, as the ones in this country are quite bad), and used the default ones supplied by Bazis, as well as defining the router itself as the DNS server (which would only cause the PC to use the default Bazis ones anyway). This was done both on the PC and the router itself.

The problems remain.

These issues occur on three different devices, with different DNS servers set, I believe the fault lies with either your or Kazakh Telecoms network hardware.
I did not think that resetting the TCP/IP protocol stack would be worth doing, as all three devices would be very unlikely to suffer from the same problem at the same time.

I used to work for an ISP in Britain, as a Senior Technical Support Agent, so I hope I have told you all the information you need to fix this problem. If there are other tests you want me to carry out, please tell me.

If you have a modem that you want to test in this flat to confirm the fault is not here, I would be happy to help.

Chris Merriman

Once I actually read their reply, I wasn’t exactly over the moon…

Chris,

Reinstall operating system Windows
or restore her(it) with help of the load disk. Probably after attacks virus she conked…
Earlier beside me was such problem, was not opened mail on www.yahoo.com
If you want that I came to you home and has tested on my notebook, I with joy to you will come…

About 10 GB… There is quota In Kazakhtelekom to speed on loading more 10Gb.
You it is necessary to call me 688-907

Krasnikov (name removed)!

I should point out straight away that they said they didn’t speak English (not a problem, it is to be assumed in this country), but I really hoped the letter I’d sent would give them enough information to not get a ‘reinstall Windows’ reply. Anyway, at some point last Saturday something happened that caused the sites to work again. Whether it was something corrected at Bazis, or further on up the line with Megaline (the real ISP) noticing that some of their hardware wasn’t working, I’m not sure. Anyway, sent this reply…

Thanks for your advice.

Reinstalling Windows really is a last ditch ‘fix’ for any computer problem. The fact that these sites did not work on THREE different devices (XP desktop, Vista laptop, Windows Mobile 6 PDA) indicates this would not have done anything to remedy situation. All three devices are confirmed as virus, trojan, spyware, adware and, in general, malware free. I’ve not encountered any viruses in the last 15 years that prevented that sort of range of sites from loading.

Luckily, at some point during Saturday afternoon, something was fixed somewhere, and the sites worked again. Perhaps Megaline had a routing problem or flakey hardware that is now fixed?
Anyway, I’ll wait until the end of the month, when I get my ‘normal’ speeds again (I understand the 10Gb limit, it is laughably small, but I understand it), before retesting to see if BitTorrents still cause catastrophic failures for all internet based traffic.

Thank you for replying,

Chris Merriman

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Nov 19 2007

Burping For Real This Time

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 10:44 am

If you were sincerely upset by the misleading title of the Oz Equals Land Of Toxic Emissions? post, go and check out this site on burps and farts.
OK, so it is not the most mature of content for web sites to focus on, for sure, but if someone, somewhere wants to find information on something, you can almost guarantee a webmaster has already compiled just such a site, LMAO.
Sadly, I could not get the videos (such as Britney Spears belching) to work at all in either Internet Explorer of Firefox, but the audio files make up for that. If you find this all immature and not to your taste, just skip on to the next post.

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Sep 20 2007

A Prime Example Of My Stubbornness…

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 2:43 am

The previous post took around 30 minutes to write, mainly because I was also doing a few other things at the same time. Having written the post, I hit the Publish button, and moved onto to clear down the work required on a few dozen other FireFox tabs, intending to return to the WordPress tab a little later.
For some reason I checked back on it before that. Lucky really – the post was lost, with a 406 error, I believe. Some issue with a suitable request not being issued or found… Anyway, simply returning back to the previous page just presented me with an EMPTY post page, with all my work missing. OK, so I’ve had similar problems before, clicked forward, and then F5ed, and the data has been re-posted correctly. So I tried this approach, unfortunately the same error returned. Before looking into this much further, I opened up Internet Explorer, and checked I could publish a test post there. (Didn’t want to do this within FireFox in case I cleared some sort of internal cache, and therefore lose all hope of recovering the work.) This new test post appeared fine.
I now had a choice, spend perhaps 10 minutes re-writing a post, as I still had the basic outline in my head, or… decide the PC was trying to annoy me on purpose, and rise to the challenge & beat the issue into submission.
Friends will not be greatly surprised to hear that I took the second route – and some twenty minutes later, recovered a version of the text, by sniffing the outgoing packets that were sent whenever I hit F5. Unfortunately the software I had installed to do this was rather rudimentary, with no filtering options, and as I had a lot of other pages loading and data being sent, it took a while to track down the right packets to analyse. Once I had searched for, and replaced, the silly codes (ASCII escape codes??), I had the post back again. OK, so it would have been simpler to just retype the thing, rather than start sniffing network packets, but it had been a while, and you can never tell when it might be useful 🙂

Then before this post was finished, we had a power cut. Luckily we have already replaced the last UPS we had, so I had enough time to hibernate the PC. The power came back 5 minutes later, the PC booted up, then decided it wanted to hibernate before it had finished booting. It hung for 5 minutes, before I hit restart. T.F. for FireFox’s ability to restore sessions when it senses your PC has become fubarred 🙂 Even our washing machine didn’t lose its programming, which was lucky, as I am doing some last minute washing, drying and ironing to get ready for Amsterdam and Britain. I’d already been delayed on that front by a few hours when our hot water went all orange again! Then Kara decided it was time to rid the shirt I am wearing of those evil adornments – buttons.

However, none of the above is going to bug me, I’m on my way to get severely relaxed, meet friends and family after a break of some 9 months, so I shall take it all in without getting too stressed. Oh, and Steve, a good friend from my Uni days back at Bournemouth has just got in contact through Facebook, my beautiful wife has just kissed me before going to bed, and I may even be in bed myself before dawns breaks, so the world could be in such a worse state for me right now 🙂

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Aug 24 2007

CNN Report On Nuclear Hangover In Kazakhstan

Category: In The Media,Kazakhstan — ChrisM @ 6:43 pm

I watched an interesting short news item on the problems facing the area in Kazakhstan that was used by the USSR to test nuclear weapons. I was actually quite surprised at the tone used by people in the area, as I would have thought that they would feel more cautious talking to a foreign reporter about things like this. Anyway, catch it over at Yahoo News.
I just rechecked the video, and for some reason it is now playing at 50% of the intended height. This was in FireFox, I checked the same link in Internet Explorer 7, and didn’t have the same problem… If you have issues with the video, try switching browsers.

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Aug 08 2007

Standards Were Needed…

Category: In The Media — ChrisM @ 3:01 am

If you have any interest in the history of the internet, or more specifically the World Wide Web (unless you remember the days of bulletin boards and Compuserve, the two terms are probably synonymous), then an article I recently found may well be of interest to you. It details the battles fought over the need for standards in the days of early web sites and browsers. Check the Business Week link for the full run down, however it basically explains how Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape browser were very incompatible at the beginning, which lead to the ridiculous situation of web sites having to be designed, hosted, and of course paid for, in duplicate. Although the comments indicate that some in this field believe Zeldman (the subject of the article) receives too much glory, the story behind the creation of standards is of interest. To me at least, hopefully others won’t fall asleep after the 1st page ;-P

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Jul 06 2007

Alex’s New Blog – Dryad Musings

Category: Friends,Kazakhstan,Personal — ChrisM @ 4:47 pm

Alex has now setup her blog at her new domain – www.DryadMusings.com. When you get a moment, check it out, and if you happen to know anything about CSS, you could even leave her a message about sorting her Internet Explorer rendering issues.
You can find her post on the Birthday Celebrations in Astana , if you would like to find out a little bit more about what has been and will be happening to celebrate Astana’s 10 years as the capital of Kazakhstan and also the President’s birthday

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Jun 04 2007

Virtual Dress Up Dolls

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 8:40 pm

If you have a daughter, or young niece, you may want to check out the service offered at webkinz. The main concept is taken from dressing up dolls that many girls play with. One of the problems with this conventional manner of playing with dolls is the prohibitive cost of buying new dresses, tops and accessories for the dolls.


So, Cartoon Doll Emporium have digitized the whole process – your child simply chooses the base doll they want to work and play with, and the page then loads up all the options available.
Although the site is aimed at the ‘tweenie’ sector of the market, they have included some dolls that older girls may be interested in, for example see the doll I created below.

Virtual Dress Up Dolls

For the most part, the site is well constructed, though small children may well find it easier to move the clothing and accessories when viewing the site via Internet Explorer, rather than FireFox. If the item is further down the page than the doll, you need to drop the item, scroll up, pick it up and then drop it again, though this is probably unavoidable – the only way to make it all fit on one page would be to user smaller images, which wouldn’t be as interesting.

The final result can be saved, linked to and as you can see from above, referred to as an online image. If your daughter/niece has had enough of dressing dolls for one day, the site features other activities to keep themselves interested.

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May 29 2007

Homepages EXACTLY How You Want Them

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 11:04 pm

Personally, I have about:blank as my homepage for both Internet Explorer and FireFox. Why? Two reasons, primarily because I only have a measly allowance of 700 Mb per month, and also because the application loads a little quicker when it only need to display a blank page at start up. (Has anyone else noticed IE7 still takes a silly amount of time to achieve this?)
However, if I was not data limited, I would have setup a personalized homepage over at NetVibes.com a while ago – you can either create an account there, and have your choices saved permanently, or if you prefer to experiment with it a little first, you can just rely on a cookie saving your preferences for a certain amount of time. (If you do settle on one design, do reg an account, else you risk losing your choices eventually)
Thanks to a postie over at the PPP forums for the heads up on this site, I’ve forgotten who you are, but if you leave a comment, I’ll gladly link to you 🙂

This post is NOT sponsored, I’ve just been meaning to write about it for a while, apologies for the delay…

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Nov 03 2006

Backlinks To This Site Improving

Category: Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 5:31 pm

A picture paints a thousand words…

I’m guessing, as the image will be clipped on the right hand side, the image above will paint 982 words 🙂

[edit] Except, I, once more, forgot about Internet Explorer 6 users, who saw this post only once they had scrolled half way down the page. So I’ve resized the image, hence it’s low quality appearance, apologies. One day I’ll get round to checking what CSS needs to be altered for IE6 to display the same way as IE7 & FF….

[edit]
plugin has been removed, so no images available any more, sorry.

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