This made me laugh. First I heard of it, my son rang me and said the PS3 wasn’t working. I thought fair enough, I’ll take a look at it when I get home – it’s still under warranty anyway so not really concerned. Half an hour later one of my mates calls and says his PS3 isn’t working – so now my spider senses are tingling.
Turns out the PS3 (the old fat one, not the new slim) had a “Millenium Bug” style fault. It thought/thinks that 2010 is a leap year, so the consoles date & time for 1st March 2010 actually set to 29th Febuary 2010. So far so boring, but that caused a major problem. Once the PS3 was switched on and went online it did what it apparently always does and checkes it’s own clock against the clock on the PlayStation Network. Now since 29th Febuary 2010 doesn’t actually exist, the PS3 throws a panic and sets it’s date back a few years. The result of that…the connection to the Playstation Network fails. And some games will not operate as the DRM checks go potty when they realise you’re trying to play a game that hasn’t even been written yet. Presumably Sony don’t want you playing games from the future eh?
The official Sony blog were awash wish outraged gamers who couldn’t use their PS3’s, but Sony did say the problem “should” correct itself once the PS3’s internal clock had rolled over to 1st March 2010 (ie a date that exists). It did for me – just past midnight the PS3 started up perfectly and connected to the PSN, and there didn’t appear to be any damage (like lost game saves).
I couldn’t believe how angry some people were about this. Sure. it’s not exactly something you would expect, but sometimes these kinds of things do happen. I’m certainly not angry about it – the PS3 is such an awesome piece of hardware. If you think the grass is greener on the other side, just see how many results you get for “Broken XBox” on a Google search – their hardware is nowhere near as robust.
The other thing I thought was great was how Google responded to this. Just by Googling “Playstation Network” the top result was a news entry letting me know what had happened. I was watching TV and neither SKY nor the BBC seemed to be reporting it, but were doing the usual reporting about the same news items they’d been talking about all day long.
Found some competitors to my workplace today with quite frankly astonishingly good reviews listed on Google Shopping. Sounds good, I mean if almost 300 people felt compelled to leave positive responses about their shopping experience, then I want to shop there too and become another satisfied customer. Or do I? I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, but this is what I see.
First up, see the ratings here.
Look over on the right – out of 283 ratings, 280 are from ShopZilla.co.uk. Maybe that’s the only place they list where you can leave a review? No, they also list on Dooyoo.co.uk, yet have not received a single review from that source. They also have Google Checkout as an option, but do not appear to have received a single review from that source either. Google does also list three reviews from Reviewcentre.com. Oddly there are actually 9 reviews for this merchant on Reviewcentre – 4 out of those 9 are 1 out of 5 ratings though. Run that through a calculator and you’ll see that compared to the average rating of over 90% through ShopZilla, on Reviewcentre this merchant scores closer to 55%.
Now look through those ratings taking note of when they were posted. Spot a pattern? One review a day. Almost as if someone has this as a little “job” to do each morning at 9am before they have their first cup of coffee. It’s certainly not what I would call a natural pattern.
ShopZilla claim they have filtering technology in place to prevent abuse of their system, but it doesn’t look to me like it’s working particularly well. I thought maybe I should ask them what they thought about it, but have yet to receive either a reply or an acknowledgement that they got the message (I used the contact form on their site to be sure they did).
Now, I’m open to correction on this, but I can only see this as:
1) A deliberate attempt to mislead the consumer on the part of the merchant.
2) A shockingly bad moderation system in place at ShopZilla.
3) A “we’re not really concerned” attitude from Google Shopping. Trusting another online resource simply because they are “one of the big boys”.
Obviously I’ve chosen just one example. Unfortunately within a few clicks it’s easy enough to find another, and another. There are doubtless many more. Contrast them with the reviews for this well known merchant who clearly is not manipulating their reviews (if they are they haven’t got the hang of how many out of five is best).
Conclusion: Out there somewhere, I would guess someone is doing this as a “service”. For a scant 50p per day you too can probably get a seller review profile just like this. ShopZilla’s assurance that they stop abuse using IP address filtering clearly is ridiculous since spoofing an IP is so easy to do. That’s assuming they are even actually doing it.
I’m forced to ask myself who really benefits from a review system that’s dishonest. It’s certainly not hurting Google. They get to serve their ADs and as we all know that’s the core business – don’t feed me “do no evil” as a company motto! It’s not hurting ShopZilla – someones posting content onto their system for free day in, day out which in turn makes them appear to be on the side of the consumer by showing all these “impartial” reviews. Clearly if the system is being abused in this way, the merchants are doing it, so they must be benefitting or why bother?
Bottom line: unless a review system can prove it only shows reviews from people who ACTUALLY MADE A PURCHASE it’s not woth the web page it’s published on. Be careful out there.
OK, after talking about Horizon’s program on infinity, here’s a simple (sort of) explanation of how the universe is finite and unbounded. By finite and unbounded, I’m saying the universe is a fixed (unknown) size, and yet there is no “edge”. No boundary. You can go as far as you like, and just keep going forever, without the need for the universe to be infinite in size.
To begin with, you have to accept what Albert Einsteins theory of relativity tells us. The universe is not a three dimensional object (like the Earth) but a four dimensional object (the fourth dimension being time). There are theoretical physicysts who tell us there are in fact even more than four dimensions, but that’s not important here. The problem with a four dimensional universe is that it’s not something you can visualize in your head – your (and my) understanding of the world we live is is that it is three dimensional. The Earth is a big sphere. It’s finite and unbounded because we know how big it is, but we also know we can walk around it in a straight line and never get to the end (unbounded).
To make this even simpler to think about, we can go down to just two dimensions – a clock face. As the minute hand travels around we can start at 12 o-clock, and move through each of the twelve hours on the face until we get back to twelve o-clock again. But there is nothing stopping us at that point – the hand can continue to go around and we can start to see that the twelve o-clock position is not only twelve, it is also zero at the same time. Not only that, we can start the clock from any position we like, and that position will become the zero position after a complete revolution. the twelve o-clock position has no real significance per se.
My universe is the same as the clock face. You can start from anywhere you like, travel away from that point and eventually you’ll simply come back to where you were. You’ll never come against and edge or boundary, you’ll just end up back where you started. What with the universe being a four dimensional object, you’ll also not even be aware that you have come “full circle” because you won’t in fact have travelled in a circle – you’ll have followed a “straight line” through space and time to all intents and purposes.
So there you go – just because it doesn’t have and edge, this is not a reason to believe the universe to be infinte. By the same token, just because we don’t know what it is, it is not reasonable to assume there is no “biggest number”. Just like the clock face, the biggest number exists, and in a rather neat way to describe it, it also just happens to be zero (think back to 12 o-clock – it’s the Alpha, and the Omega all at the same time). I like this idea – it has beautiful symmetry.
Saw this one today, and I’m struggling with some of it. For instance, the conclusion that there is proof of infinity simply because we can count sequentially, and not see an end to it. That’s rubbish surely – just because you can’t see the end of something does not mean it doesn’t have an end. It just means your own limitations prevent you from seeing it.
I didn’t much like the constant being told things like Googles, Googleplexes & Graham’s Number are so big we can’t imagine them. I don’t need to be told that – I can’t imagine 1000000 personally, and I’d question if anyone can. Personally I can’t imagine 1000. I might be able to have a rough idea of what 1000 looks like, if I have a point of reference like, say I’ve seen a picture of a crowd of people which was reported to number 1000, then maybe I have a rough idea of what 1000 people look like. Even then, I don’t really have a good visual of that number in my head. If you asked me to point out person number 764, theres no way I can do it and I doubt very many people could. I can cope with, say 10. Show me 10 of something, even for a couple of seconds, and almost right away I will know how many there are, and probably be able to describe number 7 from memory.
Then, the idea that the Universe is not only infinite in size, but that there are an infinite number of infinite universes. This one is surely simply a mathematical construct – it can’t have any real world consquences (other than providing an after dinner conversation topic) since in an inifinite universe, nothing outside it can have any observable consequences on our universe so there’s not a lot of point in them EVEN if they do exist, from the point of view here in our universe.
For me, it seems that the universe, based on my reading, ought to be finite and unbounded. If we’ve got a point of reference for the beginning of the universe, which we seem to have, it makes a nonesense of the idea that the universe might be infinite. Saying it is, when we also say it was once finite in size, is saying that at some point in the last 13.7 billion years ago the universe somehow jumped from a finite to an infinite size. That simply doesn’t make any sense at all. Edwin Hubble managed to show us that the unverse is apparently expanding (which re-enforced the idea of the Big Bang which originally surfaced as a consequence of General Relativity).
My conclusion: infinty does not exist in any meaningful sense. It’s merely an amusing construct for mathematicians to tease us with.
It’s easy to be a bad company these days. Just don’t give too much of a hoot about your customers AFTER you’ve got their money for instance. I can think of quite a long list for that.
On the other hand, how about being deliberately deceptive, and actually publishing the fact that you are for the world to see? Now they probably aren’t alone of course, but since I’ve spotted it may as well name and shame:
chainreactioncycles{dot}com (can’t put a link – keep reading….)
They have an alluring “Exchange links with us!” page. There’s a load of gumpf about how echanging links with them will benefit your site. They’ll even pop your link on their homepage for a day or so. Sounds great! But wait….what’s that in the header of your “Partner Links” page. Some appears to have mistakenly added an extra meta tag:
<meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW” />
Hmmmm – it’s also mistakenly been pasted into the headers of all the other link pages – the ones listing the 800 or so gullible webmasters who fell for this. I just love the way the noindex and nofollow are in all caps to – maybe they are really hoping that’ll make sure Google knows how little these guys think of their llink partners.
On the off chance you don’t know what this meta tag means:
NOINDEX – they are telling the search engines NOT include these pages in their results.
NOFOLLOW – they are telling the search engines they do not vouch for the quality of the sites they are linking to. That’s a bit rich since their “exchange links page” states they check your site to see that it meets their guidlines – I mean, are they doing that or not, and if so, why the nofollow?
They do, it seems, put their newest “partners” on the homepage, but they seem to habve missed out the NOINDEX meta tag. Not to worry, they found a solution to that by cloaking the link with redirects. Fiendishly inventive.
Honestly, this whole “hoard your PageRank” and ongoing battle to trick other webmasters in to thinking they are getting something when they are not is really cheesing me off. The blame has to lie at Google’s feet as they started this whole nofollow nonesense. The initial idea was sound enough – the tag should be used for UGC and I agree with that. I don’t, however agree that it should become a tool for webmasters to manipulate their ranking in the search engines and I’m pretty sure it’s intention was to try and put a stop to that anyway. The most laughable example of course is Wikipedia “nofollowing” the links to their sources. Shame on you Google.
Footnote: chainreactioncycles may well be, in all other ways, a reputable company selling quality kit to lots of satisfied customers. I have no experience with which to comment on that though.
New laptop time – this time around it’s a shiny Sony Vaio VGN-FW48E. Sony were kind/vindictive enough to pre-install the machine with Windows Vista which was no good to me as I actually want to do some stuff with the machine, not sit looking at a boot up logo all day or wait 15 minutes to find a file. So I installed XP Pro. And you can too.
Firstly (this is more for the event the laptop ends up going to someone else) I ran the create recovery media wizard so it can if needs be get back to it’s factory installed state. You ought to do this too just in case.
Second, completely wiped the harddisk by deleting all the partitions, creating a new one and formatting. Quickest way to accomplish this is with a good boot disc – I used the Ultimate Boot CD for this.
First problem – XP isn’t going to recognise the hard disk controller as it’s not in it’s driver section. You could go for the F6 option during the XP install and load the drivers from a floppy disc, but of course this machine doesn’t have a floppy and I’m not about to buy a piece of 90’s hardware to fix this 2010 machine. Find your driver then slipstream your XP installation disc using nLite. It’s not nearly as hard as it sounds, and nLite is a free download. You’ll just need access to a machine running Windows, your Windows Disc, a copy of your Drive Controller Driver and a blank CD.
Then you can install XP. On a side note, I installed XP Pro using OEM media, but the license key from my old VAIO that this one replaced. Didn’t seem to cause any issue at all, and activated online without a hitch. Once you’re up & running you’ll need to find drivers for all the hardware so you end up with a device manager that looks like mine does:
Everything as it should be. Wireless networking, ethernet, bluetooth, camera, media keys, card reader etc all functioning. It’s a pig of a job to find drivers that will work though, so be warned. Here are some links that may, or may not help:
Modding ATI Catalyst. Basically, you probably won’t get the right driver from ATI for a laptop – they will tell you to go to your Laptop Manufacturer (Sony in my case). Sony haven’t made an XP driver for any of my hardware as they don’t support it, so modding the Catalyst is the only option. It works and it’s free.
Sony Vaio FTP Driver Archive. Basically, Sony may not have written XP drivers for my machine, but they have for plenty of others and the hardware in them is all the same stuff. I just used drivers from similar models.
HP (for the Ricoh Card Reader) This was the last one I had trouble locating. In device manager it was simply listed as “Base System Device” so finding out what it actually was was the first trick before I could start trying to find a driver.
There are other places on the web purporting to have XP drivers for Sony VAIOs, but treat them with caution and virus scan anything and everything you download.
Good luck.
Been having a problem getting my Sony Vaio to boot up XP this week. On each boot, XP started running the add new hardware wizard claiming it had found “ACPI Uniprocessor PC”. Sometimes it wouldn’t load Windows at all, falling into a never ending loop of reboots. A bit of Googling and it seems lots of people are having the same issue. As is usually the way, almost without fail all the answers on forums from “experts” fell into these three categories:
- “You’ve got a virus” – followed by complicated instructions to run various virus scanners, edit the registrty and perform multiple reboots in between.
- “Your XP installation is screwed – re-install Windows” – this is the one Microsoft themselves seem to suggest.
- “You’ve got a hardware fault – send it back for repair”
I didn’t fancy any of these approaches as for one, they would all demand a great deal of my time, and for another I didn’t actually believe any of these was actually going to fix the problem in any case (I know re-installing Windows will fix almost anything – but it’s a bit like buying a new car just because the old one is a bit dirty or has run out of fuel).
I did a bit more Googling to find out exactly what the ACPI Uniprocessor PC is. Something to do with the processor itself and the HAL. That in turn appears to be connected to power management. So….
I’ve switched off power management, and the problem has gone.
Of course, if you use your machine on batteries this may not be the best answer in the world. It does, however, mean you can use your computer a bit as oppsed to not at all. I only run my machine at home and at work, so I’ve always got mains power.
***UPDATE*** Turns out I’m wrong, and this was the first sign of impending hardware failure. The system board actually died completely on me. I’ve got a new post up about how I set up my new VAIO with XP Pro.
Got this one today, the joke being this was arrived at from a link within Webmaster Tools itself. It would have been bad enough if it was in Google search results considering it’s one of their own pages. Obviously my favourite part is “Part of this page has been removed” – that would be the content then.
Got this one when trying to get into the forums on mysql.com
Working on a new Drupal site at the moment, unfortunately today while trying to access the Drupal site itself I got this one:
This is what a Drupal site does when it’s having problems. Trouble is, that link to the handbook isn’t a lot of use when the handbook is on the site that isn’t operating 
Started playing around with Drupal, and got this advice in my status report. Put simply I needed to increase the amount of memory available to PHP as I only had 64M available to it. My hosting is with Godaddy and after much Googling found a couple of possible solutions – add a line to .htaccess or edit the settings.php file in /sites/default.
First off, tried adding a line to .htaccess as explained here. It didn’t work. So I went for modifying “settings.php” (instructions at the same link I just referred to). Editing the file was no problem, uploading it was. My FTP Client couldn’t do it (I just got “critical error” each time it failed), and modifying permissions on the file, and it’s parent directory didn’t help either. Drupal “protects” the settings.php file as a security measure, and nothing my FTP client could do would get around it (that may just be a good thing).
The answer to overwriting this file with a Godaddy account is to use Godaddys’ own file manager. Log into your hosting account and make your way to hosting control center>content>file manager. Browse your way to the folder sites/default then click the little “Upload” icon, tick the “overwrite” checkbox and then use the browse to locate your modified settings.php. Worked for me
Amazon requires you to supply a 12 digit UPC, 13 digit EAN or 14 digit GTIN code for any product you wish to sell through their platform. This is a bit of a problem if you don’t have that information, and it is NOT displayed on (or hidden in the source code of) the product page on Amazon.
To find the UPC/EAN/GTIN you can view the rss page of the product and search for the relevant tag such as <EAN>, or <UPC>. For example to get an RSS page for the 80GB Sony Playstation 3 which is listed on ASIN B001DTETLS, you’d use this URL:
http://webservices.amazon.co.uk/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&AWSAccessKeyId=youridhere&Operation=ItemLookup&IdType=ASIN&ItemId=B001DTETLS&ResponseGroup=Medium,Offers
You’ll need to substitue “youridhere” with your own AWSAccessKeyId. I’m not publishing mine here, but you can get one for free yourself by signing up to Amazon Web Services. You could also just Google for someone elses as other people do publish their keys.
You can substitue the domain extension in the URL if you want to look it up on other channels such as .com .de .fr .ca or .co.jp.
This RSS page has a bunch of useful information in it. The static URLs for images for example and also the lowest prices for both new and used and of course, the EAN and UPC code.
If you’re loading your products into Amazon using flat files (which you really ought to) then there’s another interesting option. Amazon’s flat files require the field “StandardProductID” (this is your UPC EAN or GTIN) and “ProductIDType” (this is just the right prefix for the “StandardProductID” you are using so the allowed values are UPC, EAN or GTIN).
What Amazon don’t tell us is that their is a fourth “StandardProductID” type the system will accept – have you guessed yet? Yes, we CAN put an ASIN number in “StandardProductID” and enter “ASIN” into “ProductIDType”.
This has a couple of advantages. Firstly, we don’t need to bother with an EAN, UPC of GTIN code and secondly we can be absolutely sure we’re listing onto the correct ASIN.
Some people may wish to NOT list onto the correct ASIN. Typically if you’re selling a product and you’re not the cheapest seller for it it is going to be very difficult to get the buy box on that product. So you stand a much better chance of a sale if your product sits on it’s own ASIN. To do this, you’d need to supply Amazon with a unique, and also incorrect UPC, EAN or GTIN code.
