At last I do beleive this blog’s back in business!

I am fed up to the back teeth with the gross incompetence and awful standards of service from fasthosts.co.uk . Fasthosts have cost me my blog audience that it’s taken me 10 months to build up! Honestly; I’ve had less then 10 hits today so far. The last time the figure was that low was June 2008 when this blog was in its first fortnight of operation. Even I myself haven’t been able to connect to this blog more than four times after a long wait since Monday 11th May 2009.

The company penalised me at the end of March 2009 after I installed the Apture plugin. This plugin demanded more server resources than fasthosts.co.uk were prepared to let me have for the money (Just over 200kb: That’s not a lot of resources to me. On a 64-bit server, as they boast that all their servers are, it should hardly dent the resources.). Rather than advising me of the situation they instantly and punitively claimed to have transferred my main blog at kkomp.com from the shared-platform server to a backroom scripting server. I don’t think that they actually executed this move until May 11th; long after I’d rectified the matter. – It took them that long to act on their word.

Anyway; I phoned their technical help department back in March, having uninstalled the Apture plugin, and the guy there said that there was no longer a resource issue, and to leave it to him and he’d sort everything out.

There was no further problem until Monday May 11th, when kkomp.com suddenly became virtually impossible to connect properly to. I rang Fasthosts and asked what was going on? They informed me that I was still on a scripting server. (In other words they’d just put me back on a scripting server.)

So I put up with it for 3 days in the hope that they’d sort it out: They did absolutely nothing about it. They totally ignored my request and sat on their fat arses taking my money for nothing in return. They lose: I have already begun transferring kkomp.com.

Nobody but the stupid gormless British could cock up to such an extent by demanding a trail of unnecessary red tape to be in perfect order and lose a customer in doing so. Not only is it ridiculous, it’s also wasting the money that this company are taking from their customers in hunting and maintaining red tape in an unproductive fiasco.

I’m meant to be proud to be British. – In reality, though, at times I’m embarrassed to be even associated with the British!

At last it appears that this blog’s now back on a normal shared platform server after 3 days: 3 days in which my audience has all but given up trying to connect to a blog that they made all but unconnectable.That’s the upshot of all this polava. Had I been depending upon this site solely for my income then I’d be pretty poor this week thanks to fasthosts.co.uk.

In short I’m not going to allow Fasthosts to do this again. It appears that, being seemingly mainly staffed by backward British half-geeks on a power-trip because they still have a job in a recession, they fail to recognise that the world has moved on to web 2.0, and that people rely on their websites for a livelihood.

It’s like renting a shop in the middle of town and building up a clientele; only to find one day when you turn up for work that your landlord has dismantled your shop and rebuilt it on a deserted backstreet, yet is still asking the same rent from you.

To prevent this from happening again, at least as far as it happening by the mean hand of Fasthosts is concerned, I’m forced to transfer the hosting. Go-Daddy has been recommended to me in the past; and therefore Go-Daddy – who aren’t British – Shall have hosting for this blog. Hopefully there won’t be any teething troubles. I don’t forsee any. I’ve set up an account and requested the transfer yesterday. – So it should happen soon. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to do so; one which I jumped at without doing any homework; more out of necessity than anything else. Hopefully I won’t be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

I’ll write more on the subject when I know more. Until then I hope Fasthosts won’t be pulling any more unsavoury surprises out of the hat.

Do you have any opinion you’d like to express? have you ever felt the wrath of halfwits in the same or similar manner? Please feel free to comment.

P.S. I did initiate transfer to go-daddy; but after careful consideration I decided to stay where I am. A move would only mean that I had to reset all the ftp configurations etc on my various setups, and that’s just a start. – ‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. They have 1 more chance: I really don’t want the extra hassle right at the moment.

I know that I’ve spoken a number of times, here on this blog as well a in comments on other blogs, about the deplorable state of the internet infrastructure in a large percentage of the world – Particularly the UK.

A Post of Politics

In a proposed initiative announced earlier this week; British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is to unveil plans to allow low-income families in the UK to connect to the internet. The plan is to accomplish this by sending such families a voucher worth up to £700, (About $1350) depending upon the families’ means as assessed under the strange, outdated, and in places unfairly applied, British Law. These vouchers can be used to pay for broadband charges, software, technical support, or even computers themselves. This scheme is intended to be run over the next three years; and is primarily intended to assist poorer children and their parents to keep up with the recent use of computers in classrooms in UK schools which is seeing school reports, homework, and study materials being posted online at an ever-increasing rate.

“To ensure we are prepared for the times to come, the Government will fund one million more households to get online, enabling parents to link with the teachers at their children’s school and helping young people with their homework and coursework.” According to Brown.

It is also intended that the initiative will keep teachers and parents in constant touch with one another; rather than just by means of the three school reports per-year as under the old system.

Knowing the nature of rip-off Britain as I do; I foresee a lot of exploitation by British businesses in charging unacceptable prices for these services to the unwary possibly computer-illiterate bearers of these vouchers. I see larger companies capitalising upon this opportunity by offering their old stock in exchange for vouchers: Using this as a means to clear yesterday’s technology without any loss of revenue on the original marked-up price. I foresee amateur computer “technicians” taking advantage of this scenario; taking people’s computers to a professional repair shop, adding their own profit and charging the customer a fortune, then claiming vouchers as payment.

I foresee more of the following too:-

Part One (Above)                                       

       Part Two (Above)                                                      

This kind of behaviour by supposed “professionals” is utterly diabolical, completely unethical, and also totally illegal: Nevertheless it does happen – That was a real Channel 4 TV programme about a real con-artist operating in the UK some time ago. I have plans to do something towards preventing the British public from being ripped off; although unfortunately I currently have neither the resources not the ability to provide any sort of similar service to Mike Quigley (Above); despite the fact that my service would be totally ethical and not rip the public off as this cowboy did.

- And Queue Advertising…

As many of my readers may be aware; I build computers: I operate under the name of “Kustom Komputa” and have been trading as such in a rather limited capacity since early summer 2007; building computers for associates, friends, neighbours, and acquaintances mainly. I have several years experience in computers and also have qualifications in both analogue and digital electronics. I once again state that unfortunately I don’t offer a technical support service or a visiting computer repair service, other than a similar support service under the terms of the Kustom Komputa warranty to my customers where the customer has their faulty computer picked up by courier and returned to me for repair should any hardware component malfunction during the warranty period. I also only deliver to addresses in the UK currently.

Please do enquire with Kustom Komputa about a new PC if you find yourself on this scheme. I build each individual computer for the benefit of the customer that will own it. I will build tower-only or I will supply peripherals and/or operating system as part of the package. The website is overdue for an update; but please don’t let that put you off.

Alternatively; if you’re feeling adventurous, you might try this:

Enough advertising for the time being: Let’s get back to the issue of this proposed Government incentive. Despite being well-intentioned this is once again too little and too late; something that we in the UK have come to expect from any government in power at any time:

The Real Politics Part

Despite this bringing the possibility of allowing some of the less-well-off families in Britain access to the internet it neither answers the matter of limited broadband access nor does it answer the matter of substandard infrastructure throughout the UK: It is still the case that in many rural areas of the UK those with internet access have to rely on a dial-up service through their telephone lines at 56k on an old-fashioned dial-up modem simply because there is no alternative other than the expensive satellite broadband services. The reason for this is because the companies that deliver services such as cable have in their own immediate interests only wired up the urban and suburban areas to benefit from their services. BT themselves, despite being able to deliver broadband services of up to 8mbps to customers virtually on the doorstep of their exchanges, are nevertheless unable to offer decent connection speeds to anybody living more than about a mile-and-a-half or more from the exchanges. This means that over 40% of the population of the UK are still unable to benefit from speeds above 2mbps; with many unable to access anything faster than 56k dialup due to location and/or financial reasons.

The fact is that were this 1998 this would be acceptable; although barely so. In reality this is 2008 and the situation is totally unacceptable. It has been brought about by the failure of the current Government to address the matter of proper investment in technology and the infrastructure of the World Wide Web in the UK. At the risk of sounding like a politician; although hopefully without the echo-chamber effect of the hollow words of a politician; I feel that it is time for the British people to get up out of their comfort zone and lobby Parliament to gain and institute the necessary investment.

The British as a nation have become complacent and have lost all enthusiasm for keeping Britain great; in fact it appears that they’ve given up – Because the politicians that are supposed to be setting an example have also given up leading and have set about doing as little as possible for as much money as possible.

This has set the tone for rip-off Britain – because our politicians are leading by example; ripping off Britain in the first place.

The latest round of pay-rises in the House of Commons would themselves have partially paid for a renewed internet infrastructure rather than putting wealth into the pockets of the “elite” who are supposed to be running this country on our behalf; not on theirs.

Unless further investment occurs in this area soon; the UK could end up as a third-world nation! Is that what you want? Then get off your arse and do something about it: The politicians aren’t going to do it for you; all they care about is how fat their wallet or purse is: they make token gestures but fail to address the real issues. Nothing has ever been achieved better than by people power: Politician-power is artificial synthetic crapola that fails and fails again; yet tells you that it’s working.

A new Government would be a change; but we’ve surely learned over the last century that neither Labour nor Conservative are any good. How many times do they have to fail over and over again before someone gets this point? I’m not saying that any party has all the answers; but surely it’s a fallacy to keep doing the same old thing in the same old way and expect different results? – I thought that was the definition of insanity rather than the definition of politics! perhaps the two have become identical? What’s your take on it?

At 01:40GMT (02:40 BST) this morning the following email was delivered to my inbox. I’ve added my comments to it in regular Arial 12pt text:

“I’m sending you this note because you registered a mobile device
to work with Twitter over our UK number. I wanted to let you
know that we are making some changes to the way SMS works on
Twitter. There is some good news and some bad news.”

“I’ll start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no
longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number. If you enjoy
receiving updates from Twitter via    +44 762 480 1423   , we are
recommending that you explore some suggested alternatives.
Note: You will still be able to UPDATE over our UK number.”

What this means is that UK telephone companies are refusing any concessions to Twitter in the interests of their own continued 100% profit; as if they needed to do so – The greedy money-grabbing penny-pinching slimeballs! Doing so might reduce their profits by a fraction of a percent; which might mean the Director will only get 5 paid-holidays and less than £500G a year or something equally ridiculous.

“Before I go into more detail, here’s a bit of good news: Twitter
will be introducing several new, local SMS numbers in countries
throughout Europe in the coming weeks and months. These new
numbers will make Twittering more accessible for you if you’ve
been using SMS to send long-distance updates from outside the UK.”

Note the absence of the word “free” or “Freephone”.

Fire Your Computer Guy or Girl!

A computer technician spills the beans and makes available the knowledge he has charged clients hundreds in service fees for.

Computer Secrets Unleashed

To find out more

CLICK HERE

The Windows Live Services can be somewhat of a conundrum in themselves. Microsoft appear to be producing everything and anything under the handle “Live” in the way of services; some of which are scrapped virtually as soon as they’re off the production line: “That was a stupid idea; put it in the trash.” Others seemingly last and remain in circulation within a specialist market: Some even hit the bigtime; such as Windows Live Messenger – MSN messenger with a redesigned GUI under a different name, or Windows Live Spaces; which has taken off in a major way amongst the freeloader amateur bloggers. One Live application which hasn’t been overly recognised, however, is Windows Live Writer; Which I’m using  right now, and I’m going to tell you a bit about my impressions whilst doing so…

XoftSpySE: Invaluable protection against malware:

Click here for a free scan

Although this picture (Left) has absolutely no relevance to this article whatsoever; I just thought I’d include it for the hell of it. It’s of a computer undergoing testing on the bench at Kustom Komputa’s workshop. (http://www.kustomkomputa.co.uk)

I’m a relative newcomer to the world of professional blogging: You’ll notice that, even though I’ve been churning out articles on an almost daily basis over the past weeks; they’ve tended at least at first to lack presentation style and appear very basic: Text upon text with very little if any proper formatting, and maybe an illustration centred top and bottom of text. Whilst the retro style may be nice in the eyes of those viewing the Internet from 1999 through a time-portal; it’s legibility may leave something to be desired by readers in the current time-stream.

Windows Live Writer extends the limited functionality of the normal blog editing interface; which in my case is WordPress, by allowing a full manual pre-formatting using functions that you’d find in programs like M$ Word; but that WordPress just doesn’t have. The article called “CRT Conundrum” was edited in Microsoft Word 12 and I was rather comforted by the extra functionality that Word provided, even though I didn’t use it much as I was experimenting to see if I could transfer from Word to WordPress, and I made a bit of an untidy job of it at the end of the day. The problem appeared after the article was finished and I wanted to transfer the draft from Word to WordPress for finalisation. Solution: Save the .rtf or .docx file  as a .html or .htm document; then copy and paste it into a new blank post created in WordPress. Yes it works and it works well. The associated issues are: 1) Too much hassle. 2) Too much mess left behind: a .rtf file, a .htm or html file, and a <filename>_files folder full of graphical images etc left behind cluttering up the desktop and using up more HDD space. Yes these can be deleted or stored but it is really too much hassle.

<Windows Live Writer>; A lot of the functionality of Word, combined with a direct interface to one’s personal blog: For example you can create tables, change the colour of the font, change the font, font size, italicise, bold, both if you like, and everything else that Word can do. unlike Word 12 in Office 2007 it’s not possible to see the changes as they will be before you make them; but who’s complaining? The functionality increase over WordPress standard is colossal when pre-editing using Windows Live Writer…And when the editing is complete just upload it straight from Writer to your blog – And this is where I find a slight conflict appears: In Writer; no matter how exactly perfectly and whatever degree of precision one formats it with; when it’s uploaded to WordPress it just ain’t the same – Ever. There’s always at least one minor correction I find I have to make after transfer; so I’ve found the answer to be that I don’t take ages formatting it perfectly in Writer; rather I do things that WordPress can’t do; like draw tables to put text and pictures in for formatting purposes and justify text within the table framework, in Writer: (I know: I boobed.) I make it look as good as it’ll ever be with emphasis upon those things that WP just doesn’t have the functionality to do…And then I upload it to WP from Writer. having done so I can adjust the formatting in WP and eradicate that extra line-break that mysteriously appeared. or add the paragraph formatting in the html window of WP to a piece of text that looked fine in Writer but appears all cramped in WP.

Probably as new versions of WP appear these bugs and compatibility issues will be ironed out. Maybe they’ll also introduce the functionality of Writer to WP; in which case this subject becomes a whole new ball-game

Another minor, or maybe major, incompatibility that I’ve noticed is causing all that space to the right of this text to be wasted, is the default table sizing in Writer: Now before we continue any further I will admit that there is a certain degree of laziness on my part involved here: But look at it this way: That space can be taken up by widgets. I know it’s not this far down the page but it can be. I’m writing inside a table to stop the text flowing into the widget space – So why don’t I just fence off the text inside a table until the widgets run out and then use the entire page? That may on the face of it appear a logical conclusion to draw; but guessing exactly where the widgets end in Writer without being able to see them is dodgy stuff. Also the table width may change just slightly on upload, as may the font sizing; and what if I want to add more widgets at some point? Oh dear I’ll have to go and reformat my article(s). The theme that I’m using may have some bearing upon this also; but I like this theme; it very “me”; and I’m not going to change it. A positive point of this formatting style using near the default Writer 1Row x 1Column as a margin is that it’s better for mobile devices. If you haven’t viewed this blog through a mobile device I suggest you give it a try and you’ll understand what I mean. Of course the default table size can be dragged to slightly larger as I’ve done herein. It’s also a lot easier to create links and link text and images in WL Writer.

Then of course there’s always the option of splitting the table to divide the written area between text and illustration: Bugs here can be incorporated into the main text area and annexed off into his own little partition, which is something that simply can’t be done using WordPress alone. (If it can then either I’ve missed a biggie or I’m using an old version of WordPress.)

If I was using WP alone I’d have to place Bugs (Above) between lines of text which span the entire page and end up with something with a retro-feel to it once again.

I could ramble on ad-infinitum with an in-depth analysis of Writer vs WordPress issues, and no doubt bore you, my readers, to tears – So save to say that I’m getting quite familiar with WL Writer and using it in conjunction with WP, I’ll say no more.

The title of this article may appear familiar to some of you as I did attempt to write on it before and posted an incomplete article by mistake in June of this year. When I noticed my error I took it down again and it remained in WL Writer Drafts section until now, when I thought that I may as well have a go at rewriting it rather than waste it: hence what you’ve just read.

Right I’m saving this into the Drafts and I think I’ll publish. I may as well do so as not… Actually I think I might make Bugs into an icon.. But that’s something of no vast consequence as yet which may or may not be in the pipeline.

I wasn’t too happy with the way the first draft of this item was going; and I’m still not too happy with it now to be quite honest – But I’ve gone ahead and published before in such a case so in for a penny – It’s something to read after all. David Risley has a much better and more detailed article on the subject at PC Mech, so I’ll do him a favour and link it here:

http://www.pcmech.com/article/how-to-manually-edit-blog-styles-for-windows-live-writer/

It might be and probably is in the members-only section, so you’ll have to buy membership – Which is well worth it for the price believe you me. I have no advertising contract with David Risley or PC Mech, so it makes no difference to me whether you do or not; but I reckon it would be a good idea; especially if you’re a geek and even more so if you live in the USA.

I’ll doubtless be back with something equally; hopefully a lot more fascinating, in due course. For now that’s yer lot.