jfw.id.au

My Internode ADSL has finally been provisioned and is up and running. Had a small drama getting it all sorted out, but thankfully the dice went my way.

I submitted the churn application on Dec 20th, wanting to move away from Westnet after I reached the conclusion that the plan changes they were implemented were detrimental to me and my usage habits. On the 21st I got an email about my order being in the system, apparently this is the email that comes through when the request is submitted to Telstra wholesale. The email indicates 3-5 business days from submission should see the churn completed.

On the 27th of December I got another of these emails. The 29th was 5 days from the original email and I called Internode to see what was happening. Apparently there had been some error at Telstra’s end and the application had been rejected and had to be resubmitted, hence the second email. Unfortunately for me the 3rd of Jan was given as the estimated date of churn.

This would push me into another month with Westnet and require me to pay another months access fees. It would also push me out of the period they were waiving the early termination charges and add that charge to my account as well. As there was no way we could speed Tesltra up with all the public holidays and stuff I had only 1 option.

I cancelled my Westnet account and had them set the cancellation date as the 1st of Jan so that I would still get the fee waived and not be charged the additional month access. This is bad because it could have seen my Westnet codes removed from my line before the churn happened. If that had happened it would have caused the churn to fail and I would have had to start the application again as a new connection which is more expensive and more delay.

Happily, this didn’t happen and I am now online through Internode.

I got a phone call from an Optus rep yesterday to thank me for my loyal patronage.  We’ve had our mobiles with them for a little over 2 years now, having moved over from Telstra after they got too greedy.  As well as the thanks for still being with them I was informed of the discounts available to us on optus home phone and internet if we were to have all services with them.  I told Optus-guy that the Optus internet plans were not good enough as they didn’t compete with the services from my current ISP Westnet.  The churn hasn’t compeltely gone through yet so I can still say my current ISP, can’t I?

This wasn’t enough for Optus-guy.  He asked me what those services were so I rattled off basically everything that had helped my decision to join Westnet, coincidentally the same features that they have just removed from their plans.  When he asked me to name the ISP I hesitated slightly before responding.  I figure if they use the information to check into the competitors plans that I would be sending them bad information by sending them to Westnet now that the plans have been made less attractive with the recent changes.  Luckily I did a bit of research before making the jump to Internode.  Netspace still have similar plans to the old Westnet ones so I pushed Optus-guy that way.

So I lied.  It was only a little white lie.  I would have gone to Netspace if I had any belief that the plans would have stayed as they currently are.  I doubt it will be long before Netspace change their plans as well.

Recent changes for Westnet’s ADSL plans have proven too much for many to accept. Such massive changes with such little return to the customer happening all at once was just too much for me. I completed my churn application with Internode this morning and finished migrating all the websites and email that we used to host at home last week.

A few days from now I should be a happy ‘Node customer. :)

Pretty much most people have heard of the **AA tactics against file sharers, but this time the RIAA appears to have gotten it so horribly wrong it’s just funny.

According to this article they have filed suit against a family that don’t even own a computer. How many more of these bogus extortion attempts will it take for the US legislators to sit up and take notice of the shit that these organisations are getting away with?

I’m migrating a database from a postgres 7.4 server to a 8.1 server and hit a small issue with the import of the dumpfile. I’m in the middle of testing the migration at the moment and the complaint coming back from the import was about invalid UTF-8 characters in the input file. A quick google and the first link was to a page on the PostgreSQL site with the following snippet:

Some users are having problems loading UTF-8 data into 8.1.X. This is because previous versions allowed invalid UTF-8 byte sequences to be entered into the database, and this release properly accepts only valid UTF-8 sequences. One way to correct a dumpfile is to run the command iconv -c -f UTF-8 -t UTF-8 -o cleanfile.sql dumpfile.sql. The -c option removes invalid character sequences. A diff of the two files will show the sequences that are invalid. iconv reads the entire input file into memory so it might be necessary to use split to break up the dump into multiple smaller files for processing.

It works :) I had no doubt, but it is good to know that it has solved this problem.

Now my only problem is to work out why there are invalid characters in the database in the first place.  But that can wait for another day.  I’m off to bed!

Taking a quick break from what I was doing I decided to have a look at Reddit to see if there was anything new and interesting to read. Currently occupying the 2nd and 3rd positions on the Reddit front page are two different links to 2 different accounts of the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma and his threats of reporting CentOS to the FBI for hacking.

Link #2 goes to the Register’s story on the whole incident (thats where i got the link to Mr Taylor)
Link #3 goes to the account as posted (including full emails) on the CentOS Site

I won’t go into detail, as there is too much to fully duplicate here. But to sumarise, if with “22 years in computer systems engineering and operation” you can’t comprehend plain language telling you that it is a problem with your webserver and you need to contact the Administrator or that server, then you’ve really got some problems. If instead you retaliate with what amounts to “stop hacking us or I’ll call the FBI” you make yourself look ignorant, incompetant and exceptionally stupid all at the same time.

I had to share as I found it too damn funny reading it.