Just a quick post on some recent work I’ve been doing. Those interested in fashion may have noticed that the past few weeks has seen the various Fashion Weeks being held in New York, London and latterly Milan (and with Paris rounding out the season starting tomorrow).

As part of the coverage, Elle UK launched a special Fashion Week microsite.

I developed the site, along with Jon Ramster and Jason Newington. The underlying data structure contains support for an effectively unlimited number of designers, fashion shows and images (OK, so the directory structure for the image server only supports 8,000,000 images…), and also allows almost any node to be ‘bookmarked’ by a user, all within the application. The site also has a comprehensive CMS behind it all, including FTP-based file upload (fashion shows generate a lot of images), which allows the Elle editors to update the site whenever they want, whilst also pulling in the latest available images from the latest shows.

So check out the Elle UK Fashion Week microsite and let me know what you think!

Update! In January 2008 I went back to Elle for a week to work on updating the site’s code for the new season of fashion shows. New design, new featrues, but the same underlying data structure as the previous incarnation, so all previous content is available in the new design.

It’s probably fairly common knowledge that I’m something of a Tokyo Jihen fan, to the point where I pre-order new singles and albums when they’re announced (which has led me to having two copies of 娯楽 as I mistakenly pre-ordered it twice).

However, the big news is that the album is also available to buy from iTunes UK for the bargain price of £8.99 - something I am considering doing even though I already have a couple of copies, if only to convice the powers that be to release more 東京事変 and 椎名林檎’s back catalogue through iTunes UK.

Cross posted from The Mobile Weblog.

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I've deliberately avoided posting about this subject the past few days, although I've been following it since it first appeared on The Consumerist website last week. I've also been encouraged to write about the post by a number of other bloggers.

I've vacillated between two schools of thought about this topic, but the one I keep coming back to relates to the underlying principles of capitalism, where Sprint are well within their rights to terminate any customer for pretty much any reason - they are, after all not in the business of providing communication service, but the business of making money for their shareholders. They just happen to be making money by providing communication services.

It can also be argued that the actions Sprint are taking in churning these customers off their books is beneficial to the company's bottom line, as it reduces the number of support calls, and hence the amount of money spent on providing such support. It also has a minor side effect of decreasing the number of accounts with billing problems (which are the primary cited reason for the high number of calls), which should have the impact of increasing revenues again.

Of course, weighed against this is the negative impact that all the exposure has generated across the Internet, and amongst mobile bloggers especially where the response has been almost universally negative. Ars Technica even popped up with their own experience.

Again, I can't help but think there is no real big issue here, there's simply a dispute between customers and the company they are purchasing a service from. Individual instances where customers are being mischarged, overcharged or generally billed for goods or services they didn't use aside, if Sprint choose to terminate a customer's service at no penalty to the customer, then that's their prerogative.

Sprint have however managed to shoot themselves in the foot by instigating another such customer purge, this time adversely affecting a group of US servicemen and women, by penalising them for using Sprint's own roaming service.

A few days after the original story appeared, another appear on The Consumerist with what appeared to be a rebuttal from Sprint, although delivered as if from a Sprint employee reporting anonymously, that claimed that the majority of the people who's accounts were being terminated were actually attempting to defraud Sprint. Consumerist reader ScoobyDoo was one of many who was less than trusting of the veracity of the account:

I call shenanigans.

This guy is probably speaking on behalf of Sprint PR and is trying to slow down the backlash they got from their little stunt.

They probably thought they could fire these 1000 customers without anyone noticing, but forgot about the Internet.

The story he's telling may apply to a couple of customers, but the previous poster proves that not everyone was a scammer, and Sprint should be ashamed of itself for trying to pin the blame on their customers when it is evident that THEY are also to blame in some cases.

Although balanced against this, other posters such as BNET41 say:

If you've ever worked as a CSR you'd know how common this is. There seem to be people out there who have nothing better to do than try to get free stuff.

In all of this, the one party that has yet to make a public announcement is Sprint itself, or at least not anywhere I've seen.

What I do think this situation shows is not that Sprint are necessarily a bad company (although there will always be debate about this), it seems to show there is a fundamental disconnect in the US mobile telecommunications industry, something that is also shown in the recent release of Apple's iPhone as an AT&T exclusive. With each company working hard to generate as much income for their shareholders as possible, the US-wide communications infrastructure is suffering, and consequently customers are having a hard time making use of such services. The original poster on the SprintUsers forum makes the point that whilst serving in Iraq - effectively a warzone - he received a better standard of service and operational coverage, at a lesser price, than he receives from the US telecommunications provider Sprint.

Why on earth I cant get coverage at the United States Military Academy, 40 minutes away from New York City is a mystery to me. I had a cell phone the entire time I was in Iraq with a middle eastern company. I payed LESS to call home and keep in touch from the otherside of the world than I do now with Sprint to call within the country. It also did not matter if I was in a major city or out in the middle of nowhere in the desert, I ALWAYS had full coverage. Never had a dropped call, and the customer reps of that company spoke better English than those with Sprint do.

It is this small section of the post that caught my attention and got me thinking - how can it be that in such a technologically advanced country, obtaining cellphone coverage, roaming and interconnects between existing providers is such a problem?

I remember myself when I used to employ people living in the US I always had to check in advance where in the country they would be to make sure that I could call them. In some cases, depending on location, I couldn't call as their carrier didn't provide international inbound call connectivity in certain regions. In some, especially to me, ludicrous instances I couldn't even send a text message, as there was no text sharing interconnect between carriers for roaming users, a situation that appears to still exist.

More than 30 million viewers tune in to 'America Idol' each week to vote for their favorite contestants by dialing into the toll-free telephone numbers or texting in on their Cingular Wireless phones.

To expand on that small quote - you can only vote for American Idol is you have a Cingular mobile phone. If you're on any other network, you cannot send in a voting text.

The equivalent situation in the UK would have the text voting provider laughed out of business, yet this seems to be the norm in the US.

Apple going with AT&T for the iPhone has also struck many people as odd, for the same reason: AT&T use a proprietary technology to deliver mobile services that is entirely incompatible with every other provider. Sprint phones are also incompatible with other providers, so those who are using Sprint are also locked in to that carrier if they want to continue using the handsets they have bought - and perhaps that is the real reason for the angst, not that the service is bad (which it apparently is), or that the company is doing what it is legally obliged to do (make money for it's shareholders), it's the fact there's no other choice that is driving the anger.

So I really think the larger issue here is not Sprint, but the parlous state of the mobile telecoms industry in the US. Common shortcodes (5 or 6 digit codes that work on all carriers) are a new phenomenon in the US (only being introduced in the past couple of years), and number portability is still a large issue. Coverage varies depending on your provider, and some areas you are limited in which provider you can even choose. Sprint dumping users is just a symptom of a much wider malaise.

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Technorati Tags: Sprint, Mobile, Customer Service, America, AT&T, Cell, Cellphone

In conversation today, I was asked what the first computer I ever used was - so I dug up a link:

Ohio Scientific Challenger 4P (Scroll down to the one at the bottom)

Well, this was certainly unexpected! It seems that the Mobile Weblog (which is the blog I write for on occasion) has been named in The Times’ list of 50 Best Business Blogs!

Internet blogs are taking on big corporations and winning. As the bloggerati continue to set the agenda Times Online provides the first full list of the 50 top blogs, corporate and anti-corporate alike.

Guess I’ll have to post some more now!

I’ve noticed an increase in comment spam in the past few weeks - not much, but a bit. Of course, since I have moderation turned on, the chances of a piece of comment spam actually making it through is zero. Which doesn’t bother me, as every piece of spam that someone attempts to post here is a failed spam attempt and a waste of their time, which effectively means less spam posted elsewhere. And since none of the links ever make it to a live state, there’s absolutely no benefit to be gained from continued attempts to post comment spam as it’s the same as dumping links into /dev/null.

I’m opening up one of my services to anyone who wants to get involved on a limited beta basis. To participate, drop me an email and I’ll give you a link to the signup page. I will be after feedback from anyone who participates.

So, a brief description:

Followup is a social bookmarking service without the social aspect. It is a web-based service that lets you bookmark a page you are looking at so you can come back to it later - and, in a nutshell, that’s all it is.

It was born out of a desire to keep a track of interesting pages to come back and read later, alongside using several different machines and operating systems, making it impossible to use the browser’s standard bookmark feature. Since most other bookmarking services are all about tagging and sharing, another thing that just seemed to waste time, Followup was designed to work in a very simple way: Bookmark the current site, then go back - no tagging, no descriptions, no sharing at the point of bookmarking. This is achieved through the use of a bookmark button that can be dragged to your browser’s toolbar - or all yourbrowser’s toolbars, on whichever machine or OS you’re running. Since the bookmarking is based on your logged-in state alone, as long as you’re logged in (or have logged in using that browser, under that OS, on that machine), any new bookmarks will be added to your list.

Followup does have a more social side, with automated links built in that allow users to submit their saved links to a range of popular social bookmarking/listing/linking sites, but this is a secondary service, and certainly isn’t the primary focus. If you want to share your links, or look at the pages you’ve bookmarked, go to the Followup site. All your links will be listed, along with various things you can do, including the all-important delete function.

So, if you’re interested, drop me an email.

The more I use Windows Vista, the more I hate it. The latest bugbear for me using Vista has to do with the way files and folders are viewed. I am yet to find out how I can tell Vista to stop being ‘helpful’ by ‘identifying’ the type of folder by the content, and just please remember that I have manually set what information columns I want, and to please use them from now on for all folders? Including the ones I manually reset and you overwrote?

This is really starting to become incredibly annoying, and far from being helpful is actually making it harder for me to work with the OS, as I have to spend time resetting the view every time I set down to work with some files, as well as resetting the columns.

The single most useful piece of information I find in the file column view is ‘last modified’, and the least use are ‘tags’, ‘rating’ and ‘date taken’ - yet for some reason Vista insists that it knows what I want, and resets all folder views to show ‘tags’, ‘rating’ and ‘date taken’, and removes ‘date modified’.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that Vista likes to decide when I’ve finished using Windows Explorer by helpfully closing it, without warning. Here’s something you can try for yourself, and this is a change in behaviour from Windows XP:

Put a DVD or CD in your DVD drive. Open Windows Explorer. Select the DVD/CD from the left-hand column so you can see a list of files on the DVD/CD. Now press the Eject button on the front of the DVD/CD drive, and watch Vista close Windows Explorer. You were finished with that program, weren’t you? (For the record, Windows XP would automatically select the next available device/folder further down the tree, rather than closing the program).

There’s been a lot of talk in the past day or so about Dell finally listing a desktop computer system for sale without Windows XP or Windows Vista, shipping with the option of Ubuntu instead. The pricepoints are interesting as well, with the Ubuntu-installed machines coming in at a lower price than their Windows installed equivalents.

Given that the Dimension E520 desktop starts at around £249, I figured I’d see what the Ubuntu price was - but it seems that the much-vaunted “Dell Sells Ubuntu-based Desktops” only applies in the US, as there’s no mention anywhere on the European Dell website of any models that feature Ubuntu as a choice of OS.

Technorati Tags: Ubuntu, Dell, US Only

Well, it’s all configured and working now, with a little fiddling, a lot of reading and the kind help of the Ubuntu community. Here’s what I had to do to make my Compaq laptop work, both with video and with wireless networking.

Video
The first sticking point. To make this work, you need to add the directive

vga=792

to the end of the boot command. When you first boot the live CD, press F6 and add that command at the end of the line. This will let you boot into the graphical shell.

You will need to do this later to the grub bootloader menu in /boot/grub/menu.lst - simply add the directive to the end of the kernel boot command. That’s it, it all worked from there. Some minor issues with the NVIDIA drivers, desktop effects and Beryl, so I’m using none of those. I’m going to try the newly released NVIDIA drivers over the weekend.

Wireless
The second sticking point, and something that was giving me nightmares for ages. I got wireless working on the Broadcom 4311 that’s built in to the point where it would see other people’s access points, but not mine.

In the end, it was a post by Pichulines on the Ubuntu forums that solved my problem. He suggested following the Broadcom BCM4311 rev 01 (ndiswrapper) installation guide. So, I followed this very carefully, except that I used the latest 1.43 ndiswrapper instead of the 1.35 version documented in the guide.

After the reboot stage, everything worked perfectly. I could see and connect to my wireless access point using WPA and I could roam wirelessly.

Moving Along
Now all that’s left to do is to finish fiddling with the setup. I need to look at various things like reconfiguring the window manager (I’m using the default Gnome, but I may switch to KDE or Enlightenment), and I need to get little things in place like proper Beryl support (I love the multiple desktops on a cube - incredibly useful when you don’t have multiple monitors), and I would really like a Mac-like toolbar, something I got used to on my work PC, although it’s not critical.

Hopefully this will help those who have been having the same problems.