I recently obtained a copy of a Java IDE that calls itself “J Creator Pro”. Considering that Java has native Unicode support, I was amazed to find that J Creator Pro does not.

It only supports a handful of character sets, such as ASCII, ISO8859-1, ISO8859-2 and a few Mac encodings. Obviously the developers of the product are unaware that there is any non-Latin character set. Since my existing source includes some Japanese, the IDE was completely unable to recognise the characters from UTF-8 files.

This hurdle stopped any possible testing, and has create an impression that the product should be called “JCreator very amateur“.

I was called today by somebody who gave their web address as w*w.resortvacationsvip.com which is a travel company with no links to enabling booking. I wonder how they could get any legitimate business.
They claimed I was being offered a free holiday from a competition that I or a member of my household had entered.

They couldn’t tell me which competition I had won, but did tell me it was only open to Visa card and Mastercard holder. - I pointed out that this would apply to over 98% of the adult UK population.

They had my correct name and address.

The scammer had a heavy, possibly Indian or Chinese accent.

When I confirmed that I did own appropriate credit cards, they tried to extract my credit card details - when I refused on the basis that this was probably a scam, they kept trying to get my credit card number out of me, assuring me that it was OK - apparently they’re FCCA registered, and because of that the details couldn’t be misused. - I countered that in fact, as my cards are issued on the UK and therefore FSA regulated and that f I was stupid enough to give it to cold callers, they could attempt to misuse it with a card not present transaction.
When I kept asking why they needed the credit card details, at first I was told that it was so that they could verify that I was a credit card holder. I pointed out that they called me so I was the person that needed to verify their credentials. Then he switched tack, and said that the would need my credit card details for a registration fee of around £250. I questioned this, pointing out that I had been offered a completely free holiday competition prize. He said “Nothing is free“.

They gave me a “Toll-free” number that I could call them back on. I pointed out that a phone number in the USA is not toll-free when called from the UK - It is an international call.

When I asked for their FCCA registration number, the caller evaded answering.
I kept leading him on for a while, to keep him from trying to scam others, and to research his web site and comments about the scam company. One particularly enlightening one was on 800notes.com

I asked him if he had heard of Perfect Travel Promotions Orlando - Which appears as the title on w*w.resortvacationsvip.com and has an identical web site at w*w.ptporlando.com. He claimed he hadn’t heard of PTP Orlando. They have the same phone number (1-877-727-7605) and email addresses of CustomerService@PTPorlando.com and sales@PTPorlando.com

When I kept asking him the name of the company he was working for he refused to give it then finally hung up.

In short, it had to be scam. What legitimate company employee would not know their own company’s name?

If you have similar experiences, or wish to comment on this, please do so.

Having seen that Sony Ericsson have updated their PC-Suite for communicating with Sony-Ericsson mobile phones, such as my S500i, I looked in vain for an update option on the software. I feel that failing to implement direct updates is a poor practice from a company that claims to be in the forefront of technology.

Since there was none I had to go direct to the Sony Ericsson web site to download the newest update of the suite.

The instructions warn that you should (manually) unsinstall the older version of their PC-Suite. What they don’t tell you is that the uninstallation takes around 20 minutes on a 2.4 GHz Quad core PC running Windows Vista.

Then, it requires a reboot….

Installing version 3 of the PC-Suite seems interminable as it sits on a screen explaining that the drivers are being installed. It actually took around 35 minutes to install, and this time was capable of installation with Firefox as the default web browser.

Version 3 of Sony Ericsson’s PC-Suite does seem somewhat better than version 2.
It allows direct editing of the phone contents, such as the address book. It also recognises the Windows Vista Contacts and Windows Calender as legitimate sources of data for synchronisation. It does not however realise that bookmarks could be synchronised from Mozilla Firefox.

it is a definite improvement on version 2, as long as you have a spare hour or so for the installation process.

A customer of mine recently received the following spam…

Amazingly, considering that they promise worldwide search engine optimization, Dr. Marc Schneider and his company Global Vibration Inc., can only be found as being mentioned on sites relating to spamming.

I am Dr. Marc Schneider and I work for Global Vibration Inc. in Washington DC ( Tel: 1 202-787-3989 ) - I would like to speak with the person in charge of your international clientele. Who is my contact? Who should I speak to??

In fact, after visiting http://www.myclients.web.site.co.uk, I have noticed that your website cannot be found on foreign search engines (I tested it on Hispanic search engines, German search engines, Asian search engines, etc.) Our company is specialized in multilingual search engine promotions in 28 languages . From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, we can show you how to develop a true international online presence by promoting your website on foreign search engines.

Let us show you how to develop a presence on the multilingual web without having to translate your website: It is not necessary to translate your website in order to submit to foreign search engines, however, you need to have at least 1 page in Japanese optimized with Japanese keywords and meta tags in order to submit to Japanese search engines, at least 1 page in Spanish optimized with Spanish keywords in order to submit to Hispanic search engines and so on…

I strongly suggest that you watch our online presentation which will explains clearly how to get top rankings on foreign search engines with only 1 entry page per language (click on the following link or copy-paste it into your web browser): http://www.mplw.net/demo

From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, get users to find your website when searching with YOUR KEYWORDS in their Native language.

Please call me at 1 (202)-787-3989 or email me and let’s work on giving your website the true international exposure which it deserves to have with foreign native online users!!

Regards,

Marc Schneider, Ph.D.
Marcs@mplw.net
_____________________

GLOBAL VIBRATION INC.
1250 Connecticut Ave N.W. Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036 USA
TEL:1 (202)-787-3989 - FAX: 1 (202)-318-4779
http://www.mplw.net :
Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services since 1999.

They don’t seem to have a presence at all on Japanese google.

They claim to have been doing Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services (SEO) since 1999, but a whois query of their domain mplw.net shows a creation date of 04 Aug 2007 16:13:29

Many other companies are receiving the same spam for example, see http://www.tmcowners.com

For such a multi-nationally aware company, sending spam to the UK, Global Vibration Inc. haven’t even been capable of putting their own phone number in the standard international format, presumably because they are not aware that anyone outside the USA has to dial in international number to reach them.

Associated with their domains are the following administrative email addresses

• urls@mseo.com
• mauispirit@gmail.com

It was wonderful to see that Microsoft have finally realized that the lack of standards compliance in their web browser is actually holding back the internet. Regrettably, they still seem to have a long way to go.

In the Microsoft Developer Network Blog Chris Wilson, an IE Platform Architect, writes that IE 8 will have an extra mode where it actually complies with the World Wide Web Consortium standards.

Unfortunately, the IE8 team have decided that the best way to comply with web standards is for all authors to add their own non-standard meta tag to indicate that the content is compliant, otherwise they intend the product to render content in their own irregular way.

Full marks to Microsoft for finally realizing that standards are essential, but probably the solution to backward compatibility deserves a D-.

A better solution would have been to render pages that are served to IE8 in the new “super standards” mode, and to render broken, or IE5, IE6, or IE7 specific pages in a compatibility mode, whilst displaying a message warning users that the page is flawed. This would encourage web developers to comply with web standards and would reduce the risks from malware that relies on quirks in rendering of malformed HTML.

I learnt from my previous PC that apart from some software incompatibilities, Windows Vista does not support the majority of powered USB Hubs.

Fortunately for me, the Dell Inspiron that I have ordered has 8 USB ports, which means I probably won’t need a USB hub for all my devices.

I would hope that Microsoft could see its way to creating a patch for Vista which will allow all the XP compatible Powered USB hubs to work.

Apparently most unpowered USB 2.0 hubs do appear to work on Windows Vista, but that means it is essential to pick and choose which devices are connected through such a USB hub. Device that are self powered, such as printers and UPS’s will be fine, as will other very low power USB devices, but items that charge from a USB port, such as mobile phones and MP3 players, need to be connected directly to the PC.

With my new PC only just a month old, there has been a catastrophic failure of the hard disk drive. Windows Vista initially reported issues with the USN journal on my data partition.
Vista suggested formatting the drive.
Instead, I managed to get it back temporarily using a chkdsk /R and backed up the data.
With the data safe, I allowed it to attempt to reformat the data partition - it failed claiming that there were errors.
I tried a full system recovery, first from the recovery partition and then from the recovery DVDs I’d created when I received the machine.
The computer refuses to recognise the hard drive completely now, and has been returned.
John Lewis, who sold me the computer have refunded the money, as they were unable to replace it.

I have just spent several hours trying to install my academic version of JBuilder 2005 on my new Quad core Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo P PC, which came with Microsoft Windows Vista Premium pre-installed.

I have a legitimate license for JBuilder 2005 and no desire to purchase the most recent version of JBuilder

Somewhere during the installation process on Windows Vista, Borland’s JBuidler 2005 installer just hangs. I used Google to search for instructions or assistance with this problem, but found nothing. Even trying to get the executable installer to run in compatibility modes for older versions of windows failed - suggesting a failure in the design of Vista or implementation of its compatibility modes, even a year after its release.

Finally, I tried copying the complete hierarchy of my old installation of JBuilder from my old XP based computer to my new Vista based one. once I had done this I found the JBuilderW.exe file in the \Borland\JBuilder2005\bin\JBuilderw.exe and double clicked it to start.

JBuilder 2005 started quickly and asked for the Serial number and Authorisation key. Once those were provided, I was able to register my copy of JBuilder 2005 and it appear to be running beautifully on Windows Vista.

If this has been of help to you, then please let me know. If there are any corrections or additions that need to be made, please comment.

Onetel, which is now owned by Carphone Warehouse’s Talk Talk seems to have been having technical problems with their web site. Specifically, the secure log-in for customers.

Onetel spent a lot of time and energy persuading customers to use their online services, instead of paper based systems. At present, log-in is either very slow, or generates a fault page.

If a user successfully logs-in then secure responses are very very slow. Moreover, attempts to view bills online generates an http error 500 - indicating an internal server error.

To add to the exasperation for Onetel customers wishing to complain about the inability to log in, are directed to “log in and use [their] account” to send the complaint.

Even if you do manage to log on, the cripplingly slow responses take several minutes to get through all the pages that are needed before getting to their contact page (which incidentally doesn’t contain a specific option for complaining about inability access user account). Unfortunately even an attempt to use the email contact option from within “My account” has failed, presumably because the pages time out.

If companies like Onetel / TalkTalk want their users to use online services in preference to paper based ones, then they need to look at the quality and reliability of these online services.

whilst cleaning up my hard drive, I found one reason that the Sony Ericsson PC Suite may have had for failing to install and to run slowly.

It created a 1.5 GB plain text log file in the temp directory. That volume of data must have taken a lot of resources by itself. It’s not surprising that the poorly built software could not install.

In S500i I discussed the difficulties of installing the supporting software for my new Sony Ericsson S500i Mobile phone.
I’ve also been having a SIM related problem, where the phone seemed to periodically lose contact with its SIM and gives an “Insert SIM” message or saying that it was an “Invalid SIM”.
I phoned Christopher Duffy, of Carphone Warehouse in Knutsford, where I had purchased the handset, in order to complain about the “Insert SIM” message. He was kind enough to explain that he had come across this problem before, but there is a solution.
You need to push the SIM right in with a pen until it clicks and locks in place, almost like inserting a memory card. - A little detail that they omitted from the (very superficial) S500 manual! In the manual, it gives the impression that the battery holds the SIM in place. This is not the case!
In order to extract the SIM, it needs to be pushed in again, at which time it pops out.
I wish Sony Ericsson would improve their support and documentation standards to match Nokia’s.
Since “clicking in” the SIM, I have not had the dreaded “invalid SIM” message.

I recently bought a Sony Ericsson S500i Mobile telephone. Since I was keen to synchronize my address book with the telephone, I tried to install the Sony Ericsson PC-Suite.
It would get about three quarters of the way through the installation and then just hang. I even left it for a couple of hours, in case there was something going on that was very slow. There wasn’t.
After several attempts at installation and several system restores of my Windows XP PC, I was getting somewhat frustrated.
Eventually I found the solution. The readme file for the PC-Suite states that Internet Explorer must be installed. This is actually an understatement. It requires Internet Explorer to be set as the default browser, certainly during installation.
It amazes me that:

1. the combination of Sony and Ericsson are incapable of writing standalone software that does note require Internet Explorer for installation
2. The software that they write is sufficiently untested that it just hangs
3. The PC-Suite installation fails to report a requirement or its own error