My website has raised its anchor and set sail into the internet oceans without me Account suspended. Er, wot? [F5, spin spin] … Account suspended. Nonononono this can’t be happening, not today. [Ctrl+Shift+R, spin spinny-winny spin spin] … Account suspended. What the heck? I am trying to post an update to my website. One of my websites, that is. For reasons lost in the mysteries of time and space, several …
Thanks for the good wishes. Sorry I wasn't in here yesterday but if you read 'Wimps' you'll be aware that I have been trying out 5G on a new handset. Today I am cancelling the 5G contract and reverting to 4G - which is what the phone kept doing anyway. The 5G-capable phone is going back too.
Cheer up, 5G isn't really a complete, ratified standard as yet. All it is in the RealWorld is a Marketing term designed to separate fools from their money. Here's some fairly recent blurb on the subject.
I have working 5G. I suspect that this is because my SIM is only a 4G one and the fact that the phone often reports a 5G connection is a software glitch somewhere.
However this does mean that I can show people it's on 5G and it'll talk to stuff without falling over which, seeing what's written above, makes me think I may be better off than I would be with "real" 5G.
Merry Christmas Alistair. =-)
... Apple keeps changing the brand domain for the email address it assigns you. Do I use the dot-me, dot-icloud or dot-mac address? Are they different? Are they the same? Are they aliases for something else ...
Well ...
That's what you get for buying that stuff.
O.
Please do tell me what a good fucking alternative is? The Windows Phone was one, but that was Nadella-rized.
I have had enough Android phones to realise that OS was a terrible piece of shit, and the upgrade support was next to nothing. Fuck expandable memory, "No Storage space left". What the fuck are you onabout...there's 32gb left on the memory card. Oh I see, bloated ROM with just a few of my installed apps allowing me to move it to external memory. Sure that was like 10 years ago and I was a cheap bastard being a student, but I'm not gonna waste my money on the unknown devil.
My iPhone 8 plus is on its third year, with only recently experiencing some hardware issues, but that would likely be down to my daughter. Yes, I've had some issues but it mostly just works. I'm not interested in changing phones every couple of years so I'd much rather my phone last for 4+ years.
Please do tell me what a good fucking alternative is?
That depends on your location, your budget, your sexual preferences and your stance on social distancing
Or if you mean alternative phone OSes: I and several people I know use Sailfish, though the choice in handsets is rather limited; a couple of others use Ubuntu Touch.
Both have the advantage of being a smartphone while you can honestly state that it won't run crap-app-du-jour.
But it is not a phone it is a very powerful small portable computer that can also make phone calls.
Most users will not need to have more memory, just like most users do not need to increase the disc space of their PC. But some do need extra storage for data. My phone has a 128 GB micro SD card and all my data and downloads are saved to it, only apps are saved to the built in memory. My card stores videos, all my Spotify music, my music, documents, word and pdfs etc.
The reason I have so much data is that the data is then easily accessible, does not require a connection and does not not use up my data allowance when I do have a good fast connection.
I’ve recently upgraded the memory and hard drive in my laptop. I bought it knowing that somewhere down the line I may need to do that, and ensured it didn’t have soldered in components. I bought an iPhone knowing that it wasn’t possible. I don’t get people moaning about functionality that doesn’t exist. If a device doesn’t have something that you need, don’t buy it, buy something that does meet your needs.
But it is not a phone it is a very powerful small portable computer that can also make phone calls.
A colleague of mine at the time of the first iPhone bought one as soon as he could. He proudly showed it off in the office and explained what it could do etc. Anyway day two and he's also seen sporting a Nokia taking calls on that etc. The reason he explains is that the iPhone isn't really a phone.......It's a touchscreen pocket computer and modem with phone functionality tacked on seemingly as an after thought. He was therefore paying for two contracts but he was a flash git and said he didn't care.
I understand your colleague's reasoning. I never owned a mobile phone never needed one or wanted to be always available. I would only have got a mobile if it was a pocket computer with a phone. I used to have a Handspring. So when the first Iphone came out I bought it, my very first mobile phone.
My card stores videos, all my Spotify music, my music, documents, word and pdfs etc.
The reason I have so much data is that the data is then easily accessible, does not require a connection and does not not use up my data allowance when I do have a good fast connection.
Not only that. When the phone dies, you don't lose all your data.
The expansion storage issue in Android is a pile of poo, that has been hacked around horribly and unsatisfactorally throughout versions.
However, you can't rant about that as a disadvantage of Android when compared to the iPhone, which "solves" the problem by not having expanding storage at all.
And for the same price, the default storage, power, display on an Android device far exceeds that of the iphone - both now and in your frankly laughable historical knowledge from 10 years ago.
By the way, if you do get a cheap Android with little upgrade support, it will cost at least 5 times less then your iPhone. So even 2 years use is much better then the pants 4 years of your ungradable iphone
Maybe, just maybe, (stick with me here, I know this is a big concept) not everyone has the same requirements from their mobile devices as you do? I'm with the Monstr, I don't give a shit about expandable this or upgradable that. Not one. Not even a rosebud. Not even a hard fart in fact. I don't keep anything on my phone, so the smallest storage SKU is just fine thank you. I always use an external battery case, so a user replaceable built-in battery also isn't a big deal. I just want a device with reasonable build quality that I don't need to replace every two years just to keep inside of manufacturer support. It would be nice if the OS wasn't written and maintained by one of the least pleasant corporations ever to have existed too, but I realise that's a stretch these days since they're all bastards. The suggestions of sailfish and ubuntu devices above were nice, but since nobody really uses them there's no ecosystem. I don't want flavour-of-the-microsecond app XYZ, but I do need my banking to work.
Nobody is saying that you should, I'm just a little frustrated that every time I complain about something I dislike on Apple devices someone seems to come along and burble about upgradable this and replaceable that on Android devices like it's the cat's pyjamas without actually taking into account what my actual issue was. My original post was written with no small degree of frustration, which has mostly boiled away now. I hadn't really intended it as a personal attack.
My aging mum called me a couple of years ago in a right panic. Somebody had cloned her card and was spending her money every month. When I eventually got a word in I asked where these payments were going. She said to Apple and I relaxed a bit knowing what it was.She confirmed it was a small amount and I gave her the explanation. It was the payment for her iCloud storage for her photographs etc. I told her not to cancel the card or that service if she wanted to keep access to all the files.
Then during the first lockdown she complained that there wasn't enough storage on her newish iPhone. It cost the best part of a grand if bought Sim Free. She had to inform her insurers she had one and even then it had some hideous excess before they'd even think about paying out. She'd seen my phone when I'd put in a new SD card and doubled the memory. "Why can't mine do that?"
A company's website was all working but they couldn't get hold of the company who created it for them. Turns out the had gone bankrupt and been liquidated, but as they'd paid for their hosting for several years in advance it was still running all their clients sites for some time. The biggest problem was the domains where ownership had passed to the official receivers hands even though the client was renewing them, but they decided to let them expire and just buy them back, (before every possible domain expiring was jumped on by squatters)
"... His only wish is that the website in question had not contained quite so much information about novelty dildos. ..."
Sadly it is always thus, Alistair.
Your well researched and beautifully worded essay disappears into the ether without leaving even the trace of a backup. Conversely that filler piece you hacked together after an extensive pub visit, will roam the networks forever.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.
This post has been deleted by its author
Your well researched and beautifully worded essay disappears into the ether without leaving even the trace of a backup.
As long as the website is up and running one should invoke the appropriate capabilities of wget or curl, apply any content and framework updates, preview the result on a local server and then realise that the best update would be to torch the lot and forget all about it.
Leaving the previous, woefully outdated site to drift around like digital flotsam. Which it would do anyway as long as its server stays up with no one at the tiller.
...with UKFSN, which was a genuine one man band. He did quite a good job until he got bored and stopped bothering with the site. My only niggle was that the website just faded out rather than its owner sending us all a "Right, thats it: you've got a month to download your stuff and find another webhost" message, which would have been preferable - at least to me.
However, I didn't loose any web content because, being paranoid about backups and such, all my website content has always been developed and maintained on my house server, which is backed up onto a set of disks which are kept offline in a firesafe. New content is published by FTPing it to my external webhost, which became Zen when UKFSN folded. As a result I always have two copies of my current web content plus at least one up offline backup copy.
Oh yeah, I own the domain names I use. These are hosted by a third party as e-mail and website redirects, so switching webhost and/or ISP is simple: I just change the URLs my domain names redirect to and move my website content to the new webhost. Making this switch is so simple that I don't understand why everybody else who owns a website and/or uses email doesn't do the same.
Everybody rents domains from Joe public to multi nationals all can lose access but it is easier for big business to get them back.
But why would you lose access the cost of say a .com domain is £10 to £15 a year not much and you can set up automatic payment.
I have my own domain and I don't even have a web site, I just use it for my personal email address.
There must be a special place out there in the ether that is full of dead, dying or zombie websites. Their words and content fading but struggling to be accessed by anybody just to maintain a semblance of existence.
A bit like me really! After crimble lunch and a couple of buckets of home made wine, a load of truly ancient Spanish films on the telly and the missus snoring or chatting to her family in Russia.
Re Autosave is for wimps; double entendre T shirts or mugs might pay, I would certainly consider the right bit of doublation.
There must be a special place out there in the ether that is full of dead, dying or zombie websites.
The Wayback Machine?
"The Wayback Machine?"
Erratic in coverage. All too often you find that only part of the site was archived. I just tried one old site which lapsed some time ago. A friend offered to take it over from the guy who didn't want to - or maybe couldn't - maintain it but the offer was declined. The domain is in the hands of a reseller and although the Wayback machine tells me unarchived pages are still available on the web they now resolve to the reseller's advert.
Of course it's not. It's a basic bot that only collects pages in a certain order if it can find accesses to them, sometimes forgetting something or following a zombie link and filling the database with garbage. But you find me anyone else who does anything remotely as good. Google might have it, but I can't exactly use it for my purposes. Similarly, I have some pretty intensive crawls of a couple sites which were important to something I was doing at some point, covering about 0.0000003% of the internet (only static files). Only the Internet Archive really has anything like it available to the public and offering general coverage.
"Only the Internet Archive ..."
For UK sites there's also the British Library web archive:
https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/uk-web-archive
Interesting item about their crawler:
https://blogs.bl.uk/webarchive/2020/11/2020-domain-crawl-update.html?_ga=2.60234021.987800561.1609261574-1304307177.1609261574
Information about international archiving efforts:
https://netpreserve.org/
"Their words and content fading but struggling to be accessed by anybody just to maintain a semblance of existence."
Serendipity - the theme of the Pixar "Coco" film on the BBC iPlayer at the moment. Once a dead person is no longer remembered by the living then they fade away in the Dia de Muertos afterworld. How does one grow marigolds in the UK for cropping at the end of October?
I managed a motorcycle web site for years before the hosting company (Fasthosts) got around to telling me they'd closed the server down as it was running NT4 in a corner and they'd forgotten to see if anyone was actually using it. Which was very nice of them. They gave me an 'opportunity' to move to a much more expensive solution. I decided not to accept that (funny that).
Alan
Right up there with the LinkedIn “transversality thinking and multi-agility preprocessing abilities”.
All of which works great until you ask the applicant, “kindly explain how you would apply your multi-agility preprocessing abilities to a scenario such as this”.
transversality thinking -> coming up with random stuff that has no relation to the actual problem.
multi-agility preprocessing abilities -> stringing together several buzzwordy 'solutions' to then be implemented by someone else.
I used to HATE interviews for just this reason.
You're sitting in front of a bunch of people who are trying their hardest to trip you up, and they start asking these dumb personal questions that don't actually have a definitive answer, but which force you to describe yourself. A bit like that interview episode on The Apprentice.
I can recall several Teamworking exercises at off-sites, where they'd rig up some complex problem that needed to be solved. It might be by talking/negotiating, or it might be a physical exercise. One I remember is having to locate and raise a boat engine from a lake up in the Lake District armed only with two Indian canoes, some rope, and some wooden beams and planks - apparently, achieving this with knobs on by building a catamaran and lifting tower, and rowing it around the lake to the boat house 2km away, was infinitely less important than how you spoke to your co-workers at any single point for the entire week, unless the co-worker in question already had a gilded future, in which case it was the other way round.
If the gilded individual said they had a 'polyfocal blend of functional skills' at any interview, people would believe them - even if they couldn't open an envelope without hurting themselves.
Yep. 100% right.
I spent a miserable half hour (aged 50) trying to stop a HR drone of the female fresh our of university variety virtually slagging me off for :-
1) Not having A-Levels (I left school at 15, did an apprenticeship, got ONC and HNC Mech Eng)
2) Not going to a proper University (I went to Central London Poly)
3) Turning up for the interview on a Motorcycle (the car had a flat that morning and using the bike was the only way I was going to get there on time.
The job was for a 6 month contract not a permie positon.
I gave up and walked out. I sent a letter (remember them) to the head of HR giving the drone a right slagging off. It made me feel a lot better.
I found out a year or so later that this was not the first complaint that had been recieved about her. She became the Company HR Manager before she was 30. Go figure. (they went bust a year or so after that)
Re: Motorcycle:
The last 9-5 I interviewed for (in 1989), I was wearing my racing leathers. When the interviewer queried my choice of "uniform", I pointed out that he had asked me to drive up from Palo Alto to South San Francisco by 10AM ... and had called at 9AM. I knew I could make it on the bike, but there was no way I was driving the Bayshore without armor ... I got the job.
The 9-5 prior to that, I wore the same outfit, for similar reasons. When queried, I responded along the lines of "are you hiring an engineer or a fashion plate?" ... They made me an offer. I counter offered, they hired me at my price point.
One day when still at DEC FS, after having worked until a bit past midnight the day before and sleeping in that morning (as regulated), I had to go to the branch office 80km away. It was a nice sunny day and on phoning that I would be coming in later in the afternoon, asked whether they would mind that I'd take the bike? There was nothing else on my roster, so, yeah.
When I got there and did the bits I had to get there for, I was asked if I was willing to go fix a VAX6k system that was acting up. Needed a CPU board replacement, and for tools just a screwdriver and an ESD mat/wristband. I knew the customer; had I come in, put a dead chicken on the cabinet and danced around it three times he would just have asked how long it'd have to stay there. Showing up on a motorcycle would only make him wonder if that would become common for such minimal swaps.
Which was more or less how he indeed reacted.
Nice customer, nice trip.
My role was fixing "impossible" problems on a particular set of IT kit, As one customer remarked "One day you are in a suit so sharp it would cut - the next day you look like a deck hand on a tramp steamer". The logical reason was that the suit was uncomfortable for long working hours - or crawling round the floor.
One day I was dispatched to a site with a particularly awkward IT manager. I arrived in sharp suit and Range Rover. He immediately started complaining about the problems - I agreed with him and said that was what I was going to fix. Apparently he was in a daze for several days because "a suit had agreed there was a problem". I fixed their problems and he was sweetness and light to me from then on - in suit or deck hand mode.
This made think of something that happened to my dad years ago.
He worked in local government and had just got started a new job for a London borough in charge of care homes. He commuted to work on a motorbike he never owed a car always had motorbikes.
Anyway he came back one evening about 6 months into the job and said he had had a barney with his manager. Turns out they had to visit a home the council administered, his manger said we will take my dads car. My dad told him that he did not own a car and that’s when the manager had a go.
He explained to my dad that he was expected to sometimes visit care homes so he would have to have his own transport, and this was pointed out in the job interview. My dad replied that he was asked if he had transport to visit homes and a driving license (car) and he had both transport and a car driving license. At no time was he asked if he owned a car, for the sole purpose of chauffeuring his boss around. But in future he would bring a spare crash helmet into work and his boss was more than welcome to ride pillion next time they had to visit a home. An offer that was never taken up.
My dad carried on working their for 15 more years until he retired not just in charge of care homes but the whole of social services.
"He commuted to work on a motorbike he never owed a car always had motorbikes."
As did my dad. Back in the '30s a driving licence was just a driving licence - no differentiation into classes so when those came it it just got renewed into all classes so whether you could drive a car or not you were licensed for one. I'm not sure if dad ever had to take a driving test to get the licence.
My dad got his driving licence in the 40s never took a test for motorcycle. But he did take take a test at sometime for a car. He just never owned a car only motorbikes.
To be honest my whole family were into motorbikes at one stage in my early 20s My Dad owned 3, my Mum 1, my Brother 2 and I had 4. Since I was old enough to ride I have always owned at least 1 motorbike occasionally I have also owned a car.
I had been riding motorcycles since I was 15. My UK licence covers both cars and bikes, and I had both. When my wife was taken ill, I sold the bike as I had to use the car to ferry her back and forth to hospital for operations, chemo, etc.. After she died, I decided to start riding again, but the insurance company wouldn't sell me cover because I hadn't taken a CBT (Certificate of Basic Training). Up until the old insurance lapsed, I had never been asked for this, but apparently Grandfather Rights do not extend more than three years after the policy ends, so I was stuffed. I refuse to pay £100 for two years permission to carry on doing what I had previously been doing for 45 years at no cost. Bah! Humbug!
This is a whole subject in itself!
The woman you mentioned was PRECISELY one of the Gilded Ones! I've lost count of how many I had to support, and then watch get elevated up the command chain. I think it is to get them out of harm's way in most cases.
The company I worked for wouldn't recognise barely anyone who hadn't graduated from an Ivy League university. In at least one case I can recall, someone who had been recruited from a lesser university was actually reminded of it more than once - it usually came up at appraisal time, as a reason for not awarding the same pay rise as the Gilded Ones automatically got.
I once applied to a prestigious university for an IT support role. Without a degree - especially one from the Russell Group - there was no way they would give me a job.
A few years later I was their saviour many times over doing support on their IT kit from our company. The guy who had originally interviewed me ruefully admitted one day - that all the people they had recruited that time had turned out to be useless.
"the address itself is susceptible to being buggered about with as your ISP is repeatedly taken over and merged with other ISPs."
I guess I've been lucky.
Most of my prime email addresses end with @ntlworld.com, and always have done from the days I was with NTL. Virgin gave the option to change them when they took over, but it was an opt-in choice to do that, not an opt-out, if my memory serves me correctly. Although I'm maxed out on email addresses through my Virgin account, I think I'm correct in saying I can still choose the 'ntlworld' domain as an option if I create a new one.
I remember once, back in the early days, worrying what would happen if my email address ever changed. It never has at a time where it mattered (vague memories of different emails in dial-up days when email was still the domain of the geek (aka Billy No Mates), but no memories of any police searches to find out why I'd gone missing).
Other emails I use are based on the domains I own and operate as websites. I've switched host probably three times since the early 90s and none of those emails has had to change. Just configured at their new home.
Appearing to working Christmas day in France, Mr Dabbs? Not gone native quite yet.
I still have a .net alias for my French mobile network account 15 years after they switched to .fr. A nice IT support bod set it up after I complained about losing it.
It's one of 5 aliases set on that mail account.
Useful having a non-geo email address, but who knows when it will fade into the ether but for now it still works.
A digression, but many years ago - in the era in the UK where colour TVs were not owned by all - my parents rented. I don't think it was Rediffusion, but another one whose name escapes me.
When the TV blew a valve for the last time, the engineer told me it had just about had it and this was likely to keep happening. I fully appreciate what he was up to next, but he told me HE could rent me a TV and fix it as part of the rental agreement with him whenever I called. And he was cheaper than whoever we were renting from.
I was wary, but I took the bait and rented for my parents. And it was a brilliant arrangement. He supplied a good TV, better than the first, and he was excellent on repairs. He replaced the set once as I recall, when it failed, for a larger screen. His TVs were far more reliable than the original rental company's and I only had to contact him once every 1-2 years at worst for the ubiquitous 'blown valves' CRT TVs were famed for. Sometimes it could be 3-4 years before the TV failed. We rented quite happily for at least another 10 years.
Here's the link in. I only found out he had retired when the TV blew on the last time, and I phoned him, his wife answered, and she told me he wasn't in business anymore. I regret not asking if he was OK - for all I know, he might have passed away. But I agreed with her that I would stop the direct debit rental I'd been paying quite happily until then, and dispose of the defunct item (she didn't want it).
That must have been 30 years ago.
There is a word for what that sysadmin did. It's not complementary. What he did is also not ethical, and would be considered illegal in many jurisdictions. I rather suspect that a simple "give it back, or I'll tell your Boss I'll see you in court" would have had the intended effect.
Back in 2001 a bunch of school mates and I made the site, registered a domain with Freenetname and pointed the domain to the dialup account's free web hosting. Amazingly the ISP in question is still running the free home page server. I am hesitant to mention the name of the ISP in case someone notices and turns it off!
If you want another blast from the past, https://www.maximumpc.co.uk is still running and hasn't been touched since the day it was abandoned in 2001. It's been upgraded to TLS, and the certificate renewed however.
I have an ancient AOL email address. I've had it since the QLink days, when I did some work for them. Later, it was automatically changed to AOL, and I used it to help support MeDearOldMum's first online fumbling with email (a shell account on my server, TheWell, Delphi, TheSource, BIX and even CIS were beyond her capability).
Even though I have never paid a dime for it, it's the only commercial email account I've ever had that refuses to die. It was supposedly deleted in late 1989, but when a forgotten cron job checked the mailbox some months later it still existed. Lather, rinse, repeat a dozen times over several years. I finally stopped trying to get it nuked in the early 2000s.
These days, I only use it for two things: It's the account I used to register here on ElReg, and occasionally someone from the old days contacts me on it.
Nob? That would be the right Jack. If you hold it on a hill-top in San Francisco while waving your willy around, it's an Inverse Fizzbin and the Universe laughs at you.
Honestly, there is this thing called TehIntraWebTubes that we all have access to. Rumo(u)r has it that you can use it to source all kinds of information. Perhaps try it? You might like it.
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