* Posts by BikerLad

3 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Dec 2009

1000s of websites vanish as TalkTalk lets domain slip

BikerLad

Last straw with TalkTalk/Tiscali

I've had a ukgateway.net email address since 1999 (it came with my old Gateway PC). Over the years, Tiscali (and now TalkTalk) would repeatedly f*** up the ukgateway stuff, from disappearing emails, to not being able to log in to webmail using the email address. So, eventually I got my own domain and have migrated a lot of email correspondence to that, so I now have less reliance on TalkTalk/Tiscali email. Sadly, I haven't yet migrated everything over, in particular my CV still contains the ukgateway.net email address (doh!).

This is the last straw for me. I refuse to call their crappy help centres as I really truely believe they've continually messed up ukgateway.net in an effort to generate more revenue through phoning them up and/or to "persuade" everyone to migrate off of ukgateway.net.

So, who's a decent, reliable broadband supplier these days? It's time to finally move to another provider.

Mozilla squirts out Thunderbird 3

BikerLad

I don't expect customers to be testing a final release

What I find laughable is software that is released as a final version when in actual fact it is of alpha or beta quality. It's not just Thunderbird that this applies to. There have been a few questionable releases of OpenSuse over the years (broken printing or CD mounting etc.) and of KDE. All software has bugs. However, when bugs are highly visible or quite detrimental to the most basic functionality then you do have to question the quality control process. Who is going to test the software? Well, as a professional developer and architect I don't expect my customers to be testing the software for me (to any extent) unless it is an agreed alpha or beta release trial. I expect developers and the QA dept to be responsible for that. Likewise I expect the Thunderbird team to ensure that moving from alpha to beta to RCs and to the final release has ironed out the showstopper bugs. Not being able to upgrade Thunderbird on Vista is a showstopper. If they'd tested this then they'd have eliminated it. If their test cases don't encompass doing an upgrade from version 2 directly then somebody isn't doing a decent job. Of course it's difficult, nay impossible, for test cases to cover every eventuality. But I'd have thought that upgrading from Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 to version 3 via the GUI menu on 64-bit Vista with mail folders not in the default location is a completely obvious test case to try out.

Thankfully version 3 works for me on OpenSuse 11.2 64-bit.

BikerLad

Went back to thunderbird 2

On my OpenSuse 11.2 system, the thunderbird upgrade to 3 was fine. Different story on my Vista system. Thunderbird 3 came back with the dreaded Blank Screens Of Death: no mail folders, no content displayed at all (BTW, account dialogs which cannot be resized with buttons half-obscured is very annoying). On windoze, as on Linux, I have my mail folders set to specific locations rather than the defaults. I downgraded on Vista to the latest version 2 release to see all my email again. No excuses for piss-poor quality control and crappy screens. Was TB3 actually tested at all?