adoption curve dot net

The best newsreader software I’ve come across so far is Shrook, produced by the wonderfully-named Fondant Fancies. So once I’d given it a whirl, I decided to buy it, online via SWREG. The only problem is that a week later, I still haven’t got an unlock code. And they haven’t replied to my emails chasing them. And SWREG don’t have any kind of contact details listed on their site.

So, is this a) a cockup; or b) a scam?

Or rather, I hate buying houses from people who change their mind about selling to you after disappearing to Tenerife for a fortnight. Bugger. Back to square one again…

Bloggerheads says goodbye politically
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Says Declan McCullagh, “One unsung benefit of the Internet is how beautifully it illustrates why the technology climate in the United States is superior to the one in Europe.”

And then he goes on to point out that it’s not just the internet climate – why, we Europeans censor the internet, start fewer companies, pay more taxes, are more unemployed and are nasty to big fluffy friendly companies like Microsoft.

On the other hand, we don’t tend to invade countries on the basis of bollocks, suspend habeus corpus and torture our citizens, or “elect” moronic half-wit draft-dodging fascist miserable failures to be President.

(Although in the interests of being fair and balanced it should be pointed out that the UK has done all of these things, but we’ll be telling Tony Bliar what we think about this in a year or so. On paper ballots.)

Rant over.

There must be some immutable law of physics that states that hardware only fails when it’s needed. This morning was one long panic caused by a failing wifi base station and a dodgy Cat 5 lead and a ropey Apache server; which meant that the only way I had of getting one of our websites back up was a Pocket PC and a Bluetooth phone.

And amazingly, it worked. The phone is a rather elderly Ericsson T39m, and the handheld a Dell Axim X3i. The neat bits are GPRS Manager, which takes all the hassle fun out of getting said T39m to talk to said Axim; and PocketPuTTY.

So the resolution went something like this: start up Bluetooth on the phone, then get GPRS Manager to connect to robbing bastards O2′s GPRS service. Use PocketPuTTY to bring up an SSH connection to the flakey server, and thirty seconds and a quick apachectl start later, all was well once more.

Ok, it’s hardly ground-breaking stuff; but the point it it worked, and what’s more, it worked under duress. Which hardly ever happens; there’s always something that goes wrong, and doubly-so when it involves phones and GPRS and things needing to happen ten minutes ago.