Author: james

Open letter to Singapore Airlines

Dear Singapore Airlines,

I have a few suggestions with regards to your handling of the current (at the time of writing) handling of the cancellation of flights across Europe. I’m sure you have contingency plans for cancellations to your service from any number of possible causes that could happen at any time for any period, so a few changes may mak handling this a little easier.

Website updates
You’ve actually had some information on your web site. It’s a little slow on the update and a little lacking in details, but this is the ONLY method of getting informtion out of Singapore Airlines right now – as see below…
Your contact telephone numbers
You listed a Singaport +65 number, and a premium rate 0844 UK 5/min telehone number. I spent 1:45 trying to get through on Friday night, giving up around 1am. My wife sent another few hours split across 4am and 5am. I am on the hone to you now again for another 1:48 in a queue…. have spent £10+ on getting nowhere….
Announce queue positions when on hold
So as I said, thats a total of 3-5 hours on hold now, and I have no idea if I am close to being served… would be nice if you could tell me how many peole are infront of me
Have your phone system ring me back
Check out OrderlyQueue; instead of me holding on for 5 hours, how about your phone system takes my contact number and calls me back when you’re ready?
How about you call me from your web site?
Even better than having us call in, how about I enter my phone number, maybe email address, and perhaps ticket number or flight number, and you call me? You could then email me every 30 minutes to estimate when you’re going to call me back
Enough of the useless messages when I called in
You’ve repeated the same advice on hand luggage to me about every 60 seconds. It’s a little useless when flights are cancelled. You also have a second message that you’re playing to me in the queue, and you’re interrupting that one to play the second message about hand luggage. One at a time please.
Quality of the hold music
You need to turn it down a little. You’re distorting the audio, making it painful to listen to. It should be BACKGROUND music. I didnt call up to listen to your advertising. And play some music, not just the same advert for Singapore Airlines.
Twitter
You have a twitter account, but you only seem to put offers on there, not status updates – which would be really useful

O2: don’t call me to tell me to stop using an unlimited broadband!

Dear O2 Broadband,

I’ve been a customer now for about 3 months. In this time I have experienced:

  1. Spontaneous reboots of the O2 broadband wireless router every 30 seconds, forcing me to put my own router in; support forums are full of plenty of people talking about this
  2. Very slow Speedtest.net speed results of around 1 MB/sec on an 8 MB/sec line in the evenings; I live around 300′ from the Poplar, London exchange (that’s the copper run, not line of site)

Now you’ve rung me to tell me to use my broadband less. Now, I’m familiar with fair usage, but quite frankly, the poor performance of the service is enough to throttle any usage.

So, here’s a couple of tips:

  • Work out how you can not suck badly in the evenings. Ther’s supposed to be a 21CN upgrade from BT for this exchange in the Q2 2010; get some of that roadmap out and publicised as to what this means for your customers? Anything? Nothing?
  • Accept that you have a bad fimware on your routers. Confirm it as a known issue. Apologise for this. Advise people of workarounds. Stop using these crappy Thompson devices. You choose, just don’t keep burrying your heads in the sand.
  • Don’t hassle your customers for using the service they are paying for. You say Unlimited. You say “No matter which O2 Home Broadband package you’re on, there aren’t any limits on how much you can download or upload in a month. So you can use the Internet as much as you like, within reason. Our network’s been designed to cope with people downloading large files (like music or films) and watching video online. But if you’re using the service excessively – like continually downloading large files at peak times – then we do reserve the right to warn you to lower your usage. In exceptional circumstances, we can even terminate your account. This is because excessive use by a few people can reduce the speed that others in the same area get with O2 Home Broadband. We just want to provide everyone with an excellent level of service.” I am not on a 100 MB/s fibre link here, its an ADSL link. It is limited already at… well, you say 8 MB/sec, I see 1 MB/sec. That’s enough of a limit already. Indeed, for central london, E14, less than a mile from some of the biggest internet exchanges in the United Kingdom, how about you actually get some performance in here.

You suggested to me that you may terminate my account; well, you’re offering has performed pretty poorly, so I am tempted to leave anyway.

C’mon Pidgin/libpurple

Pidgin is a pretty awesome, cross-platform, Instant Messaging client. It has the possibility of being one of the first Free cross-platform IM clients to support voice and video with the XMPP/Jabber protocol. Ticket 11075 on the Pidgin web site is for this feature request – it currently has voice and video on recent versions of GTK/Glib and supporting libraries under Linux, and Windows support is almost there (works in some snapshots, but not in any released version yet).
Pidgin use Trac for their bug list, and in here you can vote for a bug to increase it’s priority. Getting working cross-platform Voice and Video (VV) would rock, and gets my vote – if you care about open source IM video chat then take a look at ticket 11075. Right now it has 19 votes, making it the #2 ranked feature/defect, beaten only by 247: “MSN direct file transfers”. Shame I don’t have time or ability to help code.

HP Dreamscreen: time

The HP dream screen is now determined, once again, to use GMT without adjusting for BST, despite having turne don the “US Summertime” option. We still have a dead Snapfish app that sponoesnt show content and spontaneously crashes, and similarly a Facebook applicaiton that, although it shows content, also spontaneously crashes after a few hours.

I am disappointed in this product greatly. It had so much potential. HP, you’ve dropped the ball badly on this. I see Toshiba has a similar device on the market now. Perhaps they’ll produce an SDK and let developers enhance the platform.

HP P212 SCSI card that isn’t SCSI, kind of.

HP recently shipped us a P212 SCSI RAID card; this was chosen for our new Quantum tape drive. After a week of fighting with it, we tried an alternate SCSI card (non RAID) at the suggestion of Quantum, and Voila, all problems disappeared. Quantum claims (perhaps true, perhaps not) that some of the SCSI RAID cards are not implementing the full generic SCSI protocol and don’t handle having non-disk systems on their bus. So, hopefully Google picks up this HP P212 SCSI RAID card (PN: 013218-001) and anyone else struggling with this will see this!