The Joys of Dial-Up Internet

Nostalgia doesn't work so well when it's forced on you. I'm writing this on day 15 of no ADSL connection this year, thanks to the technical expertise of Telkom.
The reason I have an ADSL line in the first place is so that I can fix problems for my customers without having to drive there. This saves fuel and time. Tonight I have to upload a new version of an Access code file. It's 6MB in size, and compressed to a ZIP file its 2MB. Uploading it and extracting it is painfully slow at 44kbps. So far it has taken 26 minutes to connect, upload the file, decompress it, and update one of the workstations.
I called 0800-DSL-DSL again to find out the status of the fault. So far no one has been assigned to the fault, and the "escalation" of the call only means that management has noted that I am unhappy with the service. How nice. I wonder if it would help for me to stand with a placard outside the exchange? It might generate some more bad press, but I'm sure no-one would re-prioritize the fault or fix it faster.
I guess I'll just have to hurry up and wait. the call centre reckons it will take another 3 weeks. After all, we are talking about a company that makes billions in profits each year, so they couldn't possibly afford employing additional competent technicians. That would be too logical.
Jack the cable guy is obviously on leave until "tomorrow", whenever that is. In the meantime fault number 378ARK310107 is being ignored. Did I mention that Telkom refuses to refund the cost of the dial-up calls even though the ADSL "service" is down? I kid you not.

Telkom ADSL service down for 14 days this year and counting

Telkom is unbelievable, and my patience has completely run out. I can't get any work done at home, and my wife can't prepare teaching lessons or find material on-line because the ADSL line is constantly down. Jack the cable guy is obviously out to lunch.
It doesn't even help to phone Telkom or complain, because they just move at the same glacial pace as before, even when you provide them with the relevant reference numbers. Even M-Web has had enough. They sent out a general apology earlier this year. Click on the image for more details.

Then there is my posting on the MyADSL forums, which seems to have hit a chord with other frustrated customers.

Celebrating a year without the NHRA

Please stand and join me in a toast to Colin Hall and the management of the National Horseracing (sic) Authority. A year ago I was called into Colin's office along with the Data Processing Department head, to be told that the project I was working on for 5 years had been cancelled. Never mind the million or more spent so far. It must be fun to waste money like that. I guess since it is money made by gambling, it's somewhat ironic.
As it turned out later the contract that I thought had been agreed to was not agreed to (deliberately in my opinion) so I was paid out 2 months earnings in lieu of notice. I was not paid a cent by the NHRA at the end of February, and it was only the good graces of my current employer that enabled me to pay my bills at the end of February. So the NHRA earns a fat 0 out of 10 rating as an employer.
To the best of my knowledge the "replacement" system has not been implemented a year later, which makes me feel good because the project I was working on would have been rolled out in 2006 anyway.
As it turns out my new contract has been more lucrative and interesting, and both DataMover and the Miami libraries have benefited by my new work. As Winston Churchill once remarked when asked if an event was a blessing in disguise, he quipped that perhaps it was, but the disguise was quite effective. As I write this I am glad that I didn't spend another boring dead-end year at the NHRA, who seem incapable of organising their way out of a paper bag.
I had blogged extensively about my experiences at the NHRA, but their lawyers asked me to remove these entries as part of my payout agreement. I guess they didn't want their sordid behaviour known in public. Shame.

Fixing Local DNS Unreliability

For years I've struggled with bad DNS servers in South Africa, and now that Tiscali (formerly referred to ad World OFFline) and M-Web are the same company, their DNS is equally slow. Some days you have to refresh almost every page just to get it to load.
ADSL has improved things a bit, when the DNS servers work at all. I have a list of local DNS servers that keeps changing: 196.43.1.11, 196.43.1.14, 196.25.1.1, 196.25.255.34. The problem is that at times they ALL stop working, or take ages to time out, causing delays and timeouts, even on better browsers such a Firefox.
Now I've added two more DNS servers to the mix: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. They are the servers run by OpenDNS, a free service. The difference has been noticeably better, unless the international link is down, in which case everything is then broken anyway.

OpenDNS: Providing A Safer And Faster DNS

Telkom ADSL service down again

Maybe the reason why he's called "Jack the cable guy" is because the service goes up and down like a Jack-in-the-box. Last night the Telkom ADSL "service" went down again. I'm wondering how long it will take for them to attend to the problem, given that yesterday they still thought they hadn't fixed the previous problem from 12 days ago.
It's always the same thing: it rains, and then the PPP signal goes. I have notes from the last 5 outages: in each case the phone line remained working, but the ADSL light started flashing, or just no PPP facility and no ability to authenticate. Here are the reference numbers:

• 6ARK170206: 16th Feb 2006
  
• 36ARK170506: 17th May 2006
• 215ARK211206: 21st Dec 2006
• 237CRK180107: 18th Jan 2007
• 24CRK310107: 31st Jan 2007
  

That's a pretty impressive list for the last year: 5 outages for a total of 12 days, or only 96.71% uptime. So much for "always on", and that doesn't take into account the fact that the service is disconnected every 24 hours to assign a new IP address, and this can interrupt downloads or streaming audio.
Update: Last night I called to find out the status of my fault. The person who originally took the call, Mahomed Moses, cancelled the call after we were disconnected, so I waited the whole day for nothing to be done, even though I had been sent an SMS telling me the fault had been logged. So I had the fault reinstated, and asked for a written letter of apology. Do they get paid commission on the number of calls they don't log?
Update: When they reinstated my fault it got a new fault number: 378ARK310107. Nice of them to let me know. The line is back for now. Does that mean that it would have been back yesterday already if the call hadn't been cancelled? I guess that's too much to hope for.
Update: The line went down again on Friday afternoon at 3.30pm, so it will presumably be down for the entire weekend. I have to re-use reference number 378ARK310107 because even though the service was working the call hadn't been closed. These guys are unbelievable.

My HelloPeter complaint and another one | Previous ADSL Downtime

1LifeDirect Tries SPAM Marketing

Spam is not a good idea for any kind of financial institution. I got an email from 1LifeDirect advertising life insurance or something. A quick visit to their web site told me that:
a) They don't comply with the Promotion of Access to Information Act
b) The complaints@1lifedirect.co.za and compliance@1lifedirect.co.za email addresses on their web site are bogus. I got a message saying that these mailboxs do not exist. I hope that the info@1lifedirect.co.za mailbox works.
My complaint to HelloPeter got some results, however. They have put my name on their "do not call" database, and the offending company, Mailburst.co.za, has apologised. They obtained my name from a "competition" entered by a relative, and then didn't validate whether I wanted to "opt in" or not. They don't have a web site, but the contact email above can be used to opt out.

Many-to-Many Relationships get a new look in Miami

Consider the Many-to-Many relationship shown in the diagram above. Many "References" can be used in many "Enquiries". The list of which references are used in each enquiry is stored in "RefsUsed". The composite picture below shows a new way of managing these relationships in Miami database applications. The edit screen in the background is for the "Enquiry" table.
The page shown lists the relationship between the "Enquiry" table and the "Reference" table, and the combination information is stored in "RefsUsed". This relationship is displayed by using listboxes. The one on the left is based on "RefsUsed", and the one on the right is the "Reference" table.
Double-clicking on the "RefsUsed" record in the listbox on the left allows the user to edit the relationship details, by means of the foreground form. Is has not been possible to do this kind of multiple-table editing in Miami forms before.

Many-to-Many Relationships in Database Design

More Privacy Scumbags Float to the Surface

Why do these marketing types think its OK to bombard me with special offers, SMS messages, calls, and so on? Don't they already understand that our society is overloaded with ads, billboards, publications, and other marketing junk? I guess not. And even if they did, would they care?
On the weekend I had the misfortune of getting an SMS from "Call Co" in Durban. The SMS number used was 083-227-2416 and when they called me the number used was 079-204-6982. Their offices are on the 10th floor of 85 on Field Street, Durban. When they called me I informed them that I do not wish to get marketing calls from them, and asked where they got my details from.
They said they got my details from "Durban Database Solutions" and gave me the contact number of a Mr Paul Sartorius 082-659-9309. They apologised. Paul has taken my name of his grubby little database, and apologised for the inconvenience. However, he got the information from either ETL Solutions in Johannesburg or TIS in Cape Town. I have had dealings with ETL Solutions before. Mr Barry Cowden or his BEE partner "Mpumelelo Patrick Snowy Mafunda" may spend a year in jail thinking about their broken database system unless they sort this out.
Their web site has a form you can fill in, but they didn't set it up correctly so it doesn't work. You have to send the information to removemyinfo@etl.co.za instead. I called them on 011-467-2984 to complaint that even though my details were supposed to be removed in August lat year, I was still getting calls. They said they'd get back to me.
The matter gets worse: CallCo made calls on behalf of AutoPage. I have already told AutoPage, both on the phone any via email that I didn't want to receive any marketing calls from them, or on behalf of them. It seems that they aren't prepared to listen either. Even the AutoPage Marketing Manager had to apologise for the obvious and complete lack of thought given to this issue by the company. I hope that forcing the General Manager to send me an apology will wake them up. If not, a year behind bars will surely do the trick. Probably not.

Yet another HelloPeter complaint