Who to Support? England? USA?

There is a lot of weirdness going on in South Africa at the moment: FIFA and MATCH are screwing the tourism industry; Vuvuzelas are on sale for 5 times their normal price of R20; and motorists are shredding the national flag by driving too fast on the motorways.
Then there is "Zakumi San", the world cup mascot who is made in China, along with the national team T-shirts. Such is the nature of business and trade unions. I vowed not to buy anything with the FIFA logo on it, because I don't support organised crime.
But I was given tickets for the England vs USA match on Saturday, because a friend is doing temp work for the USA team. So who do I support, apart from Bafana Bafana? Do I acknowledge that my grandparents came from England and my brother lives there? Or do I support the USA team because the US needs to get a clue about soccer and catch up with the rest of the world? Of course we'll have to put up with bolshy US Secret Service people escorting Joe Biden around the place, but is that any worse than the chaos created by the English soccer hooligans? Its going to be an interesting time. Will I be able to pluck up the courage to wave a US flag? I doubt it. Why is it the English team and not the UK team? More weirdness.

More Bafana Bafana madness

WebHost4Lies: incompetence as a business model

WebHost4Life proudly proclaims two outright lies on the front page of their web site. The first is that they provide "99% uptime" by which they mean (presumably) that you can access your web site 99% of the time if they host it. Not so. See my actual measurements below:
Nowhere near 99%. That means that if you tried to visit a page on FishWisePro.com then in some cases you would have waited longer than two minutes for the page. That's when internetsupervision.com logs a "timeout". These measurements are made by an independent company with multiple testing servers around the world.
The second lie is that they are "powered by 100% wind energy". Wrong. They have diesel generators for backup and they get their power from conventional sources. Their "Green Hosting" page states

Since generating wind energy on site isn't feasible, we're offsetting all of our electricity use with wind-generated Renewable Energy Certificates

That's very different from being powered by wind energy. It's a bit like saying "I'm not a racist because I know some darkies who aren't racist."
So from now onwards I am calling them "WebHost4Lies" because that's what they do: they lie, either directly or by omission. It's part of their business model. If you don't like it then they are quite happy if you leave, because they have too many customers anyway, and their tech support staff are too overloaded to bother. They aren't delivering on their promise of "an outstanding customer experience" because they aren't enjoying "an outstanding employee experience".

Celebrating 100 years of inept colonial bureaucracy

(Click for a larger image)

On 31st May 1910 the Union of South Africa was born. The former colony of the British Empire because a semi-independent colony. On 31st May 1961 the Republic of South Africa was declared, and we were no longer a colony but an independent racist state. In 1994 we got rid of legalised racism, but retained our glorious history of bungling government bureaucratic inefficiency.
In 2007 one aspect of this bureaucratic nightmare got a new name (eNatis) and two years later it's still eBroken. The queue above takes about an hour or so to process. There are big signs saying that the credit card machines don't work, and that they don't accept R200 notes either. Notice the TV in the top left of the picture. It used to display adverts to its captive audience, but that's broken too. There is a much shorter queue on the right for windows 11-13, where they will accept payment of traffic fines, but nothing else. I got the traffic fine because of the length of the other queue. Because I paid the fine first I couldn't pay the license fee. Go figure.
I tried to enter this door to get my Driver's License renewed, but they wouldn't let me in. I think they have more security guards than employees. Apparently their fancy new eNatis system isn't working and they are only processing 100 people per day. Doors open at 7.30 but get there early. The sign on the door says they closed yesterday at midday, but by 11am today they were turning people away. never mind the economic impact of denying people a valid driver's license. After all, the fine for an invalid one is a mere R1200. I will try to go back tomorrow.
One of the "benefits" of the eNatis system is that you can go to the Post Office to renew the license. The queue was a little shorter, but still took about an hour. The difference was that there was only 1 terminal instead of 5 or 6 (out of 10 counters) at the Licensing Department, and the Post Office employee complained that if she typed too fast the system bombed out. Now for a Post Office person to complain about a slow system speaks volumes, since they aren't that fast themselves.

WebHost4Life? Not on your life! They suck

I originally thought they were just plain incompetent, but now I think they are slow, unreliable and incompetent. Which is a polite way of saying that WebHost4Life sucks. Badly.
The graph above shows that they have failed to provide a continuous service on the Fishwisepro.com site for the past month. Then check out the speed in the right hand column:
Now compare this with my new hosting company:
So WebHost4Life is slower. Much slower. When I measured this I also measured the "time to first byte" as 175 seconds, and a total load time of 298 seconds. (The numbers in are in the status bar on this screen shot):
Since 300 seconds is 5 minutes, we are talking about a very slow load time indeed. Most users would have cancelled the page after 10 to 15 seconds, so they would never have seen the page at all. I'm told this was caused by their "migration scripts". The ones that screw up your web site for you.
Maybe I should also add useless to the list. It certainly describes their help system, and their much-vaunted "migration" process. Incidentally, the "new platform" doesn't support multiple web sites. They proved it to me because they couldn't get it to work, although they wouldn't actually admit that it couldn't be done. They are under the false impression that it can be done, but when push comes to shove it doesn't work. How sad is that?
Update: We can add "losers" to the list. According to www.web-hosting-top.com, WebHost4Life's hosted domains grew for 2007-2009 from 62,076 to 70,669 domains. In 2010 the decline has set in, so that by May 17, 2010 they are down to 60,912 domains, a loss of 16% in just 5 months. It boggles the mind that they could throw away 10,000 customers so fast.

Another satisfied WH4L customer (not!)

Mustang waves goodbye to WebHost4Life

The Mustang web site has found a new home, thanks to the technical incompetence and bad planning of the Endurance International Group, the new owners of WebHost4Life. The DNS transfer from WebHost4Life to Arvixe should be completed in the next 24 hours. This blog uses graphics from the Mustang site, so there might be a hiccup or two, but I'm not expecting anything like the fiasco that occurred when WebHost4Life screwed up the FishWisePro web site.
The difference between WebHost4Life and Arvixe is like chalk and cheese. Arvixe sends you an email that explains how to set up everything. Their control panel is easy to use and mostly intuitive. Their database setup is totally straightforward, and even the domain transfer instructions are clear and easy to follow.
Two of my support questions were already answered in the support knowledgebase, and two other questions were answered by a technical support person who actually knew what was going on. Quite a change from the idiotic and nonsensical responses I got from even the most senior people at WebHost4Life.
They automatically created a test domain called http://mustang.co.za.lilac.arvixe.com that allows me to test the setup before changing the DNS settings. I'm a very satisfied customer.
Update Thursday 2pm: The DNS changes have been implemented, and the switchover went completely without hitch. Unlike the balls-up with rate-my.biz (now fixed) and rate-my-biz.com ("cancelled" by WebHost4Life). Why is it that they break everything they touch?

AutoHotKey is Awesome

AutoHotKey is one of those free programs you wonder how you ever did without.
One of my recent uses for it is to paste difficult-to-remember passwords or user names to the clipboard. Here is an example script:
clipboard := "RandoMe20?~"
This pastes the string "RandoMe20?~" to the clipboard, which allows you to use it as a password.
Here is another example. There are numerous connections using a password that always start with "login" and end with "12345". This script asks for the part in the middle, and then types the calculated string into the password dialog box.
; Press Shift-Space to begin
; create password and paste it
;
^space::
InputBox, passw, password, Type in the middle letters of the password press ENTER
Send login%passw%12345
This particular script has become a real time saver for the people who use it. There is a learning curve involved, but there are plenty of examples and the help file is well written. Check it out!

No Defrag Benchmarks

This is just a brief not to say that the planned defrag benchmarks and reviews are cancelled until further notice. I have lent the FRAGG machine to a friend for a month or so, and this makes it impossible to run any publishable benchmarks for a while.
I have not abandoned the idea of doing the benchmarks, but the whole process has got bogged down for a while.

The Cost of Ignorance

South Africa has become a nation of idiots. Take our politicians for example. A Cabinet Minister tells us to save electricity by only switching on the hot water geyser during peak load periods. Municipalities are bankrupt, and/or providing little or no services. Politicians blame all the country's problems on racism. Yeah, right. I guess it's too much to expect a national leader to say "I don't know" in public, but what do you do at a company level?
My biggest customer runs a national call centre. The people who work there are men, mostly young. Many of them have no idea which province half the towns in the country are, and so instead of finding out or checking on a map, they guess. Customers get sent hundreds of km in the wrong direction because the idiot in the call centre is too lazy or stupid to do his job.
Another call centre has had to fire people because they can't spell. We aren't talking about place names (those are bad enough), but traffic-related words like "overtaking" or weather-related words like "raining". There is a limit to how many errors a spell-checker can catch.
Filing a police report can be an exercise in patience. There have been plenty of cases where the complainant has had to fill out the police report because the policeman can hardly write. The same is true of government departments, including the tax department.
How do you fix it? It's difficult to fire people in South Africa, so useless people get passed from one job to another. Many teachers simply shouldn't be teaching because they are nearly illiterate themselves. Many pupils are too lazy and irresponsible to learn, and expect to pass because they are "entitled" to an education.
Many companies, such as the Endurance International Group, are content to employ people who are totally under-qualified to handle "technical support" queries. Other companies, such as Microsoft, refuse to accept or acknowledge bug reports, or are too quick to blame someone or something else as the source of a problem. How do you encourage excellence and literacy in a society that tolerates mediocrity and TV dinners? I wish I knew.