Monthly Archives: May 2009

TCX Synergy Motorcycle Boots

Posted by David Hurst on May 28, 2009 None comments

I bought myself a pair of TCX Synergy boots last year, and have been very pleased with them. They took a few hundred miles to wear in properly, but once they had, they have been very comfortable, warm and waterproof. I like the discreet styling that allows you to wear them anywhere without looking like you’ve just come off-piste.

Unfortunately, the stitching on the left boot started to come away. I was pretty annoyed about it, because I had stupidly discarded the store receipt, so the store refused to change them. I took a photo of the boot and emailed it to TCX in Italy. Within an hour, I had a response saying that my email had been forwarded on to the UK distributer. Sure enough, I got an email from them half an hour later asking for my address so they could send me a new pair. Just like that!

On Saturday a nice man from DHL turned up with my brand new boots.

We live in the Internet age, where companies can grow up overnight and become huge without actually having to invest any hard work in developing customer relationships (eBay, Google, Facebook, Paypal etc.), and as such seem to completely forget that it is the customers that make them what they are. Instead, customers of these companies are treated with utter contempt. So, how refreshing it is to find a company that cares about its customers and stands by its products no matter what.

It is because of this stellar customer service that I shall now only ever be wearing motorcycle boots with “TCX” printed on the label.

Other companies take note! This may have cost TCX a pair of boots, but it gains them positive publicity in the form of this blog post, and they have gained a loyal customer, who will likely be buying boots every 18 months or so from them.

So, if you are looking for a new pair of motorcycle boots, can I suggest you check out what’s on offer from TCX. Their customer service isn’t just brilliant, their products are good and they stand by the quality. The TCX Infinity boot is ranked best motorcycle boot by RiDE magazine too, so it’s not just me singing their praises.

Loose chippings – the curse of the English summer

Posted by David Hurst on May 21, 2009 None comments

In this country, you know that summer is here not when the sun comes out (which of course it doesn’t, much), but instead when you see tribes of road “workers” covering our roads with loose chippings. This method of road re-surfacing really does smack of “we can’t be arsed to do the job properly”. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the local councils that covering the roads with loose chippings is for motorcyclists what driving on ice is for car drivers. Would the council liberally spray the roads with water in the middle of winter?

Last week, I was riding home from work along the old A303 from South Petherton to Ilminster, only to round a bend and come face to face with a freshly gravelled road. I stopped and turned around to take another route home. I’m not going to ride, or drive my car on this crap. Apart from the dangers to a motorcycle, I object to the damage caused by the flying chips. Even if you drive slowly and carefully, you can pretty much guarantee some twat coming the other way in a truck will not be, and I have no desire to see any of my vehicles pebble dashed by inconsiderate pricks. Even worse is the tar that sprays all over your tyres and paintwork and is next to impossible to clean off.

Only the British could come up with such a slap dash method of re-surfacing a road. In Europe, the motorist is faced with great ribbons of immaculate smooth tarmac leading them to their destination. Here, a bunch of lazy arse road work teams splodge a load of tar all over the place, lob some gravel on top, and give it a quick run over with the roller. This once over is never enough to properly finish the surface of the road, which is what is supposed to happen. Then the road should be swept clear of hazardous loose chippings. But no, instead they just can’t be bothered, leaving the rolling in to the passing vehicles and the sweeping to the elements.

I cannot believe in modern Britain that councils can get away with this, particularly given the outrageous amounts of tax we are forced to pay them.

If you have been forced to drive over such a surface, I strongly suggest that you immediately get out of your car and check for damage. Photograph the chips in your paintwork and then get a quote for repair. Send it to your local council who have third party insurance for such claims and therefore should foot the bill for the repairs. If we all start doing this, then perhaps they will see sense and lay some proper tarmac, or at least do the job properly.

Loose chippings not only damage paintwork, they damage tyres. And once stuck in your tyres, they will then damage your driveway or garage floor too. If you get chippings stuck in your motorcycle tyres they can result in a potentially fatal loss of grip. How come the Health & Safety risk assessment malarkey does not apply to road re-surfacing?

O2 Home Broadband review

Posted by David Hurst on May 19, 2009 2 comments

When is ADSL not broadband? When it’s being provided by O2.

My experience with O2 has been exceptionally poor. I was originally given an install date of the 5th of March, but when this date came, and went, I called up to be told that my install date was actually the 3rd of May. Given that I ordered the service at the end of January, neither of these dates is what you might call “a quick turnaround”. I was given all sorts of excuses ranging from the snow disabling the engineers, to just outright blaming it on BT.

It was finally switched on mid-March. I plugged in the provided router and noticed with some dismay that the wireless only runs at 11Mbps, which would have been fine 5 years ago, but these days I would expect at least 56Mbps support. None of this mattered though because my Internet connection never ventured north of 200Kbps, and only then during the early hours of the morning. In the evening, it sank to speeds slower than a 56K modem.

A few complaints later revealed that O2 (or the providing company Be) was short on bandwidth and were upgrading the service, after which all would be fine. I decided to stick with for the three weeks they told me it would take to upgrade. This has now happened, and whilst speed has improved a bit (I can now get 2Mbps on a good day), it is still much slower than any broadband I have experienced and frequently runs at speeds below 100Kbps. Add to this the fact that O2′s DNS servers seem to fail or stall several times per day and you have a pretty useless connection. On top of this, it now disconnects repeatedly, and by that I mean every hour. And then the final straw to break the proverbial camel’s back: the wireless drops out every 30 minutes or so.

I can rarely watch video. I certainly cannot do any work. The connection is utterly useless and I am sick of it. No doubt I will now have a battle on my hands to get out of the contract, but battle I shall.

I strongly recommend that you do not bother with O2 Home Broadband.

I hate spiders

Posted by David Hurst on May 18, 2009 None comments

I don’t care if people think I’m a bit of a girly wuss, I really hate spiders. They reduce me to a state of nervous hypertension and panic. I’m perfectly happy to look at the things in their own environment. I like watching them build their webs, and I’m intrigued when we see them at the zoo or pet store. But remove the 6mm sheet of glass dividing me and red knee behemoth and I’ll be out of there faster than a drunk at a party with no booze.

You might put this irrational fear down to the way they move (which I hate), or the way they look (which I also hate), but in reality I haven’t always been this way. As a boy, I was quite happy to hold a tarantula when occasion allowed. Frankly, I loved picking the things up. I used to have an ice cream tub (sans ice cream) into which I would place a few twigs and leaves, then bungee it to my bike and ride around looking for insects to turn it into some sort of mini eco-system. Grasshoppers were a favourite, and I got very good at catching them. Beetles, caterpillars, millipedes, centipedes, ear wigs, worms – they all went in the tub. And so did spiders.

I loved insects. I even had some stick insects which I used to feed on the privet hedge that bordered our garden. These were kept in empty sweet jars – big ones that I begged from the local sweet shop. The top was covered with a piece of mum’s old tights and held in place with an elastic band. It was always fun to get them out when we had company and watch the expressions of sheer horror on the faces of our guests.

Anyway, such was my affinity with the world of creepy crawlies, that my tub was soon a bustling hive of insectoid activity, that usually ended with the untimely death of some of the residents, usually at the hands, or should I say legs, of the arachnid community.

I particularly like the garden spiders. We had plenty of these in our garden, often with huge and very colourful bodies. Lovely looking things, I thought at the time. Then one day, one of them bit me. Now there are people that would have you believe that we have no biting spiders in the UK, but I know different. The common garden spider is certainly not averse to a mouthful of homo sapiens. This was no quick nibble either. The little git sunk its fangs into my finger and clung on for grim death no matter how vigorously I shook my hand. The pain was incredible. Much worse than a sting from a wasp and more frightening, because I just didn’t expect it. I am mildly allergic to bee stings, and I have had the dubious privilege of being stung by a hornet, and this ranked up there on the pain scale.

Therein lies the source of my phobia. When I see one of those things scurrying across the floor towards me, I just panic. I think it will run straight up my leg and sink its filthy fangs straight in. But why am I exposing my pathetic un-manlyness to the world?

Well tonight, as I was working in my garage – my space that must not be invaded by spiderfolk – my wife pointed out a huge one that was camped out in a hole in the door frame. That was it. I could no longer happily fettle my pedal cycle, because that was there. It could at any point jump out of its hole and across the floor to me when I wasn’t looking, and judging by the size of it, it probably would have eaten me whole. In a moment of resourcefulness that I think even Ray Mears might have been proud of, I sprayed the eight legged freak with WD40. I watched with pleasure as it slithered out of its hole onto the floor outside, and under my car. It of course headed straight for the back tyre, so it could hide in the dark.

Unfortunately for Mr Spider, he was unaware of my pressing need to move the car. Three inches forward and back again. Alas he is now rather more two dimensional than he once was. And of course by “alas” I mean: “serves the bastard right.

I’ve probably offended someone from the Spiders Protection League with my cowardly action, but I really don’t care, and I won’t be happy until every one of the little blood suckers in my garage is despatched with similar finality.

Religion is a lot like a web browser

Posted by David Hurst on May 18, 2009 None comments

Being a web developer by trade, I am accutely aware of the issues presented in building a cross-browser compatible website. This is because our clients demand that their website always looks the same no matter which web browser is being used. What they are blissfully unaware of is that, despite there being set standards for writing website code (as laid out by the W3C et al), web browsers are not forced to render said website code in a particular fashion, and this allows for a considerable amount of creative licence on the part of the browser programming team – and more often than not the programming team in question is the Internet Explorer programming team.

Firefox has its bugs, as do Safari and Opera, but you can pretty much guarantee that the vast majority of your cross-browser development pain will be caused by Internet Explorer – or as I like to think of it: The Church of England Browser.

You see, religion works in much the same way: you have one set of code (the bible) and yet each of the browsers (religious denominations) chooses to interpret that code slightly differently. And yet, just like a website, I think it is entirely probable that the person that wrote the code would have had in mind a specific way in which it should be interpreted and therefore might not be too happy about the way some browsers just do whatever they damn well please.

This is turning into quite the analogy, so let’s leave the web behind a minute and focus on the theological for a moment.

The bible clearly condemns war. Well, actually, the Old Testament is full of war, but that’s different to the Christian faith and principles of the New Testament. Perhaps we do need the web analogy still. Think of the Old Testament as Web 1.0 and the New Testament as Web 2.0. Web 1.0 is not invalid and many of it’s principles remain true, but other elements have been superseded by Web 2.0. The same is true of the bible.

Jesus and his apostles, of New Testament fame, quoted liberally from the Old Testament, thus proving its relevance to those of a Christian persuasion. And whilst it is true that God actively helped the Israelite nation in warfare, one must remember that in doing so he was merely using His people as His tool to execute His judgment. In fact, the Old Testament itself talks about beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning shears and ceasing warfare. The United Nations was particularly taken with this notion, and had the words of Isaiah 2:4 stuck on their building as some sort of motto, which they completely ignored by failing to turn any of their weapons into farming equipment. I digress…

How is it, that this straightforward piece of “code” can then be rendered by some religious “browsers” as: kill everybody? How can you have Catholics of one nationality going to kill Catholics of another nationality, with both claiming that God is on their side? Hmmmmmmmm. I detect a browser error. He cannot be on both sides, and therefore I suspect He is actually on neither side.

Jesus shunned politics, yet he had a clear and uncontested royal lineage that could be traced back to King David. He rightfully could have claimed his kingship, and indeed this is exactly what the Jews expected him to do. In fact, they tried to enthrone him as king, and he ran away. (John 6:15). Why? Because he chose instead to devote his life to talking about the future kingdom of God (Luke 4:43) – he even told us to pray for it in the Lord’s prayer – rather than focusing on the meaningless politics of the day which could never have brought any lasting benefits to humanity as a whole. He underlined this with a simple statement: “I am no part of this world.”

So then, how is it that the clergy of the Church of England are so involved with politics? Religion has shaped the governance of this country (and many others around the world) for eons, and it still refuses to let go. You see this particularly in the US of A, where politicians preach their manifestos from the church pulpits, creating an interlaced mush of religio-politics that must surely confuse the hell out of the parishioners – they usually look pretty confused to me anyway.

I think we are witnessing another browser error.

Here’s the thing: as sure as you know that Internet Explorer is a pile of festering turd completely incapable of following any standards whatsoever, you also know that there is a Firefox out there. Yes, it may be a little buggy in places, but it is rendering that code out the way it was intended to be viewed, and that’s all that matters.

Likewise, if you wade through all the religions, there simply must be one out there that is correctly distilling the truth. The problem is that you can’t just whip along to mozilla.org and download a copy, but I’m pretty sure that using purely the two principles discussed above, a diligent searcher will be rewarded with the Firefox of truth.

The Konami Code on Facebook – Facebook ‘Easter Egg’ – Secret Facebook trick

Posted by David Hurst on May 15, 2009 None comments

Many years ago, Konami used to include cheat codes or gamepad sequences in their Nintendo games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code). The most famous is:

[UP] [UP] [DOWN] [DOWN] [LEFT] [RIGHT] [LEFT] [RIGHT] [B] [A]

Now if you log into Facebook and click anywhere on the white website background and do this combination:

[UP] [UP] [DOWN] [DOWN] [LEFT] [RIGHT] [LEFT] [RIGHT] [B] [A] [ENTER]

then whenever you press your left mouse button you will get a lens flare effect on the screen.

This is of course completely useless, but it’s nice to see that geekdom is alive and well within the Facebook development team. Now, if only they could spend some time actually working on all the bugs…

Thanks to Emma H. for sharing this.

Esso Petrol Station Sparkford, Somerset – highway robbery is alive and well in Britain

Posted by David Hurst on May 15, 2009 1 comments

I just popped out on the motorbike for a rather filthy lunchtime McD’s with a chum to Sparkford services. Realising I needed fuel, I rode into the Esso station there to fill up, not noticing the price per litre as I did so. I didn’t look at the price on the pump either – you generally don’t look at the pump at all when filling a bike, less you should spill petrol everywhere. I did notice after I had filled up though and nearly fell over.

£1.03 per litre.

The Shell services outside Ilminster are today charging 95.9p per litre. That’s 7p per litre more to fill up my bike at Esso Sparkford than a garage 20 miles down the road. For a family car, it represents between £2.80 and £4.20 more per fill up. Even the Shell garage a stone’s throw from Sparkford services is 5p per litre cheaper.

There is no good reason for this whatsoever. It is nothing more than greedy profiteering. Esso already make billions of dollars in pure profit every year. They don’t need to do this.

Thieves!

The rain in May falls only in the UK

Posted by David Hurst on May 15, 2009 1 comments

What a crap country we live in! Apart from the obvious disadvantages of being a Brit (ludicrous taxation, overcharged for everything, corrupt government etc. etc.), we have to put up with this stupid weather. Monday this week was blue sky, sunshine and high temperatures. I was trapped in the office. I duly booked a half day off for Tuesday, where the sun shone all morning, so we decided to take the boys down to Weymouth. Obviously, by the time we got there it was blowing a gale and raining.

I refused to let this stop our plans so we sat on that beach, with the wind whipping sand into our eyes, shivering our collective rears off, building sand castles. To our credit, we endured the arctic conditions for a good 45 minutes before admitting defeat.

We then slipped over to Portland to eat chips in the car on the top of the hill. It was nice, but it would have been better if the boys could have had a run about and enjoyed the sun that lurks just behind the ever-present mass of grey.

The sun came out again just as we got home.

And now, having endured 3 days of rain already this week, it would seem that it will continue to rain all weekend. It’ll probably rain next week too, and the week after. In fact, it will probably transpire that Monday was in fact the sum total of this year’s “summer”.

What I don’t understand is why our ancestors, when tramping across the delights of Europe in search of a new place to call home, came upon the UK and thought, ‘Yes! This is the place. Rain and mud – that’s the way forward’. So, thanks to that bunch of moronic village idiots, I have to suffer this constant precipitation instead of enjoying the sun that somehow manages to shine without pause on the rest of world.

My invisible new motorcycle boots

Posted by David Hurst on May 15, 2009 None comments

I need new motorcycle boots. The pair of TCX boots I bought are falling apart after six months. Yes, you read that right: SIX MONTHS! A letter is winging its way to TCX as I type.

I decided to head up to George White’s outlet store in Swindon, tieing in the trip with a visit (and ride-out) with a chum who lives up there. We rolled up at 5.20 on Saturday only to find they shut at 5! What a bunch of slack part-timers! 5pm on a Saturday?? I guess I should have checked the website before I left, but frankly it never even occurred to me that any large store would shut that early on a Saturday.

I can’t be arsed to ride all the way up there again – there are no decent routes to take on a bike from Ilminster to Swindon – so I guess it will be another trip to Hein Gericke tomorrow.

[UPDATE: Just had a response from TCX who are replacing my boots! What extraordinarily good customer service. Now I have complete confidence in the brand.]

Mysql Error: #42000 The used command is not allowed with this MySQL version

Posted by David Hurst on May 14, 2009 3 comments

Are you getting the above error message? Are you attempting to import data from a file into MySQL using LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE?

The reason this message crops up is due to a security setting in the MySQL configuration file (my.cnf). The following tweak to the file will fix the problem, however, MAKE SURE that none of your code is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks before you do this, as making this change could potentially allow someone to access local files on your server if you have any vulnerabilities in your queries. If you are using PHP, a good start would be making sure that all user entered data (GET, POST etc.) is run through the mysql_real_escape_string() function prior to being sent to MySQL. You have been warned!

This method assumes you have root access to the server. If not, you’ll need to speak nicely to your server admin ;-)

Find your my.cnf file. The exact location will depend on your OS/distribution. On Linux boxes it might be in /etc or /etc/mysql or something similar.

You will probably have a line in your my.cnf that says: set-variable=local-infile=0

Change it to: set-variable=local-infile=1

Restart MySQL.

You should now be up and running. It goes without saying that I am not responsible for anything untoward that happens on your server as a result of following these instructions.