Paypal prepay card

Paypal is a pain in the neck from a business perspective, albeit not as much as other credit card processing companies (where 90days can be often seen). You receive the payments instantly but then need to wait 3-5 days after initiating a *manual* transfer to your bank account.

After being bombarded by adverts for the paypal prepay card everytime I logged in, I succumbed. I ordered a card.

Delivery was very quick and after ordering on the Monday, it was usable on the Thursday. However the implied ease of topping up isn’t what it says.

Most people that use Paypal are used to the idea of topping up accounts on sites and the payment being logged instantly. This is not the case with the card. If you top up on one day, the topup will register the next day. Added to that, one topup I performed on a Saturday didn’t register until the Monday morning.

So while I can reduce the 3-5 days I would get with a bank transfer to get the money available to use in my hand, its not perfect. Far from it in fact, since in addition to taking a day to register your credit, they also charge to extract your money from an ATM.

All in all, not as good a deal as they make out.

A rose by any other name?

Many people are of the opinion that product names are unimportant. I believe they are wrong.

Imagine for one moment, you have a cocktail in front of you. It is a yellowish colour.

Now if the barman describes it as a ’sunburst’ or equally pleasant name, then this will affect its taste. You will emphasise its positive aspects and downplay its negatives.

Now if the same barman serves the same drink but decribes it as ‘cat vomit’ this will also affect how it tastes to you. You will be looking for any perceived similarity to the texture or taste of vomit. It will affect how you view the drink.

People don’t seem to get this concept very often. I don’t believe it is a hard one to grasp though.

Security Theatre

Over the last few years many of the governments across the western world have used terrorism as an excuse to erode our civil liberties.

If you rank cause of death over the last few years then terrorism comes way down the list.

If it was significant, then there would be some blip in the figures for deaths caused by injury for a year with a terrorist attack.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_health/Dh2_32/DH2_No32_2005.pdf – table A doesn’t show this, in fact the figures (52 (56 if you include the bombers) from the July bombings in 2005) are tiny in proportion. Bombings are fairly infrequent, and if you average the deaths across the years the risk becomes negligible.

You stand more chance of being struck by lightning or winning the lottery than being killed by a terrorist in the UK at the present time so why all the precautions?

I believe it mostly stems from the fear of politicians to be seen not doing anything. They have to be seen doing *something* and while their ‘precautions’ are ineffective, most of the fit the criteria of ‘doing something’.

I for one would be far happier if they did absolutely nothing, rather than take away some of the freedoms we have enjoyed. Its not as if they have any real effect on the situation.

Take for example, barriers at stations. They now have barriers at most major stations. These force you to put a ticket into the barrier to allow it to open. There are also random searches at these same barriers, although I personally have never seen anyone stopped while I was commuting to Sheffield for months.

I can understand why they did it, but are they effective? Do these measures stop a bomber getting onto a train to travel elsewhere or blow up a train? The answer is easily ‘No’!

If someone was determined to get onto a train they could board at a non major station (which generally don’t have barriers and random searches) and also get off at a similar station even if they passed through a major station. Since once you are through the barriers you are generally clear to move between platforms.

What about the blowing up of trains? Is this still possible? Do barriers and searches at major stations stop this risk? The answer again is ‘No’!

There are thousands of miles of track in the UK, most of it unprotected or protected by only a small wire fence. It would be trivial for a determined person to bypass this protection and gain access to the line itself. Once that is accomplished, then its fairly easy to at the very least derail a train if you are determined enough and have explosives. The same goes for infrastructure like bridges and level crossings. These are exposed and can’t be protected since there are so many of them.

I don’t agree with the terrorists, but I agree even less with the current ideas of the government about how they are going about ‘protecting’ us from the terrorists. The amount of money that has been wasted for no real gain in security is immense and is one of the reasonsthe country has no real reserves to draw upon now we have hit a downturn in the economy.

I know its harsh, but I just wish that the government would understanding that protecting life at *any* cost is not worth it. That some people can be sacrificed if the cost both in reduction in freedoms and lifestyle is too high. I don’t think this government has the balls to put this concept forward nor the vast majority of sheeple to accept it, but its something that needs to be done if we are to have any rights left for our children.

About Technomonk / Dreamhost discount

There are many people on the net who aren’t economical to have as our customers the way we currently work. They are after rock bottom prices and are willing to make sacrifices to achieve it. This isn’t the way we work.

Our priority is good customer service and transparency. We wont lie to you and if we feel something will suit the customer better we will often tell them so, even if it means we may lose a sale.

Its not about wringing every last pound out of the customer’s wallet, its about creating a real valuable relationship with our clients. We aren’t going to be the cheapest provider on the block, but we feel we are worth what we charge.

So what about the customers that are looking for cheap hosting?

Currently, we are pointing them to Dreamhost.

As providers go, we have been using Dreamhost along with other providers to suppliment our own infrastructure for a while.

There have been some outages, but for the cost and benefits we can live with needing to fail-over once in a while. (Once in three years on the servers we use)
Even with the best designed infrastructure in the world, failure is enevitable, so it needs to be designed to cope with failure, so this is no massive hardship.

Even so, we are happy to recommend Dreamhost for the budget users we can’t service ourselves.

You don’t even need to take our word for it since they offer a 97 day money back guarantee.

Further to that, if you use the following discount or promo code, you will get a $50 discount and a free lifetime dedicated IP.

The promo code is TECHNOMONKIP

So why would you want a dedicated IP?

Put simply, a dedicated IP gives you two major advantages. The first, it allows you to run an SSL website on the IP. If you combine that with a free SSL cert from someone like StartSSL, then you essentially have free secure hosting while you are a Dreamhost customer.

The second advantage is that it allows you to run an anonymous FTP server. This is very useful if you need to distribute files to end users. Perhaps you write software or need to supply updates to customers?

If you have any comments, please use the form below.

Time and Money

I apologise if I appear to have disappeared online a lot over the last month. There have been a lot of things pulling on my time both business and personal.

Hopefully this is an indication that some of the economic downturn is easing. I’m not holding my breath though.

It has been reported that the free 0845 numbers on the site is currently broken. This is confirmed. It was accidentally rolled back to an old version during a server restore and should be fixed in the next couple of days.
In the meantime, if you want need any DIDs, feel free to contact us direct and we will set them up manually.

New site design for Technomonk.com

Its been a while since I designed the main Technomonk site. Its old, it was thrown together before any of the recent browsers were out and it wasn’t a good advert for the company.

The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t do it. I could. Its just that whenever I started changing something something would come up and say ‘Hey! I need your attention now!’ and it would then go back on the ‘things to do’ list.

I’ve got something up that looks a little better. Its not all shiny web 0.2 or anything like that. Its just a basic website that anyone without javascript enabled can visit and use.

If you notice anything broken, please contact us and we’ll do our best to fix it.

Metrics

When we take over a project, frequently we find that there is nothing to show how far along a project is and sometimes even worse that there is no requirements statements as to what the project is actually for.

Without knowing what your goals are and how you measure up how can you tell when you have met them?

You Can’t!

Metrics, also known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are how you know where you currently are. This could be something as simple as your annual turnover and profits, or perhaps something far less concrete like a metric developed from user interface testing.

Goals are generally only useful if you know you current state and by extension; where you want to be.
An unreachable goal doesn’t help anyone. If there is no chance of ever hitting it then why set it? It will simply cause stress which would be energy far better channelled into hitting an attainable goal.
For example, if your current turnover is 10Million Pounds a year you want this to grow. If the average growth in your industry is 10%/year then growing at 2% above the average is a reasonable goal.

Only when you have both a goal and a measurement of how far from your goal you are can you really plan how you are going to get there. If your aim is to reduce energy use in the workplace by 50% then once you have the measurements of how much if currently being used and by what devices (the metrics). You then set your goal ‘reduce 12KWhrs of power useage a day down to at least 6KWhrs’ only then can then plan how you will accomplish the goal.

Reducing Consumption

I first came across the concept of a 50% goal as part of a green incentive. The aim being to reduce power use by 50%, ideally without changing your workstyle much. This has worked well here and we managed to reduce the office power consumption by just over 50%, saving both money and carbon emissions. Which one is more important depends on your perspective, but with the rising fuel and power costs the first is enough to justify it alone.

The sucess of this got me thinking. How feasible would it be to apply the same concept to other aspects of my business and life? Could you, for example, apply the same concept to office waste, car use or even the amount of processing power user to serve each user on your site. While I haven’t been as sucessful on the first two tasks, there is a definate improvement in both. The third on the otherhand has been very sucessful.

With the improvement in efficiency of the servers, we can either run idle for longer (with the associated power savings) or we can serve well over twice as many users on the same hardware (for the optimised application). This alone can potentially reduce both our CAPEX and OPEX, improving our margins.

[Note: It has been pointed out to me that as an extension of the 80/20 rule (Pareto Analysis) where 80% of the power is used by 20% of the devices, so simply optimising those 20% should mostly get us to that 50% reduction (or 80% if you can get rid of them completely]

New Stuff

I’ve never been an avid blogger. Sure I will write entries, but its more about me. Putting finger to keyboard can quite often allow me to get my thoughts in order and to structure stuff in my mind better.

Given the above information it might suprise many people to learn that I have started writing a new blog for a co-operative venture between myself and some friends. This also may suprise some of the people who know me. The last couple of joint projects have generally meant myself doing a lot of the work and everyone else struggling to even find the time to meet up and discuss points of interest. I’m not saying that its the fault of any one (or more people) that they haven’t suceeded, just that overall we didn’t work well as a team.

On a slightly related point, the Traction Through Action website is running the new version of my CMS, loosely called TMI-CMS (TechnoMonk Industries Content Manglement Management System). I think the acronym will stick, although the meaning will change; TMI-CMS – ‘Too Much Information Content Management System’.

On a completely unrelated note, if anyone is interested in reselling UK DIDs through myself, then I would be interested in talking to them. Contact details here.

Version control

Everyone makes mistakes. Its a fact of life. The question is how do you cope with them?

[Note: version control of websites, while very common in the wider software development community, is still fairly rare in the web industry, so don't be suprised if you ask a web developer and they look at you like you have two heads.]

We haven’t been using version control (subversion specifically) for that long at Technomonk, however we have seen its advantages and wont go back to non-version-controlled development in future.

In the bad old days, we used to hack together web code live on a server or hack it together locally and upload to the server wiping out my previous version. If you make a mistake – OOPs! – you might have wiped out a lot of work.

The next step was to zip the site up every so often and store it somewhere safe. What happens if you make a change to a file and only spot the problem a couple of months later? (Rare but has happened) Can you easily find the version of the file that didn’t have the change?

The problem with manual archiving is that you have to remember to backup and you also need to label the backups in a way that allows you to find the version of the file you want.

Version control changes this.

Every time you check in a change, you write a comment discribing the change to the file or files you are commiting to the repository. So its fairly trivial to look at the change history of a file and see all the changes that were made to it and by whom.

That alone is a compelling reason to use version control – but wait there’s more. Have you ever took a version and made a few changes to try something out without wanting to affect your main codebase?

This is easy with version control. You can make a branch of your code and try some new stuff and either merge it back into the main code base (the trunk) or just abandon it. A branch acts completely seperately from the trunk so it wont affect your main code.

You don’t need to restrict version control to development work though, you could just as easily put configuration files into repository so you have a track of changes made over time. Most wikis keep track of changes; this is also version control, just built into the the wiki engine itself.

We are seeing a real value in version control and will be using it a lot more in future.