Pauses Café

Internet is full of scammers. Here is the mail I got as a request for more information regarding an apartment to rent:

Thanks for your email and it is my gladness to hearing from you.I am
jim.bukner,the owner of the house you are making enquiry of.Actually I
resided in the house with my family,such as my husband and my only daugther
before and presently we had packed due to my transfer from my working place
and now situated in the west africa (Nigeria)and presently my house is
still available for rent for 600euro including the utilities like
hydro,washer and security,it is furnished.Moreso Now, i went for a Crusade
in the West Africa and i will like you to get in touch with me for more
discussion as i am with the keys and the document to the house.Pls i want
you to note that,i am a kind and honest man and also i spent alot on my
property that i want to give you for rent,so i will solicit for
your
absolute mentenance of this house and want you to treat it as your own,is
that taken,it is not the money the main problem but want you to keep it
tidy allthe time so that i will be glad to see
 it neat when i came for a check up.i do that oncein a while.I also want
you to let me have trust in you as i always stand on my word.if you are
interested in renting this flat i will like you to fill out this form
below....

If I summarize: a Gay (with a daughter adopted or from a previous marriage) on a Crusade in Nigeria

then

RENT APPLICATION FORM
Also,Pls let me get this answer.
1)Your Full Name
2)Your Full Address & Phone Number
3)How old are you?
4)Are you married?
5)How many people will be living in the house?
6)Do you have a pet?
7)Do you have a car?
8)Occupation?
9)What is your religion?
10)Do you believe in god?
please i will like you to know that everything will based on trust,because without it this transaction can not hold.
please i will like you to get back to me as soon as possible so that i
can let you to knoe the next procedure.
Thanks and you are welcome
Regards.

you can call me on my mobile +2348030538934

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I have been using gmail for a while now, and am mostly satisfied with it. The threaded system it is based on has some good points and bad points, but so far nothing that required me to reconsider changing my setup. Things have changed.

I missed an important mail part of a ongoing thread on Thursday. The person who wrote me that mail resent me a mail on Friday. That mail ended up in the same ‘conversation’. When I read that second mail I discovered the previous mail, strangely marked with a read status. I am pretty sure I didn’t read that mail. I am sure I didn’t see that conversation marked as read in my Inbox. I am sure I didn’t click on update this conversation and read that mail afterwards.

Now this is at least the second time this happens to me in the past 2 months. First time, the mail wasn’t that important and I assumed an user error. Now this time I have big doubts.

Could there be a bug in gmail’s mail read status in connection to threaded conversations. Maybe some kind of
timing issue ? Or something that gets the mail marked as read even if it wasn’t displayed properly ?

I doubt it, but nevertheless, twice the same problem in a short period while I’ve never had a problem in years is strange.

Note: around the same time I received that mail, I was in a network that had failures due to(?) a mis-configured WebWasher proxy. That’s too important to leave this out. In particular that proxy caused errors with gmail. E.g. I couldn’t read my mail properly and couldn’t logout. More info below. I wonder if the issue could come from a combination of proxy error and bad update. So could this 2 problems be linked ? Could there be a code path in the gmail Ajax calls that update the mailbox statuses that don’t properly handle failures ?

This type of problem is not new in the world of “web 2.0″ applications. I stopped using BlogLines because they also used to have errors with their read status count. I noticed that google Reader (beta) starts having similar failures (some of them perhaps related to the fact that sometimes my google reader page is opened on multiple PCs ?), and now gmail…

I haven’t contacted Google yet. I still believe it could be a user error. But I will watch out for the third time…

Webwasher failures

I contacted the vendor on Thursday, let’s see if they answer…

For info, the version of Webwasher was 6.0.1 Build 2533

Failing hardware

My nice 3 years old Samsung ML-1210 laser printer failed. It can print but it cannot grab the pages…
Cost of repairing it 675 NOK + shipping + time to send package/post it. Cost of buying an newer more performant item and get it delivered at the office, 1100 NOK.

OK, what do I do with my almost functioning old printer ? I am sure someone can fix it.

Cost of bureaucracy

Failed RAM module for my laptop…. But it has a lifetime warranty !!!
Good, just need to send it to UK for replacement. So what are the costs ?

• 10 min on the phone to get an RMA number
• 40 min to go to the post office and come back
• 80 NOK for sending the parcel to UK
• 180 NOK to pre-declare the parcel to customs to avoid having to pay Taxes on the item to be returned, OR pay taxes on the item to be returned, i.e. 25% (125 NOK) + 99 NOK fee).

Total: 1h lost + 300 NOK to pay to get a 500 NOK item replaced… Crap. Don’t even understand why I need to repay taxes on an something I already got taxed upon.

Final thoughts

• companies probably never replace small items like that. They just buy a new one. My Dell laptop cost me so much because of the various hardware failures that I could have bought 2 other laptops instead and still end up with less costs.
• it’s easy for Crucial and co to offer lifetime warranty on an item when you know most failed items won’t be replaced…
• it’s not because your dead hardware is worth less than a new one that you should throw it carelessly. E.g. it may contains valuable data.

Talking about the valuable data, now that my future phone is a PC, I wonder what are the measures taken to ensure that our data will be somewhat secure ? Encryption anyone ?

Tim Bray is afraid of Wikipedia proeminence in the search engine results.

The question is valid, but I do not worry.

When you look at a wiki-pedia entry, the first thing you should look at are References and External Links. For example for information on the Prince Edward Canadian province
you will find the information from Canadian Statistics which is mostly what Tim was looking for.

Wikipedia is to me an aggregator, a non-official mini-resource summary of external information. If you are really want the official data you have to go one link further.

As for vandalism, maybe can they implement some sort of detection mecanism to catch most of it. Or maybe can they implement tools that are able to validate a piece of data in a page against information found in an external page. That could also be used to show the information’s origin.

With regard to resistance, there will be one for sure: other encyclopedia will have to adapt their models and propose some information for free on the web. Then we will have multiple sources for total (but shallow) information.

There’s another solution, which is I believe the future: micro-resources web sites. But I’ll maybe talk about that in a future post…

I’ve tried Google spreadsheets and unfortunately, right now, the import functionality doesn’t let me test the tool.

I’ve got 2-3 spreadsheets that I would love to put online. One is my freelance accounting spreadsheet. That way I could share it with my accountant. No need to go and see her Second a couple of administrative spreadsheets for various projects. But when I tried to import them, one failed “spreadsheet couldn’t be imported” and another “file is too large”. Go figure. (thos issues and other reported)
On the other side, the quick tests I’ve made on small spreadsheets I created myself hold their promises. I guess I just have to try again in some weeks !
Now if only we could have templates, better desktop and gmail integration and why not some online disk space, I would be sold.

update: after some tweaking, I’ve managed to upload properly. I forced the deletion of everything that was around the used cells of the spreadsheets, and now the server happily imports them.

<offtopic>
After being recognized by GaultMillau last year, Une Cuisine en Ville, a restaurant in Dax, France, got his first macaron.

Congratulations to Philippe Lagraula, 26, who started his restaurant only a year ago.

Philippe, let me tell you that I really like your food and I am very proud that you chose my brother to help you in the kitchen

If you travel to the South West of France, pay them a visit. Be sure to book some days in advance!
</offtopic>