In my line of work as a web designer/developer I’ve learned to silently detest Internet Explorer, especially version 6, so today I decided to check out the analytics of my web sites, how much of the visitors would I be cutting off if I decide to drop IE6 support for the future. I checked several sites – totally different audience, markets, etc. All showed about the same result – 7% of all total visitors were using IE6, and IE6 was the least used of the IE family. Except for one site which had about 9.6%, but it was targeted at the wider Bulgaria population – demographics that I presume has mostly outdated hardware running XP’s.
I was delighted to see kirichkov.com’s demographics – IE was third, after Firefox and Chrome, with just about 11%! IE6 accounts for just 1.5% of the visits! Yes! This site looks awful in IE6, and NO! I don’t care, if you’re visiting with IE6 you’ll see a friendly greeting informing you that kirichkov.com does not support IE6 and the visitor should upgrade! Also the dominant OS of the visitor is … Linux! Even more joy for my web designer heart! But then again I’m not really surprised, given that 65% of the visits start at my article for ZoneMinder on Ubuntu 10.04!
I surely hope that sometime soon I can get back to my ZoneMinder project and present to you part 2 of the series that will turn the video server into a CCTV terminal!
Free trade and competition are supposed to guarantee much higher quality of service to the customers. Nevertheless the Bulgarian market of mobile services shows quite the opposite – customers are mistreated, sometimes overcharged and forced to sign unfavorable terms.
Mobile phone services in Bulgaria are provided by three independent service providers and several virtual service providers. Despite the supposed competition on the market the quality of service from the providers’ employees is getting worse and worse. After the mobile phone number portability was forcefully imposed on the bulgarian market by an EU legislature the battle for customers became even more fierce. Currently, despite the Universal Service Directive of the EU, the mobile operators are using illegal tactics to keep their customers – bargaining and presenting special offers after a customer has deposited his determination to chose a different service provider, despite that being forbidden by law.
The General Conditions, that are integral part of every contract, are purposely written using jargon and contain a large number of purely racketeering clauses – e.g. a customer has to forfeit the remainder of his/hers subscription fee should he chose to change his service provider in the middle of the billing cycle, and despite paying his subscription fee in whole s/he also has to pay forfeit for the same period – i.e. he is charged twice for the same contractual obligation.
The Bulgarian state’s Communications Regulation Commission is in no position to do its job – to regulate. They have no direct access to the operators’ databases and have to require documents proving the operator’s guilt from the phone service customers. On top of that I have the suspicion that quite often the mobile operators are issuing falsified documents and thus blaming the delay in the number portability procedure on the customers and getting away with hefty fines.
The low amount of ported numbers – 0.5% of all subscribers for a year and a half [1] certainly proves that either there is no competition between the mobile phone service providers and prices are being fixed informally or that number portability is not truly working in practice.
Footnotes
[1] 15th Progress Report on the Single European Electronic Communications Market – 2009
There’s a lot of buzz going around social media – every company wants a twitter account and a facebook page, probably just to be hip. But does ‘hipness’ sell?
I decided to start a simple experiment – I want to sell my car – a 13-year-old Audi A3.
So here are the details of my experiment:
Social Media: I will post every 3 days a link to the photos of the car – on my facebook profile and on twitter. I also changed my profile picture to the one you see to the left. It is apparent that this limits the exposure of my ad to only my circle of friends (I don’t keep people I don’t personally know as friends in facebook) and to those who find my twitter gibberish interesting. Nevertheless several friends already re-shared my ad on facebook, thus it is already getting exposure to people who are beyond my circle of “friends”.
The non-social Internet media: On the other hand I’ve also posted an ad in the most-visited portal for vehicle sales in Bulgaria (see my ad).
The old media: As a bonus for publishing an ad in the vehicle portal, I also requested the portal to publish my ad in a local newspaper free of charge, but without a picture of the vehicle.
The goal: let’s see where does the sale lead originate from – my facebook ad or the mobile portal or even worse – offline (the newspaper).
I will update this post once I sell the car, I’ll also try to keep track of the generated leads and also the usual haggling.
It is important to note that this ‘experiment’ takes place in Bulgaria, furthermore in a city with population of about 200 000. My presumption is that people are not so technology-inclined as in bigger cities. Let’s see!
Update: Well, the car is sold, and the lead came from the portal! The best offer I got from the people in my social circle was an offer for my seats, and the wheels. Apparently direct social media sells are no good at this time!
What you need:
Let’s start!
- Install Ubuntu
- After the base system is installed install ssh (always good to have) and ZoneMinder
-
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install openssh-server zoneminder - Add the www-data user to the ‘video’ group to access the video streams from the web interface:
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo usermod -a -G video www-data - Make Apache automatically start the ZoneMinder web interface and restart Apache:
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo ln -s /etc/zm/apache.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/001-zoneminder
Password:
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo service apache2 restart - At this point you should be able to open ZoneMinder’s web interface by pointing your browser to http://IP-OF-ZONEMINDER-SERVER/zm/
- Download Cambozola to be able to view the live streams from any Java enabled browser in case the Flash viewer does not work for you:
user@ubuntu:~$ wget http://www.charliemouse.com:8080/code/cambozola/cambozola-latest.tar.gz
user@ubuntu:~$ tar -zxvf cambozola-latest.tar.gz
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo cp cambozola-0.76/dist/cambozola.jar /usr/share/zoneminder/Please note: As of writing this cambozola version 0.76 is the latest one, hence if you get a newer version you should change to the respective directory.
- It’s time to add your cameras – it’s best to first read ZoneMinder’s defining a monitor documentation
- In the very likely event that you get black/blank screen when you try to view the live feed from your camera, then you should change your maximum allowed amount of shared memory and restart Apache and ZoneMinder:
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo echo "256000000" > /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo service apache2 restart
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo service zoneminder restartHow to calculate that magic number (256000000 in my case) is discussed in this thread in the ZoneMinder’s forums. It’s best to read it and calculate the amount yourself, as this is highly dependent on the cameras that you intend to use.
In order to add the change permanently you’ll need to edit /etc/sysctl.conf and add a line kernel.shmmax = 256000000 to it.
If you are still getting no image you should check your cameras and how you set them and experiment with the Device format and Capture palette. - You’re all set!
It might be a good idea to slightly tweak some configuration options. You can do that from the Web Interface’s options menu – it is located in the upper right corner, just below the load/disk-usage monitor and it took me quite a while to find it.
- Options -> Image -> OPT_CAMBOZOLA set to TICKED
- Options -> Image -> STREAM_METHOD set to mpeg
I plan to implement also a Live View monitor so stay tuned for the next HOWTO.
A day after the iOS 4 was released I upgraded my iPhone 3Gs to benefit from all the new features. I was delighted with the new Cellular Data switch – it allowed my iphone to be a real phone and last for days not merely hours, all due to the GPRS/3G not abusing the battery.
Unfortunately one of the “features” in iOS4 turned out to be an even worse battery abuser – the persistent Wi-Fi. While I was at home or in the office – about 20 hours of my average day – the phone was constantly connected to the Wi-Fi and the battery lasted for 15-16 hours tops, with no more than an hour of actual usage!
So far there is no “Persistent Wi-Fi” switch, so I set on finding out what caused this behavior, and here is what you need to do to get it off:
- Disable notifications (yes, no more knowing when someone wrote on your Faceboko wall or mentioned you on twitter)
- Disable any Push e-mail, from the list of e-mails (Exchange, GMail, Yahoo, etc.), not just the Push switch in Settings -> Mail -> Fetch New Data!
If you are using Exchange (or Gmail/Google Apps) you’ll also need to disable your calendar and contacts unfortunately. In other words you have to switch to IMAP/POP e-mails.
This feature, unfortunately, makes you chose between having Push e-mail and notifications or manually turning on and off the Wi-Fi every time you need it, just like those nasty Symbian phones, the iPhone claims to be superior to!
UPDATE: after ten days I have to admit – I was wrong. Probably one of those nasty background-running apps was keeping the Wi-Fi connected at all times. Now I close most of my apps after I’m done with them and battery indeed lasts for 2 days and about 3 hours of use! Cheers!
Customer service: Toyota calling you to kindly ask you to go in for a free repair of a problem that
a) you might not have
b) you don’t really care about
Anti-customer service: M-tel employee yelling at you for demanding your rights, guaranteed by law
Six little cuties, six little kitties, and their mother
