This is Nomad’s Land

A friend of a friend tells me that their ISP forwarded an abuse message to them from the RIAA. Apparently they were downloading a torrent from http://tracker.torrent.to . Obviously the RIAA is monitoring that particular tracker, so beware of torrent.to. Moral of the story: Even if you are in South Africa, the RIAA can still complain to your ISP.

Linking to the above page sends spam bots to a site filled with randomly generated email addresses. The bots harvest these addresses for their spam mailing lists. This is an attempt to “overload” the spam servers by making them send spam to thousands of non-existet domains.

Maybe it is just because I only recently acquired a decent system for playing games on, but I’m noticing that many of the games being released these days have some incredibly beautiful soundtracks. Sure, there have always been games with soundtracks worthy of praise, but over the holidays I played three, recently released games, with some pretty decent music.

First of all, everybody’s favourite (and considered by many to be a perfect game)
Portal theme – alive.mp3: Portal alive.mp3

You really have to finish the game to appreciate this song. It might sound cool and all, but it really just doesn’t have the same meaning if you haven’t played the game. The song is basically the conclusion of Portal, so you just can’t listen to it without the back-story. Portal is included in Valve’s Orange Box set (R317), which also includes the multiplayer masterpiece, Team Fortress 2. If there is one game (or collection) from 2007 worth buying , it would be the orange-box.

Hitman 4 Blood Money: Jesper Kyd – Ave Maria: Ave Maria
I don’t really have an opinion about this game as I haven’t played more than the first level. The theme song in the menu is “Ave Maria” by Jesper Kyd. Some people prefer the piece as performed by a more mature female voice, but I think the imperfections in the child’s voice performing this version actually makes better.

Clive Barker’s Jericho – Theme of the First Born: Jericho First Born Theme
This is an in-game track. It is only 1 minute long, but I find it more haunting than the end- or menu tracks. The game is pretty straight forward with a pretty decent plot. Unfortunately, the ending is severely lacking…

Another reason I’m suddenly noticing so many cool audio tracks could be because I just got the Logitech Z-4‘s last week. They’re not going to blow you away with volume, as they are designed for desktop PC use, but in terms of quality they are pretty impressive for a “budget” speaker system, and I am very happy with them.

I certainly believe it would not be sensationalist to say that the Wiimote is a revolution in household remote control technology. It is small, lightweight, minimalistic and absolutely packed with really cool features like a 3-axis accelerometer, infrared optical sensors and bluetooth. Better yet, it can interface with a PC – The hacking potential is limitless.

When I first read about the Wiimote and all the hacks people already made for it, I knew I had to obtain one for myself. However, if you’re buying one in South Africa you could pay up to R500 for this puppy. There was no way I was dishing that out for a remote, so I turned to eBay, where you can pick one up for between R175-R210. I ordered one from thumbmonkey.com, international shipping only $10 (Only twice what kalahari charges for local deliveries.) and it arrived after three weeks, only one week late (Thanks ZA post office!).

Here’s a couple of its features:

• • 3-axis accelerometer to determine orientation (A Wiimote can replace those R4000+ 3-axis sensors they use at industrial engineering for measuring orientation)
  • PixArt optical infrared sensor to determine position. (Use Wiimote as an accurate pointing device)
  • Force feedback/vibration control. (Ladies?)
  • Built-in speaker. (Voice commands/confirmations, finding a lost remote.) Controlling this feature is still not fully understood. Much potential for discovery and contribution.
  • A programmable EEPROM chip for configuration data.
  • And perhaps most excitingly, wiimote extensions like the Nunchuck uses a standard I2C interface, so you can create your own Wiimote peripherals. Better yet, you can use the Wiimote as a cheap and simple bluetooth adapter for your own electronic development boards.

So, the second I popped some batteries in, I connected it to my laptop and started coding. I grabbed Brian Peek’s C# Wiimote library off the net. Within about an hour, I wrote a little application that sits in the system tray and binds Wiimote actions to keyboard keypresses. It lets you control VLC by waving the remote around. Waving it left/right skips the video forward/back. The further you rotate, the faster it skips. Waving it up/down controls the volume, and otherwise it just does basic operations like play/pause/fullscreen/task-switch/mute.

I will probably release it as a full-scale Wiimote app at a later stage once I’ve cleaned everything up, but for now I will just lie back, put on a good movie, and enjoy the ultimate in lazy-man’s bliss.

Possible Solution: A user claims to have found a solution, check the last comment and let us know if it works. (Change your primary paypal email address from gmail to a non-public email service.)

Update: From the comments on this page and all the hits I’m getting, it is obvious that this is a widespread PayPal bug affecting only international users and merchants other than eBay. My queries indicate a serious and permanent error in their back-end services, emerging after a recent website upgrade, that they may not be aware of yet. The contact support staff can not solve this problem if they believe it is an exceptional case. The only way to fix this is to contact PayPal and report this bug. Please contact PayPal support, they will only realize the extent of the problem if enough people report it.

PayPal confirmed it was their internal security systems that refuse the transaction. This means it is their internal, back-end services that are malfunctioning and not the front-end as I suspected. However, it still seems that their system is favoring eBay transactions (suspicious, since eBay owns PayPal).

Original post:
“This payment cannot be funded with a credit card at this time.”

I’ve decided to make this post to see how many people visit it, and get a rough estimate of how many people are experiencing the same problem: Every time you try to pay an online merchant with PayPal, you receive the following error: “This payment cannot be funded with a credit card at this time.”

I have noticed a lot of hate-speech online about people experiencing the same thing, but there are no solutions. The support staff suggests that “PayPal employs complex statistical models to identify patterns of behavior.” However, I have noticed the following irregularities which points away from that explanation:

1. I am a premier PayPal user and have never before had issues with a PayPal payment. Only recently have I started getting this error message.
2. My card is verified by PayPal.
3. I successfully payed for an item on eBay using my credit card through PayPal this weekend. Sort of… At first I received the familiar “This payment cannot be funded with a credit card at this time.”, but after trying again, the payment went through and cleared just fine. In other words, the problem probably lies closer to their front-end. [edit: This assumption was incorrect, PayPal confirmed the problem was with their back-end services.]
4. I can not donate even $1 to Wikipedia . This is contradictory to their explanation because, not only did I complete a successful payment 3 days ago (so my card is valid), but there is no way that a Wikipedia donation could be flagged as suspect.

So, they will either have to admit that their “complex statistical models” are flawed, or (more likely) that there is another problem causing this error.

Sucks to be us…

(I found this funny cartoon, which exactly explains our situation, on paypalsucks.com:)

PayPal sucks cartoon

Now these points of data make a beautiful line…

stillalive.mp3_ (Rename to .mp3)

“Good day Mr. Toadstool”

“Good day Knuffeltje”

Where the hell did this come from?

The pitfalls and not-so-openness of OOXML (Office “Open” XML), Microsoft’s new office format, has already been hotly debated, with several solid reasons why OOXML should be refused ISO standards certification. Even South Africa voted against OOXML gaining ISO status. With Microsoft strong arming countries left and right in their push for standardization (including several cases of corruption and bribing standards board members) the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure decided to put up an official, 2500 Euro prize, in the fight against Microsoft Office standardization.

Benjamin Henrion, founder of noOOXML.org site, explains: “Microsoft is spending millions on rent-a-crowd support for international certification for its proprietary Office format, OOXML. But we already have an ISO standard for word processing, called ODF (Open Document Format). OOXML is Microsoft’s attempt to subvert this existing standard, to keep its strangle-hold on the world of documents. It’s time for activists across the world to stand up, to reach out to their national ISO bodies, and to explain why Microsoft’s format is not open, not a standard, and not XML.”

Surprisingly, Microsoft itself was announced as the winner of the FFII’s “Kayak Prize 2007″ yesterday. The software monopolist was declared the “Best Campaigner against OOXML Standardization”.
FFII president Pieter Hintjens explains, “we could never have done this by ourselves. By pushing so hard to get OOXML endorsed, even to the point of loading the standards boards in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, and beyond, Microsoft showed to the world how poor their format is. Good standards just don’t need that kind of pressure. All together, countries made over ten thousands technical comments, a new world record for an ISO vote. Microsoft made a heroic — and costly — effort to discredit their own proposal, and we’re sincerely grateful to them.”

There you have it. To summarize: Don’t support closed formats. Don’t support OOXML. If you don’t want to support ODF, at least save your documents in Word 2003 format so other people can read them.

“The FFII has highlighted serious problems with the proposed standard. It relies on undisclosed patents, and undisclosed or incomplete licensing terms that make any independent reimplementation impossible or heavily risky. It obliges implementors to reverse-engineer the behavior of old closed Microsoft applications and formats. It uses non-standard formats for languages and dates, and specifies known bugs, such as treating 1900 as a leap year.”

http://www.lomont.org/Math/Papers/2007/Excel2007/Excel2007Bug.pdf 

If you are using MS Office 2007, try entering =850*77.1 in a cell and see what happens. Now work that out on your calculator. If you support OOXML (the new, default, broken office 2007 format), you deserve all the pain that comes your way.

One more amazing screw up by Microsoft. Early adopters of MS Office 2007 (and Vista) must be feeling like real suckers… Microsoft’s second worst OS to date have received such negative feedback that they have finally given in to consumer pressure to simplify downgrading to XP. But ya, what do you expect? I mean, it was just a couple of days ago that the vice president of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft, Charney suggested that security in Microsoft products has moved on from being the ‘laughing stock’ of the IT industry to something more respectable.
Unfortunately, it is the abundance of silly bugs like these that still earns Microsoft the title of ‘laughing stock’ in the technological community…

Until recently, FNB was still using the ancient OS/2 on their branch network system. Although there is nothing wrong with using an outdated system if it is proven, time-tested and Does The Job (Voyager 1‘s controlling computers is over 30 years old and still going strong), at some stage it becomes pretty expensive finding developers and maintainers for legacy operating systems. Additionally, they replaced approximately 4000 windows2k computers with the Novell Linux Suse operating system for better security and stability.

As an FNB account holder, I feel pretty good about my bank switching to a Unix based operating system. Especially after being reminded of how utterly unusable and unstable windows often becomes, several times this month. The most recent incident involved a parking ticket payment station in the Neelsie which had to be power cycled after its windows (XP) operating system failed, displaying the notorious windows crash screen.

Riaan van Wamelen, CIO of FNB Branch Banking, says the rollout is already under way.
“We piloted our first branch in July of this year with great success and we are now proceeding with national rollout. The solution has proven to be stable and provides us with excellent centralised administration and deployment capabilities.”

FNB could have switched to Macs, which is just computers for dumb people, or they could have gone with Vista for the Hey-what-does-this-buttonOOH-LOOK-SHINY-THING! type, but they chose Linux. Configuration might require a bit more technical expertise, but it is unrivaled once set up properly. Linux is stable, secure and incredibly flexible by definition. FNB made the right choice, and made me more confident in their business as a customer.

On the 28th of September, the University of Stellenbosch will celebrate Software Freedom Day, handing out CD’s, demoing interesting stuff and installing Linux for interested people.

NOTE: This deal is not so great if you are using dialup or ISDN.

When I read about the Telkom CLOSER packages, way back when they were first introduced, I was pretty skeptical. You actually payed more for standard time calls, you couldn’t use Infinitcall with it, and you still payed normal rates to your dial in to your dialup ISP. You can read more about CLOSER in the past in this article written June 2006: http://www.grandtrunk.za.org/telkom-closer/

Today, you still pay standard dialup rates, and cannot use InfinitCall, but that doesn’t really matter anymore if you have ADSL (Which is now becoming affordable at around R200p/m).

Advantages of CLOSER 2:

Monthly Charge of R145 includes:

• Home Line Rental – R111.90
• Call Answer – R9.85
• 30 local standard time minutes – R11.412
• Unlimited “free” local and long-distance callmore calls (up to an hour)

How does it compare with standard line rental?

Notes:
* CLOSER 2 local calls are 5c per/minute more expensive than a standard line. But since you have 30 “free” local minutes, you will only start paying more after talking more than 260 minutes (4.3 hours).
** Free up to an hour. Just put down the phone and dial again!
Internet dial-up calls, international calls, Premium rated calls (0862 & 0867) and calls to mobile numbers are always charged at normal rates.

Summary:
If you limit the amount of time you spend on the phone during peak time to less than 10 hours per month, and call people at their home instead of on their cell, you can enjoy “free” local and long-distance calls after 7pm. With a bit of planning, you can cut your phone bill to under R200 per month.

Further Reading:
You can read more about the other CLOSER plans here and here.
Call charge rates were obtained here