Monthly Archive for August, 2007

Forced ezboard Account Migration and Advertising

Published on 31 August 2007 in Syndicated. Closed

I wonder if, with the second anniversary of the ‘launch’ of Yuku rapidly approaching, ezboard, Inc. are finally getting somewhere close to taking it out of beta?

As I mentioned earlier, an old ezboard account of mine has been migrated to a Yuku one without my agreement and without my acceptance of any revised terms of use, etc. Interesting.

Of course, the benefit of doing this to Yuku is that they can claim a larger number of users when trying to sell advertising - whether or not those users are actual, live and regular user accounts or simply dormant ones - and also serve ads. on the users’ profile pages.

Talking of which, I noticed that instead of the regular Google Ads block on a Yuku user profile, there was an ad being displayed for Justin Timblake’s “Futuresex Loveshow“, whatever that may be. Nice for all those users complaining about Yuku’s classification as a dating site by corporate website content blocking providers.

I also noticed that Yuku are once more using OASIS - “Open source Ad Serving and Inventory System” - rather than just the Google Ads they were serving.

Maybe this is a precursor to their finally beginning to share advertising revenues with board owners, as Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc. CEO promised at the Yuku launch. I won’t hold my breath…

Another Unannounced Change at Yuku

Published on 31 August 2007 in Syndicated. Closed

Back in April 2007, a Yuku user asked “so do we really have 1TB of image space?“ adding that it sounded “ridiculously high, and quite misleading” which was my conclusion too.

However, a Yuku representative replied, saying:

“I thought that there was not actually a limit… so I guess you could say 1TB.

“I have no idea on the actual answer.”

Excellent stuff…

Another Yuku representative then relayed what she had been told:

“You are limited in amount of pictures you can save in a album, but you are allowed to make an unlimited amount of albums. So it really is nearly unlimited.

“I believe we have the right to limit that at some point.”

It fell to another Yuku user to provide the definitive answer to the question - she pasted in part of an e-mail she had received when her board was moved from ezboard to Yuku:

“In addition, we have added some new features:
1. Search - fast and accurate search that works
2. Free Image Hosting - 1TB of storage to host jpegs, gifts, bmps, pngs
3. Posts Don’t Fall Off the 20th Page - unlimited storage of posts
4. Advanced Private Messaging - 4GB of storage for you, friends list, ignore list, mark as unread
5. Profiles With More Customization Options - (e.g. embed videos/music, choose from a list of ready-made designer skins, HTML blocks that you can edit any way you want, etc).”

[emphasis added]

There are further examples of the 1TB storage limit being mentioned in this message board post.

Now then, 1TB is 1,048,576 MB. So when someone apparently ran out of image storage, they raised a query on Yuku and were told that:

“Ok, it should be fixed now. :)

“Log out and then log back in for it to take effect. You should then have 30MB of space for images.”

[emphasis added]

Only 30MB? Of course as the Yuku Help Wiki has been down for a while now, I cannot check there what limit there really is on image storage size.

Fortunately, Yuku came to the rescue recently: an ezboard I once posted on has been migrated to Yuku and so that old ezboard account was migrated over as well - without my agreement, I hasten to add - and an e-mail (with the usual Yuku grammar errors) sent to me, telling me about Yuku:

“In addition, we have added some new features:
• Search: fast and accurate search that works
• Free Image Hosting: 30MB of storage to host jpegs, gifts, bmps, pngs
• Posts Don’t Fall Off the 20th Page: unlimited storage of posts
• Advanced Private Messaging: 4GB of storage for you, friends list, ignore list, mark as unread
• Profiles With More Customization Options: (e.g. embed videos/music, choose from a list of ready-made designer skins, HTML blocks that you can edit any way you want, etc).”

[emphasis added]

Compare that to the details sent out in April 2007. Yes, ezboard, Inc. has reduced the storage allowance by a factor of nearly 35,000!

Funny how they kept quiet about that…

The Trouble with Firefox

Published on 29 August 2007 in Code and Firefox. 0 Comments

I tend to have a number of web browsers installed on my systems to make sure I can test web pages in a number of up to date browsers, and this includes Firefox (
)

But one issue I have with Firefox is how after a few hours’ use – especially as my use these days tends to include a number of AJAX-based sites, Gmail, etc. – the amount of memory being consumed sky-rockets despite, or possibly because of, the amount of physical memory on my main work machine.

This evening, I’ve implemented a number of hacks that may or may not help things out with this supposed memory leak (apparently it’s working as designed…), so here we are. This is Firefox version 2.0.0.6, by the way.

Firstly, we want to reduce the amount of RAM being used for Firefox’s cache. We do this like this:

1. Type “about:config” (no quotes) in the browser
2. Find browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer
3. Set its value to “0″
4. Restart Firefox

Secondly, as minimising the browser window seems to accomplish little, we’ll try to reduce memory use when it is:

1. Type about:config again and then press Enter.
2. Right-click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

Still with me? Now we’ll move on to page rendering speeds and more memory leak hacks, this time from “Have Laptop Will Travel”:

“Type in the address bar about:config.
Type pipelining in the filter bar.
Double-click on network.http.pipelining to set its value to TRUE.
Double-click on network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and change its value to 12 or more if you have broadband.

Play a little with the setting to find a configuration which is best for your connection.

Firefox is most hated for its memory usage. After having browsed some hours, Firefox will easily have taken 250MB or more of memory and slow down your PC. This is because FF has never been programmed to overwrite the memory it doesn’t use anymore and give free to other programs. Sometimes even closing Firefox won’t speed up your PC anymore. But the leakage can be prevented.

To do so, open a new tab and type about:config in your address bar again.
This time we want to limit the size of the memory cache.
Therefore we need to create a new preference, named browser.cache.memory.capacity.
Right click on any free area in the preferences window and choose New —> String.
Type now the name browser.cache.memory.capacity and in the next window set the value to 20000.
This will limit the size of the cache in the RAM to 20000KB and should prevent the annoying memory leak.
Restart your browser now.”

And after I’d found and implemented these hacks, I discovered them and more at the element14 Blog.

PayPal?s e-mail Support

Published on 29 August 2007 in Syndicated. Closed

I tried adding a new bank account to one of my PayPal accounts today and wanted it to be savings account in my name. So I went through all the steps and found that the Direct Debit mandate it wanted to set up was in the business name and not my name as I wanted it to be, with no way of changing this.

There was an e-mail address listed for help with the direct debit mandate, so I contacted them from my regular e-mail address @ my domain. I received this reply:

“Thank you for contacting PayPal. My name is Katherine and it is an opportunity to assist you today.

“PayPal works hard to protect our customers, and uses many security measures to help ensure your protection. For this reason, we can only send answers for account related information when the request comes from an email address that is associated with your PayPal account. We feel that this is the best way to ensure that your personal information is not compromised.”

Fair enough, I suppose. So I replied using an e-mail address of registeredpaypal account @ my domain. Imagine my joy upon receiving this reply:

“For security reasons, we are unable to answer all enquiries that we receive by email. In those circumstances, and in order to maintain the integrity of an account, we need to make sure that we are speaking directly to the account holder. In order to assist you, we recommend that you contact us by telephone at 08707 307 191 and we will be more
than happy to clarify the matter with you.”

So why couldn’t they say that the first time and/or amend their website accordingly?

And I won’t even start on the way they’re not currently adding VAT to website payments as they used to…

Japanese Wave Pool

Published on 25 August 2007 in Internet, WTF and YouTube. 0 Comments

Now I don’t know about you, but I like a bit of space to myself which is why I’d probably cope badly living in a more densely populated area and in particular somewhere like Tokyo.

So as you can imagine I’m not looking forward to travelling this weekend as it’s a Bank Holiday, but at least it’s nowhere as hatstand as Tokyo:

“It’s summertime here in Tokyo, and since we’re in the middle of the Obon holiday week a lot of Tokyoites have left town for the countryside, leaving a strangely empty city behind. Those who stick around or come in from the countryside pack just about every tourist spot to the gills. We went to the Tokyo Summerland today to catch some sun, and could barely move!

From here.

This is what he’s talking about:

Ruby the Foul-Mouthed Parrot

Published on 24 August 2007 in Internet and WTF. 0 Comments


Fowl Mouthed Parrot – Watch more free videos

Restored ? For Now

Published on 24 August 2007 in Syndicated. Closed

Wahay! Quietly and quickly, my posting here about Yet Another ezboard Data Loss has done the trick and both our old board and the community chest have been restored.

I wonder how long it will take them to break things again?

Jack and Me

Published on 23 August 2007 in Syndicated. Closed


Jack and Me, originally uploaded by Captain Blue.

Just before the England v Germany friendly on 22 August 2007

Optical Express using known Spammer Frankdata

Published on 22 August 2007 in Syndicated. Closed

Yes, yet another company buying lists of e-mail addresses from and using the spamming services of Frankdata in breach of the legislation. This time it’s Optical Express.

Two e-mail messages, both entitled “Freedom from specs and contacts with laser eye surgery” but sent to two different domain names and two different users, a “Richard Gummer” and a “Richard Rooke”. Obviously these two names are fictitious and only exist on Frankdata’s spam database.

Optical Express have promised to investigate and get back to me…

ezboard, Inc. – Where’s Our Money? (Redux)

Published on 22 August 2007 in Syndicated. Closed

http://wp.bluescrap.com/2007/07/04/ezboard-inc-wheres-our-money/

Well, within the last hour our community chest, which was finally restored at the end of July, has now disappeared again.

From an e-mail:

“After reviewing the transaction logs I have reasonably determined that the current balance now showing is correct. So, as of 7/24/07 your board has a $443.00 balance.”

Not any more, it hasn’t…





overtone