Blog - Page 16 - Phil Leggetter

Bing.com round table
27 Jun 2009
On Monday between 19:00 and 21:00 I'm going to a Bing roundtable (round table) in London. The event is being organise by Colin Mercer and is described as: a small round-table event to discuss Bing and since we saw your recent tweet regarding comparative search results between Bing and Google, we thought that you might be interested in coming along. The idea would be to get your initial thoughts and you'll get an update on the future steps for Bing which are being developed specifically for the UK. During the session you’ll have the chance to talk with Microsoft representatives and other people from social media like yourself, who have expressed some early opinion.
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The O2 Mobile Phone Upgrade saga concludes
1 Jun 2009
Conclusion I finally managed to get the O2 XDA Serra (HTC Touch Pro) but boy was it a hassle! (See Trying to upgrade my O2 mobile phone ) I had to start a new contract with O2 and lose my old one that I'd had since 2004. I now know that this means I've lost 5 years of loyalty bonus points (or similar). I only found this out when I tried to get my PAC for my old O2 contract and the "retention team" offered me 18 months free with 250 text messages and 75 minutes. Yes, FREE. Other problems along the way were: "You can't take an existing simplicity tariff number onto a new O2 online tariff" Paying for two contracts for a number of days whilst O2 muddle along O2 actually trying to get me to keep two mobile contracts. Why would I want two mobile phone contracts? I can only use one phone at a time! Plenty of mis-communication Numerous calls to and from O2 Customer Services No offer of a "sweetener" to say sorry although they did end up manually transferring my phone number after I threatened to cancel both contracts. When my 24 month contract is up I will do everything in my power to use an alternative mobile phone network. I now have my O2 XDA Serra (HTC Touch Pro) and I'm very happy with it. What I should have done I should have phoned up and tried to cancel my contract as soon as I was displeased with the service. I then would have been put straight through to the "retention team" at O2 who would have done everything within their power to keep me. This most probably would have included getting the XDA Serra (HTC Touch Pro) for a discounted price and getting a better general tarriff. You live and learn.
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Trying to upgrade my O2 mobile
7 May 2009
I’ve been out of contract with O2 for probably around two years now and during this time I’ve been perfectly happy with the XDA IQ that I’ve got. I also carry around a Blackberry that I have for work so use that to browse the Internet, check email, and send tweets. I’ve not also got a 3G USB dongle from work that I can use on the train. All these gadgets have become a bit of a burden and I’ve been considering upgrading my phone to something that I can use as a 3G modem for my laptop, has a reasonable mobile browser, GPS, and has a good set of other applications for it such as Google Maps, a Twitter client, and a Yammer client. I want to replace three gadgets with one. I’ve been looking at the HTC phones for quite a while since they run windows (I like Microsoft stuff), I can easily sync my contacts and calendar (ActiveSync is still the best for this), I can write .NET compact framework applications for it (I’ve already said I like Microsoft stuff), and HTC are generally up there as one of the best phone/PDA manufacturers. [caption id="attachment171" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="HTC Touch Pro"] [/caption] So, I was delighted when I recently went to the O2 website to see that they have the XDA Serra which is actually the HTC Touch Pro . The HTC Touch Pro HD and HTC Touch Pro II are available but I would have needed to fork out for the whole phone myself. I’m an existing customer so I went straight to the Upgrades section of the website, requested my upgrade code, chose the Online 20 tariff, and looked for the Web Bolt-on to give me unlimited data on my phone. The Web Bolt-on isn’t available. [caption id="attachment176" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="O2 Upgrade Page"] [/caption] From here I decided to find out if I would get this option I were a new O2 customer. I found out that not only can a new customer add the Web bolt-on but also they get the O2 XDA Serra around £50 cheaper than an existing customer. So, I decided to phone up a “online upgrades advisor” (0800 1313136) to see if they could help me order by phone with the Web bolt-on and at the same price as a new customer would pay. The “online upgrades advisor” was of very little. I was informed that they “don’t have the phone on the system” so the only way to get it was to upgrade online (for a more expensive price and without the Web bolt-on) – No thanks! [caption id="attachment175" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="O2 New Customer Page"] [/caption] After phone calls to O2’s main number as an existing customer (08442 020202) and customer services, and Hertford’s O2 shop I had to phone new sales. They informed me that since I was on the rolling Simplicity deal I would be treated as a new customer anyway. So, I had to set up a new contract, do a credit check, set up a new O2 account, and set up a new direct debit. I also now have to cancel my existing simplicity one when I get my new phone. In addition, if I could have done the upgrade one I could have selected where I wanted my new phone to be sent to. Since I've made my purchase of a new contract over the phone I've had to get my new phone delivered to my registered address and I know I won't be in meaning I'll have to drive out to the delivery depot to collect it. What’s my point? My point is that I wanted to pay £200 for a new phone and sign up for a 24 month contract worth a good few quid and nobody at O2 seemed too bothered to help me out. Also, I can't believe that O2 force you to get your phone delivered to your registered address. Most people don't work from home so won't be there to receive the delivery. How much customer and delivery driver time must this waste?! I’m sticking with O2 at the moment simply because they offer the best coverage for where I live. When this contract is up I’ll probably have moved so I’ll certainly consider another mobile provider above O2. Amazon.co.uk Widgets
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Caplin Systems Blog Post - What is the real-time web?
28 Apr 2009
About a week ago I wrote a blog article at work entitled " What is the real-time web? ". I'm seeing even more tweets and posts about the real-time web and I'd love to hear if other people agree with my opinion on what the real-time web is. View the What is the real-time web? article here .
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What is the “real-time web”?
20 Apr 2009
Are we really seeing the real-time web? The phrase real-time web has been streaming its way around the Internet for a while now. It s presently being used to describe information being available in search results as soon as it has been published by its author. Examples of this are Twitter...
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How to read a file into a string using PHP
28 Feb 2009
function ReadFile($filename) { $fh = fopen($filename, 'r'); $theData = fread($fh, filesize($filename)); fclose($fh); return $theData; }
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Snow in Hertford
3 Feb 2009
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="220" caption="Me in the snow in Hertford"] [/caption] Jo took some great photos and a couple of videos of Hertford in the snow today. See more photos in Jo's Snow in Hertford Album
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My reply to: Which is the worst Transformer?
3 Feb 2009
I follow Chris Garrett on Twitter and he posted a link to a blog post about Which is the worst Transformer? . As a kid I really liked The Transformers and felt compelled to defend some of them. I posted what is about to follow as a partly tongue-in-cheek comment but it's been "awaiting moderation" for hours so I just thought I'd dump it in my blog. I'm pretty sure that Chris will agree with me about Soundwave as he's got the toy on his desk . The original blog post: Which is the worst Transformer? Blog post
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Sunday Lunch Review - The White Horse Hotel, Hertingfordbury
1 Feb 2009
Jo and I have decided that we are going to start going for Sunday lunch and are going to keep a list of where we've been and what we thought of it. What better place to keep a note of this than on a blog. Here's our first effort at a review.
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Drag Drop bug in JQuery UI 1.5.3
31 Jan 2009
JQuery UI Update - 31/01/2009 @ 17:15 Richard Worth just got in touch with me via twitter to let me know that JQuery UI 1.5.3 is only compatible with JQuery 1.2.6. The bug is not in jQuery UI 1.5.3, but just that 1.5.3 is only compatible with 1.2.6. Only 1.6rc5+ is compatible with jQuery 1.3 Therefore to use JQuery with JQuery UI from the Google Ajax Libraries hosted service you need to do one of the following: Script includes script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js" /script script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.5.3/jquery-ui.jss" /script Google Library loading google.load("jquery", "1.2.6"); google.load("jqueryui", "1.5.3"); --- JQuery seems to be the most active of the JavaScript libraries at the moment so I decided to use it for a little project. I've also decided to use the Google AJAX Libraries APIs hosted service to serve up the JavaScript files. At present Google is hosting JQuery UI version 1.5.3. After a bit of investigation I've determined that there is a bug in the Drag and Drop functionality in this version. It would appear that the "drop" function is not fired when you try to drop a draggable element on a droppable zone. I verified this by changing the JQuery UI version to the 1.6 RC that the JQuery UI droppable demo is using at the moment. When I did this the drag and drop functionality worked as expected. This may be a know issue but I thought a small post on the matter might save other people a bit of time. I did have a look at raising a bug but there appears to be a bug in the bug tracking system .
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