Archive for category Rants
Backup, Backup, Backup!
Posted by Kieran McCarthy in Humour, Oddities, Personal, Rants on May 21, 2009
My Dell Inspiron 1720 Laptop recently was me giving trouble where by it started to hang for no apparent reason. One minute I’d be working away contently with very few applications running, next “Bang!” it would freeze with a constant (Vista) spinning icon and a screen that turned opaque white. Nothing I could do to rectify it only to wait… and wait… and wait… by running Windows Task Manager I noticed the CPU Usage was running at a near constant 90% all the time which was pretty high. I tried all sorts of tips from registry defrag to killing unnecessary startup processes even being suspect of Firefox sucking up resources but no luck to be had.
It finally ground to a halt and would not boot up so with the laptop still in warranty I called Dell to arrange a repair, strangely enough they sent out a repair tech a few days later who discovered the problem was a screwed up motherboard which was replaced. It was also recommended that I format my hard drive and re-install Windows (Bloody) Vista. At this point I decided to back up my laptop data to an external hard drive via USB. I left it transferring all files overnight and presumed all was ok with no error messages that anything went wrong with the transfer, having backed up I was happy to prepare for formatting the drive and re-installing.
Dell arranged a phone call and a talk through of the reinstall. All went well and at last the laptop is back to peak performance so tonight it was time to hook up my external drive and transfer my stuff back . BUMP! nothing there! yes there was a c: drive backed up with full windows directory etc. but no “My Music” – “My Videos” and worst of all no “My Pictures” aaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!!
No pictures!!! over a years worth of photos… nowhere to be found. Family snaps, birthdays, events, creative pics… all gone… thank f**k I had uploaded a few of those pics to my flickr account…. and all for the sake of a couple of backup DVD’s!
Lesson learned? shit happens… (note to self) from now on always check an test your Back Up, Back Up, Back Up!
Popularity: 8% [?]
3V.ie Online Account Security Weakness – Beware!
Posted by Kieran McCarthy in Oddities, Personal, Rants on September 3, 2008
Image via payzone.ie
I may have identified a possible security weakness with the 3V.ie (online customer account) service. This occurred recently while trying to retrieve my own 3V account details, this weakness would allow any person with prior knowledge that you have a 3V account coupled with your mobile phone number to access your 3V “Online Customer Service” browse your balance & purchase history etc. Here is a summary of user tasks taken from their website:
Online Customer Service
Sign on to the new Online Customer Service section of this 3V website using your email address and personal password to:
- Receive again the security details for any Voucher.
- Check the balance and transaction history on your 3V Vouchers.
- Redeem money left on your 3V Vouchers to your bank account.
- Transfer money from one Voucher to another Voucher.
- Request a replacement 3V Customer Card.
- Update your personal details or password.
- Change how you receive the security details when you buy a 3V Voucher.
You can also find the balance and transaction history for any 3V Vouchers quickly by clicking on the View Transaction History link on the left hand side of this page.
Popularity: 12% [?]
Ticketmaster.ie – Where Are The Cheap Seats?
Posted by Kieran McCarthy in Personal, Rants on March 12, 2008
I’ve come to realise a strange pattern when booking ticket online using ticketmaster.ie First off when I am logged into my account with them and I’m searching for tickets why is it that I can never book the lower advertised (cheap seats) prices? its like those prices don’t exist for online users.
I say this as having bought quiet a lot of tickets this year alone from them. A recent example was buying 2 tickets for a friend for the “Prince” concert in Croke Park this summer. The morning of the sale I was logged in prior to the 8:00am ticket sale and as soon as online booking started I proceeded to book 2 tickets but no matter what way I tried to book I had no choice but pay the premium price of €126.50 + booking fee per ticket as apposed to the much cheaper €66.50 per ticket, I just don’t get it!
Same scenario booking tickets for “Wwe Raw – Wrestlemania Revenge Tour” Belfast, I’m taking my two sons to that event as they are completely into wrestling at the moment, well they’re aged 11 and 8 so it will be a mind blower for them, but tickets for that event were advertised at €20 and €55 per ticket and guess what Yep! I had no choice but pay the premium again online.
Anybody out there manage to book standard tickets with ticketmaster.ie online? I’d like to know?
Popularity: 12% [?]
YouTube have blocked my download tool!
Posted by Kieran McCarthy in Bits Of Code, Oddities, PHP, Rants, Videos, YouTube on January 24, 2008
It’s less than 48 hours since I posted my last article “Free YouTube Video Downloader & Path To FLV Finder Tool” and today I noticed that the download tool has stopped working! At first I thought it was a code glitch, but no I checked everything out and it was clean? then I tried uploading the same scripts to a second server and yes it worked, I even tried the same scripts on a third server and it worked…. and one last shot was to try the scripts on a different domain but same server “Bump!” no joy…. 
Could it be that YouTube/Google tracked the script page because of the Adsense banner? (maybe)… and the fact that a heap of trackback links from crap blog scrapers featured the article….. What to do now… Should I remove the scripts and links to it…. I’m not sure?
Popularity: 32% [?]
Update on Imagine/Gaelic Telecom Problems
Posted by Kieran McCarthy in Broadband, Oddities, Rants, Telecom on November 14, 2007
In my last post I mentioned about problems connecting to my own blog from my home broadband connection with Imagine/Gaelic Telecom. Although it is now fixed I am still having problems accessing my friend Robert’ Sweetnam’s Blog. I am accessing his blog through proxify.com its the only way at the moment – I rang Gaelic Telecom/Imagine support again last Friday night complaining about not been able to view his site.
I was asked if I have “Content Filtering” enabled which I said no and his reply was “Well I really haven’t got a clue why you cannot access http://blog.sweetnam.eu” he went on to say “I will send a ticket up to tech support and see what they say” he also asked me for my mobile number so a “techy” could ring me back within the hour, but as expected I was left still waiting on the call.
Monday morning came and lo and behold I got a call back from Gareth “the techy guy” at Imagine Telecom Support. He said they were still looking into the problem and that he would call me back before the end of working day. He also suggested that they change my IP address as that would surely fix the problem, I said no to the IP change and left them to it but hence to say I got no call back.
Left it stew for Tuesday….
This morning Wednesday I called back support went through the whole “rigga’ ma’ roll” (procedure) again with general support and demanded some answers by today. An hour later Gareth called back with the solution of changing my IP and I quote what he said…
Popularity: 14% [?]
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