Update: Dell have finally agreed to refund us our money for the actual price we paid and not some lower price or credit note. I wont hold my breath until we actually have the money in our account. They must have finally realised that by not giving us our money back they were going to lose a whole lot more in the future because my company spends a lot on Dell equipment.

Anyone that knows me or reads this website will know that I have had problems with Dell. I cant stand them to be honest and the support that I have received is and was bloody awful. The basic story is that I have a £2,000 Dell XPS M1730 laptop that has gone wrong about 5 times now (two major ones where the motherboard and graphics card have been replaced). The last repair that was completed was shoddy workmanship and the screen has not been fixed correctly so it now wobbles on its hinges and now the wireless card is all messed up.

Basically I have lost confidence in the machine completely and have demanded a refund but they don’t want to give me one. The amount of times that they have put the phone down on me (or got cut off) is mind boggling and the number of times that they were meant to call me back but never did has been very annoying, especially when it means I have to go through the same shit every time I start with someone new. They were even cheeky enough b******s to ask me to pay to extend my warranty in case any more problems occur – If I could have, I would have put my arm down the phone and strangled the git.

My company in Germany has now managed to get our business contact to actually offer a semi refund. This is from the guy who originally said that he could not do anything for us and we would have to go through the customer service. The thing is though that they are not refunding the money for the actual laptop that I have. They are offering a different cheaper laptop. I mean how the hell can they get away with this, it just does not make any sense at all. Dell have gone from the company that I always recommended to people to the company I will tell everyone to stay away from. This is a lot of computers as well because I regularly get asked for my opinion on which computer someone should buy and they listen to what I say. How many other people in a similar position have they done this to? This has just cost Dell a lot of customers. Its a sad sad shame that Dell is no longer the company they were but I look forward to the new company that can fill the space.

The reason I mention all this again is because I read the consumerist.com and they have loads of complaints/articles about Dell and one in particular stood out to be a very similar experience to my own.  What really annoyed me was when I got my phone bill this month and £20 worth of calls were for my time on Dell’s support line. That’s how long I have been on the phone to them and it still hasn’t got me anywhere – the computer is still in my drawer doing absolutely nothing.

I now own a very very expensive paper weight. Just remember to thing before you buy from them or any other company that treats its customers like dog poop.

Saw this on reddit.com. How true is that..

I just asked my mate Jonny (in Germany) what he planned on doing this weekend. His reply was that he might be going to a model airplane show if the weather is alright. I had a little joke at his expense because usually I would expect him to be found in the nearest pub. How exciting can a model airplane show be? He sent me these videos.

That looks bloody mint. I’m hooked and I want one.

I am sure that most of you have already noticed this but some of you are probably unaware or don’t really care. If you know anyone who isn’t really computer literate but still go on the internet for certain things (probably about 70% of people online) and have watched them on google you might have noticed that they click on the very first link that shows up in the results. This first link is usually an advert. I have watched my mum on many occasions look for something, click on the first link and then wonder why the content is not really what she was looking for. I have explained this to my mum but she is still getting used to navigating around to find what she wants and she forgets all the little bits such as sponsored ads etc. So how many companies are paying for clicks like this? I would take a good guess that most of the clicks on these very first sponsored links are done by people like this. Perhaps some advertising campaigns are setup for this but I can imagine that most are not.

The main crafty issue that I don’t like is when Google shows an ad for a company when they are the very first result in the rankings and they always place these ads in the top sponsored links section meaning that most people see what they were searching for so will click on it costing the company money for traffic they would have gotten anyway. I noticed this a while back but didn’t really give it much thought until I was creating a campaign for someone. The last search I completed was for iSale software on the mac. If it is still the same you will notice the first result is correct but the ad above is for the exact same link. Your telling me that Google could not automatically work this out? They could but won’t because I can imagine that a lot of their revenue is created by doing this. I don’t know if Google has something under the hood that will sort this out in the admin, but considering they are showing the ad in the first place I doubt it or else why show it?

I don’t know Google Adsense well enough yet to know if there is a way that you can create filters to get around this, but I would recommend companies to take a look into this so they can see how much money they might be paying for traffic they would have gotten for free. If you have analytics you may be able to see what the search result was in the same way normal referrals work but, any click from Adsense gets redirected through the google system (obviously) so perhaps they do not include the same meta information they normally would do. If this is the case you begin to get a better understanding why they are not doing this.

So what do I think Google should do?

Firstly – They should remove the first sponsored links that blend in so well with the search results. I think this ruins it to be honest. Its easy enough for me to ignore them but what about the majority of users who have no clue what they are and just click on them thinking that they are the results.. They get around this because they put on ’sponsored links’ and it removes them of responsibility but they know that in the majority of cases people will click on them not really understanding what they are.

Secondly – They should stop putting paid ads in the results when you appear in the first few results of a page and the user should be able to specify exactly how they want this. They might say show my ad when I am not in the first result or in the first 10 results. It’s their money so they should have control over this functionality.

I have been helping out a friend by creating some software for a business that he is starting. Once again I have been going through the process of choosing a suitable platform but, to be honest I wish I hadn’t bothered now. I had been trying to convince myself to use Java because I love it – mainly because it is ace, has the potential to rock and because I know it best (perhaps the last one is more of an objective reason). So why is it that I have not yet used it for any of my own web projects? Developing Java web apps? Because I think it is just too much hassle to get going. There is so much stuff to setup even before you actually start coding it puts me off every time. I want to be able to get going immediately with what’s in my head. The last time I gave Java a chance I got that bored after having set everything up and learning what everything was that I gave up with the project pretty much soon after. I just keep wishing that someone would start a Java framework/platform from the ground up that is not based on JEE (well perhaps just some of the best bits). There are no reasons why Java could not have a framework that would trample all over Rails/Django or in the very least be as enjoyable.

It is worth noting though that if I were writing software that was ultimately critical (such as banking software etc) I would not use anything else (.Net would be suitable but it would take a while for me to get to the same level of experience) because this is where all that configuration and power makes sense and allows applications to scale easily, allowing disparate groups from different locations to easily work on the software. The sheer amount of professional tools available for Java projects is also amazing and I have gotten so use to some of them that when writing in another language I miss them. Eclipse is a god send (Netbeans is not too shabby either) and I miss it greatly when working in other languages. This even includes when an eclipse plugin is available to use. They are just never as polished as the standard Java editor, even though a lot of them are very good (so don’t take this as some sort of insult).

Let’s face it, in reality most web applications that you work on these days are relatively simple in nature. Usually you are taking information -> processing -> displaying in some simple fashion. For this kind of use why would you need to be running a JEE server + Spring + Framework(struts et al) + ….. ? Let’s face it, most companies ditch the full stack servers and go with a plain servlet engine (tomcat). For most projects it always seems like an overkill. I would prefer to see a very simple (but production capable) web server that is capable of running a variety of simple but powerful frameworks that adhere to some standard (like WSGI on python) all written in Java. I think this would increase the use of Java in the web space by a huge amount. Companies that trust Java would choose it over buzz word frameworks any day of the week and for good reason as well.

By the way, all this moaning does not mean that I am saying that any of the other languages or frameworks are rubbish. Quite contrary actually because they have managed to fill this gap that Java could have so easily filled years ago. In the end I decided to use RoR for my friends business just because I could start work on it immediately and show him results. Everyone seems happy with that. For the kind of app it is, it will never go crazy and need to scale like your facebook or twitter so that’s one less thing to worry about. The application has already been designed so that nothing is shared from the beginning allowing requests to be forwarded to any server providing enough scale for what it will be used for. Using RoR (would be the same with Django) I have managed to get the main application skeleton (different users, authentication, signups with verification/states/file upload, admin sections and much more) up and running within a week of working in my spare time. The last time I tried using Java it took this long just to get up and running.

Some of you might be shouting that it could be that I am lacking experience developing Java web apps, and you would be both right and wrong. I develop software for Java web applications all day long but, they have already been setup and I just add new functionality and fix bugs etc. But why is it that my most experience is with Java but I find it tiresome developing web apps for it? Yet I had no Ruby/Python experience at the time but found the whole experience developing with Rails/Django a much easier and enjoyable experience??

So what does all this mean?? Well if anybody is perhaps interested in rectifying this situation and working on a Java open source web server and framework then leave a comment expressing your interest. If we can get enough people interested (I am guessing about 3-4 people to start with) we might as well go ahead and do it ourselves. It would be interesting, we will learn loads and it will finally shut me up moaning about Java frameworks all the time.