I recently ran into some problems with 123-reg after taking advantage of their offer on .eu domain names and finding that the REFUSE to update the Company/Organisation field on the Technical Contact.

As they were offering .EU domains for around £1.20 I thought I would grab a few and grab myself a bargain, however I soon ran into problems when I tried to update the contact information for the domains.

As you can see below, for the technical contact on a .EU domain it clearly states that users need to contact support in order to have the Company/Organisation field for the Technical Contact changed.

So, I did as told and opened a ticket with 123-reg to have the detail changed… which they flat out refused to do – Read their reply below.

My Initial Message:

Please change the company on the technical contact from “Webfusion Ltd” to “XDnet Web Services” for the domain xdnet.eu

Thanks,
Dan

123-Reg Support Reply:

Dear Dan,

Thank you for contacting 123-reg on the 01st April 2010.
The technical contact cannot be changed. This information will remain as it is on the domain as we are the technical contact of the domain if you have registered the domain with 123-reg.

If we can be of any further help with regard to this or any other matter, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Kind Regards

Farhan
123-reg

My Second Reply:

123-reg and/or WebFusion Ltd is NOT the technical contact for my domain. You are the registrar.

I work in web hosting, I am my self a domain reseller and I know how the who is works. Please don’t BS me.

Your own system states that “* For .eu domains, please contact 123-reg support if you need to change the Company Name.” you also have support articles stating the same.

As I am the owner of the domain, and you are the registrar it is your responsibility to update the who is with the information the owner (that’s me) requires.

Please do so.

Regards,
Dan Rodgers
XDnet Web Services

123-reg support Second Reply:

Dear Dan,

Thank you for contacting 123-reg on the 01st April 2010.

I can confirm we can change the ownership details for the domain, however not the technical information unfortunately.

If we can be of any further help with regard to this or any other matter, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Kind Regards

Faiza
123-reg

Now as you might imagine, while yes the technical contact company is only a small detail, I still found it unacceptable that 123-reg was actively choosing to deny a simple request which I am more than entitled to do as owner of the domain.

I decided I wouldn’t let it rest, so persisted. And it worked.

I thought I would give 123-reg the benefit of the doubt, and thought that perhaps there might be some kind of limitation for changing the Technical Contact Company, so I went straight to the source and contacted the dot EU registry (eurid.eu) which stated:

EURids accredited registrars should be able to make changes under
registrant technical contacts and this can be done without any fees from
EURid.

So, after I established that this wasn’t the Registry, this left one link in the chain to contact – Tucows which is the real registrar behind 123-reg (123-reg are a mere reseller of Tucows).

After a couple of emails to Tucows they went through proceedure of contacting 123-reg about it and requesting the login details for my domain to the central OpenSRS management system. After no response and 123-reg still not replying to my support ticket asking for the login Tucows forced it and sent me the login details themselves.

Which provide me full management of my domain, direct with the registrar! Win!

I decided I would share this little story, both to share my anger at 123-reg’s lack of co-operation in the matter and also to hopefully show other users who may be facing the same problem with 123-reg and their .eu domains a way to have the details on the domains THEY own correct for the owners.

I would also strongly encourage people facing this problems to get in contact with the Tucows Compliance department on compliance [at] opensrs.org who can hopefully help you resolve the problem and eventually gain full management over your domain. Please also drop a comment below as I would love to hear from others facing this problem.

I run a small web hosting company, and work with multiple data centres and software suppliers etc to deliver my products, one of which is OVH.

Been using a server with them for almost 4/5 months now and, while the server seems fine the technical support is terrible.

A month or so ago i added an extra 10GB network storage to the RPS which now found I don’t need, so hey why not save a few quid a month and ditch it right? … No…

I called them up to ask about getting it removed before i renewed the service and paid the last invoice, something I consider to be reasonable, expected a few minutes on the phone and it to be done, however apparently they can’t do downgrades…

And if i wanted to downgrade i should have done it within the first 7 days… and I agreed to it… sorry… what?!

For me to get an RPS server without the unneeded extra disk space I will have to order a NEW RPS and migrate everything over to the new one, now while I can move 1 of the 2 IPs on my current RPS over I would be unable to move the main one… the one I and my customers use for everything.

Now it is my understanding that the process of changing disk space allowance is simple, if i request a upgrade the system puts it through a tech sits there types in the commands to the network storage node and allows me more disk space. So logic dictates that the exact same system should work in reverse, they remove 10GB – end of.

I have now been forced to renew the service, and pay the extra few quid for unneeded, unwanted additional diskspace so as not to have to 1, loose an IP which is in use on multiple websites by many clients. 2, take a server which has been stable and online with NO issues for over 2 months offline disrupting many streams which support radio stations from bedroom operations to large commercial stations, dependant on them.

Not only did I find the outcome dis-satisfactory but also the technical support person on the phone was also, rude and unhelpful add on top of that he sounded like he was half asleep and mumbling does not equal good customer satisfaction.

When the person first answered, and I explained the issue, he mumbled about me emailing instead, to which I tend to think – Hell no, I’m paying for a service and you have phone support to get off your lazy arse and do it instead of trying to pass it off and delay me getting the information i need for another 12 hours – after I replied with “sorry? what.” he mumbles nevermind and spouts the spiel about how if i want a refund – which i don’t – it has to be done within 7 days of purchase. It appears OVH have no understanding that when your purchase addons etc you purchase them as a monthly product, as you do their servers, you pay for them on a monthly basis, and not as a buy and get locked in product, each item i pay for is monthly, and i should have the freedom to discontinue these monthly addons at will – WITHOUT having to completely reorder my server.

I can only conclude from my current experience with OVH is do not use them unless you are VERY experienced with servers, and require NO support with your products.

DO not use them if you are an end consumer, instead try a host which works with users – try XDnet Web Services

Twitter has become a massive force on the Internet, I am wrapped up in it and tweet obsessively (@Dansgalaxy) as well as managing many twitter accounts and twitter bots.

As well as this other (bigger) businesses are taking advantage of twitter and using it as a way to communicate with their users, often it can be hard to tell which accounts are official here’s a list of companies / celebrities twitter accounts which are worth a look.

Microsoft:

• @Microsoft – Main MS account being run and managed by the corporate communications team
• @MSWindows – Announcing Windows 7
• @WindowsLive – Official Twitter account of Microsoft Windows Live
• @liveframework – liveframework
• @livemesh – Sync, share, and access the information you care about—wherever you happen to be.
• @SharePoint – The official tweetstream of the SharePoint product group – managed by @LLiu
• @bizspark – Microsoft BizSpark – Software, Support, Visibility
• @zunemarketplace – Zune Marketplace is a store for the way you love music, with brand-new releases every week and a huge selection of music in every style imaginable
• @wmdev – Windows Mobile
• @microsofttag – Microsoft Tag
• @ch9 – listen to the cockpit, help us fly the plane
• @ch10 – Channel 10 is Microsoft’s online community for the technology enthusiast
• @ch8 – Microsoft’s community for students
• @mixonline – Come check us out at www.visitmix.com
• @MIX09 – The Next Web Now, pre-empted by @MIX07, @MIX08 and @PDC08
• @SiteNamedDesire – Want a copy of A Website Named Desire? This li’l birdie will tell you how. Wait for the tweets.
• @MicrsftTech4All – News from Microsoft Accessibility team, which strives for technology to be usable by everyone & complements our physical & cognitive abilities.
• @MSDN – Updates from the MSDN site team.
• @adCenterBlog – News, Tips, Tricks & Best Practices From The Guys At Microsoft adCenter

[ Most Microsoft twitter accounts sourced from on10.net ]

Tech News:

Twitter can be a great place to stay on top of the latest tech news, and I often use it as a basic RSS system, and am often reminded to check out TechCrunch.com or the Guardians tech articles when i see their tweets.

• @TechCrunch – TechCrunch.com is a great tech news blog with some interesting stories.
• @GuardianTech – Tech stories from the Guardian
• @Twit – This Week In Tech
• @NYT_tech – New York Times Tech
• @TimesTech – Times (of London) Technology News
• @Digg_Technews - Popular technology stories from Digg.com
• @msntech – Tech and Gadget news from MSN
• @BBCClick – The BBC’s flagship technology TV show.

News:

• @BBCbreaking – Breaking News stories from the BBC.
• @Reuters – Reuters breaking news stories.
• @SkyNews – SkyNews news stories.
• @GoogleNews – Breaking news stories and updates from Google News
• @CNNbrk – CNN.com is among the world’s leaders in online news and information delivery.
• @NBCnews – NBC News — a leading source of global news and information for more than 75 years

Twitter Bots:

Twitter bots are becoming a fun part of the Twitterosphere (Twitter community). Twitter Bots can be like marmite, you either love them or hate them as with most things.

Personally I love some twitter bots (particularly the ones i run) and tend to take the view of don’t like it don’t follow.

Here’s a few of mine and others which I follow which are worth checking out.

• @JacksonBot – Picks up tweets about Micheal Jackson
• @LMAObot – Picks up anything with “LOL”, “Lmao”, “ROFL” etc in it picks up some random and funny tweets.
• @IsDeadBot – Picks up tweets about all things er dead. Which can be more interesting than you might think.
• @NoteRobot – Retweets “Note to self” tweets, very funny and some random laughs!
• @LuvOrHate - Picks up on what people love and hate, again some random interesting tweets – Created by @aaronbassett.

Celebrity Twitterers:

There is no doubt that celebrities have jumped on the twitter bandwagon, be it for self promotion or simply to tweet their life.

I wont go into an extensive list of Celeb twitterers, as there are lots so instead I will share my favourite picks and share with you some great celeb twitter stalker sites!

@StephenFry is one of my favourite twitterers with some interesting posts and insights into an interesting mans life as he goes about his day to day tasks, from visits to the apple store to ponderings a must follow for twitter users.

@lilyroseallen is one of my favourite artists (I know maybe a little sad) but i do love her, and from what i can tell she tweets for “real” and isn’t using twitter purely as a publicity vehicle, which i like you get to see Lily Allen the person.

One of the difficult parts about the web is you don’t really know if the person you are following is the person you think it is, this is where Valebrity.com comes in. Valebrity enables you to “validate” celebrities online so you know who your following is who it says it is!

Worth checking out if you want to follow your favourite celebs.

Also came across a blog post on Mashable.com which is worth checking it out which has 25 celebrities accounts from actors, musicians, politicians and writers which is worth checking out too.

So take a look, follow people and get involved in the wonderful world of twitter!

Don’t forget to follow @Dansgalaxy for updates and randomness from the world of Dan.

So I noticed a shiny new feature the other day on YouTube, the ability to pop out the video or to “Watch this video in new window” on certain videos.

Now so far the only video I have come across using this feature is a 1:05:37 long talk from Vint Cerf  and amazingly, I have yet to find a bug… and there’s only 1 improvement i would like to see at the moment.

So on videos using the feature you see a little TV shaped square with an arrow pointing into the top right corner right next to the Turn Down the Lights button.

When you click this it pauses the video on the main page and loads the video in the pop-up as you can see below.

This seems to work pretty well and is a nice little idea, but it can be taken further, now i have been watching this hour long talk and i want to watch the video in a new window after 20 minutes and the pop-up opens and starts playing from the beginning, which isn’t a massive deal but it would be a lot easier if it resumed from where you were watching, like BBC iPlayer can.

Well i have been on and off YouTube all day and finally seen a mention about the TV shows and Films which are supposed to come in and take over normal videos and all this crap… and YouTube just tweeted about they blog post on the matter so i thought i would check it out and share with you my views, however as its almost 4am I will leave that till the morning… but i will leave you with a few thoughts on the new Beta layout for the user page.

Beta Profile Layout/Design

First off this morning on my twitter i saw Alan (fallofautumndistro) was chatting about the new Beta profile layouts (i naturally activated mine and you can take a look here)

As you can see its a totally different look and puts a lot more focus on the users videos themselves. This in my view is a good thing, and YouTube have said in their blog post about the new channel design, that it does need more work and new features are on the way soon hopefully.

Personally I’m hoping the upcoming features include more usability and interactivity with the videos themselves i would love to be able to do everything i can on the normal video page on the user page as well, thus enabling the page to “channel” all that users content to you without having to leap frog back and forth between videos and users channel which never made sense to me…

Btw, Don’t worry about opting in to using the new Beta design, YouTube save everything about your current profile design so you can easily revert back if you don’t like things!

Okay, so i thought i would start something on my blog, quite simple just to talk a little about my favourite song of the week, i love my music, and listen to radio alot so i have a lot of favourites!

So this weeks i think it has to be Lily Allen’s The Fear, for me its classic Lily with a good beat and interesting lyrics.

The video itself reminds me a little of a couple of other female artisits, one being Kate Nash (which i also love) and Gwen Stafani because of the style of the video and music.

I am only now realising how crap I am at describing music, o well, important thing is i like it so watch it on youtube and buy it on amazon! (please).

So previously i made a post about YouTubes’ “Turn Down The Lights” feature, which when it was first online was very… very… very poor, now however i have noticed that the nerds at YouTube have obviously pulled their fingers out and got it sorted so it (almost) works as intended in all browsers.

Now lets get the “almost” out the way…

Yes they have still left the button position all messed up!! (if you take a look at the previous post I even demonstrated how this can be fixed!)

But alas, no it’s close but the no smoking ban means its no cigar.

I do want to post a few screenshots of how they have improved the feature and do a little comparison too.

So originally the page displayed like this when YouTubes’ “Turn Down The Lights” feature was activated.

As you can see the gradient looks crap… and there is the random floating “promoted videos” title, which as you can see below is still floating randomly in the background.

So they seem to have sorted the background fade which now looks much better, they have also fixed the problem with the pop over message when you hover the button so it doesn’t mess up the background gradient after you have hovered over it.

 Overall i think they have made some good improvements to how the feature works and looks in IE7, although there are still some basic things which need sorting, like the floating “Promoted Videos” title, and the alignment of the button and video title, both of which are pretty basic and can be sorted with a little time and a skilled programmer; which YouTube has.

So come on YouTube get this together! Nice idea. Poor execution.

I was just catching up on my YouTube subscriptions and stumbled across yet another, under tested (assuming it has undergone ANY testing) “feature”.

“Turn down the lights”

This only seems to show on the long videos, i noticed it on a 50 minute ofcom talk (don’t ask why, but i like to keep up with the media and communications sector).

I have to say, this seems to be the best example of simply little to no testing being done before things go live, and frankly it is totally unacceptable of a company/website like YouTube/Google.

YouTube and Google literally have hundreds and thousands of developers (its rumored it costs $1 MILLION a day just to feed them), and they are FAILING to produce decent features.

Okay so first off lets show how this looks on the page.

Exhibit A clearly shows the YouTube coders need to learn how to code.

Because the “Turn the lights down” button has bumped up the title of the video, leaving a lot of wasted white space around the top area. This is BASIC coding, and YouTube should not have this problem. End OF!

Also before any of the people who know I generally prefer to use IE7, this isn’t just IE… its FireFox too – not browser issue, it’s YouTube.

Just to prove my point slightly, i even went to the trouble of proving it can be done better.

Within 5 minutes (including the time it took to download and install the editor plugin) I had hacked about a bit and got them looking better. Obviously it can be done better. But it shouldn’t be done by me (at least not until I’m on the payroll!).

- Plugin used: http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ -

Of course, i do seem to rant about YouTube and their handy little “features” and changes, but this ones really got me, and it gets worse.

So when you click the “Turn down the lights” button to adds a kind of lightbox effect to the area around the video and hides the sidebar and other boxes next to and below the video itself. (Note the fact that the “Promoted Videos” title is left floating mid-screen)

As you can see it seems YouTube tried to get fancy and be different by not just making the background fade but by adding gradient to the fade, so the top left hand corner is much darker and fades off into the bottom right, however frankly this looks crap, and a normal lightbox style would be much better.

Also why couldn’t they have some nice JS “move” the video into the center of the screen, and maybe enlarge it? I assume the idea of putting it only on long videos is they expect users to watch them, and want to make it easier and less distracting? Well surely a centered slightly enlarged version is much better than just hiding the sidebar which now leaves a HUGE empty void above and below the video!

You guessed it! It GETS WORSE!

Not only this but now when you hover over the “Turn up the lights” icon it totally destroys the gradient around the area of the pop-up.

And leaves it looking like like someone cut a chunk out the gradient and then refilled it with another gradient.

This kind of thing just really bugs the hell out of me, its terrible, its buggy, its crap, pointless, pathetic attempts and showing off what they can do and they have failed.

Maybe the credit crunch is to blame, everyone else is blaming everything on the “economic climate”… maybe Google/YouTube had to give the entire debugging team the sack as they running a little short on cash? After all a majority of Googles money comes from ads…

The worst part is you just know that this kind of thing would have been picked up in minutes if the people who developed this went to Bob in the next office and said mind taking a look at what i just done?

YouTube, you fail.

BETA TESTING IS WHAT YOU NEED! I will keep saying it until you start listening!

The Kingdom Cover (UK)

Last night i quite literally discovered “The Kingdom” on my shelf, had no clue where it came from and thought i would give it a watch, I loved it.

The kingdom (2007) is a great action film where the main character Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) and 3 other FBI agents played by Chris Cooper (Jarhead), Jennifer Garner (Daredevil) and Jason Bateman (Smokin’ Aces) fight to get boots on the ground and find out what really went on in the oil-company compound which put Saudi Arabia in the worlds press after a terrorist attack killed and wounded hundreds of innocent children and an FBI agent. Their mission is to find who did it, and bring them to justice.

While The Kingdom is not your stereotypical action film, it does still check all my boxes, lots of gun fire, big explosion, strong male leads, huge suspense in the first 2/3rds (acts) of the film and a dramatic breaking point when they thought they would get out easy but instead found themselves in the familiar high-speed car chase, sprinkled with intense shoot outs and awesome explosions. Not to mention the kidnapping which could lead to another beheading video on the Internet.

Note: It’s well worth checking out the bonus features on the DVD which shows how they filmed the car chases and explosions – Very interesting and almost as entertaining as the final product – for geeks like me anyway!

I find it facinating how societies and people communicate and function, and this film shows this well between the characters. Unlike some films and media representations this film did not shy away from criticizing both the Saudi Arabia and the USA, although admittedly the line “America’s not perfect; not at all. I’m the first to admit it” for me made it obvious that this was an intention and not something which naturally wrote itself into the script and the American heroes seem to get more glorification compared to their Saudi counterpart which played an equally exciting role in the final action.

Throughout the film the team are blocked and hindered in every way, in the beginning they are informed of the “rules”, they are only permitted to walk through the crime scene, they must not touch anything and under no circumstances are they to touch a dead Muslim – This make finger printing hard. It is clear the FBI are there for one purpose. Publicity. The Saudi Arabian princes are desperate for good publicity after the 9/11 bombings (when 15 out of 19 were Saudi Arabian), Fleury uses this to his advantage to get boots on the ground and later on when he is blunt and honest with the prince, allowing them to do what they came for, finding the baddy and bringing them to justice (which doesn’t mean jail… have you ever seen an action film where the bad guy lives?).

I won’t go into how this film is great in how it handles the politics and shows it all in a different light than most films/TV shows, like 24. Hopefully this review was interesting, and i didn’t give too much away for those who haven’t seen the film; hopefully i hope to write more reviews like this, well hopefully better, in future.

Watch it, if you like action films, you will love it.

Read More about it:

Internet Movie Database: The Kingdom

Wikipedia: The Kingdom (film)

Get The Kingdom [2007] on Amazon