Tag Archives: Rant

Pizza Shop #Cannes Fails To Deliver

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Copied from an email addressed to…

To: info@cannes-centre.pizza-shop.fr, postmaster@cannes-centre.pizza-shop.fr, contact@cannes-centre.pizza-shop.fr, riviera@angloinfo.com, riviera.forums@angloinfo.com.

CC: info@mister-pizza.com, contact@mister-pizza.com, postmaster@mister-pizza.com

(Note that some addresses may not be active, though RFC requirements do require a postmaster@ address, though many domains choose to ignore this at their peril.)

I thank you for being fuckers.

For all the claims of quality, you fail to respect service. I’ve already
announce on Twitter #Cannes

http://twitter.com/SirWumpus/statuses/9787915922

your failures and I’ll publish in other Internet places related to Cannes / Cote d’Azur your refusal to respect common practice concerning 10-points for a free pizza.

Your most current flyer claims free delivery and makes no exceptions concerning 10 points for a free pizza. All the competitors, especially Mister Pizza (http://www.mister-pizza.com/index_fr.html), respect the concept of delivering a 10-point free pizza. PIZZA SHOP DOES NOT!

Your requirement that I must order a regular pizza at the same time as the free pizza is unreasonable for single person. How do you expect one person to eat two pizzas?! Totally stupid. Typically french as the english have come to know; certainly wanker behaviour

I’ve including Anglinfo.fr, Mister Pizza, and friends in this communication. I hope that they publish these details about your
failures to respect common practices.

Update: since the Pizza Shop fuckers won’t respect the “10-point get one free” concept, I’ve opted to order from a new different delivery place in Cannes, Wasabi d’Azur(04 93 39 55 70). This is my second time trying their service. No point system, but at least honest and friendly thus far.

Anal-tics & Urchins

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Google Analytics, or my preferred name for it “google anal-tics”, is a service designed to provide web site owners with statistics about visitors movements on their site. One would think this is a simple and ordinary enough service and nothing to worry about.

However, I have two issues with this:

First, to achieve this data gathering, a web site is required to load on each web page of interest a Javascript file called urchin.js from Google or the more advanced ga.js file. Essentially a web site is telling your browser to execute some remote 3rd party script on your system. This is a BAD idea in terms of security, since it might be possible to hijack that script in transit and replace it with attack / hack code. Also the script is not loaded securely via HTTPS, so no certificate authentication or validation of any kind is done; just blind trust that google-analytics.com has not been hijack by DNS cache poisioning or that some intermediate web proxy hasn’t been compromised.

Second, I am interested in protecting my privacy online as much as possible these days. I already have a pretty big online foot print dating as far back as 1986; regardless I see it as my right to restrict data collected about me. So whenever a web site asks for HTTP cookies, Flash Cookies (How to Manage Flash Settings), tries to load advertising, or track my movements through scripts and/or cookies, I’ll go out of my way to block that from happening.

So when a web site loads urchin.js or ga.js, it is going to communicate information about visitors back to Google. I find this an invasion of my online privacy. What I do online is my business, not Google’s. Google already has enough data about what search terms I look for (this can be controlled through Google, though who knows if it is honoured or not). Frankly I don’t think Google or any other 3rd party advertiser needs to know where and what the frack I’m doing.

Simple solution: use a URL blocker, like Bork Bork Bork! or Adblock Plus, to block urchin.js, ga.js, and/or anything from google-analytics.com from being accessed. If you don’t want to use a URL block, this can also be achieved by adding to the Unix or Mac OS X /etc/hosts file (Windows has an equivalent C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) and add an entry like:

127.0.0.1  www.google-analytics.com

Most webs sites where google-analytics.com has been blocked are designed well enough to continue functioning. However, there are a small handful of web sites that refuse to do anything when the tracking code is not loaded. Typical bad design on the web sites part. In the end I see Google Anal-Tics as evil and chose not to do business with web sites that expect me to put up with that shit.

“You no speaky english”

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Today is I have some technical pet peeves I want to get off my chest, arse, and other parts of my anatomy.

I’m Canadian and live in France. I speak and read both English and French, but English is my first and preferred language, especially for all things technical. I’ve configured my web browser Firefox (Opera and IE have this facility too) as to which language variants I want. The HTTP/1.1 web protocol as described by RFC 2616 supports the Accept-Language header that the web client software specifies in HTTP requests as to which language the user wants to receive in order of preference.

So !WHY! is it that web sites like Google, YouTube, and many others select a web page language based on the user’s geographical location (determined by country assignments of IP addresses) rather than my personal preferences!?! Especially when there is a protocol mechanism to facilitate language choice! Why should I then have to change the web site preferences and store a language cookie (RFC 2965) to remember that choice, when my web browser keeps telling the web site my preferences as part of each request I make where ever I go!?

Why do web sites insist on pissing users off by making broad assumptions about as simple a thing as preferred language? “Oh! You live in France, you must speak French by choice. We’ll give you the French version of the site.” Bzzzzt! WRONG! Game over! Thanks for playing! Bloody wankers! (I can make similar comments about language selection when installing software, my region is set to France, but I have a UK QWERTY keyboard! What does tell you about me? Grrr.)

My second peeve concerns Contact Us links on web sites, either the lack there of, that they are often buried deep deep in the web site in some obscure corner of a page, the poor choice of options such as no means to make general comments, suggestions, or ideas, or that the page is inaccessible or won’t display at all. I wanted to comment on my language selection peeve to YouTube, but there was no link for comments, just how to complain about copyright, abuse, security, get API information, and the like. Trying some of the alternative choices, like Help Centre, would not even display at all in the browser – as though the web page request was stuck in some sort of redirection loop.

One thing YouTube/Google have done is publish their postal address and phone numbers, so I’ll probably print a hard copy of this rant and mail it to them. If I had a fax (OK, I could use the computer’s fax service I suppose), I might do it that way, but I’d probably find their fax machine connected to an automated telephone system menu that I’d have to navigate first before I could get a carrier tone. Hmm. Maybe if I press zero for an operator and blast the modem tones in their ear. That might give me some small measure of pleasure and assuage my need use a clue bat on someone.