Archive for April, 2008

So, yes I got the laptop back. …. With a 3 inch scratch across the screen. I am sure it was the repair guy who wouldn’t give my the damn rubber feet. So I rang on Monday and the said they send to send it back for a screen replacement. Acer received it today, so I rang for an ETA. I now have to wait 5 days for a new screen to be ordered, before the damn thing will even be repaired. It’s really starting to piss me off now….

I’m starting to have Ferrari deja vu..

Finally got my Acer back, which was an 8 day turn around which including the day for dhl to mess up wasn’t too bad. It was meant to be 5 days however, but the inter-departmental arguments between customer services and the repairs department over me having to pay for some new rubber feet for the bottom of the laptop delayed matters. Repairs, wanted me to pay for 4 little rubber feet, and said it was not included in the full 3 year warranty with accidental damage. Customer Services said I didn’t have to pay. After they could not come to an agreement Customer Services informed me they would have to send some through the post and I’d have to fit them my self. They could not however ship them with the PC that was being returned that day !

Overall, no where near as bad as last time, at least they didn’t loose my pc. Customer Services, i.e. the phone answerers, were consistently quick at answering the phone and polite and helpful. The repairs lot, being techies seemed to have no social skills at all and what they did have was more abundant than their common-sense.

Had fun yesterday, rang Acer to get an update on the progress. They have “fixed” all the problems, but didn’t have any record of my warranty details, despite being told all the details when I opened the support call. I eventually managed to get it sorted, someone had typed the serial number on the warranty policy incorrectl.y

Today, I rang again today to see how it was progressing and told it was on hold as tomorrow they have to have a meeting to see if they are going to charge me for the new rubber feet to go on the bottom of the laptop !

If they try, I am going to argue that either they have fallen off as the glue was defective and therefore it’s covered as a defective part, or they must have accidentally fell off, in which case the accidental damage covers it. I don’t think I’ll sleep tonight with the anticipation….

I’m quite please so far… DHL honoured picking up the laptop yesterday and at about 10 am I got an email from Acer saying that the laptop had been received I can track it’s repair progress on-line. The online tracking said simply “under repair” and that was it, but at least it is some communication and feedback….

Two years 5 months ago, I purchased an Acer laptop. I wanted a high spec laptop capable of playing games as well as I don’t own a desktop machine. I bought an Acer Ferrari 8000, but within a month had problems with it refusing to start up sometimes. So I sent it off for repair to Acer. Acer support were appalling, it was in excess of 30 minutes before you got to talk to someone, then it was someone in India, who never seem to understand my accent. They picked the laptop up for repair.

Having waited a couple of weeks and there was no news, I rand Acer to find out they could not find my laptop. After another two weeks of hassled calls and nagging, they finally admitted that they had a receipt for delivery but still could not find it. They gave me my money back, and I purchased a Travelmate 8204 WMLI instead. (I know the support was bad, but I am technically minded and can sort out anything but hardware problems myself. So although the support was awful, the probability of me needing it was a lot lower than the average user. A small price to pay for the cost savings at the time)

I’ve been having a few problems with the laptop recently, something floating about inside when you tilt the laptop left to right is probably a good bet for the cause, but it has completely shut down a few times for no reason, and then wont boot for like a minute or so. The web cam started going a bit dickey a few months ago, failing to initialize sometimes. This could be solved by spinning it on its access a bit so I deemed it not worth sending back at the time.

So, on the 15th April, I gave them a ring. The phone rang ONCE !!!!! before someone answered it (must have been a quite time of the day). I explained the problems to someone that understood me (not in India) he asked for my warranty details, he couldn’t find them on his system which was a bit annoying so I finally admitted I’d have to ring back.

I found the details and again, Acer support answered the phone before I could start counting the number of rings ! The took the details and sent me an email detailing how to organise pick up and packaging. Excellent, I rang the courier (DHL) booked a pick up for the next day, wiped the hard drive, packed it all up and waited.

16th April

DHL failed to pick up the laptop, rang them and they said it would definately be picked up to day.

For the last two years I have been saying to people the Acer laptops are reasonably reliable, are an excellent price, but the support is really, really bad, so I have not passed on recommendation to anyone who cannot handle software problems themselves.

So, DHL aside, I have so far been impressed with Acer support. Will this continue ? Have Acer taken the bull by the horns and addressed their customer service issues ? Do they now provide an professional excellent support service to match their excellent range of laptops?

Only time will tell. Specifically the next couple of weeks…….

As well as providing an online web based chat mechanism in Assembla, you can also use any jabber/XMPP client to talk with the project chat room. This is very useful when you are coding and awaiting some input from another project member. Instead of having to check the web page for updates, register your pidgin client and get the nice new message notifications you are used to, whilst not having to install yet another IM Client. Simply add your details as per the attached picture (changing username to your registered user name).

I left the advanced settings as default, and had no problems connecting.

I cannot believe I have not come across assembla sooner !

Assembla is a free service, it provides virtually everything you need to get a project up and running with a distributed team. It is a web front end built round subversion, and provides a whole host of project orientated features.

The features are all modules (termed tools) and can be added and removed from your project at any time.
The tools include:

• SVN database
• Online chat that records history
• Image management for collaborative image design
• mephisto (blog and site management)
• Milestones for project management
• Scrum – for assiting in team meatings
• Tickets – bug / enhancement request tool

and a whole host of others. Essentially it seems anything you need for product development is provided apart from the development experience and a good idea. They can however provide the development experience if necessary as discussed later.

Within the space of half an hour, I had signed up, had a good look around, created a PRIVATE project, connected by SVN and checked in the first version, invited a friend to join the project by the on-line invite, played with the chat (which doesn’t hold your interest for too long when your the only person in the project chat room) and created a couple of tickets for bits to do in the project. I was nicely suprised to see lots of emails in my inbox when I did things like check code in and add new tickets, keeping my informed even if I was not currently on the site. It’s all very integrated and very well thought out, e.g. the change set notification emails provide links to the changeset online so you can see all the post comments and fiels changed.

Everything you’ll ever need for managing and communicating in a distributed project development seems to be there.

So what do Assembla get out of it? Well it seems their main drive is not orientated around the project provision, you can pay extra for professional services (like team time tracking, off site synchronisation branding, etc. ) which for the service level is in my opinion is a very reasonable price. However, their main income comes from the non-project side of your account. You can choose without cost, to fill in details and publish your skills and profile on their site. This database of highly skilled people can then be tapped into by others who wish to hire developers. Someone who has a good idea can create a project site, source developers, manage the project and it’s progress and pay the developers all with out leaving assembla. The payment scheme operates similar to paypal, moving money into credit and the paying it to the developers assembla account when they have completed the work. There are various mechanisms for getting money in and out of the assembler account, of which assembler take a margin and a reasonable one at that.

So there you have it, all the benefits of sourceforge, etc with a lot more additional tools and integration. The ability to create open and closed source projects under the same user account. The site is responsive, organised, and easy to pickup, but what do you expect from a site written in Ruby on Rails?

Oh, and it’s free. What more could a developer want ?

Last week, Apple chose in “Microsoft style” to enforce all users that have ITunes / quicktime installed on their windows machine to as default install the latest version of Apple’s Safari browser as part of the latest updates. The more humorous part of this ordeal, not with standing having the browser forced upon you was the amendment to to license agreement, that the software can only be used on “a single Apple-labeled computer at a time”.

To ensure that all you windows users, still comply with the license agreement for Safari, even though you don’t actually want it I have created the Apple Safari License Compliance Kit.

1. Download the picture to the right.
2. Print it on a sticky label.
3. Cut carefully along the dotted line (ask your mother for safety scissors if needed)
4. Stick onto your laptop / pc.

For more information see the register article