Nokia "Support" - ha!

Well, my irate feedback on the Nokia Support site did yield results quite quickly - they replied via email within the specified 24 hours. I'll include a screenshot for your "enjoyment":

The red-circled areas are:

• Wrong URL - it's actually "account.nokia.com", not "accont". Speaks worlds about the competence of Nokia Support staff when they can't even get the URL to the website correct.
• Not only no acknowledgment that their site had a fault, but a haughty "oi! mind your language!" :-\
• URL if you want to "reply" to this mail - that's right, replying to this mail got me an automated reply telling me to go to this URL and fill out the Contact Us form ALL OVER AGAIN. Brilliant. Absolutely freaking brilliant!

I'm refraining from calling them up because I'd probably wind up blasting some hapless support rep who's neither involved with the website snafu, nor this haughty and rather useless email. Instead, when Nokia's site prompted me to fill in a survey about how satisfied I was, I told them (the Comments box - the rest of the survey indicated my huge dissatisfaction):

I forgot my Nokia Account password. The extreme geniuses who designed the Nokia Account site mailed me s reset link that took me to my account information page (not a password reset page). The Change Password link demanded my old password, which I have forgotten. 


The last complaint that I wrote was responded to by another great genius, signed off as "Seauli Hati" - the reply starts off by advising me to go to "www.accont.nokia.com" which my browser tells me is a non-existent site. Way to go, "support" people!


Moreover, this genius advises me "We also request you to refrain from using unparliamentary words in your e-mail." Do support staff not understand the that the depths of "genius" displayed in not having a proper password reset page is bound to drive customers up the wall? Have they heard of acknowledging an error and apologizing for the fault, and then reminding the customer that his behavior transgressed polite communication standards, and giving the customer a chance to apologize?


The mail from "Seauli Hati" then gives me the procedure to reset my password (which I had already followed and complained that it did not work). At no point does this person acknowledge the website fault that caused me to lose my temper, nor does this support person say it has been fixed - merely rattles off the hackneyed procedure to reset my password. This is extremely nice to know - despite the fault being on Nokia's web site, it's the customer that gets treated like dirt... 
Your Q. 5 below asks how likely I am to recommend Nokia to a friend - well, be assured that this horrible experience with the website, and with haughty and "genius-like" support staff who cannot unbend enough to simply say "Sorry, mistake has been fixed, please try again" - THAT is going to feature first in my advice to friends.


And I will also stress to friends and whoever asks that when Nokia Support says "via email", it means only at their end - you, the "valued" customer, still have to go fill out the form at http://www.nokia.co.in/get-support-and-software/ask-nokia ALL OVER AGAIN, instead of being able to reply to a mail like normal people do.


Further still, I will continue to decry the "genius" in requiring the customer to sign in separately on every site in the Nokia family.

Well, now that I got back into my account and could sign into the Store, I find that to actually choose and download the 100 free tracks promised to me in the voucher that accompanied the phone, I have to either install their great "Nokia Music" app on Windows (which I don't use) or download the tracks on my mobile phone, running up a nice fat bill on GPRS. Wahoo!!!

It's almost funny, actually - it's the 100 free tracks voucher that I was trying to check out when I ran into that website password-reset stupidity... and now it looks like I might not take advantage of it after all. Hah! :-/ C'est la vie...

Nokia Account website - or - "hire some real developers, stupid!"

I own a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. To check out the services offered by Nokia to its customers, I'd signed up for a Nokia Account some time back. I re-visited their site today, to realize I'd forgotten the password I'd supplied when creating the account. Well, that should be easy enough to fix, right? Click the "Forgot My Password" link, supply the info they ask, and wait for a password reset link to arrive in my mail.

Ah! It arrived super-fast. But when I clicked it, this is what I saw (some parts redacted for obvious reasons):

After that first "Huh??" moment, I saw the Change Password link, and clicked it:

Yes, you guessed right... the Old Password WAS mandatory entry. For someone who'd applied for a password reset because he'd forgotten the old password. Sheer soaring genius, no?

I re-tried this a couple of times, to check if I was somehow making a mistake in this elementary and often-used ritual at different sites. Then I lost my temper. Having found a "Contact Us" link, I proceeded to Contact Them. Oh, yes, sizzling contact:


Do the morons who designed and coded the Nokia Account website NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT A PASSWORD RESET IS??? WTF is the idea of mailing me a "password reset" link that only takes me to the main page of my account - and when I click the Change Password link, DEMANDS MY OLD PASSWORD BEFORE I CAN CHANGE TO A NEW ONE???!! When are the blasted imbeciles who coded this function going to realize that people ask for a password reset WHEN THEY HAVE FORGOTTEN THEIR PASSWORDS and can't log in to the site in the first place!!! Yet you expect me to enter my old -- FORGOTTEN -- password before I can set a new one - FIX THIS, IDIOTS!!!


If you don't understand what the word "customer" means, Google and others understand very very well. No wonder Nokia is slowly dying, if this is the kind of screaming frustration imposed on users who are trying to use Nokia sites via the Web - and who make the mistake of forgetting their password for the garish, Flash-ridden sales spiel that comprises these sites. 


Which brings me to another huge annoyance - hasn't Nokia dealt with web-sites long enough to learn how to implement single sign-on for all the sites in the Nokia family? What kind of juveniles make you enter your username and password at each and every site?? I am sitting looking at my account information at account.nokia.com - from the reset password link, which I've already blown off about above. I click the Ovi store link IN MY ACCOUNT INFORMATION and arrive at an Ovi site that is totally ignorant of my account information! How much coding effort does it take to pass a UserID number in the querystring of the link to other Nokia sites? Forget about Web 2.0, you people are still trying to get Web 1.0 working - if you're trying at all!


Bah - your website developers are disgusting. Looks like Nokia IS going to die out after all. Pity, because the phones are pretty darn good - I should know, I'm on my third Nokia now after a stint with Motorola.


Since you have demanded my email address, kindly mail me a notice when your idiot web developers have finally managed to create a proper password reset page. Till then, twiddle your thumbs and figure out how many users you're losing that might have converted into paying customers...


I don't know how productive that will be - I got the usual mealy-mouthed acknowledgment page and follow-up automated email that assured me of action within 24 hours.

And yet, I wonder - if the Nokia site has at least a few hundred users, am I really the first to forget my password? Are all the other users of Nokia sites Einstein-like geniuses who never forget a password? Umm... what are the odds of THAT?

So that means that at least a few of the other users who have faced this babbling lunacy from that site have probably complained, and been ignored. Well, perhaps it is time that Nokia dies...

VirtualBox PUEL, Ubuntu Lucid beta 1, low graphics & hang, kernel 2.6.32

Curious about it, I downloaded Ubuntu Lucid beta 1. Growing wise as I age, I didn't even think of running it on the bare metal, and set about installing it into a VirtualBox VM. After the first reboot, of course Ubuntu came up with a low 800x600 screen resolution, so I installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions and rebooted.

Oops.

When I returned to look at the VM, Lucid was complaining about low graphics and throwing up a series of (X) windows asking me to resolve the problem. None of the options helped, and after a couple of minutes of wandering through those dialogs, Lucid went into hard-hang... so I turned to Google, of course.

Naturally, it turns out it's a known bug, though VirtualBox hasn't yet released a version with the fix included. The answer (for now) is in the post http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/6198#comment:5 - which advises manually patching a C program file and recompiling the Guest Additions.

Running the Lucid installation in recovery mode, I was glad the patch was only 4 lines of actual code, and did a peek-switch-type-switch-peek (...) copy of the changes into the specified file. Then ran the vboxadd setup command, which compiled the modules, and rebooted.

Well, I got the GUI, minus the mouse. Actually, minus the mouse pointer - moving the mouse caused various areas of the panel to be highlighted, so it was just that the pointer wasn't visible.

Some poking back in browser history brought me back to
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9012706&postcount=15 and I copied the conf file content, and (thankfully) pasted it into a new /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in the Lucid VM. Log out and log in again, and thankfully the mouse pointer was visible too.

After all that, I wound up getting quite angry, having realized that ALL the darn themes in Lucid place the blasted window control buttons on the left.. AARGGHH! Couldn't they have left ONE theme in there with the buttons in their old place on the right of the title-bar?

I've seen mentions on the Net of having to use gconf-editor to switch the placement of the control buttons back to the right, but I'm not bothering with that right now - had enough of Lucid for one day! :-/

Free file share site Opendrive (with hotlinking) + Copyscape

I needed to check an article that I was editing for plagiarism, and while Googling for snippets did yield some hits, there were patches of the file that looked suspiciously well-written (in contrast to text that was obviously original to the author). For these blocks of text, Google didn't give me helpful (contiguous) results. Meh.

The most famous site for checking this, is, of course, Copyscape.com. Though, in hindsight, I should have checked for clone sites that might have let me upload a text file for scanning, I didn't do that; I wound up slogging my way through several free file-sharing sites, but apparently all of them protect their downloads - you can't get a direct URL to the file, which was what I needed to give Copyscape. Instead, those sites dish up an HTML page with ads etc - which explained the really crazy results of my first try at Copyscape :-\
(This may sound like I'm being a bit of a cheapo, but sans a credit card, I can't sign up for the Premium service, which I think lets you simply upload a file for checking. I don't see this as being a frequent need, either, and a monthly or yearly subscription to Copyscape would probably just lie unused most of the time. So this is a worthwhile workaround for the rare case when I want to run a document through their plagiarism scanner).

Keeping up with my research, I found that the operative term that some sites used to describe this feature was "hotlink" or "hotlinking". A new search led me to Opendrive. The site info said it allowed hotlinking for free, so I signed up. Good point - they don't force you to verify your email address before letting you use the site. WARNING - bad point - use a throwaway password for this site, not a password you use anywhere else - they belong to the class of "geniuses" that mail you your username and password in their welcome mail, and will probably do the same when you change the password. Obviously, be wary of entrusting such a site with confidential data/documents as well, since the practice of mailing a password indicates (to me at least) that they have no concern for the security of your data. If it wasn't for the fact that the featureset included just what I needed, this would have turned into a rant! Grrrr...

Anyway: I uploaded a text version of the article, and then had to fumble around a bit to get hotlink (direct access):

1. In Folder Properties for My Documents (default upload folder) I changed it from 'Hidden' to 'Public'.
2. In the folder listing, below the icon for the file you want direct access to, is a "Properties | Links" hyperlink. Click that to visit the file properties page - there, you have a "Full: (download)" link for the file. I tried that URL in another browser, and voila! direct access to the text file... good to go!
3. Went back to Copyscape, and pasted this URL in. Copyscape scanned it, and gave me a (very limited) listing of possible sources - including some that Google had not. Still, this served to identify several different sources - now to get back to comparing the sources v/s the article. Copyscape helpfully highlights the common text blocks between source and your checked "page" (obviously, this is the first time I'm using Copyscape, though I remembered the name for some reason).

Well, brain-dump over, back to work. This setup can, hopefully, be used quicker and with more efficiency in the future, than I did today - nearly two hours of digging and annoyance to get the result I wanted!

PyS60 2.0 install headache on Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

So I just bought the 5800XM a few days ago... the price had dropped enough to make it a rather attractive buy for the features - large screen, 3G, WiFi, A-GPS. Moreover, Nokia has recently (partially?) open-source-licensed Symbian OS code, which appeals to my FOSS sensibilities (yeah, yeah, they were probably forced to do so to compete with the likes of Google's Android, but still!).

Another feature that strongly attracted me toward S60 was the availability of Python, my current favorite programming language, on the platform. It can do some pretty powerful and useful stuff, judging by the modules available, and some of the sample code out there.

The wiki's Installation page was apparently outdated, or did not address some special condition on this phone, since it originally only advised "Download the latest SIS packages of the Python for S60 runtime and the PyS60 Script Shell from the SourceForge project page or maemo garage." (I have since edited the page, but don't know how long that info will last, or whether it is 100% accurate, or will continue to be accurate.)

So I initially installed the two packages, following the wiki. I found, at the Maemo download page for PyS60, an archive named "PyS60_binaries_certificate_error_fixed.zip" which then seemed to be just what I needed - including a fix for some certificate error I didn't have to face. Great, huh? Turns out, not so much...

I installed the two packages, and then tried to run the Python shell. Result? An error message, "Update is mandatory for installing Python Runtime & it's dependencies. Rerun the application for automatic updates". So I looked around, and found the App Update utility on the phone, and ran it. It told me that "Live TV" and "Mailsync for Exchange" (neither of which I needed or would use, and I couldn't understand WTH these had to do with Python anyway) were available for download. Sighh... exiting App Update and trying Python again gave me the same error, so I despondently told it to go ahead and install them.

Still the same error message. Arrghh! Re-ran the App Update, it apparently found even newer versions of the packages, with different sizes, and painfully and slowly (GPRS, no 3G service here yet) downloaded and installed the packages. (Why couldn't it have located the newest versions the first time? Or did I happen to check just before and after release of a new version? Who knows!)

STILL the same error message!!! Some more Google searches... found that I probably needed to reboot the phone. Did that - quite a few times. Nope, no improvement :-(

At this point, I decided the obvious way was probably wrong, and two hours into what should have been a simple and quick install, revisited the Google search I'd abandoned earlier. I kept at it till I found this in the Maemo bug tracker. N97 - another S60 5th Edition phone, but unlike what the wiki stated, this person had a bunch of other packages installed... and his worked after a reboot. Hmm... was I missing some packages, and the stupid error message was wrong? It wouldn't be the first time.

Now where was I supposed to get the packages he mentioned? After looking around the Maemo download page a bit more, I noticed the PythonForS60_2.0.0.tar.gz file. I found it contained pips.sis in the PythonForS60/PyS60Dependencies/ subfolder, as well as ssl and stdioserver packages that the bug report mentioned. I wanted to try them one by one, so I connected the phone via USB cable as a Mass Storage device, and copied the pips.sis file onto the card. I then used the File Manager to locate and install pips.sis. This first package itself fixed the immediate problem with Python - it runs, and I can execute sample scripts. I didn't need to reboot after installing the pips.sis file.

Still miffed, I created an account at the wiki, and added in http://wiki.opensource.nokia.com/projects/Installing_PyS60#For_S60_5th_edition_phones so that at least other users in the same boat might find some semi-accurate information in the wiki! :-/

Probably I'll encounter a need for the ssl and stdioserver packages later, as I get into playing with Python on the phone. For now, other things are holding my attention :-)