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photo of Coldcut’s live setup — structured cabling system required
Justin's Linklog Posts
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Downloadable filesystem images for Xen; all Linux so far, modified to run as Xen guests out of the box
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‘what if your Singleton has a handle to some limited resource, like a database or file handle? I guess you get to keep that sucker open until your program ends’. YES (via mjd)
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excellent software-development interview advice
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iPod-sized ambient hardware loop player from China; the tee-shirts are fantastic
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DHS ineptitude strikes again
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some really authoritative thumbs-down comments from Valdis Krebs and John Robb
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interesting further notes; apparently the Trintech Smart 5000 PINPad terminals run Linux, and can be managed remotely
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‘Communities are human business debuggers. Why not know the problems, address them and prove that they’re fixed all in public?’ excellent article, with the solid testimonial of Threadless backing it up
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‘former Iowa congressman Edward Mezvinsky was caught up in a 419 scam, and stole from his law clients, friends, and even his mother-in-law .. He is serving more than six years in prison after pleading guilty to thirty-one counts of fraud.’ bloody hell
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Suw Charman and a load of others (see comments) lay into the BBC’s “citizen journalism” conference: “a complete waste of time”. ouch
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‘Please visit and take a minute to post positive comments about BlueSecurity. BlueSecurity is encouraging us to do such things so let’s help them spread the good word.’ explains a lot; several other astroturf coordination forums at castlecops.com, too
new-referrer-rss.pl – generate RSS feed of new referrer URLs from access_log
SYNOPSIS
new-referrers-rss nameofsite [source ...] > new-referrers.xmlDESCRIPTION
Given the name of a web site, and a selection of Apache combined log format ‘access_log’ files containing referrer URL data, this will generate an RSS feed containing the latest referrers.
The script should be run periodically with ‘fresh’ access_log data, from cron.
Renesys Blog: The Bluesecurity Fiasco — in which Todd Underwood, CSO for Renesys Corporation, applies some real-world knowledge of how the internet works to the “timeline of events” press release, issued by BlueSecurity as part of their ongoing PR about the DDoS.
Judging by the comments at Slashdot, this really needs to be more widely read.
Here’s some highlights:
The timeline from BlueSecurity […] is frustratingly vague. It uses phrases like ‘tampering with the Internet backbone using a technique called “Blackhole Filtering”.’ As Thomas Pogge, a philosophy professor of mine, used to say: that’s not even wrong yet. There is no “Internet backbone”, there is no technique known as “Blackhole Filtering”, and blackhole routing is not normally described as tampering. So the whole explanation is nonsense. […] Let’s clear one thing up for the press and everyone else: this event just wasn’t that interesting. The attack against bluesecurity was a run-of-the-mill denial of service attack.
His conclusion:
I believe that the PR engine from BS is in overdrive spinning this event as fast as they can. But the concrete facts being put out by them simply to not add up. In the process they seem to be doing two things: 1) trying to imply or state that someone at UUnet was bribed by a spammer. This is simply ridiculous. I know many of the people who work for UUnet and they are honest, hardworking and extraordinarily clever people. They would not be crooked, or stupid, enough to do such a thing and if they were, they would have been trivially caught by change-management procedures. Moreover, such a change at UUnet (or BTN) wouldn’t have caused the event BS claims to have witnessed anyway. Additionally, 2) BS is trying to deflect attention from the damage that they caused at Six Apart. It would be much better if they could just claim ignorance of the DOS, apologize and move on. I recognize that that isn’t going to happen, but it sure would make this whole thing easier to handle.
Well said.
Of course, this is pretty much immaterial — the people who are using Blue Frog, and vocally supporting Blue Security, don’t really care what happened. All they care about is that someone is taking some kind of direct action against spammers, in some way or another, and if there’s a little “friendly fire” and some bending of the truth, why, this is a war! What, do you support the spammers?
It’s disappointing — the amount of disinformation being successfully pumped out (and accepted!) on this story is massive.
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they’re no longer shipping games, electronics, or home/garden items to Ireland. what with this and the crappy shipping, looks like they’ve written off the Irish market for some reason
Bubba, now safely back in Dublin after his 8000-mile flight from LAX, is getting back into exploring his old manor.
Here he is, ignoring a very brave magpie. Judging by the way the magpie was brazenly hopping around him, cawing, and the way that Bubba was ignoring him, I suspect there may be a nest nearby….
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good points from Joe Drumgoole; what works for Irish VCs isn’t necessarily aligned with what’s good for Ireland’s high-tech industry
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First doodled on a placemat by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike for Plan 9 in 1992 (via era)
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Blue Security accidentally took down large chunks of the blogosphere in an attempt to evade the DDoS targeting them; impressively inept. also, they really need to tone down their sock-puppet commenter squad (via torrez)
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open geodata creation from OSM in a 3-day mapping-fest this weekend. great explanation of why open geodata is important in the UK and Ireland, too
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behavioural analysis on web-search engine bots, with some pretty pics (via waxy)
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YUM. wonder if I can find condensed milk around here
Apparently, Transport For London are planning ‘e-money’ trials based on their remotely-readable Oyster RFID cards.
Combine that with Kevin Mahaffey of Flexilis’ talk at Black Hat last year, where he demonstrated apparatus to extend RFID read range from 4-6 inches to approximately 50 feet, and things could get messy. ;)
The slides for that talk are available here (PDF); slide 20 specifically mentions the Hong Kong “Octopus” cashless-payment card.
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Some users of the Blue Frog software are considering this leak to be some kind of Churchillian challenge to their resolve, instead of a failure on Blue Frog’s part! amazing
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‘What Wikipedia has taught us .. is that in a vacuum of politics, politics will be created. There is no vacuum of politics.’ interesting article
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‘This spammer is using mailing lists he already owns and is now sending millions of such messages’ — hasn’t hit any of our thousands of spamtraps, which is quite impressive in that case
Blue Frog is a company who operates a “Do Not Email” list, on the (optimistic) basis that spammers will vet their lists against it.
Reportedly, it’s been compromised. If this is true, I’m not surprised — as Dr. Aviel Rubin‘s report to the FTC of May 2004 regarding a Do-Not-Email list notes:
The scrubbing approach [to running a D-N-E list] requires that a list of live email addresses exist. While the party owning that list may be well intentioned, it is unlikely that such a valuable list would not leak out. History is replete with insider attacks, as well as external break-ins to highly sensitive sites, such as the Pentagon computers. The Do Not Email Registry represents the kind of prize that attracts hackers. In this case, the prize has monetary value as well. Once the list is exposed, there is no way to undo it.
Also, it’s almost inevitable:
If this service were running for some time, it is more likely than not that the plaintext addresses would leak at some point, given the history of computer security incidents.
Update: it appears, according to this white paper, that the Blue Frog “Do Not Intrude” list is hashed, rather than plain-text. Rubin’s advice still applies:
Without hashing, a compromise of the registry database results in exposure of all of the registered email addresses. This is a total disaster. However, even exposure of a hashed list is a catastrophe. A spammer with a copy of a hashed list of email addresses is able to find out, for any email address, if the address is in the registry. The attacker simply hashes a candidate email address and sees if the hashed value is in the list. This is very powerful. [….]
Hashing provides absolutely no security against a marketer who obtains a scrubbed list and uses that to sell the addresses that were scrubbed by the registry. Whether or not the list is hashed has no impact on a malicious marketer in the scrubbing approach.
Are you a student, and interested in earning $4,500 for contributing to open source, and fighting spam, over the course of the summer?
If so, get thee hence to the Google Summer of Code 2006 site, and propose a project!
Last year, we in SpamAssassin didn’t get it together to mentor SoC projects. This year, however, we have a few prospective mentors (including myself), and a few sample project ideas lined up; we’re all ready to go! Here’s the Student FAQ. Be quick; applications end in a week and a bit.
Here’s hoping we get some interesting submissions ;)
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YouTube’s bandwidth bill ‘may be approaching $1 million a month’. holy crap (via waxy)
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a really nice Flickr-like take on mapping; every street has user-contributed location geodata included; open REST API; social aspects; Google-friendly. Best mapping site I’ve seen
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‘Everything needed to make this episode is available in the eler-source directory in a bzipped tarball. … Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license’
Here’s what happens when you search for single letters on Google:
- A: Apple
- B: BHPhotoVideo.com
- C: C-SPAN
- D: D-Link
- E: E! Online
- F: FuckedCompany.com (probably due to being referred to as ‘F***edCompany’ or similar)
- G: Gmail (not the main Google site, interestingly)
- H: H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online
- I: iTunes
- J: Jennifer Lopez (really. “J-Lo”, I guess)
- K: K Mart
- L: the Council of Europe (?!?)
- M: Texas A&M University
- N: AT&T Knowledge Network Explorer: Blue Web’n Homepage
- O: O’Reilly Media
- P: The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Q: Q4Music.com (the website for the UK music magazine ‘Q’)
- R: The R Project For Statistical Computing
- S: McDonald’s (note the apostrophe-S!)
- T: AT&T
- U: The University of Arizona, Tucson Arizona
- V: V for Vendetta (the official site)
- W: W Hotels (a subsite of StarwoodHotels.com)
- X: X.Org
- Y: Yahoo! Messenger (again, not the main Y! site)
- Z: A To Z Teacher Stuff
Interestingly I got to see the new Google search results page, with the sidebar, once. It must be in the process of rolling out…
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tomorrow afternoon, Federico Heinz and a talk on GPLv3 from Ciaran O’Riordan
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could be interesting if true
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‘That’s the only way that snails catch you up. If you weren’t paying bloody attention.’
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Los Vegas – home of Windows XP piracy!
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via O’Reilly Radar. good to hear I’m not the only person hacking awfulness with Data::Dumper and eval()
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hello new Linux desktop wallpaper!
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Google Maps mash-up from John Handelaar, mapping the locations of all of Eircom’s DSL-enabled POPs in Ireland. excellent! some major holes in the map: not so excellent
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using an ALSA output plugin called raop-play, which streams to the remote server. If only Apple had just used esd’s remote streaming protocol, instead of inventing their own crappy DRM-laden proprietary one, this would be a lot simpler
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everybody seems to be taking the piss out of this, for some reason
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Apple’s postmaster on the DearAOL.com blocking fiasco, and the economics of Goodmail. ‘Goodmail will likely fail on its own merits’
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‘the scammers had used open-source software called Asterisk to convert a computer into a PBX … running an automated telephone information system. The voice system sound[ed] exactly like the bank’s phone tree’
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turns out a user named “sekrit” has actually been representing the output of the BBC 6Music radio station. awesome!
John-Graham Cumming asks, ‘Are Citibank crazy?’:
I blogged a while ago about Thunderbird’s phishing filter trapping a seemingly innnocent mail. Now, a reader has forwarded to me a genuine email from Citibank that he says was trapped by Thunderbird. I’m not going to reproduce the email here because it contains private details of the user, but it is a valid Citibank message.
Thunderbird thinks it’s a scam because Citibank uses one of the oldest phishing tricks in the book. The have a URL displayed in the message then when clicked goes to a totally different URL.
Sadly, this has proven to be really quite common. We’ve investigated using this rule as a worthwhile phish-detection rule in SpamAssassin, several times, and without much luck. In fact, we’ve had to create a FAQ entry for it — since it’s such a superficially-attractive but ultimately useless, idea, many people have had long discussions on our lists about it!
The companies that produce these false positives in their mails include American Express, Bed Bath & Beyond, Universal Studios, Microsoft, Hilton Hotels — and now Citibank.
A couple of other examples from real mails:
<a href="http://www65.americanexpress.com/clicktrk/Tracking?
mid=MESSAGEID&msrc=ENG-ALERTS&url=
https://www.americanexpress.com/estatement/?12345">
https://www.americanexpress.com/estatement/?12345</a>
<A HREF="http://echo.epsilon.com/WebServices/EchoEngine/T.aspx?l=ID">
https://www.hilton.com/en/ww/email/tab_email_subscriptions.jhtml</A>
By the way, it really is quite impressive for a bank as heavily phished as Citibank to still be making this kind of basic mistake in their mail-outs! It reinforces a point I made in a mailing list posting recently:
As far as I can see, the approach taken by pretty much all banks to their online services is simply too bureaucratic, hide-bound, and fundamentally driven by their marketing departments, to ever cope effectively with phishing. :(
(For what it’s worth, I know Citi have some smart techies working there; but the rest of the company needs to start paying attention to them.)
If you routinely log into one or more remote systems using SSH, and have a flaky internet connection or an incompetent ISP, you probably already know about screen’s ability to detach and reattach sessions.
However, you still have to manually type screen -r to resume a detached session, each time — and sometimes you’ll forget, start working in an SSH session, get logged out, and lose your state.
Here’s the next step — automatic screen-sessions for any remote logins: RemoteLoginAutoScreen.
Optimo have a new mix up — the First Hour Mix:
Here’s the fourth in a brief series of mixes where we present something a little different. This mix isn’t really a mix in the conventional sense but rather 17 tracks blended together. To us, the first hour of Optimo, or to be more accurate, the ‘Espacio’ part of Optimo (Espacio) is a vital part of the night. It is our chance to play absolutely what we like without thinking about the dancefloor.
It’s a great mix — certainly not dancy, but some really interesting tracks here. The Optimo guys put together some really great music.
In fact, I went to see them play last Saturday — or, at least, myself and a couple of mates tried to. Supposedly, they were supporting The Juan Maclean at the Bud Rising festival over the weekend, but the show was such a shambles, without anyone having a clue when it started or who was on stage at any time, I’m pretty sure we missed their set entirely.
On top of that, it was EUR20 in, and to add insult to injury, the only lager on sale was Budweiser! I mean, I wouldn’t mind that if the “Bud Rising Festival” deal meant free entrance, but charging 20 squids and then cutting off the supply of decent booze as well, is just a crime.
Ah well, the Filthy Dukes were pretty good at least.
The view from Sorrell Hill, Co. Wicklow, facing north.
Looks lovely, doesn’t it! Well, here’s the view in the opposite direction. ;) We got a great reminder of the mercurial nature of an Irish April. This panorama captures the whole story.
So I’ve been using this for a few days now — and I’m loving it. A calendaring system that deals coherently with the web:
- good RSS integration
- publishing calendars, easily, via HTTP
- subscribing to third-party calendars via HTTP
- a URL API, allowing third-party sites and user scripts to add events to your calendar
I keep finding little things that make perfect sense, and just feel more logical than what I’ve used elsewhere. This rocks!
One thing still needs work, though: the links to Mapping fail spectacularly, for non-US addresses at least. But that’s pretty minor.
By the way, I have a feeling that Mac.com had parts of this, but really, you had to drink a lot of Apple kool-aid to use that, and I just didn’t go for that. Sorry Jobs fans.
Do you know what would be cool now? If Upcoming.org published venue/location-specific iCal feeds. Oh look, they do! Awesome…
Argh! This is what happens every day to my DSL connection, at half past 12:
13 Mon Apr 10 12:26:53 2006 PP12 -WARN SNMP TRAP 2: link down
14 Mon Apr 10 12:26:53 2006 PP12 INFO ppp_ready: ch:8056167c, iface:80419f14
15 Mon Apr 10 12:26:53 2006 PP12 -WARN SNMP TRAP 3: link up
26 Tue Apr 11 12:26:46 2006 PP12 -WARN SNMP TRAP 2: link down
28 Tue Apr 11 12:26:48 2006 PP12 INFO ppp_ready: ch:8056167c, iface:80419f14
29 Tue Apr 11 12:26:48 2006 PP12 -WARN SNMP TRAP 3: link up
38 Wed Apr 12 12:26:56 2006 PP12 -WARN SNMP TRAP 2: link down
40 Wed Apr 12 12:26:58 2006 PP12 INFO ppp_ready: ch:8056167c, iface:80419f14
41 Wed Apr 12 12:26:58 2006 PP12 -WARN SNMP TRAP 3: link up
50 Thu Apr 13 12:27:00 2006 PP12 -WARN SNMP TRAP 2: link down
52 Thu Apr 13 12:27:03 2006 PP12 INFO ppp_ready: ch:8056167c, iface:80419f14
53 Thu Apr 13 12:27:03 2006 PP12 -WARN SNMP TRAP 3: link up
Worse than that, it will generally assign a different IP address to the connection when it reconnects! This buggers up any applications that rely on long-lived TCP connections, such as SSH shell logins, tunnels, remote-desktop sessions, and instant messaging; all get disconnected and have to be manually re-set up.
Initially, I thought this may have been a flaky connection. However, it appears not — check out those timestamps; that’s a scheduled, daily event. Also, there have been no other disconnections apart from those.
A discussion on the IIU mailing list revealed the reason — it seems BT Ireland have a policy of resetting their customers’ connections daily. That could be OK, if they came right back up with the same IP — TCP/IP is designed to cope with that, and generally does — but it does not do that. Instead the IP address is reassigned every single time.
This is turning out to be quite a nuisance. Working over the internet requires quite a few VPN connections, tunnels, and remote logins, and having to re-set those up, daily, is turning out to be a pain in the neck.
I’m casting around for hacks to get around this. Right now, I have an assortment of jiggery-pokery involving ssh, a shell script ‘while’ loop, and screen(1), but it’s messy and not working out too well. Ideally, I’d set up another VPN (via IPSec or CIPE), and set it up to reconnect on link failure, then route all other VPNs and remote logins out via that — but I don’t have spare routable IPs to do this with. Anyone got any good suggestions?
By the way, it’s worth noting that their FAQ fails to mention this, instead giving some incorrect information about my IP being ‘removed’ when my web browsing session ends:
Is it a fixed IP?
No, the product is set up with dynamic IP Addressing. This means that every time you open your browser you will be allocated a different IP address for the duration of that session. When the session ends the IP Address is removed.
That is incorrect — this has nothing to do with web browsing sessions.
To be honest, I’d prefer not to have to switch ISPs to get away from this brokenness — the rest of the service is quite nice, good pings, good throughput, no other disconnections or outages — but this is quite a problem for someone using BT Broadband for telecommuting purposes. :(
I gave up smoking last year on May 26 — that anniversary isn’t too far away. Here’s how much money I’ve saved, courtesy of QuitMeter.com:
QuitMeter Counter courtesy of www.quitmeter.com.
Wow — I could buy myself another iPod! ;)
Paul Graham’s recent essay on his experience with software patenting has been making the rounds recently.
Now Kevin Marks has commented. Worth reading, since he demonstrates nicely the kind of crap you see in a ‘hot’ field, such as video (which he worked on with Apple’s Quicktime):
I broadly agree with Paul Graham’s essay on Software Patents, but I do think he underestimates the damage from patent trolls, and from what he calls the mafia-like behaviour of some patent holders. Paul has been lucky in the field he has worked in, but in the Audio and Video area there are many patent thickets. … While I was at Apple on QuickTime, there was a steady stream of patent trolls claiming that Apple should pay them royalties; enough to keep several lawyers busy, and a lot of engineers spending time working on prior art evidence demonstrations. Several potential features were excluded from QuickTime due to patent thickets. The obvious one was the Unisys LZW patent that encumbered GIF, but there were other more subtle pressures that meant adopting open source codecs was discouraged. Working on the patent license agreements for MPEG meant that technology ready to ship was deferred pending legal agreement on more than one occasion.
In my experience, that’s what happens — once a field becomes “hot”, patent trolls and other nuisance “inventors” start appearing en masse, and then you’ve got to waste a lot of time dealing with that crap.
So, now that I’m back in Dublin, I’ve taken a quick look around for ways to keep up to date on upcoming live gigs — and found that the situation, frankly, sucks. In particular, almost none of the sites are offering RSS or Atom feeds yet.
Having said that, Waxy and Leonard‘s Upcoming.org is doing quite nicely for the Dublin metro area:
Upcoming.org: Dublin Events
And lots of credit for the promoter, MCD, who seem to be just about the only Irish listings site who offer RSS:
This is fantastic, but — naturally — they don’t cover events put on by their competitors. ;)
Apart from that, it’s pretty shoddy. Lots of late-90’s-looking websites out there, and no feeds in sight. Thankfully, Feed43, and some perl scripting, is on hand to allow me to take matters into my own hands.
Entertainment Ireland offer a pretty good music news section — but sans feed. Feed43 saves the day:
And, surprisingly, Ticketmaster, of all sites, is turning out to be a great way to find out what’s on in Dublin, listing pretty much all ticketed events in a nice, clean, succinct format. Unfortunately, the highest location resolution it offers for Ireland is the country as a whole. However, this can be worked around by subscribing to individual venues, such as Crawdaddy or The Village. (This has a happy side-effect of narrowing down the types of music — I can skip finding out that The Eagles are playing, since they won’t be playing at Crawdaddy ;)
For some reason, though, Ticketmaster haven’t got around to offering their own RSS feeds. Not a problem — in response I’ve hacked up tm2rss.cgi, a little script which scrapes the venue pages and produces RSS:
For other venues, simply take the venue URL (for example, http://www.ticketmaster.ie/venue/198641 for The Village), add the numeric venue ID in place of NNNNN in this URL: http://taint.org/scraped/tm2rss.cgi?v=NNNNN , then use that as the Feed URL in your feed reader.
It’s my bi-monthly perl blog entry, to earn my place on planet.perl.org! ;)
Here’s an interesting “gotcha”. Take this code:
perl -e '%t=map{$_=>1}qw/1 2 3/;
while(($k,$v)=each %t){print "1: $k\n"; last;}
while(($k,$v)=each %t){print "2: $k\n";}'
In other words, iterate through all the key-value pairs in %t once, then do it again — but exit early in the first loop.
You would expect to get something like this output:
1: 1
2: 1
2: 3
2: 2
instead, you see:
1: 1
2: 3
2: 2
The “1” entry in the second loop is AWOL. Here’s why — as “perldoc -f each” notes:
There is a single iterator for each hash, shared by all “each”, “keys”, and “values” function calls in the program
That’s all “each” calls, throughout the entire codebase, possibly in a different class entirely. Argh.
The workaround: reset the iterator using “keys” between calls to “each”:
perl -e '%t=map{$_=>1}qw/1 2 3/;
while(($k,$v)=each %t){print "1: $k\n"; last;}
keys %t;
while(($k,$v)=each %t){print "2: $k\n";}'
This got us in SpamAssassin — bug 4829.
To be honest, having to call “keys” after the loop is kludgy — as you can see if you check the patch in bug 4829 there, we had to change from a “return inside loop” pattern to a “set variable and exit loop, reset state, then return” pattern. It’d be nice to have a scoped version of each(), instead of this global scope, so that this would work:
perl -e '%t=map{$_=>1}qw/1 2 3/;
{ while(($k,$v)=scoped_each %t){print "1: $k\n"; last;} }
# that each() iterator is now out of scope, so GC'd;
# the next call uses a new iterator, starting from scratch
{ while(($k,$v)=scoped_each %t){print "2: $k\n";} }'
Scoping, of course, has the benefit of allowing “return early” patterns to work; in my opinion, those are clearer — at the least because they require less lines of code ;)
I just received a very nice info-pack through my front door regarding the new Dublin Metro line, which is in planning at the moment; it seems they’re soliciting feedback from residents near the proposed routes. Nicely done.
Right now, Dublin has an embarrassment of good public transit, at least when compared to my previous home in Orange County. There, public transit is actively campaigned against.
My favourite claim: that it ‘increases crime’ — in other words that poor people from Santa Ana would come down to Irvine and steal stuff, which they couldn’t do with vehicular transport, for some reason.
The OC Weekly thought it was pretty funny, too — and an opposing group comprehensively debunked it. Still, it seemed to work; while I was living in Irvine, I got to see the Centerline proposal gradually whittled down until it was finally killed off. During that time, in contrast, Dublin built the Luas.
Unfortunately it doesn’t exactly go where I want to go, but you can’t always have everything. ;)
Quick update — I’ve added Ed Falk’s “Spam Diaries” to http://planet.spam.abuse.net/ .
finally!
Just got a new cafetiere, so I can finally switch back from instant coffee to the real deal again for my morning coffee. My productivity has doubled. Still no DSL, though — early next week is the current estimate, and I can hardly wait.
I went to a pub quiz last night with mates Macker, Tom and Alan — a benefit for a new Dublin theatre company, I think. The prizes were:
- First prize: several 50 Euron vouchers for various Dublin eateries
- Second prize: two fancy scarves, a Nivea women’s cosmetics kit, and a very metrosexual Nivea bath kit for a guy
- Third prize: 4 bottles of nice wine
We did very nicely — “aglet” was correctly defined for instance — but not nicely enough. Put it this way: guess who’s wearing Nivea deodorant?
Hey lazyweb, hear my plea! What are my options for buying consumer electronics online, now that I’m back in Ireland?
I like online shopping. I dislike Argos, and I really hate Dixons, Currys and all the rest of the consumer-electronics high-street operations. Get me on the net and out of the nasty little shops and I’m happy. ;)
All in all, I’m a bit of an Amazon fan. However, now that I’m back in Ireland, I’ve been brought back to earth with a bang on that count; the prices are OK for items at both Amazon.com and .co.uk — but shipping is turning out to be a total disaster.
Basically, I’ve put in two orders, paid through the nose for basic shipping, and neither has turned up. For example — I ordered this phone a week and a half ago, on the 9th March, ponying up UKP 27 for the item — and a painful UKP 7 for shipping by International Mail.
Delivery estimate on ordering was for between 5 and 7 days — 14th to the 16th March. That was long enough — but it still hasn’t turned up, and Amazon.co.uk is still claiming that that is the current estimate, despite the 16th of March being 4 days ago ;)
On top of that, it appears they don’t offer any way to track the packages using that shipping method, so who knows what’s happening with the damn thing right now.
If I compare that with an order I made at Amazon.com last November, in which I nabbed a handy FM transmitter for my iPod — in that case, I got it shipped by plain old US Postal Service for $4.51, which was handily discounted as Super Saver Shipping. That — as with pretty much all my Amazon.com orders — arrived in 3-4 days, and for a hell of a lot cheaper too. If I’d had to pay for shipping (which I didn’t anyway), $4.51 vs UKP 7 works out as a third of the price, no less.
I’m guessing this is mainly down to Amazon.co.uk being shoddy in terms of how it deals with shipping to Ireland, and there are probably sites that use better-quality shipping partners.
Surely there must be better deals with vendors in Ireland, or even elsewhere in the Eurozone? Anyone know? Please drop us a line in the comments!
Update: the items arrived — 14 days after ordering. This is a moot point now, though, since Amazon.co.uk are no longer selling ‘PC & Video Games, Toys & Games, Gift items, Electronics & Photo and Home & Garden items’ to Ireland; I guess it was easier to give up on the Irish market for now. Very disappointing — but I’m waiting to see what happens next.