Tag Archives: problems

Reviews

Air quality in airplanes

It’s now been two days since I got back from my trip across the pond, and every time I blow my nose, my mucus is bloody. Sorry if I’m grossing you out, but I’m trying to make a valid point. The air in airplanes is too dry! Every time I fly for extended periods of time, my nose dries up so badly that it bleeds. I doubt I’m the only one with this problem, and I wish airlines addressed it already. It’s been well known for some time now. I remember reading an article years ago about how dry the air gets in planes, and what some airlines are doing. Well, I doubt much has been done since, because this problem still exists.

It seems that if the humidity is turned up, problems with damage to internal, structural components in the fuselage may occur. Also, fungus problems may occur in the plane. However, if I remember correctly, the impact of these two issues can be minimized, if not eliminated, through modern humidification systems and proper insulation of walls and crevices. Yes, it requires some retrofitting, but it’s worth it. Just think of the millions of travelers who have to deal with bloody noses every time they fly!

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Reviews

Caveat Emptor: Global Internet Solutions (GISol)

➡ Updated 11/4/2008: See FOX News expose GISOL for the crooks they really are, and watch the two people behind the scam literally run from the camera. Watch the video on YouTube or below, and read the post, as well as the numerous comments here or on this post (over 300 comments in total). My thanks go to Mike of Report-Gisol.com for doing the legwork to get these criminals on TV.

These same crooks have been calling me from private phone numbers, harassing me, and trying to intimidate me into letting them post responses on my website. They’ve tried repeatedly to post comments on this post and on my other post about them, and I refuse to let their lies go through to the live site. They need to be in jail.

This is one web hosting company you should not touch, not even with a 10-foot pole!

I signed up with them back in January of 2006, because I was attracted by their many features and low price. They were offering over 35GB of space, and unlimited bandwidth. While that last hook should have had me turning away, I fell for it. I anticipated increasing traffic to my sites, and was worried about bandwidth fees. Their many features blinded me. See the attached PDFs for the details of the hosting packages (Gisol Windows Hosting, Gisol Linux Hosting). GISol AdSure, there were signs this was a shady operation right from the start, but I ignored them. The cheesy site design should have clued me in, as well as the script, which is still running, and says there are so many more hours left until the “blowout sale” expires… As of the date of this post, that script’s been running for at least 6 months (January to June 2006).

I took the bait, and signed up. That’s when my problems started. I knew I should leave right away, but I was hooked on their Control Panel, which let me do everything easily. They were, and they still might be using the H-Sphere Control Panel, which lets one do just about everything (add/manage domains, sub-domains, DSNs, MIME types, databases, etc.) You name it, the control panel can do it. Unfortunately, that’s the ONLY thing that Gisol has which works well. Everything else is broken in one way or another.

Let me give you a few examples:

Their web servers always go down! By always, I mean always. It could be daily, it could be a few times a day. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, your sites will stay up for a few days, which is nothing short of a miracle when it comes to GISol. The funny thing is, they advertise 99.999% uptime on their site – look at the plan specs, linked above, or this beauty: Gisol Uptime Guarantee. I’m still not sure how they compute the percentage they list in the plan specs, but I think their formula automatically eliminates the downtime to the third decimal point…

Their web servers don’t store session variables. Yes, you heard me correctly! I used session variables for logins on one of my clients’ sites, including a couple of my own. I’d log in, and the site would kick me out, because I had the web pages look for the variables, and they couldn’t be found anywhere. I had to argue with their tech support for days, and finally appealed to management. They kept accusing me of being at fault, when their pathetic servers wouldn’t work right. Finally, they switched me to another one, and wonder of wonders, no more session variable problems… but of course, other problems awaited.

Their tech support is outsourced to India. Normally, I don’t really care where the tech support is located, as long as they can do their job, but when they can’t speak English, are obviously reading packaged phrases off some sheet, are rude to me, don’t solve my problems, and lay the blame on me when they’re at fault, I tend to get a little upset, and I think you would, too.

False advertising: they say they have millions of customers on their site. I doubt it. I think their real number of customers is somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand. Why do I say that? Because:

  • They only had 1 mySQL server. Seriously. I’m not kidding. The name of that server was was mysql1, and they couldn’t move me to a new one when I asked.
  • I signed up for a Windows Hosting account, and my server’s name was win2k8. When I had problems with that, they moved me to win2k9, then win2k10.
  • I also signed up for a Linux Hosting account, and my server’s name was web16.
  • When I called Tech Support, I kept speaking to the same 3-4 technicians all the time.

I had numerous – and when I say numerous, I mean plentiful, as in plethora – database connection problems. Just about every time I tried writing to one of the mySQL databases, I’d get timeouts or connection problems, and they simply couldn’t solve them.

The user testimonials on their site are false. They have to be. I can’t imagine I’m the only one who’s had problems with them. Besides, the problems are so blatant that anyone but a blithely unaware novice would know they’ve got serious problems.

I made the mistake of buying a domain through them. When I wanted to switch to another web hosting provider, they held the domain hostage. It took several emails and phone calls to get them to release it. I kept getting bounced from one “department” to another. Welcome to Indian-style bureaucracy, right here in the States!

I cancelled my web hosting plans. On their site, they say they offer refunds any time, for any reason. That’s the biggest crock of crap I’ve ever seen. It’s now three weeks since I requested a refund, and I’ve still to get it. I spoke with their Billing “department” – and I use the term loosely. They passed me off to the Refund “department”, and told me I could call them at certain phone numbers – one was a toll-free number, and the other was a long-distance number. I called the first number, only to be disconnected right away. Then I called the second number, only to have it ring endlessly, then get disconnected. No, not even an answering machine. Finally, I wrote to their email address (refund@gisol.com). I’m still waiting for an answer. I’ve already started fraud proceedings with my credit card company.

All in all, I think I don’t exaggerate when I say you should beware of Global Internet Solutions (aka GISol). If you value your sanity and your wallet, stay far away from them!

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Thoughts

HP to cancel telecommuting for its IT division

In a move that stunned its IT workforce and the public, HP’s new CIO announced it will eliminate telecommuting for most of its IT folks. They’ll be forced to come to work at some 25 offices in various locations around the world. If they don’t, they’ll be out of a job without severance pay. Due to its previous policy of encouraging telecommuting, HP now has employees spread as far apart as the East coast when the job is on the West coast. If such employees want to keep their jobs, they’ll have to uproot their lives and families, which is just plain silly.

As a past IT Director with change management experience, I can say the following:

  • 180-degree turns are traumatic, and don’t turn out well. This is one such change, and it will be messy and painful. It will alienate a lot of bright folks. From a management standpoint, it’s not right. Change is best done gradually, and by co-opting people.
  • Making the bright people come into the office in order to straighten out the poor performers, as HP’s CIO hints, is yet another silly decision. Yes, I can tell you certain IT personnel should be on-site, but not everyone needs to be there. If HP’s IT workforce is peppered with poor employees, this is a recruitment/management issue, not a telecommuting issue. The decision is a non sequitur. If your tire is flat, plugging the exhaust pipe won’t solve the problem. Seems to me a much better solution would be to pair up the poor performers with good performers who live in the same area, and have them work together on issues, whether it’s at someone’s home or my IM/phone. Training would also be another solution.

Overall, I think this is a pretty rude change in policy, and not well thought out. It was done namely for the sake of shaking things up, not because a specific goal needed to be accomplished.

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How To

Moving email from a PC to the Mac

Background

For the purposes of this guide, I’m going to assume that you were using Outlook or Outlook Express on the PC, and you want to import your messages into the Mail app that ships with Mac OS X. I speak from personal experience with this guide. I had to do this when I switched from a PC to a Mac in September of ’05. I’ve finally solved the last piece of the puzzle, and I wanted to share this information with you so it won’t take you as long as it took me.

I had an email archive that spanned close to 10 years – a fairly complete one at that. I’d been keeping it in Outlook Express, then Outlook, over the years. When I switched to the Mac, I didn’t want to lose it. My wife had an archive that spanned a few years as well, and she kept it in Outlook. We didn’t want to lose those messages, either. As you know, there’s no easy way to import email directly from the PC into the Mac. There’s no nice and easy transfer wizard, for multiple reasons: different operating systems, different file systems, different ways of storing the mail, different applications, etc. Even if there had been a wizard, given my huge mail archive, I’d have probably crashed it.

What didn’t work

Still, I tried to be reasonable. I thought equivalent Microsoft products on the two platforms might be able to import from each other. So I took my PST from my PC, transferred to my Mac, and opened Entourage (the Outlook equivalent on the Mac). The import failed. The two can’t talk to each other. You can’t import between them either way. I thought that was pretty silly. Of all the things Microsoft does wrong, this has to be one of the more obvious ones.

Next I tried the less possible, which was to import from the PST file directly into Mail. That didn’t work, either. I surfed the internet for solutions, and stumbled across a possibility of installing Eudora on the PC, importing from Outlook into it, then copying the library onto the Mac, and using some special utility to do the PC to Mac translation. Well, Eudora failed on the import from Outlook. Again, I had a big PST, I wasn’t surprised. Plus, even when I tried transferring the messages it had managed to copy to the Mac, the utility didn’t do its job. At any rate, I hadn’t put my hopes in Eudora. It might have been all the rage in the early nineties, but it’s pretty useless now. Somebody else suggested using old versions of Netscape Mail. I tried that as well, only to fail again.

I called Apple Support, who were completely clueless about this. Finally, on my second try, the technician suggested I use an IMAP account to transfer the email between the two computers. I saw two problems with that, both related to the size of my archive: one, where am I going to find an IMAP account with more than 4GB of storage, and two, I’m not going to sit there and upload over 4GB of data through my DSL connection. It was going to take days, if not more. Obviously, not a very practical solution.

➡ Updated 1/3/08: Gmail now offers more than 6 GB (and growing) of email storage, and includes both POP and IMAP access.

What worked

Just so I won’t drag this out needlessly, Thunderbird turned out to be the best solution for the transfer. I installed it on the PC, imported from Outlook into it, then transferred the mailbox files to the Mac, where I had to delete the mailbox index files (.msf) files, and only leave the un-indexed data files there. That’s because the Mac version of Thunderbird needs to build its own indexes. So, I located the directory where the email got stored for Thunderbird on my Mac, moved the mailboxes there, and deleted the index files. I then opened up Thunderbird, and after it re-built the indexes, there were my messages! After all the trouble, I was pretty happy!

Next, I wanted to get my email into Mail. This is the step that took the longest for me, and I just solved it yesterday. Granted, I hadn’t been looking very hard since last September… Now, some of you might be asking yourselves why in the world I’d want to switch from Thunderbird to Mail, and I’ve got two reasons: one, and the most important, Spotlight indexes Mail messages, so I can search for what I need from one location, and two, iPhoto sends out photos through Mail, and we email photos a lot; we wanted to have our email messages in one place. Yes, I know, we should share our photos on the web instead, etc…

So, how did I solve it? Certainly not by calling Apple Support, who are were clueless on this issue as well. And I also didn’t solve it by importing from Thunderbird into Mail, which is impossible (not any more), as you might find out if you try it. Version 2.0.7 of Mail crashes miserably, and has done so, reliably, since September of ’05, on my every attempt to import from Thunderbird. I choose Import, then I select the Other or the Netscape/Mozilla option (since Thunderbird isn’t listed as one of the options), then I browse for the location of the message databases, and when I select Import, it crashes like a drunk limousine driver.

Instead, I solved this by doing a search on the Apple Support forums, where intrepid users have posted some great solutions. Among them, I found the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. It’s a wonderful little utility that will let you drag your Thunderbird message databases onto its icon, and will automatically convert them to Mail message databases. It will also copy them to the proper Mail message library. All you need to do is sit back and wait for it to finish, then rebuild your Mail folders, and all your messages will appear – just follow the directions you’ll find on their website. The best part is that it didn’t crash while it processed my entire archive (over 4GB of messages)! Now that’s a reliable application!

➡ Updated 1/3/08: It turns out, as one of the commenters has pointed out, that Leopard’s version of Mail includes an import function from Thunderbird. Problem solved. Thanks Logan! Now I wonder if a new version of the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner will be released, or whether this new import feature in Mail will negate the need for it.

When I got done, I was ecstatic. All my mail is indexed with Spotlight, and I can instantly find messages and files that are years old without having to do separate searches for each!

Let’s review

  1. Install Thunderbird on PC, import from Outlook/Outlook Express into it.
  2. Install Thunderbird on Mac, note storage location for mail files.
  3. Copy message databases onto Mac, in the specific directory where mail is stored, delete index files, then start up Thunderbird and let it rebuild the indexes.
  4. Use the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to export to Mail. (only for OS X Tiger)
  5. Rebuild mailboxes in Mail, then relax, because you’re done! (only for OS X Tiger)
  6. If you have Leopard, skip steps 4 and 5, and use Mail’s import function to get your messages out of Thunderbird. (only for OS X Leopard)

💡 Thunderbird and the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner are free software. If you find them helpful, please don’t forget to donate to them, even if it’s just a few dollars. It’s the right thing to do if you want to support the efforts of their developers. Here is a donation link for Mozilla (the maker of Thunderbird), and here is a donation link for the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner.

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Thoughts

There's something in the air here in the States

I’ve been meaning to post an entry about this for some time. There has got to be something in the air or in the environment here in the States that’s causing people to have problems with their breathing, and flaring up their allergies. Case in point, Ligia and myself. Let me explain.

Ligia came to the States in 2004. She had no problems whatsoever (no allergies, no breathing problems) in Romania. As soon as she came to the States, she started having problems with pollen, clothes fuzz, and dust. She gets itchy eyes and she sneezes when she goes outside. The skin on her fingers gets cracked and rough when she handles old books or cleans the dust in our home. It’s not fun at all.

Me, I came to the States in 1991. Like Ligia, I had no allergies in Romania, which is a fairly polluted country – or at least used to be when I lived there. While my problems aren’t as serious as Ligia’s, my nose seems to be continually stuffy, and I’ve noticed my problems getting gradually worse over the past few years. Now, I’ve started sneezing from little bits of dust as well. All I need to do is to shake some clothes (even if they’ve just been washed) or pick up an old book, and off I go, sneezing. My skin gets like Ligia’s, cracked and dry, when I clean around our home, and it doesn’t make sense to me.

In 1999, I visited Rome. Out of the 3 weeks I spent there, the first week was taken up with breathing problems. My throat and nose burned, and I could only take short breaths. I understand the pollution is fairly bad there, but it’s nothing special compared to some cities in Romania – cities where I spent plenty of time as I grew up. It’s as if my body had been stripped of any protection against allergens, and I was at their mercy.

Now that I get to compare notes with Ligia on this, both of us have observed that there are a lot more kids here with asthma inhalers than in Romania. As a matter of fact, I never saw any there, and Ligia only saw a single person using an inhaler. Allergies are practically non-existent there, at least not to the level that they’re present here. When our friends in Romania complain that they’re sick, it’s usually with a cold, or the flu, or a headache. Here, allergies flare up, people can’t get out of their house… What’s up with this?

I tell you, there’s got to be something in the air here in the States, something that strips one of any protection against allergens. I’d love to hear what others have to say about this.

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