www.richardhyland.com ..::.. richard’s diary

I’m now on Twitter, lots of people seem to constantly talk about it, I still don’t really see the point in it but I’m going to give it a go and see whether I like it or not.

In the mean time you can follow me, although I will not promise that it’ll be exciting or informative, here.

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I’ve developed in a number of languages and systems over the years from Windows Batch Files, Perl, PHP, C#, VB, ASP, etc, etc and I absolutely love Visual Studio 2008 and it’s intellisense.

Now I thought I’d dab my hand at iPhone development.  For those that don’t know you have to use a Mac OSX application called Xcode to be able to develop for the iPhone and iPod touch, and then using this in a language called Objective C which seems to be Apple’s own extension to C and C++.  To be honest I’ve never gone down the C++ programming route and it probably wouldn’t have been so difficult had the Apple Developer Documentation been any good but basically before Apple lifted their NDA and allowed discussion about developing for the iPhone it was basically trial and error which insanely cryptic compiler debug errors.

Anyway I’ve solved many of the issues now and coming next I’ll talk about my first App that’s already on the iTunes App Store.

My RSS reader popped up with a new article from the IEBlog today, for those that don’t know the IEBlog is the web log from the Microsoft Internet Explorer team.

The article is over at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/07/02/ie8-security-part-iv-the-xss-filter.aspx detailing that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 will include a Type-1 XSS Filter.  This is fantastic news as along with phishing and nigerian 419 scams, XSS attacks are an evil crime designed to simply steal user’s personal information or money.

Sure us developers should make sure we never make websites vulnerable to XSS scams but that doesn’t excuse people actually using XSS to steal information.  Heck even PayPal recently had an XSS vulnerability.

Well now finally the web browser manufacturers are going to start protecting users who don’t have enough knowledge or even need to know anything about XSS.

Now I’m not going to get into the argument of the rights or wrongs of using PayPal as a transaction processor, for me it’s simple, easy, relatively cheap and if you use eBay you’re pretty much forced to use it anyway.  Also not all of this is PayPal’s fault, but I’ll start there

OK so on 14th May 2008 I recieved an overly large transaction payment into my PayPal account, being a bit suspicious I logged in with the intention of refunding the payment, to be notified by PayPal that they had held the transaction pending an anti-fraud review. OK fair enough but that process blocks me from refunding it anyway so I have to wait for PayPal to conclude their ‘investigation’.

Next I get an email on the 15th May from PayPal saying they have reversed the transaction.  Great case closed, resolution I wanted anyway.

Now it starts to get complicated.  On the 22nd May I get a chargeback from PayPal (and they cancel the reversal) saying unauthorised transaction.  So now not only do I have to refund the month I fully intended to refund (and believed that PayPal had refunded anyway) but now I have to pay a chargeback fine for a transaction PayPal would not let me refund in the first place because they placed a hold on the funds.

On the 7th June PayPal closed the chargeback, refunded the month and charged me a chargeback fee.  OK so this should be case close right?  Think again.

Yesterday, 30th June, I get another email from PayPal stating a chargeback again!  What?  You’ve refunded the money, charged me a fine and now you issue me another chargeback?  Apparently the chargeback was initiated on the 28th but they only told me on the 30th.  Apparently the reason for the chargeback is ‘Special - Chargeback created by processing error’  What the heck does that mean? 

In the email it tells me that I should get in contact with my account rep at an email address, so I did, I get an email back telling me  I can’t email them I have to do it from within the resolution centre…. then why tell me to email you then!?!!?!

I’ve added info to it under the resolution centre but I can tell you this if they refund the money again and charge me another chargeback fine I will not let it rest as I’d consider that theft of my money by PayPal!

Now I did say that PayPal isn’t the only group at fault here.  Some responsibility must lie with the person who’s PayPal account was used to make the fraudulent transaction.  How difficult is it… don’t fall for phising scams!

Well, had a great time seeing Bon Jovi live at Twickenham on Friday.  We managed to get 6 rows from the front this time, fantastic view, although why do I always seem to pick the bit with the tall people in front of me!

They had Stewart Mac who was fantastic, they won a competition to be a support act.  Then was Biffy Clyro, who can only be described as bloody awful… the cheer that went up when they announced that it was their last song was funny!

Then on came Bon Jovi, loosing track now but I think it was the 6th or 7th time of seeing them.  I think this was way up the top along with Hyde Park in 2003!

I know I’ve been to:

These Days Tour - Wembley 1995
These Days Tour - Milton Keynes 1996
One Wild Night Tour - Milton Keynes 2001
Bounce Tour - Hyde Park 2003
Lost Highway Tour - The O2 2007
Lost Highway Tour - Twickehham 2008

I missed the Crush tour at Wembley because I was in Greece at the time and I sold the tickets to the Have a Nice Day tour as I couldn’t go. 

No where near the longest set I’ve seen Bon Jovi play, but was still a great one.  Hearing Dry County live for the first time in years was simply stunning.  The set list was:

PRAYER
BAD NAME
LOST HIGHWAY
BORN TO BE MY BABY
CAPT. CRASH
RUNAWAY
SLEEP w/ Twist & Shout & Start Me Up
BLAZE OF GLORY
WHOLE LOT OF LEAVIN’
DIAMOND RING
ALWAYS
IN THESE ARMS
WE GOT IT GOIN’ ON
IT’S MY LIFE
I’LL BE THERE FOR YOU - RICHIE VOX
DRY COUNTY
HAVE A NICE DAY
FAITH
WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T GO HOME
BAD MEDICINE w/ Shout

ENCORE:
HALLELUJAH
WANTED

So on to the next tour then.  Hopefully not too long to wait this time!

Photos: Take a look at some photos taken with my iPhone (I’ve always been a defender of not having a good camera in the iPhone as if I need to take good photos I use my dSLR, however when you’re somewhere when you can’t take an SLR a good camera in a phone is essential!)

For those of us just jumping into some DVD editing, how great is iDVD?

But I have to ask one thing, why does it take so damn long to encode the video. It claims about 3 hours for a DV or AVI file, yet VisualHub can convert the same file to a VOB in 12-15 minutes, just no menus.

Is it just me, am I getting old or is changing websites and creating pointless stories for April Fools a waste of time. Personally I’d just like to read my news without trying to work out if what they are telling me is real or not.

Some are very easy to spot, some however are not.

Here is a complete list for 2008.

Quite possibly the most annoying are:

• All YouTube featured clips redirecting to Rick Roll
• Virgle, Virgin and Google join forces to create a colony on Mars
• BBC flying penquins

Although one of the funniest is this one from the Metro.

Well I’ve been a big fan of Parallels Desktop for the mac, running my bootcamp partition natively in Mac with coherence to allow me to run IE and my apps directly in OS X. It’s a shame then that after installing Vista SP1 when in bootcamp, that loading it in Parallels now removes the license and activation of Vista, it also removes bootcamps activation status. If you reactivate once in one type of boot then it removes the activation in the other. Thanks Parallels, I’ll stick to using Bootcamp natively until you fix it