Hanne's blog

Chapter one, Monday

So I came in one innocent looking Monday morning and found that my boss had left his laptop at my desk with a note on it: "Could you please send this to repair while I am away on holiday. The extra battery/dvd drive wont come out". Well thank you, I love you too. Not.

I knew this was a "case" as soon as I saw it. I was going to have a hell on the phone and sending parcels back and forth and I had no box to send it in and I was going to spend enormous amounts of time on this.

But I didn't know how much hell it was gonna be.

I'd known about this error for a while because it had appeared one of the first times he tried to use the feature, but off course he couldn't spare it so I could send it to repair earlier. It would probably have been easier to convince them that it was born with the problem just after we bought it, but we were still well within the first year.

First I spent some time digging out the sales conditions from EU computers where we bought it. It said that the laptop should be handed in at an address in central Copenhagen but first I should send them an email to get a queue number. Good, that would mean I could hand it in personally and save the risk of it being damaged during transport. So I sent an email to the address in question where I mentioned that I assumed this was covered by the warranty. But no I got an email back saying: You need to contact Fujitsu Siemens support on this number: xyz. Great.

Chapter two, Tuesday

So I called the number described the error to the man on the phone. He wrote down the error description and the serial number and gave me an address to send it to Service Partner A/S in Hørsholm. Bye bye chance of saving the transport. I asked him when it would be finished. He couldn't answer that but he gave me another phone number directly to the service department.

So I called the Servicepartner A/S number. 5-8 workdays, they said. If they had the part in stock. Fine with me. "While I am away", oh, well, you can't have everything. This was late Tuesday afternoon. So I spent the next hour locating a anti-static bag of sufficient size, a cardboard box way to thin to make me feel comfortable about putting a laptop in it, and some flamingo from a printer we bought some time ago which I could cut up in suitable pieces, making a huge mess all over the office floor.

After which I taped a whole roll of tape around the box to make sure it didn't fall apart.

By then it was past five so there was no point in sending it that day.

Chapter three, Wednesday

Next morning I went down to the secretary downstairs and got the only positive experience in this entire case: Yes she could send it for me, I just had to fill out a requisition form saying which account to take it from. So there's me running after the economy guy, boss is away, where do I take the money from? New account numbers all over due to institute fusion, but I got the form filled out and the parcel sent.

Chapter four, Thursday

So on Thursday I got a phone call from the technician: "Hi this is "John Doe" from Servicepartner A/S, the problem with the laptop is not covered by the warranty since it is physically broken. What is your email address so I can send you a repair offer?"

So I gave him my email address. This is probably the time I should have bastard operator from hell'ed him with all I had and not let go of his throat until he gave me what I wanted, but I was not prepared and I didn't think fast enough. I mean, off course he was right that is was physically broken. That was the problem, like. But I also knew that we ought to have sent it in right away a few month earlier.

So he sent me an offer that it would cost 1791 dkkr to fix the ****** thing. The reason they used in the written offer was different, namely that the damage had not occoured through "normal use", which indeed it had. It was crappy plasticware in the first place. So I sent boss on holiday SMS asking if he would pay 1791 dkkr to get it repaired. No he wouldn't so I asked them to send it back.

Read on, the worst is still to come.

Chapter five, next Monday

So no laptop had arrived and I wrote "John Doe" again. He said that it had been sent and gave me a postal tracking number on it.

Chapter six, next Tuesday

So after I left Monday, a note from the post office had arrived. A parcel was waiting for us there, to be paid for on arrival, 700 and something dkkr!

Chapter seven, next Wednesday

So the deal is to pick up the laptop and pay, or to not pick it up. Boss back from holiday and decides to pick it up. Paying personally. What else to do?

Now I was pissed. So I wrote a rather nice email to "John Doe" the technician who had dealt with us, asking him where to complain. No answer as of today, one month later.

So we payed I don't know how much for sending it there and getting it back for absolutely nothing. And I carefully described to the person at the support department what the error was. He didn't mention it was not covered by the warranty or that we would get billed for it if it was not covered. And the guy sending me the offer never mentioned that they would bill us half anyway, even if we wanted no repair.

I feel stepped on.

One thing is that they wont repair the thing though the fault was there when we got it. OK we took too long time to complain though they still should fix it IMO. But on top of that

A) They send parcels to be picked up at the post office to the University. Like we have people for doing that.

They send parcels to be payed for on arrival to the University. Like we have time to go the the post office during work hours. Like we have cash lying around to pay with. It looks like they are only used to dealing with private persons?

C) They bill us 700 kr. without warning for something we never saw an offer on, without repairing the ****** thing!

It looks to me like they're trying to tell us something. Like, "bugger off, creep".

In principle I don't like the vendors treating us better just because we are a big customer. But treating us like we are mosquitoes at their company picnic even when we are a big customer doesn't help either.

I was pissed. I am still pissed. I am pissed with myself because I let them step on me and because I didn't fight them 'til death or challenged them to met me at dawn with their weapon of choice. I am pissed because I lost without even putting up a fight, but I am even more pissed that I had to fight this one at all when it's their crappy casing that breaks if you try to use it and they ought to apologize to us and fix it. And I am never ever going to buy Fujitsu Siemens again.

Lesson learned:

• Fujitsu Siemens' service department is evil.
• Mondays are never innocent.
• Fujitsu Siemens' service department is evil.

Problem: Mail sent from pine to an exchange handled address which is exchange auto forwarded to f.ex. gmail (or other) fails with status 4.4.7. On top of that it waits for an hour before it tries to contact gmail's MX again (gmail is an example, same problem with my postfix/assp). Mails sent directly to the final recipient (e.g. the gmail address) goes right through.

Cause: After a lot of debugging and no error messages except connection timeout, even when the receiving mail server was may own - thanks to Bjarne on this one - I have pinpointed the problem to being the Content-Type: MULTIPART/MIXED; BOUNDARY="bla bla" (I have the non ASCII character "ø" in my .signature so it is sent in every email).

Solution For the user: Install alpine instead of pine. Select the option "downgrade-multipart-to-text" in "feature-list=" in .pinerc (or in "sending preferences" in the Setup -> Config menu).

I also set the following, after deciding that it was time to start running UTF-8:

keyboard-character-set=UTF-8
posting-character-set=UTF-8

I have also set my locale to en_US.UTF-8. I don't know if it is required to ru
UTF-8, with the "downgrade-multipart-to-text" ISO-8859-15 that I used before might have worked just as well.

I had to convert my .signature to UTF-8 too.

I have no solution for the exchange admin as it is not my exchange server (thank <divinity of the week&gt and I don't do exchange servers except if I cannot avoid it. It might have the same problem with other content types, or other mailers might set the same content type.

Setup details With exchange auto forward I mean creating a Contact in AD with an external email address, e.g a gmail address. Then creating a user, call him exctest, in AD and set his Exchange Delivery options to point to the Contact. Now emails sent to exctest@yourdomain should, if it worked, go to the specified gmail address.

Richard P. Feynman: Don't you have time to think?

This is a collection of Feynman's letters from 1939-1987 published by his daughter in 2005.

He takes time to answer some really weird letters. I like that about him. This book gives me a feeling I usually only have about certain fiction books: That I miss the characters when the book is over. I miss Feynman, too.

Now I have the projector working with Linux the way I want to.

Section "ServerLayout"
  Identifier   "Default Layout"
  Screen     "Screen1"
  InputDevice   "Mouse0"   "CorePointer"
  InputDevice   "Keyboard0"   "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
  FontPath   "unix/:7100"
EndSection

Section "Module"
  Load "dbe"
  Load "extmod"
  Load "fbdevhw"
  Load "glx"
  Load "record"
  Load "freetype"
  Load "type1"
  Load "dri"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
  Option   "AllowMouseOpenFail" "yes"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier   "Keyboard0"
  Driver   "kbd"
  Option   "XkbModel" "pc105"
  Option   "XkbLayout" "dk"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier   "Mouse0"
  Driver   "mouse"
  Option   "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
  Option   "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
  Option   "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
  Option   "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier   "ThinkPad LCD"
  Option   "DPMS"
  HorizSync   31.5 - 67.0
  VertRefresh   50.0 - 75.0
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier   "Beamer"
  Option   "DPMS"
  HorizSync   31.5 - 100
  VertRefresh   56 - 80
  DisplaySize   340 272 # width x height in mm
EndSection

Section "Device"
  Identifier   "Intel 945GM/GMS/940GML"
  Driver   "i810"
  BusID   "PCI:0:2:0"
  Screen   0
  Option   "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
EndSection

Section "Device"
  Identifier   "Intel 945GM/GMS/940GML Beamer"
  Driver   "i810"
  BusID   "PCI:0:2:0"
  Option   "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
  Option   "Clone" "On"
  Screen   0
EndSection


Section "Screen"
  Identifier "Screen0"
  Device   "Intel 945GM/GMS/940GML"
  Monitor   "ThinkPad LCD"
  DefaultDepth   24
  SubSection "Display"
  Viewport   0 0
  Depth   24
  Modes   "1024x768" "1280x1024" "800x600" "640x480"
  EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "Screen"
  Identifier "Screen1"
  Device   "Intel 945GM/GMS/940GML Beamer"
  Monitor   "Beamer"
  DefaultDepth   24
  SubSection "Display"
  Viewport   0 0
  Depth   24
  Modes   "1024x768@59" "1024x768@75" "1024x768" "1280x1024"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
  Group   0
  Mode   0666
EndSection

I don't push a hotkey like Fn + F7 to direct the image to the projector, it is shown both on the built-in LCD display and the projector all the time. (Only in X off course).

Java plugin in Firefox has worked a long time with this procedure:

• Install java from sun
• cd /usr/lib/firefox-xx/plugins
• ln -s /usr/java/jdk-xx/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so .

Not anymore. In Firefox 2.0.0.10 (and 2.0.0.9) on Fedora 8 the java plugin shows up in "aboutlugins" but java applets does not work.

Solution (evil hack):

yum install java-1.7.0-icedtea java-1.7.0-icedtea plugin

For some people this might not solve the problem if they need the Sun java but at least applets in Firefox works again.

Credit: I found this in some online forum but I forgot where.