Onspeed is a tool for speeding up web access. This is useful if you are on GPRS (i.e. pay on bandwidth services) as it uses compression to reduce the size of web and email transfers.

I tried it out last year as I do a lot of GPRS access, but found that web pages are still too expensive to really use, and email can be screened using download headers. It was also incompatible with the anti-virus I was using at the time.

Around Xmas it started popping up an alert window telling me to pay to upgrade to get a better version. Every time I connected. So I removed it, and found the web browsers seemed to start up quicker.

But the most annoying part is the email I just recieved saying that the year of service is up. They were going to bill automatically. If my card details had changed I could click a link and change them. To cancel though you have to phone up to their national rate number. In fact:

Please note: to cancel your automatic renewal, you must call ONSPEED. Requests via e-mail, fax or post will not be actioned.

Well thats lovely isn’t it. I sign up online but can’t cancel on line. I spent 5 minutes waiting in a queue to cancel this. I could write them a letter but they will IGNORE it.

Think carefully. Do you want to want to get involved with a company that doesn’t respond to written requests to stop charging you?

Last year, the UK Film Council announced that it was spending £11.7m of lottery money installing digital film projectors in 209 cinemas.

In return for the new equipment, the cinemas have committed to providing more screening time to showing a greater selection of more specialised (ie non-Hollywood), classic, and foreign language movies.

That was over a year ago. So what has happened? My local cinema hasn’t expanded it’s range of films yet.

*update*
I emailed the UK Film Council and recieved this response:

Odeon Southend falls into the South East section of the DSN rollout, which means we anticipate the installation should take place towards the end of this year.

I was working through some errors with my AJAX application running on Opera and found a problem parsing the JSON response from the server. Testing things out I found that this script won’t work in Opera 8.53, but does in IE & FF.

var f = eval( “( { 1337: ‘Hello World’ } )” );
alert( f[1337] );

The problem is that Opera doesn’t seem to like the fact that the PropertyName ( 1337 ) is not an Identifier. This is a spec violation as having NumericLiteral as PropertyName inside ObjectLiteral is valid, see ECMA-262 3rd Edition Page 158.

Note this is unrelated to the bug below about Opera and evalScripts().
(more…)

Prototype is a great JS library for building your AJAX enabled web pages and I am using it in a project I am working on. However when I was testing my application inside Opera 8.53 one of my little interactive widgets stopped working. The problem was due to the widget downloaded a little piece of extra scripting capability which needed to be added to the page, so evalScripts was being called from the AJAX responder. But this was doing nothing inside Opera.

Don’t ask me what the problem is, but I have got round it, here is the quick fix in case anybody else needs it.
(more…)

The bad news I talked about in the last post is finally over. My mum died of cancer yesterday. She had lung cancer that had spread to the spine and head. The spinal cancer had caused spinal cord compression, leaving her unable to walk and with very little feeling from the waist down. We got her home from the hospital for about three weeks where her condition seemed to make no progress, but went downhill rapidly from about last friday. Her last good day was Monday where she seemed quite with it, then spent most of the time sleeping.

I’d like to thank all the friends who have supported me through this and continue to offer their friendship and kindness.

Ok so I’ve been a little lax in going away, but just as I’ve been getting ready a couple of *very* bad situations have popped up, so it looks like I will be here for a while at least.

Well as you can see I’ve not been updating much. I seem to have got stuck on the site by the Cuckoo Pub for a little while. Had the fixed gas tanks added to the van and have a 1st service booked for the 19th of August. After that I’m free to go. In other news I have completely borked the gallery so dont expect any new photos for a while

All I have seen so far of Swindon is the inside of Maplins (they didn’t have what I wanted in stock) and the inside of the PC World (where I’m writing this). Off to a certified location on the outskirts of town as soon as my laptop battery runs out….

Spent last weekend on the Caravan Club site in Hemel Hempstead, didn’t do much except play freecell, work on my book and read a book by Alexi Sayle. I cannot stop saying ‘the pies, the pies’ at every oppertunity (you have to read Alexi’s book to understand it). Beginning to ‘find my voice’ as such with the writing so will have to go backwards and edit it, but I had expected to do that anyway.

Walked 2 miles or so to Jarmin Park in Hemel on Sunday to go to the cinema. Through some good timing I got into see War Of The Worlds, then 5 mins after that finished, Star Wars Episode 3. But the end of it my arse was dead, those seats aint comfortable for long periods. Both were ok, SW3 though so much better than the first 2.

Well, actually from a Starbucks in Chelmsford, but I am staying in Chipping Ongar on a CL site by a pub called “The Cuckoo”. Spent a good couple of evenings talking to the owner Russ and some locals, Brian and Tracey. It has tipped down with rain the last few days though.