I’ve already posted about how I think Carphone Warehouse are a bunch of liars. Turns out it was no small blip on the radar, however. This post forms a summary of all the various problems I’ve found that people have had with The Carphone Warehouse regarding the iPhone 3G launch. In my eyes, their activities paint them as nefarious charlatans fueled only by avarice (or, kinder, a confederacy of dunces). At the end of this post I also consider whether CPW and Barclaycard have collectively had a problem regarding fraudulent transactions.

First off: Let’s call a spade a spade

First things first, let’s first establish that Carphone Warehouse made a cockup of their iPhone 3G launch. That much is fact given the number of complaints. Supposedly Carphone Warehouse even ruined one guy’s credit rating due to their incompetence:

[B]ecause I was honest and took a phone that had been given to me with NO attempt to verify my identity, acquire my signature, or anything else - making it totally untraceable - back to the store beacause I just wanted it to work, I’ve now come home with NO IPHONE and a RUINED CREDIT RATING.

A one off, right? No. Let’s walk through some quotes.

A Fabulous Summary In Quotations of Supposed Carphone Warehouse Incompetence:

First, Twitter users:

Stuart Ridout says “My iPhone purchase from Carphone Warehouse has been the most stressful of my life … no info, no help and no iPhone! Liars and muppets!”

Andrew Ebling says “Appalled someone@Carphone Warehouse leaked my debit card details to an imposter.”

Alberto Nardelli says “carphone warehouse are absolutely dreadful. They border line delinquency.”

Cybersoc says “unbelievable! The carphone warehouse just took away my iphone! They actually took it away. Total incompetence! Blog post soon!”

Simon Pow says “About to head to Carphone Warehouse & demand a refund for my non existsnt iPhone.”

Phil Gyford says “Struggling to find adequate descriptions of Carphone Warehouse. Descriptions that go further than ‘blatant liars’.”

Rob Wright says “One week on from ordering my iPhone from the Carphone Warehouse. Still i haven’t received it.”

Ed Farrow says “It appears that Carphone Warehouse have scammed me and taken money out of my account despite advanced requests to cancel the order.”

Sam Oliver says “iPhone out of stock everywhere, Carphone warehouse completely screwed up my order and have repeatedly given me wrong information.Don’t use!”

Simon Thomas says “So Carphone Warehouse have LOST my iPhone. Customer service says its in the branch, branch says its not, even though they signed for it.”

martymc says “I have a iPhone but dont have an iPhone thanks to the crap systems at carphone warehouse. ”

It doesn’t end with Twitter. The Web is groaning with complaints..

About 30 similarly pissed off customers have written in to phonesreview.co.uk.

One chap on the MacRumors forum shitstorm is “sick with anger and disappointment.” Further:

[CPW] told me I would never get the phone, because they had over-committed their allocation and had accepted more orders for 16GB than they ever had, and he didn’t reckon they would have any more 16GB in for several weeks. So basically, despite being one of the first to order and all CPW’s assurances, I’m never going to get my 16GB, I’m afraid after looking forward to today so much like a kid, I just can’t bring myself to wait another 2, 3 or even more weeks in the hope of new stock.

And, “This should have been a great day, instead CPW have totally ruined it for me.”

Tom Smith talks of a “Carphone Warehouse iPhone Scam” and then moves on to call them scum instead. Like me, Tom has pretty much lost interest in the iPhone.

James Whatley thinks the Carphone Warehouse needs to get an evangelist to deal with the flood of complaints.

Dan Lane, who was invited to a CPW store by CPW’s PR department, encountered all sorts of issues with them.

Paul Walsh says “Carephone [sic] should consider hiring new management…”

While Rome burns, have CPW been fiddling, by adding bolt-ons to contracts they shouldn’t have been?

Suw Charman is pissed off that existing iPhone users weren’t given the option to pre-order for upgrades.

Yet more people pissed off at CPW promising delivery dates then not fulfilling them. One user shares my concerns:

This is causing such a PR backlash for apple, I’ve spent over £4000 with them this year, getting a new macbook air, and a macpro, and even though I know it’s not apples fault, it certainly burns my customer perception that I’ve gone through so much hassle in regards to an apple product.

“mickeymongoose” says:

Sorry for the rant, but the gist of what I’m saying is that CPW are rubbish, and not just incompetent, but purposefully so. I imagine somewhere they have a spreadsheet with the expected number of people they think will give up and cancel their orders and the loss in revenue due to that is smaller than the gain from allowing an overabundance of orders and just keeping people in the dark until they can be completed.

Ali A reports a similar story to my own (see user comments):

I ordered my iphone online with carphonewarehouse monday of last week, and received confirmation email early last week to say phone to be delivered last friday. I worked from home friday to wait for the phone, at 4pm I finally managed to get through to carphonewarehouse sales, they said they couldnt do the security check on their system, fault at their end, they could not accept another payment method or card and so transaction was cancelled. I rang today to follow up and the sales support hung up on me. I am appalled at the poor level of service from carphonewarehouse - discusted actually. I will cut my left hand off before buying anything from them again. They had obvisouly sold me iphone and were making one excuse after another not to tell me that. awful - never buy from carphonewarehouse!

On the same page, a user called Wardy comments:

I ordered my iphone on monday this week and when i went to collect it yesterday they had sold it to someone else, Not happy at carphone warehouse.

All this, despite the claim on their own Web site:

At the Carphone Warehouse, we believe in being totally honest with our customers. That means that when you see an item with the “In stock” badge against it, we guarantee that this item is in stock.

Yet another thread full of complaints regarding lies over stock levels. Charles Dunstone should be absolutely ashamed of the culture that has developed within his company.

Got more complaints? Post the link in the comments here, and I will continue to extend this post.

My Own Story

Within a few hours of the pre-order process going live, I put in an order with Carphone Warehouse for an iPhone 3G. I chose to have it delivered to my local store as I wouldn’t be at home on release day. On Thursday I got a mail, containing my order number, saying my iPhone 3G would be delivered “by July 11th” (Friday).

I went to my local Carphone Warehouse on Saturday and while they admitted one had been delivered on the Friday, they said it had “already gone” and didn’t know when mine would turn up (without even asking my name - hmm..). They said they were getting more on Monday. I went in on Monday; same deal. They’d had some in, but they’d sold them. I called Carphone Warehouse to investigate cancelling my order and they said I had to check if they’d take any money before they could do anything. Before I could do this (thanks to Barclaycard restricting my account for no reason at all), they sent me an SMS at 4am the next morning saying my order was cancelled.

BarclayCard have still locked my card up, refuse to tell me why, and despite promising to send a new one, I still have no working card. Only a call to close my account today has forced them to admit they had a ‘processing error’ and will send a new one ASAP.

Carphone Warehouse, O2, and Apple have all made a grave error in not accepting any responsibility for these debacles. Even if Apple had publicly come clean and apologized for the balls up in rollout, a lot of people would be able to swallow it. The silence, however, kills confidence in a company we’re meant to trust to run a monopolistic, DRM-laden, walled-garden mobile platform! I’m not getting an iPhone in the near future. If Apple doesn’t think the buck stops with them, they’re wrong. I’ve spent almost £10,000 with them in the last 18 months and they have totally sold all the brand value they had with me down the river. Fuck Apple. (By the way, if anyone wants an almost new 8-core Mac Pro with 30″ Cinema Display, I want to sell mine and get a PC.)

Barclays / BarclayCard and Carphone Warehouse Potential Fraud?

I’m investigating a potential connection between Carphone Warehouse transactions (primarily for the iPhone 3G) and BarclayCard (and Barclays debit card) fraud / rejected transaction reports. This post is to act as a repository for the information I find, and the comments to act as a place for you to share your own info or get in touch with me. There’s either a coincidence going on here or a conspiracy; I intend to establish which. Please leave comments with any supporting information.

A post on the O2 customer forum with people reporting issues with Barclays debit cards being processed at CPW stores. One person talks about two different Barclays cards being rejected (from different people) at the same store, another talks about Barclays blocking CPW transactions due to fraud (I have this page archived in PDF in case it disappears). In another post, someone reports issues with Barclays and CPW, though someone else has had success.

One forum user says about his own transaction woes: “Turns out Barclaycard Fraud Prevention blocked the transaction, as they ’seem to get a lot of fraudulent transactions from Carphone Warehouse.’” Note that this is an alleged quote from a Barclaycard phone operator. Carphone Warehouse supposedly making fraudulent transactions? Never!

This is probably not related but, allegedly, Apple has randomly been taking £121 from various people’s accounts without permission. It seems some people might be confused between authorization and actual debit though, but maybe not..

Thanks in part to insatiable customers, however, businesses have discovered that it’s economically viable to trade large amounts of goodwill by not sticking to their promises for the reward of getting a contract signed or more cash in the bank. Consumers are little different, having developed apathy towards companies who lie, resulting in their lying to get what they want (fraudulent reasons when returning items, complaining for no reason, stating matters as urgent when they’re not).

This is an amensal relationship; one where both parties are impeding each other’s success. Both parties are being passive aggressive, and neither is coming out on top. Most companies (and people) would rather be ‘polite’ liars and cheats, rather than grow some balls and tell the truth. This is slowly destroying our economy.

Even machines cannot be trusted

Supposedly “automated” tracking systems are being fraudulently manipulated to make the customer look like a liar, instead of the businesses they support. Consider the mess surrounding Amazon.com’s delivery of Harry Potter 7. Supposedly, UPS went so far to manipulate their system to show “Delivery attempted - recipient not home” (despite the recipient being at home the whole day) when they had too many packages to deliver, instead of stating the truth.

That this manipulation can even occur is a good reason not to trust tracking systems any more. Lies not only breed distrust, but apathy. If a tracking system is not relaying the facts, then I don’t care about those facts, since they are immeasurable. An apathetic customer is a customer you can milk only for a short period of time before their apathy leads to them going somewhere else.

Data manipulation is not new, but now that automated systems are so popular, it’s more powerful than before. These automated systems were initially put into place to make systems and customer communication more efficient. When you bamboozle customers by manipulating these systems, communications become less efficient as customers are forced to make phone calls, tie up customer agents, enter stores, or otherwise harass people to find the facts.

We have your phone, except when we don’t

The Carphone Warehouse decided to lie to me. I pre-ordered on the first day it was available, and received this on July 10, the day before its launch:

My screenshot’s a little blurry (no thanks to Ecto) but the key parts are that my order number was included in the mail; this isn’t just a spam or a mass mail, and they say “Your new iPhone 3G is now available and will be sent to your chosen delivery address on Friday 11th July.”

I attempted to call the store I had it delivered to earlier today, but there was no answer, so with a “I bet despite this they won’t have it,” Laura and I strolled into town. At the store, I asked if the phone I had ordered had arrived. The chap at the shop, leaning on the counter twiddling his thumbs, asked what the phone was, and immediately stated they didn’t have it and had no idea when they would “due to demand.” The demand issues are no big surprise, but curiously he added that “one came in yesterday but that was it.” This struck me as a curious addition, so I asked him how he knew it wasn’t mine, since I hadn’t mentioned my name, to which he had no answer. Laura suspects someone at the store has got a nice present.

Hey ho, it’ll turn up in the next couple of weeks. A lot of people haven’t entered apathy yet, and continue to get upset about things like this, but I’ve had so many companies lie to me, cheat me, and fail to live up to their promises so often that I accept it. This is how business is supposed to work. Businesses are supposed to lie, fake their systems, and trick customers. That is business. Thinking this, it then struck me how odd that is. No, that’s not how business is supposed to work. At least, it’s not how it used to work. I’m just apathetic to big business.

If I wasn’t stuck in a contract with the Carphone Warehouse that’s reasonably difficult to extract myself from, I’d have cancelled my contract today, and then chosen to wait a few weeks till the hysteria dies down. Instead, the Carphone Warehouse has ensured I’m an apathetic customer, who won’t be willing to answer their stupid surveys, won’t read their promotional mails, and who won’t be recommending them. Lies breed apathy.

Lying is initially beneficial

If you know someone who constantly lies, even in a non-malicious way, you no longer take what they say at face value. You could still be friends or have a productive relationship, but you will always need to check what they say. This is what’s happening between businesses and consumers now.

I’ve had this issue with some of my clients over the years. One in particular tends to deal with every single issue as a matter of urgency (even those with no urgency whatsoever). Mails start with subjects like “URGENT!!” and voicemails are fraught. Initially this spurred me into action, but I quickly realized they were crying wolf. They are the consumer-equivalent of the companies who realize that lying is economically viable. In this case, the customer realizes that if they make their case seem urgent, they’ll be dealt with slightly more quickly. Unfortunately, however, this no longer works. I no longer treat this customer’s cries with any urgency, because I am used to their lies.

Customers who have failed to have a good customer service experience in the past start to become like my client. If a big business ignores you once, start screaming the next time to get some attention. It tends to work with them, and likewise big businesses have started to focus on satisfying those who scream loudest. This gives a natural disadvantage to customers who choose not to lie. The winners all round? The liars. The losers when the decent customers finally become apathetic? The liars, again.

The solution (where I state the bloody obvious)

The solution is, as always, tell the truth. Whether you’re a business or a consumer, telling the truth is the best policy. It’s the most painful policy in the short term, which means few people will bother to try, but it leads the most mutually beneficial situation down the line. When we trust other people, we are willing to accept compromise, and also benefit by others accepting to compromise when we are truly in an urgent situation. When no-one trusts anyone, we no longer accept compromise, but are no longer trusted by others when we need that trust.

Luckily the trust-trust scenario is still visible in a few, minor areas of our economy. The small, personally run stores; quality craftsmen; one-man bands run by people with honor. My tailor doesn’t lie to me; I don’t lie to him; we both benefit. If he screws something up, he tells me. I have no apathy about buying clothes from him, even if they’re three times the price. It’s an experience I enjoy, and I know I’m not getting shafted.

Perhaps the power of lies will ultimately have a benefit: to small business! As people finally start to become apathetic to big businesses, and I hope they will, small businesses can have the opportunity of promote a good, honest agenda. Likewise, customers can enjoy the honesty, but also learn to deal with the truth. If a company fucks up and is honest about it, don’t get upset or encourage the company to lie, because we know where that’s gotten us so far.

Basically, go to the functions.php file within your current theme (usually wp-content/themes/[theme name]/functions.php) and add this to the end:

<?php remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize'); ?>

Now you’re good to go! If you want to be a bit more extreme and remove smart quoting from comments, add this:

<?php remove_filter('comment_text', 'wptexturize'); ?>

Yesterday, it appears my DSL / ADSL / broadband provider, Pipex, had some minor outages. Whereas others thought their broadband simply wasn’t working, I discovered otherwise. Everything worked except any HTTP requests on port 80 or 443 featuring a Host: header and that would ultimately return status code 200. I confirmed all of this with lots of playing with curl in verbose (-v) mode, letting me see all HTTP traffic going in and out under different conditions.

To put that into perspective, a request to a non-existing page, such as http://news.bbc.co.uk/nonsense worked fine. A request to a page that did a redirect (such as http://tinyurl.com/1ab) did the redirect fine, but then the final destination wouldn’t load (since it’d be status 200). An HTTP 1.0 request with no Host: header would work fine (though almost nothing supports this properly anymore). XBox Live worked fine (which is what I ended up playing on since the Web wouldn’t work!), POP3 worked fine, IMAP worked fine, SSH worked fine, pinging worked.. everything worked except HTTP requests on ports 80 and 443 that would usually return an HTTP 200 OK. It was like this between about 8 and 10pm on Wednesday, July 2, 2008.

Curiously, an HTTP request to Pipex’s own Web site initially appeared to work fine, but then hung like all the others after returning only about 2KB of HTML.

This all makes me think that Pipex (or someone in their chain of connections) is passively proxying HTTP requests, most likely for surveillance purposes (or possibly caching). Since requests resulting in 301 / 302 redirects and 404s were still getting through, they’re clearly interrupting the connection at some point. These stalled connections were hanging in FIN_WAIT_2 (according to netstat), demonstrating that the connection was effectively idle (to the point of timing out), and waiting for something to arrive.

I haven’t actively released it yet, but Yo Rails! (yorails.com) is a new site I’ve been working on. It’s a compendium of links to useful Rails related content. Unlike many “101 links about x” type sites, however, you aren’t slammed with a giant list of links in one go, but instead you need to work your way down to what you need by selecting a combination of tags.

I think this is a compelling way to narrow down a large, disparate list of items. I’m not convinced the interface is quite right yet, but it’s already demonstrating its power to me. I developed Yo Rails! because I see a lot of great Rails articles, then lose them in the pile (even tagging them on del.icio.us is no guarantee I can find them easily again, since del.icio.us stopped doing tag unions!)

I’d certainly appreciate if any of you could give it a go and let me know what you think. The general mechanism is all there and works great, although the number of items in the index is still low (about 100). I’m open to all feedback / criticism / praise on this, so fire away.

This is all a rather long way off and pending significant amounts of change, but I rather fancied sharing this in case it changed significantly later on. Just a book cover.

Update:

The next problem was trying to get the mouse scroll wheel to work. I did some Googling and most of the guides suggested I change a single line in xorg.conf (namely, set the “Protocol” of the mouse device to “ImPS/2″). It didn’t work. On a limb I thought I’d try changing the driver from “vmmouse” to “mouse” and this solved the problem, but the mouse tracking and acceleration was TOTALLY different between OS X and Linux.. eugh!

With some perseverance, I’ve found a solution. You can use the vmmouse driver, keep the synchronized mouse tracking and acceleration, and use your mouse wheel as it was intended.

I have been told this technique works on VMware Workstation and VMware Player on the PC too, but I haven’t tried it on there myself.

Steps to Enable Mouse Wheel Scrolling in Ubuntu Hardy under VMware Fusion

Launch a Terminal (Applications menu -> Accessories -> Terminal).

Type:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down (it’s not far, perhaps 20 - 30 lines) till you see a block that looks like this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "vmmouse"
[.. blah blah blah ..]
EndSection

Replace that whole section with this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "vmmouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Save the file, then close all your apps and hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. X restarts within a few seconds, and you’re back up and running. Scrolling should now be possible!

I haven’t gotten to the bottom of horizontal scrolling yet. I thought a ZAxisMapping of “4 5 11 12″ would do it, but I suspect either VMware Fusion’s mouse driver does things a different way, or maybe it’s mouse specific (not likely). I’ll update this post if I work it out.

The latest version of Ubuntu (8.04 a.k.a. Ubuntu Hardy - the world’s most popular Linux distribution) came out yesterday on April 24th. I downloaded it right away to play with on VMware Fusion, my Mac virtualization tool of choice (though I’ve now been told this works in VMware Workstation and VMware Player on the PC too!). It worked pretty well out of the box, with even seamless mouse support working right away, but I needed, of course, to install VMware Tools too, as any good VMware user would do. From there, things turned sour, and I was bombarded with error messages similar to:

In file included from /tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/os.h:35,
from /tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/block.c:26:
/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/./include/compat_wait.h:78: error: conflicting types for ‘poll_initwait’
include/linux/poll.h:65: error: previous declaration of ‘poll_initwait’ was here
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/vmblockInt.h:40,
from /tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/block.c:29:
/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/./include/vm_basic_types.h:184: error: conflicting types for ‘uintptr_t’
include/linux/types.h:40: error: previous declaration of ‘uintptr_t’ was here
make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/block.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.24-16-generic’
make: *** [vmblock.ko] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only’
Unable to build the vmblock module.

After banging my head against the wall for a while, trying a “vmware-any-any” patch that didn’t quite do the trick, and scouring the VMWare Fusion and Ubuntu Forums, I eventually came across a link to a page that described how to solve the problem. The credit for this solution rests entirely on the guy who wrote that page and a guy called Mufassa who posted a shorter explanation to the VMware Fusion forums.

I wanted to write this up into a proper blog post though for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to show how to fix the problem in a more, direct line by line way (just in case you’re a novice or would rather follow some command line instructions). Secondly, I know posts on this blog appear in Google very quickly, so I want people Googling for “vmware fusion” and “ubuntu hardy” (like I was earlier) to find this page and have their problem solved! So, credit to those other guys, but..

Steps To Getting VMware Tools installed on Ubuntu Hardy under VMware Fusion:

Use the “Install VMware Tools” option in VMWare Fusion, and drag the .tar file (not the RPM!) to the Ubuntu desktop.

Open a Terminal (Applications menu -> Accessories -> Terminal). We’ll do all the work from the Terminal. First, we need to install some dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libproc-dev libdumbnet-dev xorg-dev
cd Desktop/

wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182.tar.gz

Next, we need to unpack the tar files we have at hand:

tar xzvf VMware*.gz
tar xzvf open-vm-tools*.gz

Next, we’ll build the open-vm-tools:

cd open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/
./configure && make
cd modules/linux/

In the modules/linux folder we have the vmblock, vmhgfs, vmmemctl, vmsync and vmxnet modules that we need to tar up and place into the official VMware tools tarball:

for i in *; do mv ${i} ${i}-only; tar -cf ${i}.tar ${i}-only; done
cd ../../..

mv -f open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/modules/linux/*.tar vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/

Now we can run the regular VMware tools installer:

cd vmware-tools-distrib/
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Once this is done, the best tactic is to restart Ubuntu entirely. Once you boot back up, things should seem a bit smoother. The resolution of the VM will stick to the size of the VM, etc, and you can now drag files directly into Ubuntu Hardy from your Mac desktop!

Note: A few of the lines of code you need to use above are single lines of code but spread over multiple lines on your screen when viewing this blog. Either make your browser wider, or copy and paste them into a text editor before continuing.

Liberation Mono at 13 pt:

Liberation Mono at 11 pt:

No idea what it’s like without anti-aliasing, as I don’t roll that way.

But.. it has one flaw that may well be fatal for some programmers who don’t use syntax coloring. Zeroes and the letter O are somewhat indistinguishable. Typically a non-issue if you have syntax coloring, but could be a deal breaker. I’m willing to put with it, although it’d have been great if the zero had a dot in the middle or something.. but the font’s LGPL so it’s possible to hack it.

Thanks to Matt Pruitt for encouraging me to actually link directly to the downloadable files.

I’ve just launched RubyFlow, my new community-driven Ruby news / links site. As is typical for me, I bashed it together in a day, and then went live tentatively yesterday. Just now, however, I turned the taps up to full by posting about it on Ruby Inside. Visitors are now flooding through at a good clip!

It might seem a bit weird that I’m competing directly with myself (RubyFlow vs Ruby Inside), but RubyFlow is meant to be a higher quantity, rawer and more grassroots outlet for Ruby news than Ruby Inside. There’s some overlap with Ruby Inside, but there’s also a more grassroots audience to go for. It surprises me how many well known and established Rubyists aren’t that familiar with Ruby Inside (despite it having over 15,000 subscribers now!) and perhaps they’re looking for a less sanitized experience. RubyFlow is it.

The software behind RubyFlow is a basic Rails application. Not much code. It still uses the default SQLite3 database (!) but it’s working very well so far. No advanced features, no search (actually, there is, but it’s not exposed yet), and it’s really clean. It’s deployed using SwitchPipe which makes it easy to scale later on and keeps it fast now. I could roll out similar sites for other niches pretty quickly now.. so if you want to work on a collaborative weblog (in the classic sense, a site where you link to other stuff) with me, get in touch!

(Update: And PythonFlow too..)