Customer Service

I’ve been meaning to post about the differing styles of customer service I (as the customer) experienced whilst changing mobile phone providers for my wife and I. A more recent experience prompted to finally write about them, and to comment on my most recent experience.

BigPockets

Starting with my most recent experience, I ordered various items from BigPockets last Friday which arrived yesterday. This is about normal timescales for them, so no comment there. Unfortunately part of the order was wrong, so I rang them up to query it. They apologised for the mistake, told me the replacement items would be with the next day, and the courier would take the worng stuff back at no further cost to myself.

And that is exactly what happened.

I’ve always used BigPockets for my blank media simply because they were usually the cheapest and because they were initially recommended to me, but not out of any real loyalty. That’s now changed due to their excellent customer service.

Mobile Phone Operators

Last year I switched from a pre-pay mobile phone (on O2) to a pay-monthly phone (also with O2). I wanted to keep my number, so had to go through the process of transferring it, but they’re the same company so it should be straight forward shouldn’t it? Purchasing the new phone was simple enough, although the tariff I ended up with wasn’t listed anywhere on their website (kudos to the salesperson for telling me about it instead of insisting I went with a less suitable one). Transferring the number was much more painful though. Even though I explained to the person on the other end of the phone, they persisted in going through their checklist of “things to say to get me to stay”, and no matter how many times I told them I was staying with them, just on a contract it made no difference. Eventually I got what I wanted (the PAC code) and went on my way.

By contrast I was expecting similar problems with switching my wife’s phone from Virgin pre-pay to O2 pre-pay (for better coverage and cheaper calls between us), and I couldn’t have been more wrong. They simply asked two questions – why was I leaving (poor coverage) and could they do anything to make me stay (no) and then gave me the PAC code. Done and dusted in under 5 minutes.

Log rotation in Rails apps

Logging in Ruby on Rails tends to be a little…verbose. For this site, my production.log had built up to 425MB in 6 months.

Intending to use logrotate, I did a bit of googling and found this instead, which told me Rails could do it for me with the following code snippet:

config.logger = Logger.new("#{RAILS_ROOT}/log/#{RAILS_ENV}.log", 50, 1.megabyte)

However it doesn’t say where in config/environment.rb to put it. I eventually found this which was more helpful, but still not quite accurate.

So, for the stable version of Typo find the line beginning with RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER and replace it with this:

RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER = Logger.new("#{RAILS_ROOT}/log/#{RAILS_ENV}.log", 50, 1.megabyte)

I’m sure there’s an even better way to do, but this worked for me.

Content Filtering with IPCop & squidGuard

So the day has finally come… my daughter now has her own computer, and a connection to my wireless network.

My immediate thoughts went to shielding here from the, er, dark side of the internet so it was time to improve my router.

I’ve been running an IPCop box for over a year now, and I have nothing but praise for it. I knew it had Squid built-in, but I’d never played with it. My first port of call was to enable both the proxy and transparent proxying so that it could not be circumvented. This worked nicely, so it was onto the next step – filtering.

A quick google (and a chat with the #lugradio crew) pointed me at squidGuard which I promptly downloaded and installed. I few ticks in the right boxes, and all traffic to non-whitelisted sites is blocked excellent.

It took me a couple of attempts to get the filtering working the way I wanted. The trick was to add the “approved” sites to the whitelist, then remove all entries from the “Allowed” field. This forced all machines not listed in the “Privileged” or “Banned” fields to use the default ACL which blocks traffic. There’s no way to tell squidGuard (via IPCop) to block undefined traffic for entries in the “Allowed” field.

Sounds too good be true? It is. This was all acheived on my second attempt on a fresh machine – enabling Squid on my original machine did nothing, and when I enabled squidGuard the whole box ground to a halt (and when traffic did get through it wasn’t filtered) so I did a fresh install of IPCop on a slightly beefier machine and all was good.

Next up… getting QoS working so my VoIP traffic gets priority.

Campfire for free (as in beer)

37signals have changed their basic plan for their web-based chat application Campfire from a 30-day trial to free-for-life. There also some other changes, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they intergrate it with Basecamp.