Tag Archives: problems

Paypal Here: a quick evaluation

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’ve been wanting to accept credit card payments (without the big monthly fees) for many years.

Recently I contacted paypal, and asked about their Paypal Here system (I’m in Australia).

It sounded good: approx 2.9% Paypal fee on each transaction, with no ongoing fees: just perfect for me.

After Paypal activated my “here” account, I downloaded the app to my Android phone (android 4.2), and it all looked nice, and without actually entering a transaction, seemed to be just what I wanted.

However, once I took a real payment, from a real Customer, I found 2 major problems, which make me reluctant to use Paypal Here:

  • At the time of entering the Credit card details, the paypal here app tells me that I cannot continue until I activate the phones location services, and offers to take me to the settings where I can activate these services… but ALL the location services are already active! So what do I do??? I eventually decide to go OUTSIDE, so that the phone can get a GPS lock on my location, and then I’m able to complete the transaction. I can’t see any reason why this happens, and its a major problem to ask the customer to come outside with me, just so they can pay by credit card.
  • The next day, I look at my paypal account on my computer, and I see the paypal here transaction, but with no other identifying information. This is despite me spending time to enter the invoice number into the (optional) description field on the Android App.

PP_HereSo, not only to I get these awful “features” with Paypal Here, I also have to pay an extra 0.5% for the extra inconvenience.

Sorry Paypal, as far as I’m concerned, “Here” is “Gone” (at least until you can fix your app)

alot toolbar problems

Computer Aid Posted on by

It seems to me that 3rd party browser toolbars cause more problems than they are worth.

For the vast majority of people, they appear mysteriously, and its assumed that you just have to live with these annoying, space-sapping invaders.

And it seems that every man and his dog, now have browser toolbars to “enhance” (more likely cripple) your browser.

Even Google have a toolbar (but at least its vaguely useful to a small number of people).

Some antivirus software have the ability to block your homepage from being changed. I think they should do something similar to block new toolbars from being installed.

Anyway, in my travels, I have found the alot toolbar to be the most problematic.

In one case, it was intermittently stopping URLs in emails from actually opening the page they were meant to.

Uninstalling alot fixed that problem.

At least most modern browsers now have the ability to easily disable toolbars.

How to waste an hour writing a one sentence blog comment

Computer Aid Posted on by

Sometimes it seems that technology just conspires against us.

And often, it seems to happen the most, to those of us who have a good grasp of most things technical.

Most recently, I just noticed someone had replied to one of my posts.

The reply was in Russian, so I fire up google translate so that I could copy and paste the comment, translate, and then I could reply.

I then login to my website, write a reply, hit “submit comment”, and I get a page not found error.

Grrr

Ok, I’ve been getting quite a few “page not found” errors recently, and I figured it must be my hosting company (Netfirms). Why? In the past, when this happens, I navigate to netfirms.com, and I would get the same error, yet other websites would work just fine.

This time, I thought I’d also try viewing netfirms and computer-aid.com.au from a “different location”. Easily done using proxify.com

Proxify shows my website without any issues…

OK, back to by normal web browser, go to computer-aid.com.au and netfirms, and now they work.

Ooooh, I hate intermittent problems.

I hit a navigation button on my website, and I get a page not found error…

Hmmm

I try FTP, but that fails, as does ping and ssh. Its as if netfirms and all their hosted sites have suddenly disappeared…

Then I start to wonder: I’ve seen similar problems in the past.

It could be a DNS problem, or a hosting problem, or a transparent proxy problem with my ISP.

Just as I’m about to write some “please explain” emails to any possible culprits, everything starts working again…

sigh

I then go to my main blog page, and I get a “bad behaviour” error (my browser is behaving like a spam bot)… I don’t like where this is heading…

I re-check everything, and suddenly everything starts to work again… except:

I notice that only my home page is generating an error (everything else is fine)

Since the home page has some dynamic content (a short summary of my last 4 blog posts), I figure that maybe the script (runs once per day) that generates the main page, has gone haywire (it does that about once every 2 months).

OK, back to SSH, and I can’t login again.

Time for a 5 minute chocolate break (I love the Cote d’Or 70% & raspberries dark chocolate… yum… I really do need to exercise more… 🙁 )

OK, back to SSH: now I can login (it must have been the chocolate 🙂 )

yep, my index.html is only 243 bytes (it should be over 10,000 bytes).

I re-run the script to generate index.html, but the file is still 243 bytes.

I look at the contents of the file, and I see an error message about “cannot read RSS feed”

OK, I point my browser at http://www.computer-aid.com.au/blog/feed

Sure enough I get: Access is denied. Error processing resource

I also login to my wordpress admin panel, and I see my scheduled post for a few hours ago didn’t get posted. A “missed schedule” error under the failed post.

OK, I post it manually.

Now, where was I?

Oh yes, index.html

I disable the script and go back to a purely static home page.

Now, where was I before that?

Oh yes: failing RSS feed.

Thats possibly due to using feedburner, and the “possible” netfirms outage (which I can’t really confirm… I wish netfirms had an outage “bulletin” so I could at least confirm my problems are not some strange blocks on my end.

Anyway, I’ll give it a few hours and then see if it fixes itself.

Now, back to replying to the blog comment.

I write the blog comment (for the second time), and this time it works.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has these time warps… a two minute job take an hour or two to complete.

I sometimes wonder if its worth it.

And whats worse, I still don’t know where the problem is, nor if it will happen again.

Grrr

PS: I have since disabled “bad behavior” and my website seems more reliable… I’ll keep monitoring and see what happens.

Many problems running Office 2003 on Vista

Computer Aid Posted on by

Isn’t it amazing how a reasonably expensive product (office 2003) can become almost unusable in just 4 short years.

A customer purchased (without asking me for advice) a Vista PC. It came with the office 2007 trial, but since she already had office 2003 from her previous PC, I just removed the trial, and installed MSO2003.

Everything seemed OK on the surface, but after a while, some annoying incompatibilities started to surface:

  • The outlook contacts list (imported from the old PC), started giving errors whenever it was accessed. Removing and re-importing the contact list seemed to fix it.
  • Customer changed outlook, so that it would use MS word as her email editor (not something I would recommend, but it shouldn’t cause problems). So now, whenever she wants to reply, or create a new emails, Vista butts-in with: “A program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in outlook”. At this point, she has to click on the “yes I’m expecting this” button.
  • Every time outlook is started, it asks for the email password (it forgets the password, even if you tick the “remember this password” box).
  • Certain emails (I suspect html, or RTF emails… ie at least half), will not be formatted correctly, and the customer sees the raw html. No amount of web searching has found an answer to this issue (other than suggestions to upgrade to MSO2007).
  • I try to backup the PST files (using the export function), and I get the a 30 second delay, followed by the message: The office assistant requires microsoft agent 2.0 or later. So I install MSAgent 2.0, and then the export starts giving another error: Export file: the messaging interface has returned an unknown error. if the problem persists, restart outlook.

If it wasn’t for the need to use Outlook, I’d have been tempted to just switch her over to OpenOffice.

Anyway, I go to download the Office 2007 trial, and I get a whole new set of problems (see one of my following posts).