As part of the never ending saga that has become my relationship with Qantas, I have been trying to book my tickets all afternoon and I am constantly met with this error page.
Qantas booking engin offline
Luckily I should be able to call Qantas on 13 13 13 and book my ticket, but their systems are also offline. When I asked to speak with a supervisor, I was hung up on. Yet another fantastic example of the great respect with which Qantas treats their customers.
Along with many other passangers, I have been putting up with increasingly poor performance from Qantas for years. I suppose it comes with the territiroy when you are essentially a monopoly. But increasingly now I hear other people expressing their disatisfaction and voting with their feet by using other carriers.
I think Qantas is in for a bit of a rude shock in the next six months. I am just one of many people giving serious thought to the value propisition that Qantas offers. It has decreased greatly in the last few years, to the point now that Virgin is an attractive alternative.
Firstly, lets look at in flight meals. Qantas has progressivly phased these out on most flights now. Instead offering “refreshments”. Their idea of a snack, and mine are vastly different. Some cherry coconut cupcake that is so solid, sticky and cold that I could possibly use it as a hammer is not refreshing in the slightest.
Still on food, but now in the Qantas Club Lounge. We have seen the steady scaling back of the provisions in the lounge now to something that is almost an embarrasment. If I want to actually eat something, I now have to eat at a food outlet outside of the lounge before going in to it to … sit down. That is essentially all the lounge offers me now, as I don’t drink alcohol. It is simply a place to sit.
Back on board the aircraft and we should look at the in flight entertainment. Well, we would - if it was working. At the moment I am flying about twice a week. And in my last four weeks, I have not been on a flight that has not had major issues with the in flight system. Issues ranging from missing tapes, to tapes that won’t play, to screens that don’t work or are unwatchable, headset sockets that no longer operate… the list is almost never ending.
Baggage allowances on Qantas are now “simpler”. What this actually means is - you get less luggage allowance then what you previously did - see - simple! Also, the staff have had it drilled in to them that they have to charge for everything over the allowance. Gone are the days of staff being able to overlook a few kilograms here or there.
Finally, points and rewards are now almost impossible to redeem and they are getting worse.
Now, lets briefly compare all of the above to somebody like Virgin.
You select, and pay for your own in flight meal as you see fit. They have a fairly wide range of things available, including meals at appropriate times.
The Virgin in flight entertianment offers you over 20 channels of live video fed by Foxtel on most flights for a couple of dollers. This far exceeds the single screen single channel offering of Qantas (even when it works).
Virgin are sticklers on their baggage allowance and charging, but now that Qantas are the same way it somewhat nullifies itself.
All in all, I don’t see many reasons to remain with Qantas. I have tried raising my concerns with them, but they refuse to reply. I can only suggest if you have ended up here trying to find information about Qantas, don’t bother - just fly somebody else.
It seems yet another reason to not use Internet Explorer has presented itself. It seems that for quite a time now, many people have not been able to read my site from IE because they are presented with an error message that reads “Internet Explorer cannot open the internet site… Operation Aborted”.
It appears that the cause of this message is that some JavaScript used to render the page and provide functionality either doesn’t load the way IE wants it to, or doesn’t load in time. Instead of presenting an error, and allowing you to continue using the site, IE just refreshes to an error page in turn preventing you from accessing the site.
I spent a few hours messing with the existing template to try and get the script in the right place, so IE would not have an issue - but it all became too much. So now, here we are with a new look and feel. Nice and simple… until I get some more time on my hands.
…welcome back IE users. Can I recommend Firefox next time? 
Google Hosted Applications and Mail is Offline
Annoyingly it seems that the Google Hosted Services have suffered yet another major outage. In speaking with the support center they have only just become aware of it, and are currently investigating.
What I find most annoying about this is that we pay for the premium service, but somehow when ever there is an outage of all the unpaid customers, the premium customers also experience that same outage.
Google are still yet to update their status page about the issue, and it seems like they have been taken a little by surprise.
[UPDATE 20:21 8 May] It seems that this has rapidly spread to all of gmail. Not just hosted applications, gmail itself seems to be completely offline.
[UPDATE 20:28 8 May] And we are all back and happy again. Still no information on the Google Status page as to the cause of the outage though.
The Firefox Beta About Window
After purchasing several Lacie 2Big drives and installing them at client sites, we were disappointed to find that although they had advertised support for the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) it did not actually work.
The simple act of trying to read and write to the drive at the same time, for example copying a file from one share to another, forces the AFP server to fail, and in most cases writes corrupt .DS_Store, .AppleDB, .AppleDesktop and .AppleDouble files, causing the file server to be inoperable even after a reboot.
Once these files / directories have corrupt contents - the only way to salvage the drive is to disable the AFP server, FTP in to the drive and remove them completely from all affected shares. I have found that just removing them from the root does not always resolve the problem, and they any affected sub directories will also need to have them removed.
For the most part, the removal of these files is fine, and will not affect your operation. However, if you are using file forks - all this information will be lost and you may be left with an unserviceable collection of files.
Given a little forum hunting, it is very disappointing to find that this seems to have been a problem with Lacie Network Drives for quite a time.
After providing a great amount of information to Lacie - their support response has been
R&D have been able to replicate the problem and are currently working on a fix for this, in the meantime the suggested work around is to use the SMB protocol. At this stage I do not have an ETA for the release…
Whilst it is fine to suggest the use of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol (also sometimes referred to as SAMBA) in our case (and I am sure many others) this is not appropriate. The availability of a working AFP server was the primary reason for the selection of this product. If our clients had of just wanted a generic SMB share, we could have chosen any one of significantly cheaper Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices.
At this point I have only been able to confirm this fault on the 1TB and 2TB 2Big Network devices, but I am very keen to hear from you if you have any other NAS device that advertises AFP support, but fails to deliver.
I have asked Lacie to have this issue resolved within five working days, and after that time will hand my findings over to the Office of Fair Trade in Queensland and New South Wales given that Lacie are misrepresenting the capabilities of their devices.
I have written a few entries about the abhorrently poor customer service that Qantas offers before.
On this occasion I am amazed at just how bad Qantas can get when it comes to looking after their customers.
My sister flew to Brisbane last night for the April holiday. She has a small dog that obviously had to fly up with her. Under Qantas’ new “easier” baggage allowances, pets are immediately charged as excess baggage. So her very small dog cost about $110.
After her flight was delayed by about two hours, she finally left for her journey home, arriving around midnight.
When she went to retrieve her dog, she found that he was not there and had been “lost” (direct quote from Qantas staff).
After some investigation, it was found that for some reason her dog had been sent to Adelaide. It’s understandable for a bag or two to go missing, but a living pet?
To add insult to injury, Qantas does not have any real provisions in place to manage this sort of situation. So all they could do was offer the dog some water, and a brief walk in the warehouse that he was to be housed in overnight.
Given the personality of my sisters dog, I can quite confidently say that by now this morning he will be exceptionally traumatised.
Qantas has offered nothing in compensation, and disappointingly they are not compelled to by law. And again, Qantas staff have hidden behind the “we only take complaints in writing”.
If you have multiple interfaces on a router, and want to send (for example) your web traffic (HTTP/80 and HTTPS/443) out a different interface then your default route, then here is some information on how to do it.
Disappointingly, I thought this was a fairly simple ask - and in the end - it has turned out to be a relatively small set of instructions, but it took a long time to find much information about it at all.
My scenario is that I have a router connected to the internet, I also have a VPN to a USA Hosted VPN service. Given all this stupidity here in Australia with the “Great Australian Firewall” that the fool Senator Conroy is trying to implement, I wanted to practice redirecting web traffic out to the world via the VPN.
I use a snap gear router, but the instructions are pretty much the same for any iptables based router.
ip route flush table 200
ip rule del fwmark 0x50
iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -j MARK --set-mark 80 -p tcp --dport 80
iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -j MARK --set-mark 80 -p tcp --dport 443
ip route add table 200 default via 192.168.52.1
ip rule add fwmark 0x50 table 200
The first line flushes (empties) table 200. We are keeping our special routing table here, you can use any number you wish.
The second line deletes the reference telling the router to route all packets that are marked via the rule.
The next two iptables lines establish the rules for what gets to go out the auxiliary / secondary interface (in my case a VPN). Without explaining how iptables works, I am essentially looking for anything matching port 80 or port 443. That is HTTP and HTTPS respectively. If it does match that rule it gets marked with an “80″ or “0×50″ in hex (the hex is important in a moment).
Next we add the default route to our special routing table (table 200). It only has a default route for the moment, and it is the gateway IP of the VPN endpoint.
Finally we instruct the router to use the special routing table (table 200) for any packets marked as 0×50 (which is 80 decimal).
UPDATE
For those looking for some information about applying these sorts of rules in an OpenVPN environment, have a look at Taiter Tech Blog.
A fter having an extensive conversation with a wise friend, I have started to formulate an opinion about what will make for a successful performance company in the next few financially difficult years.
As I see it, given that corporate sponsorships, angel investors, government grants etc are all going to start to dry up, the reliance is increasingly going to fall back on us - the management, technicians, performers and musicians - to come up with financially viable means to keep ourselves busy.
I am of the belief that performance companies / groups that are able to switch to an “open book” style accounting so that all involved know where money is coming and going, and thus can have some sort of positive input in to the operation of the group will have the best chance at long term success.
I don’t believe in taking the ultimate decision making power away from those who need it, or changing the power structure that theater has developed over many hundreds of years. But what I do think needs to happen - especially if you are asking performers to give their time for very little (or no) money - is a sharing of all pertinent information so that everybody involved can feel completely connected.
I can think of many problems that this would pose, but overall - I think it may be one way for a struggling group to move forward. What do you think?
An excellent video by “The Mapletons”.
mapletons - the fire bridge from pocaluce moving pictures on Vimeo.
music video for the song.