Pimsleur Scam

Well, I probably had it coming for a long time…

While browsing on net I got an add for Pimsleur language course. Yes, it was full of nonsense statements but it was cheap. Just $10 for 4 CDs with introductory course. And I thought why not.

Got my CDs. Determined that their course is average at best and that Spanish cook I had in my company was much better source. So I forgot about it.

That is until a few days ago when I was sorting through credit card charges on unrelated issue. I was surprised when I noticed strange $64 charge under name of “STR*LANGUAGE LEARN LEV2”. That made me pull out even older bills and here is what I saw:

2012-08-14  STR*LANGUAGE LEARN LEV2 866-362-3822   $64.00
2012-07-15  STR*LANGUAGE LEARN LEV2 866-362-3822   $64.00
2012-06-10  STR*LANGUAGE LEARN BASIC 866-362-3822  $64.00
2012-05-11  STR*LANGUAGE LEARN BASIC 866-362-3822  $64.00
2012-04-11  STR*LANGUAGE LEARN BASIC 866-362-3822  $64.00
2012-02-10  STR*LANGUAGE LEARN INTRO 866-774-4754   $9.95

I have been getting charged for a while. Yes, I should have noticed it before.

In my defense, I had lot of charges those months. I was in middle of moving around States and paper statements from my company were going to my old address in Croatia. I did have access via Android app but with lot of charges, these were just missed.

Simply put: I was stupid and careless.

I double-checked my e-mails and no, I haven’t ordered anything more than introduction course. They did send me some stuff via mail but I threw this out with other spam. I never authorized them for any kind of subscription. However, they did have my credit card information so they felt welcome to use it.

Sorting things out with my credit card company will take some time. For start I reported unauthorized charges and canceled the card. Real pain in the ass since I had lot of stuff on that card but it was really only thing I could do. One dishonest company can really ruin your day.

P.S. No, at time of ordering, Google search for Pimsleur scam didn’t return anything in first result page…

P.P.S. Do notice how they didn’t start charging immediately. They waited for one more month just to avoid early detection.

Finally

Both Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 are finally available to MSDN subscribers.

I already got leaked versions from the torrents so this was just great opportunity to check whether SHA-1 matches. Guess what, it does. :)

Since everybody is trying to download these images right now, torrent also gives better experience.

Same general slowness and server crashes are nothing new for MSDN site (remember Windows 7). Maybe Microsoft should just embrace torrent network as distribution media instead relying on its own (obviously inadequate) infrastructure…

World IPv6 Launch

Tomorrow is World’s IPv6 launch. Are you ready?

P.S. It is not too hard.

* Drive

It seems to me that Internet drives are everywhere.

For a while we had DropBox as undisputed king of remotely synchronized files. When it prove successful, we got bunch of others, among which SugarSync seemed like most serious contender.

This week things got interesting with Microsoft introducing SkyDrive. And today we got Google onboard with Google Drive.

Only company missing action is Amazon. Yes, they have their drive also but they are missing half-decent sync client.

With so many heavyweight players around, things are bound to get interesting soon. :)

I Like Unique Identifiers

As I was finishing my order of MSDN magazine I was puzzled with one field. It said “In lieu of a signature, we require a unique identifier. In what month were you born?”

I am not quite sure in what universe month of birth is even close to being unique…

P.S. It is January.

Using IPC-3605N Without EaZy Wizard

My laptop has no DVD drive since I removed it a while ago in order to get another hard drive in. Therefore I was little bit unprepared when I bought myself ZyXEL IPC-3605N camera. User guide told me I have to run tool found on CD that I could not read.

I am lazy, so first I tried to download that tool (eaZy Wizard) from ZyXEL pages. Only when I could not find it anywhere (thank you ZyXEL for forcing users to keep CD around) I decided upon more imaginative solutions.

Since manual did mention some addresses in 192.168.0.x range and that range being most often used, I set my laptop’s wired network adapter to 192.168.0.254 and connected camera directly to it. Than I used MagiWOL’s import functionality to scan network for all MAC addresses in range 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.253. That resulted in single hit - my camera was at 192.168.0.100.

After finding out IP address, all I had to do was to enter this IP in browser and use “admin”/“1234” as user/password combination (not “admin”/“admin” as user manual suggested). With that I could proceed with setting-up configuration.

And CD was left forgotten.

WinDays 2012

I will hold a presentation on WinDays 2012.

This year theme will be .NET Micro Framework. Although this platform works very close to hardware, I will try to avoid too much electrical engineering theory and just show what can be done with it in practice.

All examples will be shown on Netduino Plus, probably cheapest way to start working with .NET Micro Framework these days.

[2012-02-29: Unfortunatelly, I will not attend. My stay in USA got prolonged and, due to certain limits of physics, I cannot be at two places at same time. :(]

Highly Improbable

Welcome to my new web server. And for the first time ever, it is Linux-based.

I haven’t moved because Windows were unstable (haven’t had any issues). I haven’t moved because of bugs (PHP is buggy on any platform). I haven’t got tired of .NET (C# rules!).

I moved because of SSH. I grew tired of plain-text FTP where any kid with Wireshark could get my password.

My hosting company made sure that server change went smoothly. They just switched DNS records and, poof, my website on new server started. It is true that, for a while, there was no CSS or JavaScript but culprit was found in W3 Total Cache plugin. It just didn’t like being copied around and quick uninstall sorted that out. :)

There were few other minor issues with upgrade service for VHD Attach and QText but they had more to do with subtle differences between Windows and Linux hosting than with any real error.

Now let’s just hope that I don’t break everything. :)

Again

More observant among you might notice that there is already new version of VHD Attach. Those who use it on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have no reason to worry: only difference between versions 3.00 and 3.01 is that VHD Attach now supports Windows Thin PC.

If you happen to use Windows Thin PC than just remember to install .NET Framework 4.0 before VHD Attach and you should be just fine.

In the Year 2011

As usual, first post in 2012 is great chance to recapitulate what was going on in previous year.

There was total of 106 posts (which is slight decrease from last year) with around 40% of them being related to programming and 10% being related to my programs. Rest of posts is anybody’s guess - I am annoyingly bad at assigning categories to posts. Improving on that might even be my New Year’s resolution. And, as it happens with all of those, it will fail miserably. :)

Total number of visits has increased to 90,000 (from 54,000 last year) so I would say that blog has some traction going. Search engines bring little bit over 50% of traffic (90% of that being from Google). Referral sites bring 30% which means that there is almost 20% of people who enter this link directly.

Analysis says that 25% of you are from United States, 10% from Germany and further 30% from all around world. My own country (Croatia) brings 2.7% to the table. That leaves something like 35% of people that have no location on this world. Either browsers got better at hiding their tracks or aliens just love my blog. :)

Internet Explorer still leads in browser wars with 36% of visitors using it. I was pleasantly surprised that majority of those using it were at version 8 (55%) or version 9 (33%). That leaves only 12% for older versions of IE. Firefox was second with 33% and my favorite Chrome was third with 25% of a pie.

This year also marks special moment for me - I left Blogger platform for self-hosted WordPress site. This step included not only efforts of installing WordPress (which was really easy) but also manual conversion of 340+ posts. And it was worth it since WordPress gives me much better control over almost every aspect of my blog, since speed is improved, since I was able to integrate everything with my old site, and list goes on and on. Only downside is that I am now responsible for making backups and paying for hosting costs but it is small price to pay (and one can always make a donation).

Happy new year to everyone.