Categories
Errors Software www

WordPress stats

Took me a while to figure out what went wrong.

With the new Firefox (v3) and the wordpress update, I was no longer able to see my WordPress stats on my dashboard.

Every (WordPress) login attempt, to see the stats, resulted in… Well nothing. I just kept getting back to the login page. No error.

Actually, I have “third-party cookies disabled” on all my browsers; I don’t like to have cookies from sites I do not visit. And this was the cause of the problem.

Simply add an exception for “*.wordpress.com” and you’ll be able to view all your stats again. 🙂

Categories
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Soocial

Been using it from time to time, and so far it has been great!

Maybe I’ll post some mini review about it some day.

Anyway, here’s a interview with one of the developers/leaders.

And a nice mail from them (reply to an idea of mine):

PS Bedankt voor de inspiratie voor blog post van twee weken terug op de next web:
http://thenextweb.org/2008/08/08/soocial-will-totally-obliterate-plaxo-and-mobileme/
(Zie TUINSLAK onderaan ergens)

In short: search my nick on the page.

/me feels famous. Great for my ego. 😉

Categories
Errors Misc www

Mobistar’s iPhone webshop error code “30001100”

When I tried to order my iPhone a few days ago from the Mobistar webshop (which is using Ogone payments), and I got to its last step “Pay goldz plx !” something happened.

Submitting the required (and correct!) info, using my MasterCard, I received this helpful error page (roughly translated): “Order failed. Seller cannot sell item” and at the bottom, error code: 30001100.

I tried to execute the payments multiple times (you have no idea’s how many times I checked and rechecked my credit card number), reordered the item, other browser, and so forth. Nothing helped.

Googleing (Googling?) the error code, returned this.

Search for the error code, and you end up at this line:

30001100 no Unauthorized buyer’s country

When filling in the order, I was unable to choose where I lived, as it was set (uneditable) to Belgium (though I do live in Belgium… Most of the time).

As, at the time of the order, I was in The Netherlands, I quickly understood there was some ip to country check, and Mobistar only wanted Belgium buyers.

Though my MasterCard is hand out by a Belgian bank, and I guess you can’t have a credit card as non resisdential, it would seem logic to accept the payment anyway… But hey, can’t have it all!

Or perhaps use this error code:

30001101 no IP country <> card country

Anyway, to solve this problem, you simply need to get a “belgian ip”.

Don’t bother to search for free anonymous Belgian proxies, it will likely fail (don’t even think about Tor) as no one is willing to share in this country… I had to set up Hamachi on a PC there (yes, because it won’t run on os x.5), remote desktop to a PC home, and make the payment/order again.

And guess what? Worked like a charm.

Talk about convient online shopping .. !

This so does remind me about ING and its useful error codes for the most stupid thing, which forced the customer to call the helpdesk, and get annoyed by commercial junk.

By the way, Google for Mobistar, and check out the “Mobistar iPhone is wrong/fail” sites so high in the search results… Haha, really something a company would like to see.

Categories
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XML-Stylesheet

I quote my Hypermedia teacher from school:

“You add <?xml:stylesheet href=”blabla.css” type=”text/css”?> to blabla.xml. You will notice that, once again, this will not work in Firefox for some weird reason. I suggest using Internet Explorer for this. Nevertheless, there’s a workaround for Firefox, using xmlstylesheet for you Firefox fans…”

Well well, let’s all blame Firefox (well, Gecko, to be precise) for not parsing this correctly! Especialy when xml-stylesheet *is* the only valid option set by W3C

Categories
www

User-Agent ……/1.0

While checking the logs of one of my websites I noticed something rather weird.

Some person (65.210.123.237) with User-Agent/browser “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows NT; ……/1.0 )” was downloading _all_ files from my website. Totally ignoring robots.txt and requesting pages without providing a referral.

This seemed quite odd and didn’t seem to be a decent/real search robot. It kept requesting files every 3-4 seconds for about one hour. Decent search bots try to spread the load over a few minutes, and wouldn’t request about 1000 files (1.6 Gb) at once.

After some Googling I noticed I wasn’t the first person wondering what it was. And as it seems, no one had a clear answer who this bot is, or what it purpose is.

So, well, I banned it.