Andrew Speakman

I have written about Maplin and its internet presence before - how they have an affiliate scheme where people can sell Maplin products on their personal web site. This is an acceptable way of trading, albeit not something I would do if I was a large established company and wanted to build my online sales and reputation. But I’m not a large company, so maybe I don’t know best, it just strikes me as short-termism - a way to generate some quick sales and raise its search engine profile.

Back to the headline question, which I won’t answer, instead, I’ll just explain what I’ve noticed. I’m always searching for products on Google, and more and more I see Maplin cropping up in the matches, with products I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to sell. When these matches are clicked, they take you to a Maplin search page with no results for the product in question. Just today, I did a search for the now, finally released, almost 2 years late Behringer BCD2000 and got Maplin as a match only to find that they don’t sell it.

Pirate DVD factory in Leyton closed:
http://lifestyle.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=5276

Looks like I won’t be bugged by DVD sellers in Stratford for a while.

I was searching google for a UK address I was interested in, and got one match. It was a file on a large UK educational institution’s website. My concern was aroused. The file had the extension .dat, I clicked the link in google, but found that the file wasn’t available on the website. I googled the path to the file and found that there were more .dat files indexed in google, one of which contained what appeared to be personal information and was still available via the institution’s website.

At this point, I e-mailed three members of the institution’s web team as well as their general e-mail address to inform them of my concerns. I asked them to reply to confirm they had received my e-mail, I got an out of office reply from one of the team, but nothing else. It has been three working days since I e-mailed them, I am disappointed that my e-mail was not acknowledged. According to my website stats, someone at the institution in question googled me and viewed my sites, so they definitely read my e-mail.

UPDATE: My e-mail was acknowledged on 22nd March, according to the e-mail’s footer, I can’t disclose it without asking the permission of the sender, so I’ll be careful. The e-mail might say that they removed the confidential data from their site several months ago, but are having trouble getting google to remove it from their cache, and that the directory in question is now secure.

A few bloggers have posted that the webcheck feature on the companies house website is closed on Sundays and only available 7am to midnight Monday to Saturday, but no one found out why. I decided to do just this, I sent an e-mail to companies house on Sunday evening and was surprised to get a comprehensive reply on Monday morning. I’m impressed, I just hope we won’t have a tax increase to pay for their new systems!

Dear Sir/Madam,

Our “Company names Index” Index Mainframe systems require updating and maintenance overnight. Our Web Service runs from 7a.m. To Midnight, which is not, 24/7 but does extend as far as we can beyond “normal office hours”.

Our Web Service is a real time system i.e. it is updated daily with substantial amounts of new and amended company information. To allow this to take place the service is unavailable after midnight. Most Web Services that offer 24/7 access have fixed information.

Our main companies information database is held on a mainframe computer, which allows Online Transaction processing between 7a.m. and 7p.m. each day. Hundreds of staff are entering new information and amending existing information daily. At 7 p.m. our overnight batch work commences, which produces Annual Returns for despatch, information snapshots for customers, reminder and default letters, certificates of incorporation and change of name, plus dozens of other essential (sometimes statutory outputs.

In addition, transfers are made to the Web Service of all amended company information collated during the day, plus images of new documents. These amounts to tens of thousands of transactions, which need to be, updated overnight. This is the reason for the service to be unavailable between Midnight and 7a.m

Companies House is currently in the process of re-developing its computer systems, which will enable us to move away from our legacy mainframe systems. This may offer us more flexibility in the future.

I hope this information satisfies your enquiry and I apologise for any inconvenience caused, if you require any further information do not hesitate to contact us.

Yours faithfully,
Dave Sullivan
E-mail Enquiries
Companies House

———- Original Message: ———-
From:
To: enquiries@companies-house.gov.uk
Sent: 12-03-2006 16:47:15
Subject: [Case 2722012] webcheck

Dear Sir / Madam,

I tried to use your webcheck service today and was presented with a message
saying:

Access to the service is closed
Companies House is available from Monday to Saturday 07:00 - 12 Midnight UK Time

I am wondering why this is the case?

Best Regards
Andrew Speakman

I got a reduced hydro-explorer rocket kit from maplin today and decided to google it to see if I could find out a bit about it. This led to me finding out that Maplin has started offering ’affiliate’ online stores to website owners. I have found them on radioandtelly.co.uk, eleinmec.com, activedeal.co.uk, krs-electronics.co.uk, electronics2you.co.uk, rmcybernetics.com.

 These sites look very amateur, I wonder if they are getting a cut of Maplin’s sales that are routed through them? Are Maplin doing this to increase their web sales / hit rate, if so, it stinks.. Maybe I’ll get one, a nice little earner. UPDATE - yes, maplin do have an affiliate programme: http://www.webgains.com/signup.html?programid=214

 Back to the rocket, it is quite an interesting design, made from as many mass produced parts as possible - hosepipe connectors, a bit of bike handlebar, a bike brake lever and brake cable. We had a go with the rocket with three launches in the local park, the results we pretty unspectacular, with a strong hook and a strong slice. We think performance was bad because we didn’t put enough water in and the launchpad was a bit unstable. I was pumping the rocket up to 80psi, so I think air pressure was satisfactory.

From what I remember, my old Rokit bottle rocket kit performed much better, except its launch was unpredictable, although that did add to the fun!

I also noticed that Maplin have something called an ecatalogue from a link tucked in the corner of their website. It uses something called Activepoint Promotion ebook which works like a paper catalogue but online. I’m not convinced. It might be a cost effective way of putting a printed catalogue online with all its printing and formatting, but you can’t read the catalogue text in the normal view so I think it’s pretty pointless. When you hove over an item, it brings up a description in larger text, but the description isn’t as comprehensive as that in the catalogue itself, and, to me, it defeats the point of being able to see a whole page of products at once. It’s like needing a magnifying glass to read a catalogue, which, one day I may need, but until then I’ll avoid it.

I have been having problems with the router. I lose all access to the internet on occasions, even when there isn’t heavy traffic or p2p, internal connectivity remains fine. Looking at the router status page shows a connection as normal. To (temporarily) fix the connection, I have to click disconnect and then reconnect. Not sure on the cause, could be bad router firmware, or possibly, but unlikely a line issue, since I never had problems like this with my cisco. Admittedly it was connected to a different phone socket, but the S/N ratios are very high: 

I’m going to keep a close eye on things, and see if I can make a further diagnosis. Maybe Netgear will bring out a firmware update that will solve all? Things can be so unreliable - the synaptics touchpad on my laptop has just died - time for a reboot….

I’ve got a small Jason Crispin site going on googlepages.com. Jason will be proposing regular updates for me to put on there, see andrew.speakman.googlepages.com. Google Page Creator is pretty primitive at the moment, but lets see how its development progresses.

I’ve had this piece of kit for a few weeks now so have been able to get a reasonable feel for it. The first thing is that it is easy to set up and configure how I want. The only thing I found lacking from the config for was a setting for dns suffix under DHCP, but that isn’t really the end of the world, just no short cuts to local DNS names.

Cosmetically the ‘PN looks pretty nice, similar to most other recent consumer netgear kit. The blue dome LEDs are a handy feature to see what the wireless is up to, an illuminated LED is supposed to indicate an antenna is ‘on’, the angle of the LED on the dome does seem to correspond to the direction of the signal. There are also status LEDs on the front panel, but these are green, and just don’t go with the blue. I spy netgear cutting (small) costs here. The last LED thing is that the rear ethernet ports seem to have status LEDs, but these are disabled on the ‘PN.

Stability wise the PN seems reasonable, but I have had a few problems, I’m not sure if these are p2p related or down to problems with interference on my wireless network. The symptoms were that I temporarily (for a few minutes at most) lost network access, although the wireless connection was showing full signal. When they recur, I’ll investigate further. Wireless range is improved vs my old netgear WAP54G which was the main intention of getting the ‘PN. An other reason is that I think my old cisco 827 doesn’t support ADSL2, plus the cisco is a bugger to set up at first if you’re not using web setup and doesn’t offer full functionality if you are using web setup. Once properly set up, the cisco was a rock solid piece of kit. The final reason is that I wanted to simplify by having one piece of kit instead of two. In fact I was using three pieces of kit because the 827 only had 10mb ethernet ports so I had a separate switch to get 100mb over wires.

I’m not convinced by the DOS protection and was getting shed loads of ‘DOS attacks’ in the log file when using a certain eager p2p app. The log has a nice e-mail feature that you can set to send you an e-mail dump of the log each time it filled. When using the p2p app I was getting at least an e-mail a minute full of DOS(sers), so I had to disable logging of DOS attacks and port scans. It would have been nice to have a bit more configurability here, as to exactly what to log and also what constituted a DOS.

That’s pretty much all - I’m not sure about VPN, and it of course doesn’t have a VOIP - analogue port, but I’m not bothered.

broken store finder page through multimap. performing a search by hitting enter instead of clicking the button gives old results or no results.

Loads of websites I see disappoint me.

They use clip art photos of smiley plastic people from strange angles, looking studious, sat in groups, or at a computer. A classic example of this can be found at www.train2gain.co.uk.

Keep it real.

I want to see the real people behind the company and the real customers doing real things. I’d rather have some slightly imperfect real photos than some obvious stock images.

Websites that use generic clip art images also tend to be lacking in substance. They are often designed and then left, without content being added to or updated. Some are even left incomplete with placeholder messages such as ‘Begin Content here’: www.bytewize.net/case_studies.php, or ‘This page is being updated’, or even the old favourite ‘Site under construction, please call back later’.

Don’t have a ‘latest news’ section on a business website unless you update it at least once a month! If your latest news is more than six months old your company can’t be doing that well, can it?

Make sure that all the links to other pages on your site actually link to pages and don’t generate nasty 404 errors. It’s really very easy to analyse your log files, any decent hosting provider should offer log analysis facilities. Regularly look through the logs for 404 errors with referrring pages, particularly those with referring pages on your site.

A website is for life, not just for christmas.