Sean's blog

Paypal: Your refund must not exceed your available balance

You have to love Paypal because it always just works. Well, always except for those times when it doesn’t. And then you have to ‘Contact Us’. And then it’s abysmally bad. A Lolyco customer changed their mind subsequent to paying for an order, but prior to shipping. No problem! We can just remove the unwanted articles, and refund the money for those items.

So you would think. The customer paid in Australian Dollars. Lolyco’s Paypal account is in British Pounds. When we tried to issue a partial refund we got the message:

Your refund must not exceed your available balance. If you have funds in another currency balance, you may want to consider transferring funds from other currency balances.

And no ‘issue refund’ button! The account had substantially more in it than was needed to repay our customer, so we ‘Contact Us’d Paypal. FOUR TIMES. FOUR USELESS REPLIES. We tried phoning too. But this is Malaysia, so that didn’t work. The phone just hung up with a useless click each time. Not a problem, that’s normal for Malaysia.

What’s really annoying is that the error message is longer than the solution to the problem. It didn’t take long to find the answer on Google – it seems it’s a fairly common problem. I found it first on Ian Ozsvald’s blog. Here’s the useful bit that the error message and Paypal’s ‘support’ droids omit:

go to Profile, select Currency Balances

How difficult is that? 6 words? The problem is having insufficient funds in the refund currency, so you have to set up a currency balance and transfer some money to it. That’s not really the problem, it’s Paypal not offering to do an automatic currency conversion back. Why is that? It seems unlikely we’ll ever know why the refund process is so lame, given that it’s not even possible to get Paypal’s support to answer a simple question.

Thanks for reading. I feel better now.

Posted in Broken, Fixed | 3 Comments »

Old articles from isono.my

I had this great idea to write about politics and open source software, and rented isono.my for a year as a domain to do it on. I decided after a few months that I wouldn’t continue with it, for … the same reason I’m not going to finish this sentence. It’s a pity to let the articles just disappear though, so I’ve copied them from the now defunct blog to this one.

Copying articles from one WordPress blog to another

It’s very easy, just go into the Dashboard of the origin blog and use Tools..Export to export the articles to a file on your own PC. From the Dashboard on the new blog, use Tools..Import to import the articles! You’ll notice that all the image links are broken – unless I did something wrong yesterday. All my articles had links to images on isono.my, when the images are now on blog.lolyco.com/sean. My solution to this was to use SSH to login to my hosting account, and use the mysql command line client to run this SQL statement:

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content, 'isono.my', 'blog.lolyco.com/sean');

I’ve just re-typed that from memory, as the command seems not to have been stored in my command history when I checked just now. Be very careful to double-check the command before you use it yourself, and remember to do a backup first!

After running the SQL command, you should be able to reload a page (perhaps after clearing your browser cache) and see the new URL, and hopefully, your images too. If you don’t have access to a command line, perhaps your host gives you access to a graphical database admin tool like phpMyAdmin. Ask them if you don’t know.

The isono.my articles

Everybody should question

as a stranger in Malaysia since 2005, I still can’t get used to the idea that nobody ever says “You what?!” when another person is obviously mistaken – at best.

Where is Pakatan Rakyat HQ?

the Opposition coalition doesn’t really exist, so perhaps asking where a non-existent political entity has its headquarters is unfair. Gape in awe at the prospect of a political party skyscraper.

Political Party Logos – part 1

the Opposition flags are nice and simple – you can use open source tools and the open SVG standard to make sure everyone can use them, and they look good at any size.

Political Party Logos – part 2

Parti Keadilan Rakyat’s flag makes a good target for a tutorial on how to go about converting a bitmapped image into SVG using InkScape

Political Party Logos – part 3

DAP’s logo is the most complex of the 3 – but it’s still simple! DAP also put a bit of effort into explaining the symbolism of their rocket. I’m not totally convinced they’ve got it right.

Where in the world was Altantuya?

We know where she shouldn’t have been. Susan Loone asked “when and where” on her popular blog. I show how to estimate place, time and time of year from shadows in photographs.

Posted in Bolehtics, Breaktime, Broken, Life | No Comments »

Chinese character flash cards

What's this?

Emily (my 3 year-old daughter) has a few sets of Chinese character flash cards from her kindergarten. We were using them one night recently when I thought they’d make a good test page for Spinneret. I’ve been wondering about javascript (never used it before) and Ajax and what I would do as a first attempt. Well, here it is – Chinese character flash cards!

I don’t really speak Chinese – as a Chinese-speaker listening to my pronunciation might guess! My native language is Thames Estuary English. My brother-in-law introduced me to some of his builder friends recently at a wedding reception near Port Dickson. It was a bit awkward – he explained that they didn’t speak English. I learned the little Chinese I speak from some Chinese (Malaysians don’t sound the same when they speak Chinese) colleagues and in a class run by a man from Suzhou back in the UK. I did my best to say “I speak Chinese not good”, to which one of the builders replied using the same words with “also” added. He said it in the style of the Beijing Opera. I think he was taking the mickey out of my pronunciation. It made me laugh like a crazy man!

The flash card web page is not an earth-shattering application, but it does get me over the ‘start learning javascript hurdle’ and also gets Spinneret to the ‘accommodates javascript’ stage (though that isn’t saying very much either). I’d be interested to hear reports of working / not working for the javascript. There are a few bits that I think need a little bit more attention (no fall-back for non-javascript / non-flash browsers, for example).

The flash cards are picked at random, which can be annoying when you get the same one twice in a row – there aren’t many! A few seconds after a card is shown, the pinyin equivalent is faded up, and shortly after that, you should be able to hear me saying the word. Maybe one day I’ll add a ‘contribution’ facility so that someone who can actually speak Chinese provides the sounds!

Update 6th January – I’m working on a flashcard website that allows people to contribute their own, and even edit each other’s cards (with permission!). It’s a work-in-progress as of January 2010, but I’d love to know what you think of it:

Wossis.com

This set of cards has been copied to the new site as:

Poditronic Han Zi

There’s another set of Chinese flaschards for the numbers one to ten here:

Mandarin Chinese one to ten

Posted in Breaktime, Life, Spinneret | 2 Comments »

ZoneEdit Nameservers down

ZoneEdit Servers Down

That’ll teach me to be a cheapskate! Poditronic.com and spider.my are both served from my desk. DNS for my ADSL-conected (dynamic IP) server is free from ZoneEdit. Spider.my has a special feature on its homepage that checks the site’s connectivity to the Internet. The check only runs when the homepage is viewed from the local (on my desk) network. All it is 2 fetches of a “what is my IP” script and a “what IP does spider.my resolve to” PHP script at lolyco.com. If the two IP addresses are different, a warning is displayed on pages served to the local network.

I got the warning yesterday, and had a quick look at ZoneEdit’s site. Their network status page has the story about the servers being attacked. Since I’m intending to keep spider.my and poditronic going for a while yet, I paid for an extra nameserver for them – $10 per year. It may look like a bad time to give money to a service provider, but I’ve been with ZoneEdit for a few years now, for quite a few sites, and never previously given them even a thank you.

Poditronic.com is now back online – it was very easy to update the domain nameserver details at Exabytes – my registrar. I can’t do the same for spider.my, some sort of weirdness with Exabytes being the ‘Technical Contact’. I’ve been in touch with their support by email and given them the changes, and now I’m waiting…

Posted in Broadband, Broken | No Comments »

Easter eggs at Google and Firefox

It was my birthday a few days ago, so I told everybody that I was now “The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything”. If you’re not familiar with Douglas Adams‘ book (or the BBC TV serialisation) “The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy“, that probably won’t mean anything to you. Google has the answer though:

Google: The Answer to Life The Universe and Everything

I made a mistake typing a comment on a blog recently and asked

Is this question recursive?

I did start considering the question, but gave up very quickly after

Is “Is this question recursive?” recursive?

Google has some help available to those searching for help on recursion:

Google: Recursion – did you mean Recursion?

Although I notice just now Google has decided it’s not funny any more 🙁

Firefox about:robots

And finally, in case Google decides to take its toys home and not let you play with them (where’s the recursion thing gone?), Firefox can help you pass some time with its helpful embedded page about robots:

Firefox: about:robots

If your browser isn’t as funny as Firefox, I recommend you change browsers, or look at the picture. Ten points are available for anyone who knows where all the quotes are from.

I see (27th July 2009) that the Google search for ‘recursion’ is doing what I expected, after a short break. Perhaps they should have a special page for ‘unreliable’ that occasionally returns no results…

Posted in Breaktime, Google | No Comments »