Jonathan's Liverstone

The "spam me" clause

Shell NZ are currently handing out promotional dockets with fuel purchases, inviting you to go to their web-site and enter a "competition" for some free fuel.

Despite the fact that they have a pseudo-"opt-out" tick-box on the form, buried deep in the Contions of entry (Clause 24) is the following:
By entering the promotion, unless otherwise advised, each entrant consents to their personal information being entered into a database, and each entrant also agrees that the Promoter may use this information, in any media for future promotional, marketing and publicity purposes without any further reference, payment or other compensation to the entrant, including sending the entrant electronic messages.
So the reason for the "competition" ... harvest customer information and e-mail addresses.

Posted by The Denizen @ 6/27/2007 07:01:00 pm {0 comments }

Way too Geeky!

So Firefox 2.0 is out and can be downloaded ... yay!
but upgrading the home Fedora box was an unnecessarily geeky activity.
I don't think I missed the obvious but this was how it went...

Go to Mozilla
find the right distro (this was firefox-2.0.0.4.tar.gz )
and download.
As root (if you do it as a user, you don't change things for *all* users.)

    tar -xzvf firefox-2.0.0.4.tar.gz

in the resulting directory (blandly named "firefox") locate the firefox script
and replace the current 1.5 version script.

    cp  firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

Now, this script is looking for (as a default directory) /usr/local/lib/firefox-2.0.0.4.
Two minor point here ...
1. the 1.5 distro on fedora is in /usr/lib (not /usr/local/lib)
2. The directory you have just extracted has to be named as the version
so ... move & rename the whole thing.

    mv firefox /usr/local/lib/firefox-2.0.0.4

Now click on your current desktop icon & it should fire up the new version 2.0
(which on startup suggests, wrongly, that Firefox is not the default browser ..etc ...)

Now I would have thought that there would have been some sort of installation advice,
but the Mozilla page has a *single* paragraph on installing:

Please note that installing Firefox 2 will overwrite your existing installation of Firefox. You won't lose any of your bookmarks or browsing history, but some of your extensions and other add-ons might not work until updates for them are made available.

... NOW THAT'S REAL HELPFUL!
I would have thought that by now this would have been easier!

Posted by The Denizen @ 6/05/2007 08:27:00 pm {0 comments }

Disclaimer: (I stole this from Internal Affairs.)
All links and references to other websites, organisations or people not within my control are provided for the user's convenience only, and should not be taken as endorsement of those websites, or of the information contained in those websites, nor of organisations or people referred to. I also do not implicitly or impliedly endorse any website, organisation or people who have off-site links to this website.
... But then again; I only link to sites 'cos I see something there that's worth linking to.