Tag: broken

Nexus 4 : Broken Back Panel (Final Update)…

Today I received a case for my Nexus 4. I got this case for £2.90 from Amazon along with free delivery. It came with a screen protector and polish cloth. 🙂

I put some sellotape over the shattered glass on the back, but couldn’t be bothered to tape over all the radiating cracks, since they are not shedding glass shards. I put the phone into the case and I’m now going to try my best to forget that LG (and Google by association) are a bunch of asses over the design of the back panel of this phone.

From a functional perspective, it’s hard to tell the phone apart from the Nexus 7 tablet, so I have no gripes in that respect. My rantings have purely been about the terrible choice of materials for the back panel.

Cheers

Tim…

 

Nexus 4 : Update from LG over broken back panel…

I just got off the phone to LG about this piece of crap Nexus 4 phone. Their response is physical damage is not their responsibility, so I will have to pay for a repair. I suggested that designing a phone that will shatter when it is placed on a room temperature surface (yes, that really has happened to people) constitutes a design flaw and they should repair it for free. After much whining on my part their stance is unchanged at this time. I guess if enough people contact them to complain they will have to take responsibility…. Maybe…

So if you end up getting one of these super-fragile phones, please save yourself a lot of grief and buy a case that covers the back completely. It’s the only way you are going to make it past a week without breaking it.

If the back panel does shatter, you have to phone LG. They will send you a letter telling you where to send your phone to get a quote for the repair. If you accept the quote they will fix it and send it back to you. If you don’t accept the quote they will charge to £20 and send the phone back to you. Sounds like something in excess of a week without a phone to me and no idea of what you are going to be charged before you do it. 🙁

I think I’m just going to accept the fact it is broken and cover it with a case to stop little shards of glass digging into my hand. Once Google and LG are shamed into admitting this design is crap, maybe I will get it repaired for free.

Tim…

Oracle Documentation: The broken links fiasco continues…

So I was just patting myself on the back for finishing my website clean up, then I happened on a few pages with broken links to Oracle documentation. That annoyed me, but I figured I better do a quick scan to see how many broken external links I had. The first attempt was a complete fail because the tool I used clicked all my Google Adsense adverts, making me a DotCom millionaire in about 3 minutes. I wrote to Google and apologised profusely. In my defense, the tool I used was right at the top of the list in the Chrome Web App Store…

Once I got a link checker that didn’t put me at risk of a jail sentence, things got a little more depressing. A very large number of my articles contain broken links to Oracle documentation. As I started looking at links it became apparent that Oracle have used at least 3 main URLs for documentation over the years:

  • http://download-west.oracle.com/docs (8i -> 10gR2)
  • http://download.oracle.com/docs (11gR1 -> 11gR2)
  • http://docs.oracle.com/ (post 11gR2 stuff)

The versions listed are based on the links I’ve added in my articles. If you check today, all/most docs come from the “http://docs.oracle.com” address.

This in itself shouldn’t present a problem, because any company with an involvement in the web knows that URLs should never change. If by chance you do have to change something, you put a redirect in place. The problem is, Oracle don’t do this, or at least not consistently. Check out the following three URLs:

They are the same document, just using the three base URLs I mentioned previously. If you click them, you’ll notice the first one fails and the following two work. My guess is Oracle have created a 301 permanent redirect from “http://download.oracle.com/docs” to “http://docs.oracle.com”, but not bothered to maintain the “http://download-west.oracle.com/docs” URL, thereby breaking just about every link to its docs on the internet that references anything older than about 11gR1. That includes forums (including their own), blog posts, documents containing URLs etc. It’s just a nightmare.

So PLEASE Oracle:

  • Stop changing URLs.
  • When you do change them, PLEASE use rewrites/redirects properly.
  • Remember, your rewrites/redirects should be permanent, not just long enough for search engines to update their indexes.

This would solve the vast majority of my gripes about the links to the Oracle docs…

Notes:

  • For those not familiar with web servers, this kind of rewrite/redirect for a whole domain name is really simple. It’s one line in your “.htaccess” file, not a separate one for each page, so I’m not asking for the world here. 🙂
  • I am aware there are other issues with changing URLs at Oracle that a blanket redirect would not solve. I’m not even going to start on whitepapers and PDFs…

Cheers

Tim…