Entries from August 2007 ↓

I’m fed up with home delivery for things I’ve bought online – why can’t it be more like buying a pizza. Time for a bit of a moan, methinks.

Here’s how my local pizza shop works – I phone them up, they tell me how long until they can deliver it, then they deliver it. I’m always at home when they deliver because I phoned them up and they told me when they’d deliver it. It’s never more than an hour after I phone them that it turns up. The pizza box has the delivery driver’s mobile number on it, in case after he’s sped off I realise he’s forgotten something. It’s like magic.

Here’s how DHL works – they don’t tell me that they’re coming except through some cryptic code their deeply unusable order tracking page. A page, of course, that I have to make a point of remembering to visit.

They put a big note through my door telling me I was out. The note says “While you were out…” with ‘you’ printed in a big red italic font to make me feel special. The note itself is a masterclass in poor design. Attached to the note is a map to their local delivery centre, presumably in case that I forget what I paid them for and go and collect the parcel myself.

I phone them to arrange redelivery, hoping to speak to someone who might be able to get in touch with the van driver and tell him he missed me by two minutes and I’m at home now. No luck. Just an automated service that lets me get it redelivered tomorrow – not tomorrow morning or afternoon, but just some time tomorrow. It’s like… well, shite.

Of course DHL aren’t alone in this – I don’t think I’ve had a good online delivery experience. They all seem to be geared towards delivering to 9-5 businesses with receptionists or stockrooms to take delivery.

Update: oddly enough, I’ve just been searching their website and found a press release announcing their DHL@Home service which sounds like it’s just the job. The press release was written in April, and talks about all the things that pissed me off today. I wonder if the service actually exists, it didn’t for me, and now I know that they’re well aware of the problems I’ve mentioned.

I’ve been struggling to understand the A-level results, a provisional summary of which is published by the Joint Council of Qualifications. Naturally, it’s published in PDF format which is a very useful way of publishing data tables…

That aside, I can’t see how from the data presented one can conclude that the results represent a definitive improvement. I’m not suggesting there hasn’t been an improvement, but I don’t think the data show one.

What the data do show is that for each individual subject, the percentage of entrants achieving higher grades has improved.

A perfectly valid hypothesis would be that candidates were being more selective about the subjects they took and biasing their choices to those subjects in which they would perform better. Or the corollary of that, candidates were dropping subjects in which they couldn’t achieve a high grade.

Let’s take a couple of concrete examples: first, a high flying student is taking four A-levels and expects to achieve AAAB grades. By dropping the fourth subject, these statistics would show an ‘improvement’ though no change in the population’s ability has occurred. Equally, a lower-ranked student may be expecting to pass two A-levels and fail another. Again, by dropping the one she expects to fail the statistics would improve. Again, the population has become neither smarter nor thicker.

I’d suggest that to make sense of these results, we need them to be normalised against the number of A-levels taken, or some other weighting scheme that would remove these biases.

Certainly, the published results don’t justify the director of the JCQ’s conclusion that “the improvement of the results at A-level reflects how well students have done this year.”

Perhaps Dr Sinclair has some other results that do show this which he forgot to publish. Or perhaps he should go back to his school textbooks – I’m sure that they still teach about self-selection biases at A-level.

Wouldn’t it be a service if one of the journalists covering this today asked about this issue? I wouldn’t hold your breath, given that on breakfast time this morning one of them looked flustered on being told that 300 million divided by 300 was one million.

As I sit here, my laptop can see 7 wireless networks other than my own – I suspect many of them have, like mine, been secured.

Here’s a question: what would happen if everyone with password-protected wifi in the UK reconfigured their routers so that up to 25% of their bandwidth was available unprotected to anyone who wanted to use it?

I don’t even know if that’s possible with current routers, but most of them surely have hardware that’s capable – and of making sure there was no route to machines on the the secure network from the public side.

Am I naive in thinking that this would create a sensible wifi commons across most major cities?

Update: James has pointed me to Fon who make a router that already does exactly this.

Parcel tracking is a pain. When I buy something online, I’d like the last page in the purchasing process to give me an RSS feed to which I could subscribe to track the delivery – I find reading feeds much less intrusive than email these days.

But I don’t want that feed hanging around in my reader after the parcel has been delivered. Somehow the feed would have to indicate to my reader that no more updates should be expected, that the subscription had expired.

My reader would then archive the feed for me and stop checking it.

One way to do this would be through the HTTP status codes. There is the 410 Gone return code that, according to the spec, implies that “the requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known.”

But this doesn’t seem quite right – it’s an error code for a start. I suggest we need another status in the 2xx range to imply discontinued or frozen.

Having this simple functionality expands the usefulness of RSS – I might want other things to be published in this way. A few examples – live train times that freeze once the train has arrived at its destination; project feeds that are frozen on completion; customer service cases; and so on.

I’m not sure it’s a killer feature, but I think it would help me in a small way – if a couple of the feed readers with large user bases added support for it, I’m sure that many more services would start using it.

Of course, it wouldn’t take long until the marketeers got their hands on it – they’d probably call it a ‘touch point’ – and started piping spam down the channel, destroying it like they destroyed email. But in the meantime, I can think of all kinds of interesting services that could be built around self-destructing feeds.