I collected my final year project result today. The project was based on the reading and recognition of roadsigns, for those of you who have forgotten (apologies for the lack of updates on the roadsigns blog).

I’m pleased to announce that I got a grade of 71 which equates to a first.

Obviously I’m very pleased with this result and it really has made the hard work worthwhile. It was far from a trivial project and presented some interesting challenges and learning experiences, but I feel the work will stand me in good stead for the future.

All this means that I’m now a mere two weeks away from getting my final degree grade and completing my time as a student of Leeds University School of Computing. Time certainly does fly.

Could this round of plugin updates spell further breakages for those running WordPress legacy? Given the admitted lack of testing on anything below 2.5, something is highly likely to go wrong with at least one of these plugins.

I’m sure Lester’s efforts to release these updates will be well received, after all I use a number of his plugins and have had to hack around with some of them to get them working and have noticed a degree of unnecessary code duplication as well - I’m sure I’m not the only one. Its just a shame that yet again we have an update in which legacy support seems to be lacking.

Back in the day I used to use a train tickets website called QueueJump. That was taken over by thetrainline.com and while underreported at the time, broke data protection laws as a result by porting QueueJump’s database directly to thetrainline.com without ever notifying users that this would be done as part of the takeover (notice of the takeover was given to users by e-mail). I know they transferred the database because I could login to thetrainline.com with my QueueJump details and see all my information there without ever having registered.

Still my issue really isn’t about the data protection problem. thetrainline.com run a secure site and I started using them for tickets and was a happy customer, until recently when they decided to start charging for everything under the sun.

If I pay for tickets and elect to collect them rather than having them posted, you would imagine I’d pay for just the tickets right? Wrong. With thetrainline.com you are charged £1 for having your tickets posted (fair enough) or 50p for collecting them from the machine. So hang on then, my ticket didn’t really cost £44 did it? No, because if I’d just paid £44 I wouldn’t have been able to get my mitts on the damn thing. The actual ticket price was £44.50.

Sadly this covert thievery doesn’t stop here, or at least it has started not to in recent weeks. Whereas previously, after having consented to be robbed of 50p you would be able to pay for the tickets with your debit card and be done with it, they have now started to charge 50p for paying with a debit card (note the words “debit card” - credit cards historically have always come with a charge, debit cards have not). So now the actual cost of my ticket had reached £45. Again, if I’d decided not to pay the 50p for card fee, I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on the tickets which they claim only cost £44. So in fact these £44 tickets actually cost a minimum of £45.

Now you might argue that an extra pound on a £44 ticket is not that much of a surcharge, and I guess I’d agree with you, I make it a little over 2%, but the serious problem arises if your ticket costs less than that because the surcharges are actually static. So if I travel to York and book in advance, as I regularly do, my £5.50 ticket with a young persons rail card will actually cost £6.50, a staggering 18% surcharge!

I am shocked and appalled at the way these charges are being levied on customers. If a retailer is feeling the pinch, they should increase their prices, not keep them the same and then sting the customer at the end of their transaction with a whole bunch of surcharges to make up for their losses. There ought to be a law against this kind of thing.

It occurs to me as I finish this post that there may in fact be a law against this kind of thing. If there is, can someone let me know so I can report these thieves.

Listening to this just made me go all gooey inside. Its a wonderful piece of jazz music, an excellent live performance from candy Dulfer on saxophone and Dave Stewart on guitar. The tune is entitled “Lily Was Here”.

I wrote back in 2006 about AVG’s crafty tactics to get you to part with money you didn’t need to part with and it now seems they are at it again.

Last night I logged into my Windows box and was greeted with a pop up from AVG saying that version 8.0 is now available. I know this to be true because I recently grabbed a copy from their website to install on my new laptop (which I have yet to write about here). The thing is though, if you clicked any of the links in the pop up, you landed yourself directly at a check out to buy the full version 8.0 security suite. There was no link to the free version anywhere, unlike the last debacle where it was merely hidden in a next to impossible to find location.

In the end the only way I could find a link to the free version was to actually go directly to free.grisoft.com and click on a series of links there. It simply wasn’t possible to get at it through their pop up reminder or the resultant pages. Now obviously I understand that they need to make money, but they do that through their corporate sales and other such deals. Surely they don’t need to be so under-hand as to dupe home users who are legally using the free version into buying the next version “in order to stay protected”, when there does in fact exist a free next version which will do just the same? If they really are losing money then they should stop releasing the free version altogether.

Whats to bet that customers who are duped into paying for the next version then later realising that they could have got it for free won’t be given refunds? Its simply not good enough.