1. Clear your browser cache

If unsure how to do this, please google “clear [browser name] cache”, where browser name is either “Internet Explorer”, “Firefox”, “Chrome”, etc.

2. Clear your flash cache

I didn’t know about this one, but if you browse to the Flash Settings Manager page, you can delete your Flash cache.

3. For good luck, close your browser and re-open it

Seems to have done to trick for me, now I can listen to albums and playlists without playback stopping anymore! Only thing is the issue seems to reproduce itself every now and again.

I’d used the extigy on the mac before, and it certainly does detect it and play sound. Unfortunately I hadn’t paid much attention to the rear speakers. It turns out creative never released any drivers for the mac, so not only can I not get proper 5.1 surround sound, the CMSS feature won’t work either.

So that was a waste of time and money, considering I can get the same sound from a normal stereo cable. Apparently the newer macbooks (hopefully mine included) have optical audio out, but I’m not sure I want to buy the cable to find out?

As a “sort of” fix, I’m going to play music using parallels running Windows XP. I don’t think I’m ever going to get away from Windows for good.

With the error not dissapearing, I gave them a ring. The first question they asked was, “what browser are you using?“. Firefox, of course. Apparently the application form will only work in Internet Explorer. A few years ago I would have thought to try this first, but I was under the impression Firefox had enough market share to be taken seriously.

What really annoys me is that there is nothing in this process that should require internet explorer to operate properly. Its just a series of simple forms. Its ironic because the government probably paid more for this one form thatn we’ve ever charged for all forms we’ve ever built, and it isn’t even accessible to 30% of the Internet (counting Safari, etc).

I read around various blogs and discussion forums for obvious problems, of which there are many (see below), but I was sure I had done everything right!

Eventually I stumbled across some posts on the paypal developers forum where a few posters were complaining that the sandbox IPN posts were either really slow (hours) or just never got sent. Worse still, there was one post where paypal acknowledged that payment notifications just did not work on the sandbox for two months!!

I used the IPN test in the sandbox area to test the script in the end. You have to type in the test values manually and you can’t test the entire process in one go but at least it got the job done. Needless to say, the single IPN tests work flawlessly. As one final test I used two live paypal accounts to send small payments to each other. IPN worked without a hitch on the live paypal site.

So, if you are stuggling to get IPN working and your logs show that paypal is not posting to your server, maybe this is your problem too. Before you assume it is however, I read of many other common issues that although blatantly obvious, many people (including myself) have often fallen for:

1. I don’t know why, but some people were using URLs like http://localhost/ipn.php for the notify_url value. Their argument is that it works for the return url. The return URL works as localhost because paypal posts the value in your own browser, which can resolve localhost to the computer you are on. Paypals own servers obviously can’t!
2. The ipn processing script was inaccessible (password protected, behind firewalls, etc). Make sure you can access it from outside your local network and that requests from paypal are in your web server logs.
3. Certain types of escaping for the POST request to paypal can mean that paypal doesn’t understand the URL.
4. The IPN processing script erroring before it can log any information. Make sure php/http/whatever logging is enabled for this script – logging is a god send for cases like this.

Hopefully you haven’t fallen for any of the above and its just paypal being crappy. In any case, I hope this post saves somebody a bit of time.

I came back from lunch today and the guys in the office were looking at me worriedly. I asked why and they went on to explain that while I was away my laptop began to make loud clicking noises. They soon realised it was the magnet and moved it away but it seems all too late.

Why did I put a magnet on my laptop? I have a couple of those twizzly gadget magnets and I was fiddling with them while I tested out the paypal sandbox (see next post). I decided to go get some lunch and without thinking just popped them on my desk/laptop. Same thing? No.

Plus I hadn’t backed up my photos in a month (all work related stuff gets backed up anyway) so lost all my pictures of Rome and the trip through France. Bummer!

I’ve since blocked the IP’s in question but, is this common? The main culprit was 78.108.81.41 but not a lot comes up in a search on google for it. The IP resolves to a russian website that looks like it could be a web host or a portal, nothing that looks suspect anyway! Very strange.

My business partner was phoned a few months back and asked if we would like to purchase some ‘meeting leads’ in the local area. Woods appointments would be in charge of calling up and arranging meetings on our behalf and we would pay something like £25 a lead. It sounded worth a shot and we purchased the minimum of I think 5 leads. I’m not at the office now and forget the exact amounts but I know we paid £140 via google checkout.

£140 isn’t a lot, and we weren’t expecting much, if anything, to come of the leads… but we were expecting some leads or some contact from Woods appointments at the very least. Having sent payment we haven’t heard anything back from Woods appointments, they seem to have disappeared.

The payment was over 90 days ago meaning Google checkout won’t mediate the payment. They suggest we get mastercard to do a charge back, which of course we will. I’m not completely surprised this has happened but it is a shame we’ve had to deal with the hassle of requesting our money back.

If I hear from Woods appointments and they have a reasonable explanation I will without hesitation revoke my comments. Until then I hope this warns at least one other person of the risks of dealing with Woods appointments. We have a phone number from a Google checkout invoice that may be worth trying if anyone else is in the same boat, just drop me an email.

P.S. I didn’t see the website until after this little debacle but it should have been obvious not to trust a company that has a website with the title ‘Untitled document’.

I imagine the site could be quite busy but surely a site that popular (and with a decent budget I’d imagine) must be able to sort out some decent hosting for their website?!

I wonder how it is hosted.. possibly in-house?

Unfortunately there are still many people using IE6, at least 15% of visitors to this site and a lot more to other sites that have a less technical audience. Luckily that number is falling day-by-day and hopefully soon we can all stop wasting time making exceptions for IE6. I’ve found there are far fewer issues with IE7, hopefully it will stay that way in future versions.

I’d apologise to IE6 users but I think its about time they upgraded! :p