Voidspace

AMD64 or X86-64?

Up until recently the 64bit Windows binaries of Python were labelled as being for "AMD64" processors. If you know the history of this architecture then you know exactly what this means, but at least one person was confused and emailed in to ask:

Should I use the AMD64 version of Python on an Intel 64 chip? I know those 64-bit implementations are very similar, but are they similar enough that your AMD64 will work on Intel?

Christian Heimes offered this reply, and suggested an update to the download pages:

The installer works on all AMD64 compatible Intel CPUs.

As you most likely know all modern Intel 64bit CPUs are based on AMD's x86-64 design. Only the Itanium family is based on the other Intel 64bit design: IA-64. The name AMD64 was chosen because most Linux and BSD distributions call it so. The name 'AMD64' has caused confusion in the past because users thought that the installer works only on AMD CPUs.

How about:

• Python 2.6.4 Windows X86-64 installer (Windows AMD64 / Intel 64 / X86-64 binary -- does not include source)

Martin Loewis (one of senior core-Python developers with a particular responsibility for the Windows releases) objected to the use of the term "X86-64" to describe this architecture:

AMD doesn't want us to use the term x86-64 anymore, but wants us to use AMD64 instead. I think we should comply - they invented the architecture, so they have the right to give it a name. Neither Microsoft nor Intel have such a right.

As a member of the Python.org webmaster team I was concerned that the descriptions were as useful as possible, and am not particularly interested in AMD vs Intel politics. I did a bit of digging to see if X86-64 was now a sufficiently generic term for the AMD64 architecture. Here's what I came up with, none of them individually conclusive perhaps, but indicators of how people understand and use the term:

• Linus Torvalds addressed this specific issue for Linux and came down on the side of "x86-64": http://kerneltrap.org/node/2466

• Look up AMD64 on Wikipedia and it redirects you to the X86-64 page

• Information website setup by AMD and partners about the AMD64 architecture: http://www.x86-64.org/about.html

• In the AMD website they refer to "x86-64 Assembly": http://www.x86-64.org/documentation/assembly.html

• Microsoft seem to draw a distinction between x64 (which would also be acceptable) and Itanium based systems. Very rarely do they refer to AMD64:

  • http://www.microsoft.com/servers/64bit/compare.mspx
  • http://www.microsoft.com/servers/64bit/x64/overview.mspx
  • http://www.microsoft.com/servers/64bit/overview.mspx

• Using a vendor specific name automatically begs the question as to whether the installer works on processors from other vendors, as we saw in the specific enquiry from the user that triggered this debate.

In conclusion, referring to the AMD64 build as x86-64, with a footnote explaining which architectures this specifically means is unlikely to confuse people. It is definitely better than just saying AMD64.

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Northampton Geek Meet

Well, last night was the inaugural meeting of the Northampton Geek Meet. Nine geeks from around Northamptonshire (in the UK) got together in the King Billy pub to partake of the real ale and geek talk.

Attendees were a mix of programmers and other geeks including:

• @Documentally - Christian Payne, social technologist (!)
• @DaylightGambler - Phil Sorrell, freelance web developer
• @ntoll - Nicholas Tollervey, Python developer
• @ydnab40 - Andrew Bedford, geek truck driver
• @taurig - Roger Dobson
• @voidspace - uhm... me

Plus a few folk who have the good sense not to be on Twitter... We're a ragtag bunch; a few of us who know each other from the London Python meetups, a few of us from Twitter, a friend of mine from university whom I haven't seen for 15 years but who found me on Facebook and is a .NET developer (doing some very cool stuff with micropayments and mobile phones), a guy interested in open source who found me via my website plus someone who heard about the geek meet from a message I posted on LinkedIn. This is the first practical use of LinkedIn I've ever found... Then there was Roger found us whilst visiting Northampton and using the 'find people near me' feature on his mobile Twitter client. I guess all this social stuff has its uses.

You can see us (thankfully blurry) and hear a brief introduction from us all that Christian recorded as an AudioBoo: The First Northampton Geek Meet.

The King Billy was great; decent beer, quiet and with a good lounge so the next one will be there too. Currently we're looking to have the next one on Thursday November 26th. I'll post reminders on Twitter, LinkedIn and the Python-UK mailing list so you've got no excuse for missing it!

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Apple Laptop Screen Replacement

A couple of weeks ago the screen of my wife's Macbook broke.

Apple refused to quote me a price at all unless I brought the laptop in but an Apple authorised repair centre quoted me 295 pounds to replace it, which uhm... seemed like a lot. In the end I found Apple Laptop Screens which is actually a gentleman called David Duck. For half the price he came into the offices in London and fixed the laptop on-site. He's very capable and did an excellent job.

• Apple Laptop Screens

He replaced the screen with an LG/Philips LCD panel. If you're not in London you can post your computer into him and he'll post it back. I'm impressed.

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Writing a Technical Book

Any day now I will get the first quarter sales figures for IronPython in Action. That will mark the book having been actually in the hands of readers for three months and also be about two and a half years since I first contacted Manning about the possibility of writing an IronPython book for them.

I've written up my experiences of writing a technical book, including my justification (uh, I mean explanation) of why it took so long, the writing process, things I learned and contract advice for the aspiring writer. This is advice I didn't follow myself but wish I had...

• Writing a technical book

Much of the article is specific to my experiences with IronPython in Action - but despite the difficulties (and there will always be difficulties) I still recommend Manning if you really have to write a technical book:

The most important thing I learned was don't sweat the small stuff. This warrants repeating. Don't sweat the small stuff. Many times I knew the gist of what I wanted to say in a passage but couldn't find the words. I would go round and round over a single sentence for fifteen minutes or more. This happened a lot. I learned to just write something and then come back to it later. Often what I had been unhappy about when writing read fine when I came back to it the next day. If I was really stuck I would just leave a placeholder (like XXXX or something easy to search for) and come back to it another time. Letting yourself get stuck drags out the writing process and makes it mentally exhausting. Far better to just write what you have and move on; you're going to be going back over it later anyway.

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Gadgets: Samsung SSD, Sharkoon SATA Adaptor, Mimo USB Monitor and Powermate USB Volume Knob(!)

Over the last few months I've bought a few new gadgets, and they're well overdue a review; so here goes.

• Samsung PB22 2.5" 256GB SSD (Solid State Drive)

As I'm sure you're aware Solid State Drives are hard drives using flash memory instead of mechanical disks; this eliminates the need for spin up, plus makes seek times and data rates potentially much faster and power consumption less. I wanted this for my Apple Macbook Pro, which only had a 120gig hard drive. Advantages for me would be a bigger hard drive, a faster hard drive, and through less heat / power a longer battery life as well.

Fitting it was a royal pain in the *ss. I followed the instructions from this article: Upgrade Your MacBook Pro's Hard Drive. They're pretty good, the only place I deviated from them was that once I got inside my Mac the bluetooth module wasn't on top of the hard drive I was removing. This was a good thing.

The hardest part was levering the keyboard top panel from off the innards. This really didn't want to come off, and it is attached by a ribbon cable to the motherboard so you can't be too violent in your attempts to pry it free. It came eventually. Scraping the ribbon cable that is glued to the top of the existing drive free is also slightly nerve-wracking.

Choosing an SSD is almost as painful as fitting. The current crop of drives are the first that are within the realms of affordable (although still expensive), but many of them suffer from real performance issue once you have written a certain amount of data (random write access becomes far slower than even normal hard drives). This AnandTech Article is essential reading on the subject. It was written before the PB22 came out, and the conclusion it came to is that only the OCZ Vertex and the Intel X25-M are worth having. From what I've read the PB22 doesn't suffer the same problems that plague the earlier drives and it is cheaper than both the Vertex and the X25-M so I decided to go for it.

And as for performance, well. XBench reported (results here) an average of 3x faster than a standard Macbook Pro on all the drive benchmarks. The difference in general is noticeable but perhaps not overwhelming. The most striking change was in launching Microsoft Office for the Mac; it launched in about 3 seconds instead of 12! The disappointing thing is that starting my Windows VM (VMWare Fusion) is not much faster, although shutting it down is (which was already pretty fast). Even worse, booting my Mac up (something I don't do very often) - if you include the fifteen to twenty second freeze on start which arrived with the new drive - took about the same amount of time.

In the end, whilst trying to fix a different problem with another of my new gadgets I reset the PRAM on my Macbook, which fixed it! Now on the once a month occasion I restart my laptop it will happen really quickly. Overall the biggest difference that fitting the SSD made was that I now have a bigger hard drive. Everything is faster but possibly not enough to make it worth the cost, it seems that other than Word most of the apps I start are network or CPU bound. The downside is that after investing in the SSD I probably have to wait another couple of years before I replace my Macbook.

• Sharkoon Drivelink SATA / IDE Adapter

When I ordered the SSD I also ordered a 2.5" SATA adaptor to go with it. I asked the salesman if the adaptor would work with the SSD and he did suggest that buying an SSD and then using it through a USB adaptor didn't sound that sensible. Actually I wanted the adaptor to clone the internal drive of my Mac onto the SSD before fitting it. The nice thing about the Sharkoon is that it has connectors for SATA drives and 2.5" / 3.5" IDE drives. Like many geeks I often have random hard drives lying around and this will allow me to use them. It worked fine (without needing a driver) on Mac OS X, despite not advertising Mac compatibility. It even comes with some funky rubber sheaths for attached drives if you want to leave one connected for anything other than a short period of time.

To clone the internal drive in the laptop onto the SSD I used Carbon Copy Cloner. Cloning a 120gig drive (CCC claimed it would do a block level clone but actually did a file level clone) took hours. It was slightly worrying to see the occupied size of the new drive was about 200meg less than the original - but I imagine this is a consequence of smaller blocks on the SSD and CCC doing a file level clone. Anyway it worked fine.

• Mimo 710 USB Monitor

Mimo monitors make a range of 800x480 pixel USB monitors. I wanted the 740 touchscreen monitor for a home media server project. The 740 was out of stock so I ended up with the 710 and the media server project got shelved (I ditched wireless for my main computer as it was sporadically unreliable and with a wired connection to the desktop no need for a separate server).

The monitor is a fantastic second monitor for my laptop but I only use it when I have a power source. Rather than see it unused I have it attached to my desktop (technically my sixth monitor) showing my twitter stream via Tweetdeck.

This photo shows the Mimo and the Powermate volume control (see below).

It turned out to be an irresistible but expensive toy, quelle surprise. Definitely useful though and in constant use, so it's fared better than some of the expensive toys I've bought in the past (Nintendo DS I'm talking to you).

Unfortunately there is a problem with the displaylink driver and the Mac OS X 10.5.7 update. Some details of the problem here and more here (apparently it is a known issue with 10.5.7 and not the fault of the driver). Uninstalling and re-installing the driver worked for me, but sometimes the display doesn't work if I restart my laptop with it plugged in (remembering to unplug it before restarting does the trick).

• Powermate USB Volume Control

This was another toy. Whenever I am at my computer I almost inevitably have a movie playing and this expensive little knob is a volume control. It has much more granularity than using the keyboard to control the volume and I find it surprisingly useful. You can configure different behaviour (e.g. scrolling) for different applications, but I just use it as a volume control.

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Hardware and Software Clearout on Ebay

It's been a fun weekend. On Friday I went to see Coraline 3D at the cinema (and I didn't even know that you could watch films in 3D in Northampton UK which is officially the middle of nowhere in England). I haven't seen anything in 3D since the red and green glasses of my childhood (20 years ago which is another reminder of how old I am getting). Both the Coraline and the 3D were awesome. Coraline is by the master story teller Neil Gaiman and is very entertaining.

I spent most of Saturday replacing the hard drive in my laptop with an SSD followed by going to see Star Trek. Apple don't make it easy to fit a new HD yourself, but it was worth it. A subject for another blog entry. Star Trek was great. Any plot that relies on time travel is slightly suspect, but even if the overarching storyline is dubious it was a fantastic cinematic experience.

And as for today... at least partly clearing out my hardware and software. It means I wasn't coding away anything from my backlog, or writing any of the blog entries I owe you, but at least I got something off my list. Anyway, if you live in the UK you should buy my stuff:

• Logitech S530 Wireless Keyboard & Mouse Set for Mac
• Original Apple Macbook Laptop 2.5" 120gig Hard drive
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Retail Boxed
• Microsoft Office 2007 Home & Student boxed with COA
• Microsoft Windows Vista Business x64 bit boxed with COA
• Rogue Trooper PC Game (DVD) - boxed with serial number
• Enemy Territories Quake War PC boxed with serial number
• Quake 4 PC Game (Classic) - boxed with serial number
• Far Cry PC Game (Classic) - boxed with serial number

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Multi-monitors and the Hazro 30" Monitor

My colleague Kamil Dworakowski has written a blog entry on using multiple monitors, showing off his desktop setup (the deathstar control centre) at Resolver Systems: Quad Head

Traders have long known about the value of using multiple monitors.

The reason it is so good for programming is that the activity requires to keep millions of things in the head at once -- names of variables, functions, classes, third party APIs. You can keep limited amount of things in your head, depending on various factors affecting your concentration like amount of sleep the previous night. You will have to page fault to the rest. And when page faulting requires switching between windows it adds friction. Energy that could have been used on solving problems is wasted.

Allocating windows across monitor is crucial. You want to have the information you will need most often readily available. What you don't want is to have two windows to which you need simultaneous access being on the same monitor.

Even with four monitors, you will find that you have more than one window on the same monitor. My average is about 2-3 windows per monitor and 2-3 virtual desktops (don't worry I don't use splits ;). For past month I had one virtual desktop for lunch time, one for spiking an interactive console for Resolver One, and one for main development.

Vista is not really well prepared for 4 monitors; windows appear on different monitors at random. It is not unusual that an application on monitor 4 will popup a dialog on monitor 1. Without some third party tools it would be a chore to manage it all. I use winsplit for moving windows around, vdm for virtual desktops and ultramon for extending the taskbar.

I quite agree that having several monitors really improves development experience; and whilst I hate to play the "mine is bigger than yours" game, I'm currently running five monitors:

My main monitor is now a 30" Hazro monitor. The others are a 32" LCD TV, 22" widescreen and two 24" monitors. (I watch movies on the top monitor - fed from my computer - and the middle monitor runs a Vista VM.) The 30" monitor is a recent addition. I've long wanted one - with a resolution of 2500x1600 is large enough to have two applications side by side in the same monitor at the same size as they would be on a standard 20" monitor. 24" monitors are typically 1900x1200 pixels - too wide for a single application and not wide enough for two side by side at a decent width.

I've resisted the lure of thirty inches for a long time because they are still hugely more expensive than 24" monitors. The market leaders for 30" monitors are Dell and Apple, and they cost around a thousand pounds or so. A good twenty four inch monitor can be had for around two hundred pounds. I recently found a cheaper alternative, the 30" Hazro Monitor. Allegedly they take the same panels used in the more expensive Dell monitors and use cheaper housing with less markup. If you read the reviews (google for them - there are quite a few), they are almost universally positive. I found one from Overclockers.co.uk for six hundred and seventy pounds (including VAT and shipping) - about a third cheaper than any other I had found.

At first I was very nervous about ordering. I hate dead pixels on monitors and have been very lucky on the monitors I have bought so far. Hazro's dead pixel policy even allows for 5x5 clumps of dead pixels. Fortunately I got very good advice on Overclockers own forum:

If you still have a dead pixel problem, can't bring it back to life and can't RMA it under warranty then you can sometimes return it to the stockist if you purchased it online. If you bought online you can take advantage of the "Distance Selling Act" which entitles you to return any item within 7 days as you were not present at the time of purchase. If you are not happy with your TFT you can return it at your cost of postage and often claim a refund or exchange.

Legally, if the stocker accepts the TFT back as a return governed by the Distance Selling Act, then they are NOT allowed to charge you a restocking fee as covered in the Government Regulations (page 11 in particular). This selling act is not widely known by retailers, but does exist if you really need to use it. You should only have to pay for postage to send it back to them.

(Obviously the distance selling act only applies in the UK.) On that basis I was happy to order it and would have returned it if there were any dead pixels. Fortunately there were none.

This is what it looks like:

It's not a perfect monitor, but overall I'm very pleased with it. Here's the good and the bad.

The good:

• Lovely image quality
• No dead pixels
• Really a lovely monitor
• Comes with the dual-link DVI adaptor lead it requires (although a bit short)
• Does have vertical tilt on the stand (not all cheap monitors I've bought have this)

The bad:

• It runs quite hot (not really an issue, but even so...)
• Vertical tilt only - no horizontal movement on the stand
• Can't remove the stand so can't wall mount it
• The touch power button is inconveniently recessed at the bottom of the monitor and not sensitive enough - I usually have to swipe it several times

The configuration options are basic - but the default setup was absolutely fine for me on a Mac Pro.

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Book Review: Intellectual Property and Open Source

O'Reilly have been kind enough to give me a copy of Van Linderg's book Intellectual Property and Open Source.

Of course the term "intellectual property" is itself controversial, but I prefer the more pragmatic approach to copyright reform of people like Lawrence Lessig.

Van Lindberg is an intellectual property lawyer, but also a member of the Python community and is strongly involved (amongst other things) in the organising of the PyCon Conference. But enough about him, what's his book like?

The book is subtitled "A Practical Guide to Protecting Code" and is intended to be a description of US intellectual property law as it stands and applies to software. It is not intended to be a defence of the current state of the law, nor conjecture about what it should be like. Interestingly though, in order to understand the state of the law, it starts with a history of IP law and the philosophies behind it. This is chapter 1: "The Economic and Legal Foundations of Intellectual Property".

Van is not just an IP lawyer, he is also a programmer, and the book is aimed at us poor beleaguered software developers. The writing is down to earth and peppered with programming analogies. It really is highly readable and enjoyable (although dense with information); no mean feat for a book on this subject.

I found the history of IP fascinating - and essential reading to understand why the law views intellectual property rights in some of the same ways as other property rights. In fact Van makes the interesting point that the concept of property is a legal construct, and as theft is the defined as the violation of property rights the RIAA (quite despicable though they are) are technically correct to describe copyright violation as theft.

Having covered the background each of the next chapters tackle a major area of copyright law; chapters 2 & 3 are on patents. These chapters aren't restricted to the subject of software patents (and in fact spend relatively little time on them) but are more on the why and what of patents. Although this knowledge does prove useful in later chapters as you consider the full range of property rights associated with our craft, I couldn't help wanting to move onto the other more directly relevant topics all through this chapter (although useful for completeness I felt that some of the minutiae of the patent documents could have been skipped).

Having said that, Van does a good job of explaining the inherent contradiction (hypocrisy?) in the current US patent system. The ethos of the patent system is to encourage the sharing of knowledge by making it public whilst granting the inventors a temporary monopoly. At the same time it penalises creators if they check for pre-existing patents in their technology field. If you are known to have been aware of a patent, yet are found to be in violation of it, you are liable for much worse damages. As a creator it is important that you deliberately stay unaware of patents in your field!

Another interesting snippet is that if any of the inventors of a technology later patented are left off the patent document then other companies are free to license the technology from the unlisted inventor. Decisions about who to list and who not to list as an inventor in the patent filing may be subject to internal company politics - but they can be vitally important. All of these points are illustrated through the book by relevant case history.

The next chapters cover in turn copyright, trademarks and trade secrets. Most people have some vague impressions of the law around trademarks and copyright - and most of them are wrong! Even if you think you know what these terms mean there is enormous amount of useful and clearly presented information here. Issues of copyright (and even trademarks) are particularly relevant to open source projects. The chapter on trade secrets was also interesting to me, mainly because I don't think we have trade secrets as a legally protected category in the UK (I'm probably wrong - but they are rarely discussed as having legal ramifications). Frustratingly enough although the chapter explains in great detail what trade secrets are, how the legal protection can be removed and so on, it skims over what the legal remedy is in cases where trade secrets are unlawfully abused. Property rights only have meaning in as much as there is a legal consequence to violating those rights - and the remedy available is this protection. All through the chapter I was wondering, what actually happens if the court finds that trade secrets have been misappropriated.

Finally in chapter seven we arrive at contracts and licenses. In some ways this is where the real meat of the book begins. The book has Open Source in the title, and one of the most tangled areas of confusion around open source (or free software or whatever you want to call it) is licensing. In order to understand open source licenses we are going to have to understand the legal validity of licensing intellectual property - and in particular the differences between licenses and contracts. (One of the main differences is the legal remedy available to you - so whether an open source license is a contract or a license can be an extremely important issue.)

One of the chapters on contracts ("So I Have an Idea...") is about the situation for those employed as programmers. Although less common in the UK, it is normal for employment contracts in the US to stipulate that not only are any projects or code you work on in your spare time the property of your employer - but even ideas you have whilst you work from them, even if you only create them later, may belong to them. This obviously has ramifications for contributions to open source projects. The solution is to communicate 'early and often' with your employer, and get their permission in writing (email is fine).

The chapters on open source licensing (including a full chapter on the GPL license!) are for me the most practical. They explain the issues around open source licensing, including how who owns the copyright (particularly for contributions - which make the resulting work a derivative work of the original) affects issues like relicensing. My default license for my projects has always been the BSD License. This is one of the more permissive 'academic' licenses, but makes no stipulations regarding contributions. After reading this book I'm considering switching new projects to the Apache License 2 which explicitly specifies that contributing a patch grants a license for redistribution under the Apache license. This simplifies licensing and redistribution issues.

The final chapters cover the legal status of reverse engineering (surprisingly protected if you do it right - but complicated by the DMCA) and incorporating as a not for profit organisation (if this is relevant to your open source project then not only have you really made it but this chapter will be very useful).

So in summary, an excellent book. Van Lindberg has done an outstanding job of navigating a dry and complex subject in an engaging and precise manner. If you're a programmer, or involved in open source projects, you need to read it - thankfully you'll enjoy it.

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Join the Glorious Python Programming Revolution

Ars Technica has a new article on learning Python:

• Getting a grip on Python, 6 ways to learn online

The article itself is kind of meh, merely linking to six of the most well known online Python tutorials, but what is interesting is their rationale for promoting Python:

"Recently, Google has stepped up its presence in the cloud computing arena. Google's new App Engine (aka "AppSpot") lets you design and run web applications using Google's existing infrastructure."

"At this time, App Engine uses Python as its primary programming language. Although Google is investigating other languages for future releases, if you want to get started with App Engine, you'll need to first master the Python scripting language."

Overwhelmingly the best part of the article is the image they use...

Ars Technica have a real problem with puns when doing articles on Python. Take their article introducing Python 3 for example:

• Python 3 Slithers onto the Scene, Sheds Backwards Compatibility

Thissss article is pretty good, but as expected Python 3 is causing controversy both inside and outside the Python community. People wonder if the benefits of breaking backwards compatibility are worth the potential confusion it causes. The very best response I've seen is the following blog entry by James Bennett. It kicks off with a fantastic introduction that has nothing to do with Python but should be read by programmers and business managers of every strain.

• Let's Talk About Python 3.0

Back to Ars Technica, they will always have a place in my heart. They've done a fantastic series of articles on the history and technology of the Amiga computer (the first 'desktop' computer with a pre-emptive multitasking operating system being one of the jewels in its crown of glory). If, like me [1], you are nostalgic for the beautiful usability of this machine (both as a user and a developer) then you'll love this series.

[1]

I had a great time playing with 68k assembly language on the Amiga. Building C structures and calling into the operating system. Both the Amiga OS and Motorola 68000 instruction sets were very elegant. It was Amiga OSes inability to support memory protection (and thus virtual memory) that was (and is) a big cause of its downfall. The latest release of the beautiful-looking-and-not-quite-dead-yet Amiga OS 4.1 still doesn't have default support for virtual memory and only runs on Power PC architectures - no x86 support (and no supported capability to run under virtualisation). Good luck with that.

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Open Rights Group in the UK

I'm founding member 748 of the Open Rights Group in the UK. Probably my biggest claim to fame to date.

The ORG exists to "protect our bits" (and someone has to):

The Open Rights Group is a grassroots technology organisation which exists to protect civil liberties wherever they are threatened by the poor implementation and regulation of digital technology. We call these rights our "digital rights".

As an organisation they're three years old now, but the UK branch was only founded this year. They're supported by individuals like Neil Gaiman (who recently did a small talk for the ORG in Clerkenwell - which finally prompted me to pull my finger out and join up) and Charlie Stross.

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Getting Dabs.com to Repair My Laptop (via the Courts)

Some time ago (about four months) I blogged about my difficulties with Fujitsu and Dabs.com; trying to get them to repair a laptop that failed.

The short version is that the DVD drive fell out of the laptop a few months after I bought it. This wasn't actually a problem until it stopped working as well - almost a year after I bought it. Unfortunately, due to moving house, it was just after a year since I bought the laptop when I took this up with Dabs.com and Fujitsu. Because it was a few days outside of warranty they both refused to fix it.

I warned Dabs [1] that I would take them to court if they refused to repair the laptop and they ignored me. Well, the story just got longer and stranger...

In my previous blog entry about this several of my American readers seemed to think that Dabs' response was reasonable - after all the laptop was outside warranty. This leads me to believe that consumer law is a lot stronger in the UK than it is in the US. In the UK, if someone sells you something, it has to be fit for purpose and not suffer from manufacturing defects - which includes a requirement that it stay working for a reasonable period of time. If something stops working then the fact that the manufacturer or retailer offers a limited warranty (limited in time or liability) does not reduce their legal responsibility or your statutory rights (UK Sale of Goods Act).

The balance to this is that if you report the problem after some period of time (for expensive goods six months seems to be the accepted limit) then it is up to you to demonstrate that the problem was pre-existing [2].

As the drive first fell out within a few months of us buying the laptop (and it had never suffered any damage - despite Dabs claiming I must have damaged it) it seemed obvious that the problem was a manufacturing defect of some kind. In this situation the UK law is pretty clear - Dabs should have repaired the drive (or replaced or refunded the laptop) and the warranty is irrelevant.

Because I was fairly confident of this I decided that I would take Dabs.com to the small claims court (the County Court in England). The whole procedure was pretty straightforward, and correspondingly interesting. It is the first time I have done this as an individual [3].

The first step is to send a 'letter of action' to the company, stating exactly what you want and giving them a timed deadline to do it and warning them that you will proceed with a claim if they don't.

Having done that (and received no response) I then filled in the court paperwork, asking for three hundred pounds compensation for the repair of the laptop. The fees for this are thirty pounds which will be added to your compensation if you win.

The paperwork requires a summary and a full version of your case. You can provide whatever paper evidence you want along with this, and refer to it in the full version. I had kept all the letters and emails I had sent and included them all in my description of the saga (including the part where they first agree to repair and then tell me it must be my fault).

These papers are then sent to the defendant (Dabs in my case) and they have fourteen days to respond.

They ignored this as well - and so I was allowed to ask for default judgement. Yesterday I received a copy of the default judgement, which was an order for Dabs.com to pay me three hundred pounds compensation plus thirty pounds cost.

Hurrah you might think. Kind of. That was the longer bit. Now it gets odder.

The same day as I received the judgement from the court I also received an email from Dabs.com giving me a returns number for the laptop (and no other communication). This was a bit confusing, but I wondered if they had decided to do the right thing and offer a repair or a full refund.

After exchanging several incredulous emails with them, it turns out that they are claiming that the three hundred and thirty pounds compensation the court has awarded me is a refund - and that if I don't return the laptop to them (at my own cost naturally) then they will invoice me for it!

Naturally this has no merit, but it looks like the story isn't over yet. sigh

In the meantime I intend to write this story up for some of the UK computer magazines. More people need to know how Dabs treats their customers and that you can get compensation if you take things to court.

For those interested in the details, here is the summary of my claim:

Dabs.com plc

National Logistics Centre, Wingates Industrial Estate

Westhoughton, Bolton

BL5 3XU

The claimant is claiming 300 pounds for the repair of a laptop that he purchased from Dabs.com. Shortly after purchase the DVD drive fell out, and later stopped functioning altogether - rendering the laptop unusable. Without ever seeing the laptop they are claiming that the failed drive was caused by physical damage and refuse to repair or replace it. The laptop has never suffered physical damage that could have caused this, and the problem can only have been caused by inadequate internal fixing.

The full details (minus the supporting paperwork of course):

In January 2007 I bought a Fujitsu-Siemens laptop from Dabs.com (Document 1). Shortly afterwards (within two months of receiving the laptop - but I don't know the exact date) the DVD drive from the laptop fell out, but continued to work. The laptop has been used almost entirely in the house by my wife, and has never suffered any physical damage that could have caused the drive to fall out (both before the initial failure and since). The only possible explanation is that the drive had faulty or inadequate internal fixing when it was purchased.

We continued to use the laptop, but didn't discover that the DVD drive had stopped functioning (making it impossible to install software on the laptop) until December. Due to pressure of work and moving house I didn't report the failure (to the manufacturer as instructed on the Dabs.com website) until January. (see document 2).

It took Fujitsu a month to decide they wouldn't help (see documents 3, 4 and 5).

I then contacted Dabs.com by email and their website contact form. Initially they offered to collect and repair the laptop. (See documents 6, 7 and 8.)

They then (without ever seeing the laptop) suddenly decided that the problem was caused by 'physical damage' and refused to repair it. (See documents 9 & 10.)

I contacted them several more times to try and resolve this, but they simply stopped replying. (See documents 11, 12 & 13.)

On 29th April I sent them a letter of action informing them that they had 14 days to arrange repair, replacement or refund of the laptop or I would proceed with court action. They have never replied. (See document 14.)

I have been informed that the replacement of the drive and connector will cost 300 pounds, including labour and carriage. This is the amount I am claiming from the plaintiff (plus costs).

As the laptop is not fit for purpose without a working DVD drive, and it is caused by a manufacturing fault, it is unacceptable that Dabs.com refuses to honour their legal obligations under the Sale of Goods act.

If you have kept the supporting paperwork, the process is not too onerous. I wonder how this will play out. I half suspect that they only want to issue me an invoice so that they can sell 'the debt' to a debt collector. If it ever goes to court they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. A nasty trick anyway.

[1]	The sad thing is that under a different account I have spent quite a bit of money with Dabs over the past two years.

[2]	I am not a lawyer etc (i.e. ignore everything I say and do your own research)... The word 'demonstrate' in that context probably means that burden of proof on you is to show 'in the balance of probabilities' (i.e. you don't have to prove beyond reasonable doubt).

[3]

I've been involved in a small claims court claim to try and recover some money from a customer in a previous job - actually having to attend the hearing as it was contested (but I had nothing to do with the paperwork for this case). We lost for a very interesting reason. The judge (or magistrate - I forget) seemed to agree that the customer probably owed us the money, but due to an ambiguity in the paperwork our computer produced he held that we hadn't proven it. As we were taking him to court, the burden was on us to prove that he owed us the money.

For the sake of good old google, Dabs sucks and Dabs.com sucks too.

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