So I just finished Prince of Persia on my PS3. I decided that I would go and purchase the $9.99 Prince of Persia: Epilogue DLC from the PSN (PlayStation Network) store so that I could have some more PoP game time.
Turns out that I can’t purchase anything using my Bank of America debit card, because Sony’s billing and account system is seriously messed up.
First I tried just entering in my account information in the PSN store interface as a direct purchase. I put in the card information and billing information. I get an error back that says “Credit card is invalid. Check your entries.” Thinking that I may have punched something in wrong when relying on my memory, I go get the physical card and verify that all the data was correct. Hit continue. Same error.
I then tried to just enter the billing information into the account management thinking that maybe that would work. Same error.
I tried logging into my PSN account over the web on my laptop and entering the information there. Same error.
Having now exhausted all the possible avenues for entering in my information, I search the Google to find out if others have had this problem and what the fix might or might not be. Turns out there have been numerous people with the same problem.
The first thread I listed had the most information. They were discussing the possible values necessary in the address fields, etc. I checked all my information. Here’s what you need to double-check:
- Make sure your console has been activated using the System Activation item in the dashboard
- Make sure that if your billing address is a post office box that you are not adding in punctuation
- Make sure that your zip code is matching exactly with the bank records, especially if your bank uses an address verification system
- Make sure that your phone number, if listed, matches the bank records
The problem is that I checked all of this and none of it helped. So I called the Sony Computer Entertainment America support number (800-345-7669) and waded through the menu system to get a support representative. I have to give kudos to the support representative, because she was very calm and nice, and she didn’t even have a problem with the fact that I had already checked everything that she had on her checklist for me to check.
Unfortunately, she said “Sometimes the PO Box addresses just don’t work. The only suggestion I can make is that you use a different credit card or go buy a PlayStation Network Card.” She was very sorry that it wasn’t working, but there was nothing she could do to help.
I am not blaming the support folks, but that kind of answer is really pretty unacceptable. I use my BoA card online, in stores, and over the phone all the time with no problems at all. To make matters worse, when I logged in to my BoA account over the web I had a $1 pending transaction for each of my attempts to connect my card to the PSN store. The customer service representative did assure me that they would drop off since a complete account transaction had never occured.
This is unexcusable. Why even bother creating an online store for your game console if it doesn’t reliably work to purchase things? Someone at Sony really needs to get this ironed out.
In my process of tranferring my DVD collection to a digital media server I discovered that the Apple TV software is smarter than I thought.
I have been ripping my DVD collection using Handbrake on my Mac and transferring them to a Windows box which is shared out via my internal only network to the Apple TV using iTunes. I use the built-in Apple TV profile to do this. The profile sets the frame rate option on the encoder to be “Same As Source”. It turns out that if your rip has a final fps (frames per second) that is greater than 30 then the resulting movie will not be available in the list of Shared Movies on the Apple TV.
So in the process of applying the new SSL cert here at work, I discovered an issue with the reCAPTCHA service.
The problem was that I was getting errors saying that my forms were only partially encrypted. This was due to my use of the reCAPTCHA library, which by default doesn’t use an SSL connection to grab the challenge HTML.
The documentation at the reCaptcha site has a section on this. Specifically it says:
In order to avoid getting browser warnings, if you use reCAPTCHA on an SSL site, you should replace http://api.recaptcha.net with https://api-secure.recaptcha.net.
Ref: http://recaptcha.net/apidocs/captcha/client.html
The example it uses shows how to change the Javascript itself. While this was nice to know it really didn’t help too much in my particular case. To solve this when using the reCAPTCHA PHP library, all you need to do is change the value of a single variable. In the file recaptchalib.php look for the function recaptcha_get_html then change the declaration to read as follows:
function recaptcha_get_html ($pubkey, $error = null, $use_ssl = true)
This will force all calls to be transmitted over an SSL connection, thus eliminating the dialog box in Internet Explorer and the slashed-lock in Firefox.
However since I am not encrypting the entire site by default, yet due to an issue with our website editing/management system, Adobe Contribute, I had to do a bit more than just updating the boolean variable. Since some of my forms are encrypted and some are not, I added the following code to the function referenced above:
if ($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] = 443) { $use_ssl = true;
}
This needs to be added just above the check for the value of the variable use_ssl in the function recaptcha_get_html. Once you do this you can use the same copy of the recpatchalib.php file for both secure and non-secure forms.
This next week the Senate is expected to vote on legislation to delay the transition of broadcast television in the United States from analog signals to digital signals.
The initial deadline was to have been February 17, 2009, however some in Congress as well as President Obama claim that more time is needed due to the fact that evidence has shown that consumers are not prepared. The new legislation sets a deadline for the switch to June 12, 2009, however broadcasters can switch over to digital prior to that deadline if they so choose.
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Over Thanksgiving break I bought an Apple TV. Like any good geek I wanted to expand the capability of the unit beyond the default setup.
After installing Firefox and getting USB keyboard and mouse support going, I realized that it would be tremendously cool if I could control it from my iPhone instead of using a wired keyboard.
To begin with I installed OSXvnc. The only problem was that I needed to store a password. After reading a the VNC post on the aTV Flash forum, I successfully conquered that. However, I had the same problem that iMattUK had: you had to use an ssh connection to start it.
To conquer this I wrote a launchd plist to launch OSXvnc for me at system startup. Read on for the process I used to get it all working.
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