Brian,
Comments are inline.
Quoting Brian Carroll :
> Dear Shane,
> Firstly, Can I express my disappointment after reading your email following
> additional unsuccessful attempts to contact you again in the last week.
I’m having problems with my mobile. However, I assumed you’d respond
via email.
Again this is not an unreasonable expectation.
>
>
> The last email you sent to me indicated the following “Your server is indeed
> online and I’ve made some changes that should improve the performance of the
> system but I am still seeing some latency issues”
>
> This did not indicate that you have fixed the problem. I have tried to
> contact you at least 4 or 5 times both inside and outside of working hours
> of which you have not returned a single phone call since your previous
> email.
>
Some latency issues are inevitable for any isochronous data stream
relayed over
a best effort packet switched networks such as the public internet. As
I stated
I reasonably expected you to have a look at what we’d done to decide
whether it
was acceptable or not.
>
> The server was only down once over the last 2 months up until last week. The
> last known outage was on Thursday 9th of which it was re-booted that same
> night i.e. immediately.
>
That has not been my experience of your server/ADSL-connection. I have
experienced several connectivity problems that have prevented me from logging
in. I have certainly asked you to reboot on more than one occassion as you’re
aware.
>
> The server is now fixable, will be sorted within the next week. I’m not
> suggesting you Gaison are liable for its failure.
I wanted to make sure this wasn’t implied.
>
>
> I’m presuming however that you do have your own server to test any new code
We do not test against a camera at the moment as we don’t have one. Instead we
have tested against a motion JPEG stream available over a HTTP server.
I do not
experience the same problems in this environment.
> before uploading to our own Server. If you now have a working solution
> (which you have not clearly indicated that you have up until now) I would
> suggest you show me this working solution urgently!
I modified the code on your server, I have a copy of it here and it’s also on
your server. This was implied by my email.
> You are firstly free to add the three remote cameras which are connected to
> my home office LAN. I can then suggest that I access an account on this test
> Server through the internet in order to verify that this works.
>
>
>
> Secondly, Either myself or one of my colleagues would then be delighted to
> visit you in your office over the next 3 days (or wherever you have set the
> working system up) and running with no latency or error issues once you have
> demonstrated it works remotely.
>
> If you cannot demonstrate a working solution remotely tomorrow or over the
> next two-three days, I can presume that you have not delivered a working
> solution.
>
>
>
> I would like to remind you of the following key points
>
> * We made our original agreement at the end of November of which you
> promised a completion date of the 17th Dec 2004
Correct. However, this was not going to be achievable as there were several
issues that became apparent when we examined what you delivered to us.
Firstly: the server itself had a memory configuration that was
incorrect and was
creating some operating problems after serveral days uptime. We noticed this
ourselves and the DELL technician that came down to examine a power supply
fault pointed this out also.
Secondly: We had to source a SCSI adapter that took approximately 3
weeks to get
from our supplier. We highlighted the problems with using this box for backup
purposes but you wished to continue anyway.
Thirdly: This project was flawed from the very start. The webcamsat software
that we believed it was possible to modify to create a working solution cannot
be legally modified in this way. You are well aware of this. It is
closed-source software and the SSL problem that you encountered plus the other
modifications would have required a substantial rewrite as I explained to you.
Therefore we HAD to create our own system to deliver on the terms of the
contract. This was always going to be a more time consuming and
difficult task.
I should have stressed this at the time but I clearly didn’t.
It was March before you managed to test our server through no fault of ours.
To the best of our knowledge it was properly configured. We provided
many hours
of technical support including things that we could legitimately have expected
you to handle yourself including installing an SSL certificate. Over
the course
of this work you did not once offer to increase the amount that we were being
paid for this solution or come to any additional arrangement that would have
compensated us for this work.
Both securenetworks and gaisan technologies were substantially over time and
over budget by March as you are well aware. After your first administrator
proved incapable of performing what we regarded as basic administration
tasks I
suggested that you needed to find a different administrator for your server.
I recommended my colleague Alan Henson to you and from his report of the
conversations you deemed that the rate we were going to charge was
unreasonable
(AT 25 euro/hour it most surely wasn’t) and you asked him would he do the work
for less if he wasn’t delivering it through Gaisan? We didn’t have any margin
on this particular contract (the rate was very low) and I was surprised and
dissappointed at your approach here.
> * Its now 6 months later beyond the original completion date.
It is a misrepresentation to imply that we are entirely responsible
for the failure to deliver a working solution within 6 month for the reasons
stated above.
> * We have now lost considerable time, resources and business resulting
> in this significant delay and by not being able to provide this solution to
> prospective customers
I genuinely understand your frustration in this regard. We did not intend this
to happen at any stage of developing or attempting to fix your solution.
> * You have already agreed to send this refund of 3,150 euro on the 5th
> may in the event of not fixing the problem by the end of may.
Agreed. However, I didn’t anticipate that the server wouldn’t be available.
I tried on several occassions to access it and couldn’t. This is not a
fabrication or misrepresentation on my part.
> * We are now at the end of June and still without a working service
Agreed.
> In summary if Gaison Technologies including yourself as a Director cannot
> provide us a demonstrably working solution over the next 2-3 days, we would
> expect the above refund to be forwarded immediately in order to prevent us
> taking further action.
We will not be able to comply with your ultimatum or your expectation that the
refund be forwarded immediately failing our provision of a “demonstrably
working solution” within 2-3 days. (Did you explicitly left out the phrase
“working days”?)
We are perfectly willing to visit your offices to determine how we can
fix your
own configuration without charge but the earliest possible time we can do this
is the end of next week. If you wish to pursue legal action against us be
assured that it will be defended vigorously and probably be met with a counter
claim against you and your organisation.
yours faithfully,
…shane
>
>
>
> Yours faithfully
>
>
>
> Brian Carroll
>
>
>
> Director,
>
> Secure Network Technology Ltd.
>
>
>
>
>
> _____
>
> From: Shane Michael Dempsey [mailto:sdempsey@gaisan.com]
> Sent: Monday, June 27, 2005 11:50 AM
> To: ‘Brian Carroll’
> Cc: ahenson@gaisan.com; ‘Jerry Horgan’; mdempsey@gaisan.com; ‘Michael
> Dempsey’
> Subject: RE: No Progress and additional problems!
>
>
>
>
>
> Hi Brian,
>
> I’m not sure what has caused your “media test failure” when you try to
> restart your server.
>
> I sent you an email on the 14th June saying we had revised the code on the
> server and believed that we had fixed it. I received no response from you to
> this email, just your email on the 21st June.
>
>
> Sorry for not responding to your voice mail but I was exceptionally busy
> last week. Also, as I stated earlier I do not believe that it is appropriate
> to respond to calls which are substantially outside normal business hours.
> However, I have the following issues with your request that we send a cheque
> refunding the money.
>
>
>
> 1) I tried on several occassions to upload code to your server and
> couldn’t as it was unavailable. I informed you on several occassions that
> this was making the process of “fixing” our webcam solution extremely
> difficult.
>
> 2) You describe problems with the video streaming to an applet over a
> LAN connection that we did not experience in our test environment. While I
> understand that there may be some issues over an ADSL connection, we did not
> experience any of these issues when testing the solution months ago over a
> LAN. I believe it unlikely that all these problems are independent of your
> network and server configuration. Indeed my associate Jerry Horgan had to
> modify server security settings a few weeks after we handed the server back
> to you which led him to believe that the server had been reconfigured by
> someone else in the meantime.
>
> 3) You have just told me that you have a serious problem with the DELL
> server on which our application is hosted. Gaisan is not liable for this
> problem or any additional problems it may cause including issues with server
> availability and application performance.
>
> 4) I sent you an email shown below stating that we had fixed some of
> the problems. I reasonably expected you to examine the fix and provide
> feedback. I can assure you that the performance improvement was tangible. I
> believed that’s what was happening. Instead I received your email on the
> 21st June tellling me that you hadn’t heard from us re: the update; that the
> server was inaccessible and you required a refund.
>
> 5) Any agreement that we made to fix the server was based on Gaisan
> having access to a reliable server platform. As you’re aware this was not
> the case. I highlighted our broadband connectivity problem and explained how
> intermittent server accessibility was making a fix difficult.
>
>
>
> We acted in good faith in creating this software for SecureNetworks. We
> dedicated many hours to creating it and attempting to resolve any issues
> that arose during its deployment. These included background system
> administration tasks that we could reasonably have expected SecureNetworks
> to perform including the procurement of hardware for the backup solution and
> the installation of an SSL certificate. This process has cost us
> considerably more time than we originally anticipated.
>
>
>
> We have certainly not been able to keep to the original project schedule but
> as you’re well aware, SecureNetworks didn’t keep to this schedule either and
> ocassionally hindered our progress in attempting to resolve issues.
> Therefore, I do not believe that a refund is justified.
>
>
>
> Sincerest regards,
>
>
>
> .shane
>
>
>
>
>
> Hi Brian,
>
> Your server is indeed online and I’ve made some changes that should improve
> the performance of the sysytem but I am still seeing some latency issues.
>
> I’ll do some more work on it tonite and talk to you again tommorow.
>
>
>
> regards,
>
>
>
> …shane
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> //=============================
> // Shane Dempsey
> // Technical Director,
> // Gaisan Technologies Ltd.
> // e: sdempsey@gaisan.com
> // u: http://www.gaisan.com
> // t: +353 (0)86 1722436
> //=============================
>
> _____
>
> From: Brian Carroll [mailto:brian.carroll@securenetworks.ie]
> Sent: 21 June 2005 23:18
> To: ‘Shane Michael Dempsey’
> Subject: No Progress and additional problems!
>
>
>
> Shane,
>
>
>
>
>
> Two things, firstly, I tried logging onto system yesterday to check if any
> developments however, there were was no response from the server and I could
> not get an SSH session connection. When connecting directly onto the system
> I rec’d message re: PXE – E61 media Test failure after going thru bootprom
> boot stage (is n’t going to usual linux round of boot stages)
>
>
>
> By virtue of not hearing from you, I presume there has been no additional
> progress since we last spoke and we’re 21 days over our final deadline date.
> More importantly after speaking to a colleague, There appears to be a more
> serious issue with the server of which I’ll need to log a call with Dell
> .(isn’t any obvious physical connection issues following some basic checks)
>
>
>
> Can you please call me tomorrow morning to discuss? At this stage I don’t
> see any other options available and my preference is to park this aside
> unless I hear of a better suggested plan.
>
>
>
> In the meantime and as agreed, Can you please forward the cheque for the
> amount as agreed and made payable to myself.
>
>
>
> My home address i.e. 29 Priory Court, St Raphaels Manor, Celbridge, Kildare
> via registered post.
>
>
>
> Regards and thanks
>
>
>
> Brian Carroll
>
>
“It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men
are able to understand them.” – Paolo Coehlo, The Alchemist.