Dell is beginning to piss me off. I ordered the Dell XPS M1330 on the 31st of July (order number 2231338), and till date, I have not even got a estimated date of delivery, and apparently, the build has not been started yet.

After placing my order, I emailed them on the 3rd of August, and a CSR called me back, promising to give me a ESD by the 6th. There was no updates on the 6th, and after not getting any response from another follow up mail that I sent, I called up their customer service department. The CSR told me that there would be a delay of around fifteen days for the build process to start. She also told me that it would take around 3/4 days to complete the build and testing processes, and then it would take upto another 10 days for the shipping, primarily because of duty and customs clearance delays at the Indian airports. The next day (or probably on the day after), another lady called up, and told me the same thing, and promised me that I would definitely get my machine by the end of August. After that, there has been complete silence from the Dell side. Right now, assuming that the build hasn’t started yet, I don’t think I’ll be getting my notebook before mid September. Moreover, to make things worse, the price of the configuration that I ordered has gone down by nearly 6000 rupees (around 150 US dollars) in the last (almost) one month.
I was thinking of cancelling my order, since the new semester has started at college and I badly need a notebook to do all my work, but people tell me that getting a refund going to be a major PITA, as I ordered via a pre-paid card. Right now I don’t know what to do. I’ll try calling up Dell India again on Monday, and I guess the only thing that I can do right now is hope that my system will go into build stage next week .

[Update]:: Called up Dell today, and the CSR told me that a new batch of parts is expected at the Malaysia factory (where all Dell India notebook orders are assembled) on the 7th of September. The build process for my notebook would start only after all the parts are in place, and so it seems that I will not receive the notebook before the 20th of September. That makes it 50 days of waiting . After the conversation, I sent a mail to the customer care email address, asking for an acknowledgement/confirmation on the info that I had received, but till now, I have not got any reply.

[Update 2]:: Got the following reply via email for my request for confirmation:

Dear Sir,

As confirmed by our customer care dept., we are currently facing a
worldwide shortage on some parts & hence the delivery is held up,
however our customer care will give you regular updates on the status.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

XXXXX XXXX

—–Original Message—–
From: Sayamindu Dasgupta [mailto:XXXXXX@XXXXXXX]
Sent: Monday, August 27, 2007 4:27 PM
To: Online India
Subject: [Order number 2231338] Request for confirmation

Hello,

I called up your customer service department regarding the status of
my order (XPS M1330, order number 2231338), and I was informed that
the missing parts holding up the order would arrive on the 7th of
September at Malaysia, and hopefully after that the system will be
shipped out on the 9th and then it will probably reach my place after
7-10 days (due to customs clearance issues at Kolkata).

Could you kindly confirm this ?

My order details are as follows:

Online reference number: XXXXXXX
Order number: 2231338
Customer number: XXXXXX

Thank you,
Sayamindu Dasgupta

[Update 3]: The laptop seems to have shipped finally. The shipping date is 30th August, and initially the estimated delivery date was showing as 18th September, but from yesterday, it has been showing 7th September.

[Update 4]: Delivered – finally the thing was delivered to my address on the 20th – a 50days wait altogether. However, build quality seems to be solid, and performance is superb.

From The Economic Times…..

“We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO,” National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said after a marathon meeting that lasted over six hours. There was no need for a voting as only Infosys Technologies and CSI supported Microsoft.

A big thanks to everyone involved in this, especially Dr Nagarjuna (who announced it in the FSF India mailing list yesterday).

• Summer of Code 2007 has finally come to an end. As promised in my earlier mail to the GNOME Summer of Code mailing list, last week was spent polishing the code, writing documentation and finally, I spent this evening writing something like a report for what has been done through out the last few months.The report is at http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2007/Reports/Sayamindu. I also finally uploaded the weirdly named “Desktop Administrators’ Guide to GNOME Lockdown and Preconfiguration”. You can read it online here. I have tried to document all the lockdown options offered by GNOME applications in this document. If I missed out anything, please let me know.
  I chose not to push the patches to bugzilla atm, since feature freeze is already in effect. My plan now is to continue dogfooding the work I have done (maybe also make my mom use it ), and after GNOME 2.20 is released, merge the relevant branches to trunk. Also, I have plans for having a general lockdown option for Nautilus, which would make the file browser read-only, ie no modifications to the filesystem will be possible with it (essentially right click menu and some keyboard shortcuts disabled).
  The SoC has been a wonderful experience. Thanks to everyone, especially to Federico (my mentor) for all the help, encouragement and enthusiasm. The SoC (and especially attending GUADEC) made me feel that I was indeed a part of a wonderful and vibrant community, a community which that not only bound together by code and other technical stuff, but also by a number of common passions for almost everything, be it food, be it music, be it photography, be it anything.
• Our local LUG has a new logo:
  
• Volunteers are required for a series of Install Fest at my University. If you are in Kolkata, and have some spare time on the 25th of August on on the 1st/8th of September, please contact indradg at gmail dot com.

I use a 7 year old CRT monitor at home for my primary desktop (which is also my main “work” machine). After coming back from the UK, I found that it was refusing to work (and was making some really nasty crackling noise). However, it seemed to fix itself yesterday, so things are normal once again, though I guess I should buy a new one asap.

In SoC related stuff, I have created a seperate branch for Nautilus (nautilus-lockdown) for the deployment and lockdown related code I’m adding to it.

I also managed to upload some of my pictures of London yesterday. Will be uploading the rest of the pictures (football match, Diego being carried off the field, etc) by this weekend.


I finally ordered a laptop for myself – a Dell XPS M1330. Hopefully this will arrive before September, since there seems to be some major delays with this particular system. The config I ordered though is pretty sweet (2 Ghz Core2 Duo processor, 160 GB hard disk, 2 GB RAM, Geforce 8400GS, LED backlit screen, etc), so I think it will be worth the wait.