Category: Computing

All I.T. related rants/posts.

O2: don’t call me to tell me to stop using an unlimited broadband!

Dear O2 Broadband,

I’ve been a customer now for about 3 months. In this time I have experienced:

  1. Spontaneous reboots of the O2 broadband wireless router every 30 seconds, forcing me to put my own router in; support forums are full of plenty of people talking about this
  2. Very slow Speedtest.net speed results of around 1 MB/sec on an 8 MB/sec line in the evenings; I live around 300′ from the Poplar, London exchange (that’s the copper run, not line of site)

Now you’ve rung me to tell me to use my broadband less. Now, I’m familiar with fair usage, but quite frankly, the poor performance of the service is enough to throttle any usage.

So, here’s a couple of tips:

  • Work out how you can not suck badly in the evenings. Ther’s supposed to be a 21CN upgrade from BT for this exchange in the Q2 2010; get some of that roadmap out and publicised as to what this means for your customers? Anything? Nothing?
  • Accept that you have a bad fimware on your routers. Confirm it as a known issue. Apologise for this. Advise people of workarounds. Stop using these crappy Thompson devices. You choose, just don’t keep burrying your heads in the sand.
  • Don’t hassle your customers for using the service they are paying for. You say Unlimited. You say “No matter which O2 Home Broadband package you’re on, there aren’t any limits on how much you can download or upload in a month. So you can use the Internet as much as you like, within reason. Our network’s been designed to cope with people downloading large files (like music or films) and watching video online. But if you’re using the service excessively – like continually downloading large files at peak times – then we do reserve the right to warn you to lower your usage. In exceptional circumstances, we can even terminate your account. This is because excessive use by a few people can reduce the speed that others in the same area get with O2 Home Broadband. We just want to provide everyone with an excellent level of service.” I am not on a 100 MB/s fibre link here, its an ADSL link. It is limited already at… well, you say 8 MB/sec, I see 1 MB/sec. That’s enough of a limit already. Indeed, for central london, E14, less than a mile from some of the biggest internet exchanges in the United Kingdom, how about you actually get some performance in here.

You suggested to me that you may terminate my account; well, you’re offering has performed pretty poorly, so I am tempted to leave anyway.

C’mon Pidgin/libpurple

Pidgin is a pretty awesome, cross-platform, Instant Messaging client. It has the possibility of being one of the first Free cross-platform IM clients to support voice and video with the XMPP/Jabber protocol. Ticket 11075 on the Pidgin web site is for this feature request – it currently has voice and video on recent versions of GTK/Glib and supporting libraries under Linux, and Windows support is almost there (works in some snapshots, but not in any released version yet).
Pidgin use Trac for their bug list, and in here you can vote for a bug to increase it’s priority. Getting working cross-platform Voice and Video (VV) would rock, and gets my vote – if you care about open source IM video chat then take a look at ticket 11075. Right now it has 19 votes, making it the #2 ranked feature/defect, beaten only by 247: “MSN direct file transfers”. Shame I don’t have time or ability to help code.

HP P212 SCSI card that isn’t SCSI, kind of.

HP recently shipped us a P212 SCSI RAID card; this was chosen for our new Quantum tape drive. After a week of fighting with it, we tried an alternate SCSI card (non RAID) at the suggestion of Quantum, and Voila, all problems disappeared. Quantum claims (perhaps true, perhaps not) that some of the SCSI RAID cards are not implementing the full generic SCSI protocol and don’t handle having non-disk systems on their bus. So, hopefully Google picks up this HP P212 SCSI RAID card (PN: 013218-001) and anyone else struggling with this will see this!

Google Nexus One: first impressions

This blog post is being done by voice from my new phone. Yes I finally caved in and bought a Google phone.

Well, the first part was voice captured, analysed, and shipped back in 95% accurate transcoding within a few seconds. This part is being written on my old laptop.

My recent trip to SF saw me meet up with an old friend (Mikolaj) who works at the so-called Mountain View Chocolate Factory that has become a part of all our on-line lives. And I was impressed; nice big bright screen, good integration with various on-line services (many Google run, but still ones I already used, like Calendar). And the reviews showed it to be good, with a “fast” processor, etc, etc. It looked like a slightly smaller iPhone, which seemed nice.

And then Linus spoke to the masses, and yeah, he professed he was pleased. While the rest of the community complained about forks and support, I found my 5 year old Nokia, with 1″ blurry screen, half-day standby time, 5 minute talk-time was a bit long in the tooth. So I caved. I got a Google phone; the Nexus One.

I ordered it around noon on Monday. By Wednesday night, a little over 56 hours later, it was in my hands in London, England. Nicely engraved with my name, in its small white box.

The open box experience was similar to what opening Apple products was like; a nice box, smoothly opening to reveal the well mounted product, sheathed in a cardboard mount to ensure it is… displayed… as the box is opened.

The ray of sunshine came down, and all was good.

So, a few second later an the device was free of its transport. It comes wrapped in a cellophane sleeve that tries to explain how to open the case. Accompanying it is a warranty paper, and a single sheet of numbered instructions, 1 to 5, indicating that you need to put the battery in, give it a full charge, and then turn it on. Back on the cellophane, how did it come off. Was there a release button, a catch, a lever, a… hang on… no, slide and it pops open – wow, that was easier than I expected!

Charge charge charge. Tap tap tap. Green LED! Go!

The set up was smooth and straight forward. Since I didn’t have a SIM in phone to start with (it was in the aforementioned Nokia device), it asked me to set up WiFi. Then my Googlemail account, and woosh… my calendar, contacts, and Gmail all came down.

And then.. it advised a new firmware, would I like to install it? Yes. And woosh, it did what it should, and it was all good. Pinch to zoom on maps works (multitouch).

A few seconds later and my rcpt.to email IMAPS and SMTP/STARTTLS was up and running.

Later, a browse the “Marketplace”, the Android App store, And it advised of an updated Maps application.  Then add in the compass, and Snake.

So,w hat are my favourite things:

Google Goggles: scans pictures for things (bar codes, objects, logos) and then displays information on it.

Voice search: someone (Eric) mentioned a book title today but couldn’t remember the author, so I whispered the title to my phone and it showed me the cover, summary, author, etc.

Maps: well, as ever. I have had this on my Blackberry Bold, but the Nexus One has a screen twice the size, and a magnetic compass.

The only downside was the battery life with the GPS turned on today. Admittedly, I did play with it a fair bit. And to its credit, it showed me what was responsible for the power use: the display – it breaks down the consumption of power to the various components of the phone, which is neat. I’ve turned off the GPS for tomorrow trail!

I’ve fired up Facebook and all my contacts from Facebook have (at my choice) been sucked into my phone contact lists (with all their pictures). So I think my contacts are now not stored in my phone, nor on the SIM, but in the cloud.

I’ve had the phone for 24 hours now. I like it. It’s light, and does everything. It was cheaper than an iPhone, and is more open.  What’s not to like thus far.