Open Letter to my ISP

// February 12th, 2009 // View Comments // Topical, tech

“Headache by magandafille“

This evening I sent this letter to my ISP in response to their support followup (I’ve removed the company name):

Please, please don’t give me a list of troubleshooting tips again…

The broadband router is attached directly to the test socket, therefore guaranteed by BT.

My microfilter is fine, and I’ve had different units at various times (of different makes and even colours); and, before you ask, I’ve got one on every phone line in the house.

I’ve reset the router in the past (though I’ve been informed that this can actually cause up to 5-days delay, it’s been more than a fortnight since the last reset).

My speeds are the same.

Nothing changes them.

I have nothing else running when I run speedtests, and have used multiple sites.

I’ve double and more checked all settings on the router itself, and have even switched SSID channels just for grins (no change).

I receive the same speedtest results on different more or less identical systems (OS X 10.5.6 each) though not at the same time, and receive the same result.

My iPhone also grows excessively sluggish between 5pm and bedtime.

My last ISP supplied me with a list of 13 troubleshooting tasks, and I completed them duly before each escalation… none of them resulted in any increase in speed whatsoever. The only thing I could think to do further is to construct a DIY parabola booster to increase the signal from the router to my Mac, though, since I write this from less than 3 meters from the router, I doubt that would help much either.

The speeds drop at peak times. That means there’s too much traffic for the infrastructure you supply. I’ve had no problem with (name of ISP) so far, and am fully aware that the West Midlands is low on its priority list (or, at least, BT’s list), and have come to terms with the low bandwidth that entails. However, you advertise speeds in my area (and have said in correspondence that you expect speeds in my area) to be at around 3MB/s. This is not true, daily.

Not only have my speeds routinely dipped below 1.5MB, but have even dipped below 500k on several occasions. I’ve not experienced “broadband” of that quality in years.

I appreciate your prompt replies, and hope you find whatever it is that’s causing this slow-down, though I can save you some trouble. It’s my neighbours, and their neighbours—all using limited bandwidth which you and other ISP’s continue to degrade by accepting more customers than you can supply.

Regards,

First ever iPhone post

// January 14th, 2009 // View Comments // Apps, blogging, tech

Ok, so I thought I’d try something. I thought I’d try writing an entire post on an iPhone. I’ve downloaded an app… Think it’s ingeniously called something like “blog writer”. I can tell that my typically long-winded style and use of punctuation will be a killer here!

Surprisingly, however, this feels easy. Whether that’s the second pint talking, however, would require further experimentation.

I should say: it’s easy enough to TYPE. Thinking at the same time, I feel, will take some time. So, my devoted reader, you’re in for a treat of mindlessness…

Still, it’s as well getting used to using mobile interfaces, I think. With it being this painless to finally BE online through such a small portal leads me to think it’ll be a limited time before this is the default for simply connecting.

Now, this isn’t THAT easy… It is so very much faster to type. But, this is fine, and it’ll only get better. However, there are some things which are necessary for this to be my default:

*I need the use of all my fingers. This screen is fantastically good-and I find it very much better as an interface even than my beloved trackball. But the keyboard… It’s too slow.

*Faster app switching. This will surely improve with time, but it’s a bit of a train-of-thought killer.

*Copy/paste. I mean: Come On!

*Finally, the way to navigate among text is to hold one’s finger somewhere near the text, and drop the resulting cursor somewhere near the letter. Arrows alongside this would be very useful.

So, there you have it: my first iPhone post. Not sure I’ll rush out to to it again. But it’s possible. I need more practice with the interface, but I’m not sure if I will.

One last thought: there’s limited to no file handling. This is a mistake, I think. I would very much hate to lose this much thumb-written text now…

Windows 7: Vista-II

// January 12th, 2009 // View Comments // Apps, perspective, review, tech

Reviews of new Windows releases always seem to say the same thing, depending on what kind of person writes them. Mac enthusiasts say it’s yet again stolen more MacOS features. Microsofties defend the new-found stability and the speed compared to last editions. Non-techies say how pretty this one is in comparison with the last, et cetera.

Well, I’ve got a preview build of Windows 7, and I’d like to give you a three-way look at it.

The Good

Windows 7 already feels stronger and faster than Vista. It installed easily using Bootcamp, and is happily running on my MacbookPro. When I got all the drivers working (to be expected running on an Apple, I suppose) it’s robust and more or less respectable. This particular build/driver combination is particularly nice, because it’s got some special Apple drivers which let it play nice with my keyboard and F-button settings (volume, keyboard and screen brightness, eject).

Windows found my external display fairly quickly, though it would not use it’s full resolution at first. Then, randomly, it let me do so (though nothing had been downloaded or tweaked—it couldn’t; I had yet to connect to my network!). This was a nice surprise, but I kind of wish it would let me choose what’s going on instead of hiding its preferences and features in the background (more on this later).

A slight improvement over Vista is the ease by which Windows 7 seemed to handle getting online. It’s a breeze to select a wireless network and get connected. I also like some of the more subtle things they’ve done with 7, which make it a bit more pleasant to use such as the way they’ve layed-out the control panel settings, and the better file-layout in the navigation panels of explorer windows.

By far, so far, the best thing has been the speed. Windows 7, at this stage, is fast enough to work nicely. I don’t know how it will do after months of updates, registry bloat, and anti-malware software; but it MUST be better than Vista in this regard. Finally, however, is a small thing that I like: Windows Live Writer. It’s great! It’s available for Vista, however, so it’s not new. However, the Live Essentials on this version seem a bit easier to get going and running. Windows Live Writer is the only application that I wish I had on the Mac, and it’s still the best blogging tool out there.

The Bad

Firstly, why is networking with Windows so hard? It found my router, got onto the internet, and updated itself fine. It talks with the Windows Mothership on the cloud easily enough. Would it, however, find my Mac on the same network? My iPhone? Yes… through Bluetooth! When will Windows start to recognise they need to make networking easy for users?

Secondly, this is basically Vista done not-so-badly. It’s, so far, what Vista should have been. Light (ish), easy, stable. But, to me, these are table-stakes. It’s not that impressive to say: “Our operating system doesn’t hang when you use default features! It’s stable, It’s easy!” It should be, why are you so proud of this?

The final reason why this isn’t going to be the best OS out there, however, is that it’s still Windows. Now, before you label me a fanboy or anti-establishmentarian; let me say why this is a problem. There are countless menus and features and settings and objects on this system. There are too many, unconnected settings. Windows Control Panel has 63 icons! OSX, in comparison, makes do with 26. The user also doesn’t often see an immediate effect from a settings change. After several sets of “OK” are pressed, I find out my network adapter’s been disabled, and have to go though a completely different route to get it back. The language used to describe the setup options has always been difficult to follow. Consider the Networking setup: Some based on actions, so you can “set up a new connection or network;” “connect to a network;” “fix network problem” etc. Others are categorical ‘HomeGroup,” “Internet Options,” “Wireless Network Connection” etc… I’ve had to go through every single one of them, and many subsequent menus besides in order to setup my home network. The “wizard” does nothing. It’s always been this way with Windows…you are expected to know exactly where the settings are hidden within some obscure menu, but you’re teased with easy options along the way. My favourite screen so far has been one which says: “Troubleshooting could not identify the problem.” Thanks for the help…

This problem stems from always being the Least Common Denominator. What results is that every set of functions is a compromise of some kind.

The Not-Ugly but unfortunately Not-Original

It’s not a new thing to say that this version of Windows is copying Mac. I grew up being told that Windows has stolen every good idea it’s ever had from someone else. While this may have been true with many things, I can’t believe they have never had an original thought. Despite its many shortcomings, Microsoft’s software is the market dominator, and has been for as long as anyone can remember. Sure, they’ve bought companies and talent along the way (so has Google… so has Apple!), but the Live stuff is pretty different, and works decently (except for its annoying insistence that all the services you use should be MS—a characteristic it shares with Apple services like MobileMe.)

Having a look at the promotional video for VistaII—I mean, Windows 7—and I’m struck by how little there is to say about it.

Firstly: “Windows Gurus”? Tell me that’s not a play on “Apple Geniuses”. You can imagine the board meeting that chose that name: “Right, we need something of an authority on the matter that sounds brainy and starts with G, but isn’t ‘Genius.’ Wilkinson?” “Uh, er, guardian…guarantor…general… guru?”

They seem terribly proud about how the windows all have previews and there’s a brilliant new thing called a Task Bar! Windows has had a taskbar for years, this one just works a bit more like the Dock in OSX. That’s it, move along.

They’ve renamed the “Workgroup” the “Homegroup”, and it does the same thing. It’s tweaked, supposedly, but it’s just a network. I find myself wondering if this a reaction to the “I’m a Mac” ads? “This isn’t work, it’s home. We’ve renamed it, HOME, cause it’s not at work. Get it?”

IE has had a few features added, called “accelerators” which essentially allow for interaction with the web through the browser. It could be a great step, except that there are Firefox folks doing it so much better. Bit.Ly plugin allows for a huge range of interaction with data on the screen through Firefox.  Ubiquity on Firefox is a genuinely new way of blurring the web, our human interactions, and our machines. “Accelerators” just seem like a glorified right-click or contextual menu. There’s also “InPrivate Browsing” which turns off cookies and history. Guess what Safari has called this? “Private Browsing”. Go figure…

I know this is a preview release, but my overall impression is that Windows 7 should have been launched in 2006. This is great, for a Windows release, it works and pretty well so far. Aside from the basic problem that it is Windows, and works by being everything to everyone, it’s OK. But it’s not exciting, it’s not THAT new, and it feels a bit like we should be seeing a real breakthrough by now.

Hook me up

// December 17th, 2008 // View Comments // Semantic Web, Web 2.0, emergent, perspective, tech

'my mac is cool "kkkkk"' by yaraaa

I’ve been blogging a bit over on Nodalities about “stuff being connected”. The idea being basically: everyone is constantly creating data—all the bits of information that can be used in abstract.  These tiny bits of information are constantly being generated by every process we undertake, from the obvious like online banking to the more obscure like driving to work (your odometer tells you how many miles you’ve gone, your on-board computer may store info about your car’s status, your satnav knows where you’re going and been, your mobile phone may know this too, the garage knows when your last service was… this list can go on and on). These data are more powerful when automated by software, and they become exponentially more useful when they are connected with other data. For example, the knowledge that £50 pounds left your account isn’t particularly helpful without a connection to that little bit of data which tells you the date of the transaction.

But why are some data more obscure—why don’t we even think about using some of them?

It may be simply because they’re not immediately useful to us, yet. We can, right now, log in to our banks and have a look at our accounts. We can shuffle and access and compare and analyse because this information is being presented to us in an easily-managed and understandable way. We have access to the raw data, and most of us have some basic understanding of why these data are important. I wouldn’t be surprised if readers of this blog have a spreadsheet or two with financial calculations on it, or use quicken with their balance info. We all know how important calendar events, emails, address book contacts, and bank balances are, and we have various systems to deal with them.

But, what do we DO with all the data we don’t currently access routinely? Well, this is where those connections come in. We can connect data together using some sort of framework, or abstract construct like a database. However, this database will need to be connected to another database (or exported to an existing one) in order for these new bits and pieces to be considered in terms of others.

More simply, the tools and formats we use all the time (spreadsheets, calendars, notepads, computers, odometers etc…) already exist but they don’t currently take into account the further levels of data we create. We don’t have a tool to see our car’s mileage at a certain date, so we’d need to walk out to the car, look at the odometer, and guess. The bit that’s missing is the connection—the link between information we have and a tool or another bit of data. In the previous example, we need a database to collect mileage, a connection between that and date data, and a calendar to view it—tools and data.

There are two sides to these software tools, though. There’s the side presented to the user, and the side that is accessed by processors and memory and software. I’ll blog more on the human-side later, but the “stuff” happens at the edge of these two coming together.

The “Semantic Web” works on a framework which enables any data to be easily connected to other data. Instead of sitting in a traditional relational database, which makes its connections based on a set of specific instructions (schemas), all the data are encoded with a bit of information identifying them to the web. In essence, each piece of data has an address, and can be pointed to much like a web site points to another. This works at various levels of granularity, so individual records can be linked very easily, allowing for applications to be written on top of these linked data. These applications can then let us analyse, manipulate, swap, and USE anything, literally, that we can link.

Alongside this linked data infrastructure (call it the Semantic Web, or Data Web or just the Web) is the proliferation of computing hardware. Processors and memory are being manufactured into just about anything we can buy. Thiese are all working  to take the stuff we do and “translate” it into data. Phones, cars, fridges, credit cards, clocks, scales, watches… we’re surrounded by little processors or bits of memory recording and crunching what we do. What makes this situation currently frustrating/exciting is that they currently don’t share their information, and aren’t “aware” of the potential of other computing.

So, what am I getting at? Well, like we’re saying over on Nodalities, hook it up! We’re getting data, that’s happening. We have the framework(s) and the distributed network (the Web), and we have decades of experience automating data-comparisons (which is all Software ever does, if you boil it down).

The next step is to connect it.

Glue Sticks Stuff Together

// October 28th, 2008 // View Comments // Apps, review, tech

So, the web is full of interesting stuff, right? Gadgets, people, blogs, books, tips, wine—all good things. At least, the web is full of interesting pages about these things. In a single session, you might read a mate’s blog (maybe about wine), then browse a retail site for a book that that mate recommended and stumble across a brilliant gadget. That’s five good things in the space of a few minutes. Here they are, in case you missed them: your mate’s a person (good), and he’s got a blog (debatable, but there you go). He’s talking about wine (which is definitely good), and he happens to recommend a book (great). In the process, you stumble across a gadget (brilliant!).

The problem with all that is that you didn’t instantly recognise all the good things in that very brief narrative sentence. The web is an interconnected bunch of arbitrarily-related pages, like a catalogue of (often good) stuff, without an index. It’s arbitrary, because the pages only exist when it’s linked to; and the stuff can be anything from a purchasable item to an innovative idea. This network is mind-numbingly huge and even the most versatile of polymaths can’t be interested in all of it. So, what we want is all the good stuff, and we want it with all the flexibility an arbitrary system can offer (I like this, this and this… are they related in any way?)

Well, when I look at them, I can see that they’re related; and not just because I happen to have chosen three things I like. I have had the tremendous privilege of testing a gadget which lets me capture these things, and lets me peek at how they connect with my own little perspective on the web. The gadget’s called Glue, and it’s the latest offering from AdaptiveBlue. I’ve blogged about AdaptiveBlue’s Smartlinks in the past, and they’re responsible for the little icons next to the linked things above (if you have a decent browser). What they’ve been doing is allowing you to contextualise the stuff on the web, and Glue goes a step further by letting you also interact with other folks’ contexts.

Firstly, Glue is a browser plugin for Firefox (remember, I said to get a decent browser?). Glue creates a  bookmark in your bar, but the real magic occurs when you navigate to some stuff. As you seek out or stumble across interesting things online, the Glue menu glides down, giving you instant options to “like” the item, find out more about it, and see who else has “liked” it too. They have an excellent walk-through on their site, so I won’t duplicate their efforts by explaining how it works here, but it does recognise many kinds of “stuff” from a myriad of very important sites.

The interesting part, for me, is that it brings a context to all the arbitrary links we follow all the time. We can see where we fit in with this, and what our mates think too. Best of all, these things are treated just like that: as the things in which we’re interested. I want to talk about this book, not this page about the book. I want to rate this book, and if a friend sees it on another site, he’ll still see that I liked it!

Best of all, it’s a social network without the need for a social-networking space. It’s the first thing I’ve seen which successfully breaks out of the need to be inside a specific place in order to interact and contextualise—we don’t need MyFace’s training wheels! Glue shifts its focus from trying to hem in, or reduce the web, to elegantly augmenting it.

As you can tell, I really like this gadget, and I thank @fraser and @alexiskold for building it, and letting me have a play of the Beta.

Google’s 10^100 (how many can you help?)

// September 24th, 2008 // View Comments // emergent, interesting, tech

Image via Wikipedia

I have begun to see that we may be entering a new age of polymaths, and I’m happy to be involved in a part of the business world which seems to sustain some of the best brains on the planet.

I remember reading about the beginners of industry—the pioneers of technology and science. I remember reading how Robert Fulton came up against problems in life, and simply invented new ways of doing things, leading eventually to the development of steam-powered paddle-wheel-boats. I remember, vaguely, from my propagandistically pro-industrial schooling that as a child, Fulton had invented or improved on the lead pencil, because the one he was using in school wasn’t up to scratch. The same story is reflected through many of the West’s inventors of what we’ve retrospectively come to call the Industrial Revolution: when opportunity or difficulty forced their hands, they changed the situation.

Now, aside from natural romanticism, I like to look to the past with neither rose-tinted glasses nor “isn’t-everything-better-now” short-sightedness. I’m sure that for every changer, there were crowds of followers in every age, and I’m sure many of you could point easily to both an earth-changer and a follower without too much effort. Besides, history pays scant attention to followers.

No, what I’m talking about is the seeming ease with which many of my colleagues in the web industry switch between impressively diverse tasks. Some I know make impressive presenters, and happen to hold PhD’s in fields more or less unrelated to what they do now… and can code Java and know a bit of CSS on the side. I fear to challenge any to play chess (since I haven’t played in over 5 years, and have the patience of a twelve-year-old), and several are rumoured to be better-than-average musicians. This diversified excellence, alongside the startups, ideas, enthusiastic organisations and programmes i’ve seen recently, remind me of the society-changers of a century and more ago. Not since then, I think, has such an importance been placed on ambition within social responsibilities.

One of the things I’ve seen most recently has been the Google 10^100 (apparently pronounced: ten to the one-hundredth with a typically geeky need to explain the pun) which aims to “help as many people as we can” by contributing $10million to fund earth-changing ideas. Their site is, in classic Google fashion, very straightforward, so I won’t repeat their blurb…just go have a read. But, while you are doing it, I dare you to set aside any cynicism you may harbour either toward a big business, or to any notion of “changing the world”. Think about what has and is being done, and then think how you could change the world.