Been quiet on the blog as of late. These prolonged silences are starting to get a bit of a habit I know.
There’s a very good reason and it goes something like this.
Been thinking a lot about the direction of the site and where I want it’s future to go as opposed to where it started out nearly two years ago.
Back then it was a bit of a pet project from a technical perspective and a desire to put a few things into the public domain, create a bit of user interaction and generally play around with some new bits and bobs.
It isn’t really like that anymore. I wanted at the time, a stronger ability to do core content presentation centred around a blog.
At the time I’d evaluated Wordpress and found although a great blogging structure, it just didn’t do all the CMS (content management system) things that I wanted and a Joomla! solution seemed more apt. That said the core blog element on the site has always been underlyingly Wordpress-ish, just ported into a larger CMS structure.
A lot can change in 2 years which is why in the not too distant future I’ll be closing down the site for a complete rebuild.
Wordpress has come a long way since then and stands up as a pretty good CMS on it’s own these days.
There is a time element in all of this. 2 years ago the family was smaller, I had more time to do my own scripting and hacking around when things didn’t quite work properly. These days I’ve got more family commitments and a lot more workload to deal with which means I’m more inclined towards a simpler (for me) solution.
There’s still a temptation to just simply be different and use something like Drupal but manually hacking my MySQL database to get it into Wordpress as a test the other night was enough work in itself.
It’ll take a while to do. I’m undecided on an off the shelf template, completely building my own from scratch or somewhere in the middle by cutomising another template.
Not to mention there’s a few HTML errors that have crept into the site that have been annoying me for a while and I’ve simply been too lazy to hack out again.
Bit of fun, but if you’re trying to flog people computers with all the latest and greatest Vista operating system, here’s probably not how you should do it:
Location, Curry’s Wolverhampton. In case anyone was wondering.
Further to my last post, and yes I’ve been somewhat busy of late and not posting; I finally got sick of Virgin Media. It’s been on the cards for a while now but the whole Phorm issue pushed it over the edge.
For the record, here’s why I’ve left Virgin Media:
1. Price. It’s possible to get faster and cheaper packages so they’re not price competitive. I was previously on their 2 for £20 offer in that being the phone line and broadband with free TV. Now I will pay £10.50 for line rental from BT and £7.50 for broadband from O2 because they also happen to be my mobile phone provider. This is for an 8Mbit connection as opposed to a 2Mbit connection from Virgin.
2. Customer service. There are a number of elements to this aspect and I’ll do a direct comparison with my new provider O2. When Virgin Media swallowed up my then provider Telewest who were actually very good, they did a number of things. They outsourced the technical customer services to (presumably India) in an obvious attempt to cut cost. They then changed from the previous free call to a premium rate line in an attempt to further cream off money from customers. I don’t like this. I’ll be the first to admit that as a techie I’ve never called their technical line but there is a principle at stake. I don’t like shifting call centres overseas and as a Trades Unionist and pretty patriotic kind of guy I’d be a hypocrite to not be supporting British based workers as much as can. In contrast O2 have wholly UK based customer and technical services and are actually available all round the clock as I’ve just experienced having needed to get a few settings off them. Oh and they’re customer/technical services are free to call on an 0800 number. I like that.
3. The technical angle. I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as a bandwidth intensive customer for any ISP. I don’t download music or movies and certainly don’t do any illegal file sharing stuff. However as a techie I do on the odd occasion require the ability to download large files. Usually we’re talking an ISO image of a Linux operating system distribution but we’re talking anything from 650MB to 4GB. In such circumstances the use of torrent file sharing technology is handy. Sadly though it is obvious that Virgin Media monitor the nature of their customers traffic and after 5 minutes of so using torrents I’ve had my bandwidth throttled down to below dial-up speeds. Even on a box standard FTP download it’s clear to see throttling going on as speeds a sequentially cut in half until it’s a quarter of the speed I’ve been paying for.
As a bit of a contrast, here’s a little screenshot from an few hours ago of me downloading a few updates:
Yes, that would be 2351 kiloBytes per second which I work out to be around 18.3Mbits per second. After having a chat to the technical guy about an unrelated matter I did mention how impressed I was and was told that for the first day or so it does run un-capped so I shouldn’t get used to that kind of speed but even with their top package being £15 a month, those kinds of speeds are very tempting (don’t tell the missus).
I also deliberately tried a torrent connection (a download of a 3.3GB iso image) and the exact same file took close to 12 hours on Virgin but only took less than 45 minutes today with no drops in speed or throttling in sight.
4. I feel like an adult again. I may be getting old and grumpy but my interpretation of my relationship with my ISP and indeed any other company that I deal with is that they provide a service and I pay for it. They’re not my mate or chum, they’re a company that does (hopefully) what I pay them to do. Equally I am an adult, I’ve not been a teenager for a very long time and I don’t like a company trying to be all hip and trendy talking to me in ‘yoof’ speak. I don’t like reference to terms and conditions as being ‘legal stuff’ and I’m sick and tired of the error screen on my account that provides me with a picture of a young female model who looks like a heroin addict.
In contrast so far I’m impressed with O2. They’re staff are courteous and polite, don’t patronise me but are simply informative and helpful. Oh and they don’t seem to try and mislead you either which brings me on to the next point.
When you quit Virgin there’s a special department that deals with presumably trying to talk you out of it. They ask you why. Strangely enough I mentioned some of the above points and was told there was nothing wrong with my connection speed and they don’t throttle torrents. They also helpfully informed me that I wouldn’t be able to get more than a 2Mbit connection from an ADSL connection. This I thought a bit strange given all these other companies that aren’t cable based are offering much higher speeds than 2Mbit. Then it dawned on me that this was a very crafty bit of not necessarily wrong but rather misleading advice. There are of course different versions of ADSL from the box standard ADSL which yes, is technically only capable of up to 2Mbits but there’s also ADSL Max services which go up to 8Mbits and ADSL2+ which will deliver up to 24Mbits. So in just saying ADSL they’re being technically truthful but given how many other providers office ADSL Max and increasingly ADSL2+ it’s a bit disingenuous and may deter a non-techie from arguing the toss which of course I did.
So for the munchkin at Virgin Media who tried to convince me I wouldn’t get anything faster, please feel free to take another look at the screenshot. Yes, that’s 18.3Mbit/s across an ADSL2+ connection with local loop un-bundling at the exchange which incidentally is a plus given the exchange is less than half a kilometre away.
5. The biggie really, Phorm and this also links into my little experience while trying to leave Virgin and also the nature of what I want from an ISP. It’s pretty simple, I pay for a connection to the internet, that’s where it stops. I don’t want value added, content or targeted advertising I simple want a connection that can exchange packets of data. What a certainly don’t want is miserable little companies that used to bang out spyware intercepting all my packets of data, analysing it to work out what kind of consumer I am to bang up adverts for it although if anyone really wants to know, I’m an incredibly arsie a merciless consumer which probably puts me out of their target audience anyway.
That said, personal information is important to me, this isn’t an episode of The Prisoner, I’m not a number (or bleeding cookie file for that matter) and I don’t appreciate people wanting to profile who I am in an attempt to flog me stuff, not that it would work anyway. The ‘please don’t leave us’ marketing lady did attempt to point me in the direction of a web page outlining all the wonderful benefits of Phorm but for some reason when I decided to start getting into techie details I think just decided to give up on trying to convince me otherwise.
So there we go. One day into being a customer of O2 and I’m very happy so far. I did have trepidations as I’ve been a very happy mobile customer of their’s for over a decade (yes I know technically speaking they weren’t O2 then and yes I still have bills with BT Cellnet on them filed away) but I’d have hated for them to have let me down on the broadband front. So far so good though, one thoroughly contented arsie consumer here at the moment and as long as they stay away from Phorm I may be around as a customer for a very long time.
Your humble Penguin has been knocking around on computers for let’s say, a fair while. He even remembers the days when you had to put a telephone receiver onto a little box so that it could make lots of little clicking sounds while trying to exchange data across a phone line.
However those days of hideously slow net connections are over as this is the 21st century and everything’s like all fibre optics and stuff so I was surprised to get this little reading while downloading an update for my system.
Yes, 481 bytes a second, lucky boy that I am. Not that this is the first time, the other week I got an estimate for downloading an ISO image of a Linux distribution of sometime about three weeks later – bless.
According to my ISP they’re connections are faster than a speeding… Well actually they don’t say so this is probably one of those clever bits of marketing like ‘up 1 trillion megabits’ when in reality you’re going to be bumbling along on half a meg, presumably that would be a speeding snail then.
However that said, it has been a very long time since my download speed was measured in bytes. Suffice to say I didn’t get much done that night and opted for an evening playing Age of Empires 2 Conquerors Expansion.
*note the small ‘c’ in that title just to make matters clear.
Sometimes in life you can get stuck into a routine. Doing the same things, using the same methods and tools without realising that things have changed and there’s more options available.
Last year I did a little review on the Apple iPhone and found it wanting in many areas to the point that I wouldn’t consider touching one with the proverbial long piece of navigational wood. Just to add, I hadn’t realised at the time that the iPhone doesn’t even do multi-tasking as in being able to do more than run one application at the same time. This is pathetic by anyone’s standards but I digress.
Using the iPhone did however have an impact on me. It spurred me into wanting to see what is technically possible with my own Nokia E65 mobile phone. Could check but can’t be bothered but just for a bit of perspective, the Nokia E65 predates the iPhone by about a year so it’s in mobile phone technology terms given the pace of change almost ancient now.
I’ll also admit that prior to last November I did what most people use their phones for. Making calls, texting and using it as an MP3 player. The odd photo but I’m not so fussed about such things.
What I really wanted to try out was mobile internet access and have a little poke around what other third party applications were knocking about for my phone.
After a week or so Mrs Penguin finally gave in to my pleas of getting a data plan added to my mobile phone contract. (Please note, it is highly recommended that before you try any application for your mobile that uses any kind of data connection that you get one of these plans otherwise you may find your bill to be rather hefty the following month).
With a newly acquired data plan in hand I ventured out into the world of mobile browsing and it’s fair to say that coupled with a change in circumstances and a more hectic lifestyle it has fitted in rather neatly to having less time to sit at my PC.
Like most people who like to keep up on current affairs I’m heavily dependent on my RSS feeds to stay up to date with the latest news. Sometimes being all over the place the availability of these news feeds wherever I am is now a must.
All Nokia smart phones come pre-installed with the default Nokia browser which is a very good feature rich and fast browser. However the feeds feature is abysmal.
After much searching around for a suitable application I came across Opera Mini. I used to use Opera as my main web browser on my PC many years back but for some reason forgot about it after Firefox really started to get going but when it comes to mobiles, Opera are certainly producing the best browsing applications around at the moment.
Opera do another browser, the full Opera Mobile which I will download when I get my next phone but for the time being Opera Mini suits my core demands, that of a very nice feed reader.
I thought I’d do a couple of screenshots from my mobile to emphasise the point. Here’s the main start screen:
It’s got what you need straight away, quick web search function, a straight to URL function, bookmarks (which I don’t use at present) and a link to the feeds. The GUI is nice, it can easily flip from vertical to horizontal format and there’s plenty of options to configure it the way you like.
On to the feeds:
A nice simple list that’s bold if there’s stories unread and a click takes you to another screen which renders the actual content of the feeds meaning there’s often no need to even visit the actual site at all.
Opera Mini works in a slightly different way to most mobile browsers. Instead of rendering the pages on the phone itself which in terms of processing power is pretty puny, it connects via Opera’s servers in Norway which render the pages in a mobile friendly way that then port that back to the phone.
The upside of this is that web pages fit neatly to the screen size of the phone as you can see here:
Although on a normal desktop browser the text of this blog fills the whole centre column, it is re-rendered to fit the screen resolution of the phone and a quick click zooms in to the actual text meaning that there’s no need for left and right scrolling, just up and down.
Anyway, that’s my tip for the day. If you’re the busy always on the go type who needs to keep up with those feeds then I’d highly recommend Opera Mini.
It does work on almost all mobile phones that run the Symbian S60 (Nokia phone operating system), Windows Mobile on them there Motorola’s and Blackberry’s although a word of caution on Blackberry’s. Check with your operator first as use of Opera Mini because it ports traffic outside of Blackberry’s own system may not be covered by a Blackberry data plan. Apparently a few people fell foul of that on O2 last year although no word as to what the current position is.
I’ll try and do a few more posts about mobile applications in the future because it’s interesting to see how things are developing and how they can impact on the way we do things differently.
To your left is a new Twitter feed added into the sidebar. I’m unconvinced at the moment as to whether it will stay there or indeed to what value Twitter is as a concept but I’m just playing around.
Pity the Flash object knocked out the CSS. I’m not a big fan of flash in general but it did look smooth. So for the moment we’re on plain old XHTML.
Presumably all bloggers will be to some extent familiar with the bane that is spam.
Thanks to a few little bits an bobs set up when this site was in it’s infancy as good as no comment spam has managed to make its way onto the site.
However, the last month or so has seen a distinct upsurge targeting my contact section meaning that for the first time I actually have a few spammy e-mail’s in my inbox.
This isn’t appreciated but from my own perspective, the nature of the spam is quite interesting.
Not your common old comment spam from (insert well known spamming server), nope, this is a full on botnet scenario. Not exactly an outright DNS attack but certainly one utilising plenty of zombie PC’s (all running Windows and Internet Explorer I might add). Quite why my site and Mrs Penguin’s have become the target of a botnet is not known, other sites linking to here who use exactly the same CMS structure haven’t been affected but there you go, must have miffed off some Russians or Chinese. (note, that’s a qualified statement as most of the worlds botnet attacks originate from either of those two countries and is no way to be considered a slur on wither nationalities).
It’s a bit of a problem and vast swathes of IP addresses have been blocked. Sadly these will be to real people who then will not be able to access the site (although they’ll get a polite message and instructions on how to contact me to rectify the problem).
I just thought I’d mention it.
In a similar vein, one particular IP address has been popping up very regularly, every ten minutes to be precise and it’s from FastHosts. Not exactly my favourite company given their policy of rolling over to rich people with well paid lawyers so they’ve been blocked too. In all likelihood it is some sort of aggregating website such as the the copious number of political feed sites that seem to be everywhere these days. I haven’t got a problem usually, the porting of content across the net is fundamental to the direction in which it is going but I’m sorry, every ten minutes is taking the piss. Not even Google pop by that often so whoever it is can hop it.
Life’s returning to normal, if normal can be considered to living on 4 hours or so sleep a night and copious quantities of coke and lucozade to get through the days and nights.
Been an interesting few weeks but it’s given me the opportunity to play around with some new things.
First up on the list of priorities was the installation of the Linux variant Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron that came out on 24th April.
For your delectation, here’s a bit of the old YouTubing of my new desktop.
(Note: this is running on a Targa laptop with an AMD Turion Dual Core 64Bit processor, 1024Mb of RAM and a Nvidia Geforce Go 7400 256Mb graphics card. It runs almost as well on my crappy old desktop which is a Celeron D with 512Mb of RAM and a 6 year old second hand Nvidia graphics card that probably has something like 32Mb of RAM)
Update:
Should also mention that any jerkiness, black lines in the clip are purely down to the recording process. It’s actually beautifully smooth and very fast.
Things are as far as I’m concerned pretty much in now. There’s the odd query or question regarding this system that I’d like clarification on but I’m not that fussed.
I’ve tried my best, although admittedly quite skeptical from the start to be fair and listen to what Phorm have had to say.
However, I’ve made up my mind. I am with one of the three ISP’s that are planning to implement this system and it is simple from my own perspective, I’m with Sir Tim Berners-Lee on this one as a consumer. If my ISP’s implement this system, they will no longer be my ISP. They may ‘just’ about get a reprieve if they configure their system in such a way that it constitutes a change in the terms and conditions of customers, that those who are in or out are handled at the ISP’s authentication level and that no part of my data stream goes anywhere near any bit of kit run by Phorm.
I think the problem is thus. It doesn’t matter about opt-out or opt-in cookies or any kind of guarantee that my traffic will not be analysed. It is now simply a matter of principle about what I as a customer want and how I consider the relationship with my ISP.
It’s pretty simple. I pay said ISP for a connection to the internet for a certain amount of bandwidth at a particular speed and they provide it. I don’t want content added, manipulated or impossible to block pop-ups on my screen.
I’ve spent far too much of my time messing around in both a professional and personal context with Windows based machines, hacking (manually in many cases) spyware, adware and viruses off them. I became fed up of spending my time having to deal with systems that worked in a way that meant I didn’t have control over what was going on. That’s why I run Linux, it’s about freedom, control over everything that I want on my system. It’s why I run Firefox because I can customise my web experience exactly the way I want it. Put short, it’s about individual freedom and choice, an underlying principle of the net.
This system and it’s future potential use if expanded to other areas like adverts before downloads or pop-up adverts between page loads isn’t what I want from my web experience.
It’s being marketed on the basis of providing two core enhancements to people’s web browsing. Anti-phishing technology that doesn’t seem to have any tangible benefits outside of what is already present in most good (or not good) browsers and ‘more relevant advertising’. From my perspective this is no benefit to me. I can spot a phishing site a mile off despite how clever it might be.
I don’t click on online adverts, I never have and never will because the internet for me is about finding things. If I’m after information or a particular product I’ll go out and look for it myself, adverts for me are nothing more than a waste of bandwidth.
Now if my ISP wanted to offer me a service that blocked all advertising I might well be up for that. It would save them bandwidth and costs and my web experience would be enhanced and if I could sign up to that as an individual customer, it be part of my terms and conditions then it would be great. I wouldn’t get any adverts that I’m not going to click on anyway, the ISP wouldn’t waste bandwidth serving me up adverts from sites because I’m not going to click on them anyway and the website publisher isn’t losing revenue from their adverts not being presented on my screen because, and I think I’ve mentioned it before, I’m not going to click on them anyway; everyone’s a winner.
I started a post last week about the dynamics in the market that are driving this situation, didn’t get it finished but will endeavour to this week.
Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note two things. Firstly the amusing revelation that Phorm, a company that it’s fair to say has a distinct competitor position to Google, uses Google’s services to monitor what people are saying about them online and secondly that no matter to whom I have discussed this issue, techie or non-techie, not a single person has said to me, yes, more relevant advertising, that’s exactly what I’ve been after all these years to enhance my web experience.
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