After last night’s triumph in replacing my home hub with a third party gateway, I was musing about BT’s ability to support their Hub and my suspicions that there is a DHCP bug on the home hub and how large organisations really need to understand the software they use and how open source products make skills acquisition easier; although BT have no excuse, since the hub is a Linux derivative, hence open source but they outsourced the development, and for months have denied any knowledge or responsibility for its functionality. …
Perhaps it’s not so bad
Paul Carr in his column on TechCrunch, wrote an interesting and balanced article on the DE Bill. He argues that, the law is not that bad but that
- businesses should not be disconnected, only fined and only if it can be proved they have colluded,
- site filtering should be replaced by borrowing from the US DMCA by implementing take down notices and rights holders and their agents should be fined for vexatious behaviour
- there isn’t a rush, speedy law is usually bad, this can wait ’till after the election but most importantly ’till after a proper debate
Cup Winners
And we score …
The DE Bill, Mark Thomas and BBC Balance
Mark Thomas is a well known campaigner against corporate lawlessness, greed and against capitalism’s consumption of humanity. He recently made a TV article for the culture show on the Digital Economy Bill, …
Total wirelessness
The availabilty of wireless connectectivity in the UK can be a bit sporadic as I have learnt over the week I didn’t have it in the house, and I relied on my phones for internet connectivity. A lesson this need has taught me is that handset designers need to remember that the goal of wifi is wirelessness. Its pointless to replace the need for an RJ45 with the need for powerlead.
i.e. energy efficiency and battery size and life become noticable if you use a modern mobile the way it was intended. HTC…I am talking to you. …
Arghh! Snipsnap
Finding old blog posts is not easy on Snipsnap; it creates a snip named on the basis of a date/serial concatenation, and does not/cannot index the date against any title specified, or at least not as far as I can see. (I have created a Tag aka Category label of “Blog” but this will only listed manually tagged articles, and it seems, attribute the serial i.e. the final component of the name, which is the day ordinal, to it. Not too useful, by which I mean useless.)
ooOOOoo
Amended, slightly, on 11th August, when copied to wordpress. This is one of the crucial reasons I decided to get off snipsnap, together with the dying community,growing legacy environment to run it and the excessive cost of hosting, since you need root privilidge to install snipsnap. DFL 11 August 2013 …
Internet on the move
In which David first comes across Orange’s adult content filters….
I moved into a rented flat last weekend, it was all a bit exciting because our original plan had been to drive to London with our stuff on the Saturday and drive home on Sunday. We wisely decided not to; the journey to the station, normally 20 minutes took two hours because of the snow. Anyway we got there and moved in. Rented accomodation doesn’t include either phone or broadband so I spoke to BT to get the phones in and since they have lead times it meant that I was without a WiFi LAN at home for the week. It hasn’t been that long since we first got broadband at home but its been very noticeable not having it. …
Around and about in London
Back at work after our first weekend in our newly rented flat in London. We took a turn about Docklands, visiting the London Ice Sculpture festival, and on Sunday, we went out to the London Boat Show, which is at the ExCel Centre on Victoria Dock.
While I had to look at some of the boats, and couldn’t avoid looking over a somewhat excessive Sunseeker, I also visited a couple of training exhibitions and several of the holiday companies, which has given me some ideas as to what I might do this summer. Sail Ionian is offering passage from Gibralter to Greece via Sardinia, which might be fun, depending on the personality of the skipper and rest of the crew, although it takes a while and I may not have the leave. Sailing Holidays might be another way to do the Ionian or even the Saronic Gulf on the east coast of the Peloponese and both Nisos Yachts, another greek charter company & Moonfleet Sailing, a training company had stands. We also looked over a couple of J boats, although I can’t imagine buying any of them. …
Un-Unlimited BT Internet
I have an “Unlimited” download contract with BT Broadband and I received a Fair Usage policy warning in November. It seems that if their “Unlimited” customers look likely to exceed 100Gb download per calendar month, they receive a warning letter, but if they exceed the limit for two months in a row, they’ll restrict the download speed to 1 Mbps for a further month during peak times. (This is 1/7th of the speed I usually get.)
This seems a bit disproportionate to me since online games, and streaming content from the TV companies replayer sites become unusable. What do the think a residential site uses broadband for? Anyway, I rang them to discuss this, and have posted my notes at a new page called BT Broadband, which discusses the fairness, transparancy and management measures. It also has a link to Ofcom’s site. (Further thoughts and notes are held on the BT Home Hub page. ) …
Scalable Computing
The “Scalable Computing” section of the Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network has published an “article, called “Cloud – why now?” by me, Dave Levy. It is a brief article looking at some of the thoughts I developed over the last year about why organisations are developing new architectural models for IT delivery and how they’ll do it. It looks at the computer science, the economics and the way in which scale is self fulfilling. The scale of the problem, of which there are three dimensions, (data, complexity & connectivity) inspires scalable IT, which itself enables the scale of the solution, and enables higher levels of scale. …