Category: Internet

Virgin Nonsense

So more bad press from Virgin. Their new CEO has said that net neutrality is a load of bollocks. Nice. He then threatens the BBC, not directly, by saying that public sector broadcasters should pay for faster access to Virgin customers or find their content delivered at a lower speed.

He also indicates that discussions are underway with content providers to deliver their content at better speeds than others. So those with bigger pockets will get a pretty big advantage on Virgin. They’ll be on the fast lane while others are in a normal or slow lane. So what’s to stop people paying to have better speeds and throttle others? How can this be fair? How can startup’s hope to compete if an ISP has the power to kill their service overnight.

I’d love to see the BBC block all their content to Virgin customers if this starts to heat up. That would really show who has control in this situation. It won’t happen but it would be an interesting step. Or is it just posturing by Virgin as they are soon to launch iPlayer on their Cable boxes?

Evernote

I’ve been trying out Evernote for the last couple of weeks and thought it was time to share an opinion or two. Since moving to Mac I’ve relied on Yojimbo for my note taking needs. It doesn’t just take notes but also store images, pdf’s, secure passwords and links. It also sync’s across mac’s. So what does Evernote offer?

Mac Client

At it’s heart Evernote allows for the storage and searching of text and image based notes. Most impressive is that image searching isn’t just based on image title or tags but on the image content. Images are scanned by Evernote for text and not just of the typed kind. It can pick up hand written text and if you search for a word that it’s found the image will be returned with the search term highlighted. Very impressive and it scans the content quickly too. Notes can be typed in, copied in via cut and paste, snapped in via the helper app allowing you to capture a screen or by using the web browser plugin capture a web page. Every note can be tagged and created in different notebooks within Evernote. Each notebook has privacy options. The default is private but if you want to make a notebook available you can set it to pubic – this content will also be picked up by search engines. Another Evernote feature is that you can get at your content on any platform. Mac, PC, Web, iPhone and Windows Mobile. Searching on the web client produces the same result as desktop which is really nice.

Web Client

Synchronising between desktops and web has worked well so far and getting access on Mac and PC t same content is very nice. The windows client is more stable than the mac version and has a couple of extra features but nothing that get’s in the way of syncing and the same content everywhere.

So overall a very nice set of clients and a useful service. Adding ability to store pdf’s and making them searchable would be a very nice addition. I’d also like to see what the final cost of the service is going to be as it’s only free during beta. At the moment I’m using Evernote for mostly work related content and sticking with Yojimbo. It does more for me at the moment and it’s software I already own. However the ability to see notes on web, PC and iPhone could outweigh Yojimbo’s extra functionality. If anyone else want’s to try Evernote I’ve got some invites. Leave a comment or drop me a mail and I’ll sort you out.

I Need Data

So with Google App Engine announced, iPhone SDK’s and me hacking more and more at work my thoughts have been turning to projects in my own time. Totally daft as I have little time, but that seems to be the way. The more I need to do, the more I want to take on. Flawed.

Anyway, a lot of these projects need data which can be difficult to find. Thinking back to Forza Leagues last year, finding stock icons, flags of the world and some other bits and pieces wasn’t always easy. So when I read this post on why we need a Wikipedia for Data it just struck a chord. How great it would be if there was a general site for free to use data. ReadWriteWeb also have a great resource for Open Data sources. I know someone who would love to get hands on easy to use TV listings and movie times.

Giveth with one…taketh with the other

More Virgin Media news and this time you really do wonder what’s going on! The one that grabs most headlines is that they are to pilot a scheme working with the BPI to send letters to users downloading music illegally via P2P. The pilot is not up and running but according to the Telegraph is starting soon. In some ways it’s no big surprise as there’s been lot’s of talk about a proposed three strikes and your out system. Indeed some ISP’s have already sent letters to users warning them about the content or bandwidth they are using. As long as there are no false positives and the action they are taking is clear, transparent and applied to all users can anyone really complain? Not really, although I’m still surprised that they will act in cases of ‘suspected’ piracy. I would damn well hope they act when they have concrete evidence and it’s not just a way of targeting heavy downloaders and their Linux iso’s.

What makes this all a bit more odd is that Virgin Media are beta testing a new Usenet service. In conjuntion with Highwinds they are looking to improve their newsgroup offering. What are newsgroups – well according to Virgin they are:

…discussion forums (usually on a specific topic) but can also be used to download and upload files such as photos and videos.

No shit Sherlock. Their binary retention will be at least 7 days and text retention over 90 days. Not bad for a free service although nothing like the service you get from providers like Giganews. Notice also that newsgroups are great for photo’s and videos. No music to be found though. Or applications, games, books etc. Just photo’s and video’s.

This doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. What happens with one provider will eventually happen to all. What I want is a reliable fast connection at a reasonable price. On reflection this isn’t what Virgin are offering although I must admit to it being prety bullet proof compared to ADSL. Time to switch?

Shady Virgin

Virgin have been running STM (Subscriber Traffic Management) for a while now. To be honest I haven’t felt much impact although it certainly hasn’t increased my speeds any by affecting ‘the top 3%’ of users downloading or uploading at peak times. I’ve got no real problems with the rules but I do have problems when Virgin apply them when they like at times of their choosing.

Now Virgin have confirmed to a user that STM applies at different times at bank holidays and weekends. That would explain why I was throttled when grabbing some Oracle iso’s a few weekends ago. I put it down to general slowness in the area but it picked up quickly a few hours later. I guess it shows how bad the service can be if I people are throttled without really realising it. Of course there’s nothing on Virgins official page about this. This all smacks of Plusnet when they had to deal with the increased pressures of downloads against cost to user. While the STM is sensible in principle at least tell us how and when it will be applied. Honesty makes a big difference.

Some of the other posts in the link above got me thinking though. Is it really a slippery step to a pay as you go broadband service? Great speeds both down and up but you pay per GB? Is that the most fair way of moving forward with broadband in the future? I’ve no clue but it will be interesting to see how the next 12-18 months change the landscape (if at all) with the increased usage of video and the move to HD by more and more people. 25GB download for just one film? No thanks, not at today’s speeds. I’m sure the music and film industry would love a move to that kind of model. I’d just like to see more consistency for my money…current speed is 3MB which certainly isn’t what I’m paying for.

Cautionary Tale

You should always be careful when handing over usernames and passwords to programs downloaded from the internet. 99% of the time it will be fine but sometimes it could lead to ruin. Not true? Then visit Coding Horror and read about how a programmer was hiving users Google e-mail passwords. Now think how many people use the same password for everything. Scary.

If you fall into the group of one password for all sites, try 1Passwd (not trying to be ironic). Great product which should help protect your many online accounts.

Head in the Cloud…

…and other shorts. Been pretty busy since switching jobs. Enjoying getting my teeth into Oracle tools again although once thing that is VERY frustrating are Oracle application installers. Unless you have full admin rights to your Windows client then installation is a pain. In fact I’d go as far as saying installation is impossible. At our work our rights are pretty limited and even with what are called ‘developer rights’ you don’t have full client admin. It made installing Oracle, BI Publisher and a couple of other tools a nightmare last week.

To get round it I now use a VMWare image at work that I full rights over. Installations are now almost painless…although then you get caught up in some nasty bugs. Hey-ho. Performance isn’t ideal either but at the moment I don’t have much choice.

Anyway…head in the clouds. I’ve moved away from a couple of desktop tools to some hosted options. The first issue was tasks. I’ve been using iGTD for around a year now and it’s been great. A couple of time the syncing between machines got a bit screwy but it was easy to recover. There’s a big but though – I could never see my tasks at work as they were separate and in Outlook. Not ideal. So I tried Tracks and installed it on my domain. It was a lovely app, did most things I wanted but I couldn’t find a couple of key features and I had to hack in things like e-mail support. Then I remembered the milk.

So I know GTD using Remember the Milk. I can get access to my tasks and lists from Mac or PC and in future they look to have a fabby interface for iPhone users. I also like being able to subscribe to tasks in iCal and the Google Calendar plugin is excellent. Sorted. Just need to do the tasks now.

I’ve also got my own wiki installed now. Helps me have one area for notes, procedures etc. I tried a couple of hosted options but preferred my own MediaWiki install with plugins.

My final ‘find’ was Zoho. I can’t believe how feature rich this set of applications are. Very handy and they also have a wiki…I just don’t believe that my firm won’t ban access to these app’s eventually.

I guess what I’m realising is that putting more info on the cloud rather than on the desktop is a reality, is pretty easy for all and that it’s no longer a pipe dream. Not a startling conclusion but it’s been good to take more advantage of some of the web 2.0 app’s than normal.

Anyway, other stuff. Burnout Paradise is a cracking game and one that shouldn’t really be missed. I haven’t played as much as I would want to over the last couple of weeks but the few sessions I’ve played have been great. It does the online side of things really well.

Sold my old amp on eBay. Quite pleased getting £150 for it. Still to post up some thoughts on the Onkyo 705 which will probably take another couple of weeks but so far it’s been excellent, especially Blu-Ray. Thank goodness one of these formats has emerged on top. Hopefully that will lead to better hardware and cheaper prices.

Apple updates – there’s been something new in the store every Tuesday this year. The Macbook Pro updates today were pretty small – increases to processor speeds, hard disk sizes, graphics card’s and the addition of multi touch which I guess is more extensive than the current model’s use of two fingers on the touchpad. I’m pretty pleased as the laptop I bought 15 months ago hasn’t really changed much apart from the expected speed increases. I still have no regrets with the hardware…touch wood.

Finally, a rant. I do wish Virgin Media would piss off and stop calling me about their inferior TV service. While I’m happy with their broadband reliability (although not always with speed which can be pathetic sometimes) I really hate when they try and sell me TV and even maintain they have a better HD service than Sky. Liars. Better package – don’t make me laugh. Well, they eventually do but only after annoying me. I’ve asked a few times now never to call again but they still do. Time to take the matter further.

when I am through with you there won’t be anything left

Did I say finally? If you recognise the quote you’ll have been watching Damages. If not, then try and catch up with it via downloads as it’s the bet thing on TV at the moment.

Three Strikes

The Times this morning is leading with a story that the UK Government is to propose banning UK net users who download illegal material. It looks like under the scheme the ISP will be responsible for identifying and banning users using a three strikes and your out principal. Caught once and you get a warning. Caught a second time and your temporarily banned. Caught a third time and your banned by that service provider. What the article doesn’t discuss is whether the ban would apply to all service providers or whether your banning would be passed among other ISP’s.

This is a pretty tough stance and at the moment I don’t know what to think of it. How will the ISP’s identify users? What about falsely accusing a user? Will there be a way of appealing a ban? Will we create a large number of users who won’t be able to use broadband in the UK due to bans? How much information is currently being tracked and how much is readily available to government now? Will media companies make content available at more reasonable prices i.e. at least the same as US is paying? Will the hardcore pirates always be one step ahead of ISP’s so making the system redundant apart from stopping the casual downloaders?

If this does become law and the system is reliable (big if’s at the moment for me) then there’s at least one positive. Broadband speeds will be a lot more reliable and the high end speeds will be dropped by a high percentage of users. Still can’t see this becoming law, or at least one that’s reliably enforceable any time soon.

Bye Bye Facebook

So for the second time I’ve disabled my Facebook account. I’ve also removed myself from LinkedIn. The real reason is that I got no benefit out of these web app’s. Maybe if I had lot’s of online contacts I wanted to keep in touch with then they would be useful, but I don’t. For those that I do want to keep in touch with e-mail, IM, the blog, Flickr and Twitter all do a decent job. I also felt uncomfortable about the amount of personal information that these sites shared amongst my ‘friends’.

The recent furore around Scoble and his removal from Facebook due to running a script raises an important question I hadn’t considered. Who is responsible for my contacts? Is it me or is it Facebook? Facebook have said they stopped a script from running on Scoble’s profile as it was scraping information and they were protecting their users from having their information taken by this script. While that sounds fine in principle why do Facebook want access to my Google, Microsoft, Yahoo contacts when I first sign up? All smacks of double standards. The real reason is to stop you easily moving to another site.

If I worry about my information and who has it online what’s to stop real friends from sharing that information with Facebook, LinkedIn, Google – anyone. I guess nothing really. My contacts on Facebook or in real life have allowed me to store their information making me responsible for it not the application or website that I store it in. Ultimately it is you that is responsible for your information and giving it out to those people or applications that you trust. If your at all worried about it the only person that can really address it is you. It’s a pretty sobering thought, especially when so much of my personal information is easily found on the internet…and that’s mostly down to me. Annoyingly for a lot of the information it’s already too late to clean up. If I could roll back time I would have been a bit smarter in protecting my real life identity online.