No gods, no kings, no billionaires
Gosh, there’s a new version of Firefox, too. The ol’ cable modem is fair creaking under the weight of downloads today.
I don’t like the toolbar buttons of the new default skin, but on the other hand version 0.9 now has a nice new Theme manager, and the long-awaited Extension manager, too. Nifty.
My crazy rant about BT’s Midband internet service yesterday wasn’t completely out of the blue. I have spent time with the product. Too much time, in fact. It took me about an hour to wade through BT’s hundreds of customer service and sales numbers to even order Midband. And then I spent three and a half fruitless hours on Saturday trying to get it to work. And failing.
I’m going to be cutting and cruel to BT in the rest of this article, but I do have to give them some credit up front: after spending 20 minutes on hold to their dedicated Midband Technical support help line, the woman I spoke to was top notch. I’ve dealt with a lot of helpdesk operators in my time, but never has first-level support been so clued-up and helpful. Maybe I got lucky, or maybe the Midband people are all like this. Whatever the case, I was very impressed. (The conclusion we eventually came to was that there was too much line noise. An engineer is being dispatched to investigate.)
Anyway, on with the disaster movie.
Continue reading “BT Midband: Just like ordinary dial-up, only without the good bits (part 2)”
If you’re unfortunate enough not to live in an area covered by cable or BT’s sporadic ADSL service, you used to be limited to dial-up. But the British government and communication regulators have been very keen to show that Britain is “showing global leadership” with regard to the adoption of broadband. So BT (provider of the UK’s telephone infrastructure) has been urged to speed up their roll-out plans, and to look into alternative technologies to serve hard-to-reach areas (like Scotland).
Hence: Midband. Midband is neither dial-up nor broadband, but a demented hybrid that combines the worst aspects of both, and then discards any vestiges of quality the sickly offspring might have retained. In fact, it’s ISDN. The meeting where the service was green-lighted must have gone something like this:
Senior Executive #1: Guys, we need to bridge the gap between dial-up and broadband. We can’t get broadband out to remote areas quickly enough, and if we don’t show some progress soon, I’ll be in danger of losing my six-figure bonus.
Senior Executive #2: It’s worse than that–some members of the board think they might miss out on a knighthood in the next honours list!
Senior Executive #1: Jesus.
Pause for deep thought and reflection upon the fickle nature of job security.
Junior Executive: Hey, why don’t we part-upgrade all the remote exchanges to something cheaper but slower than real broadband? We could call it, I don’t know, Midband?
Senior Executive #2: Mmm, nice. But we’d have to go back and re-upgrade all of the exchanges later. Future costs against current benefits. I’m not sure if the board would go for it.
Senior Executive #1: I like that Midband name, though.
Senior Executive #2: Catchy.
Continue reading “BT Midband: Just like ordinary dial-up, only without the good bits (part 1)”
I’ve been hoarding some of these for a while… time to linkdump!
Some people have them in a sidebar and call them “Further random reading“, “sidelights“, “trinkets“, “oddments“, or “obLinks“. Other people post occasional blog entries filled with links, more links, and nothing but links.
But the best and most descriptive name I’ve seen for them for them comes from Cameron Marlow who calles them “Low threshold links“:
“…My threshold for what to post was way to high to catch many of the sites I was laughing at, engaged by, and sending on to my friends. Instead of losing these links thanks to my imperfect brain, I decided like many others to create a separate weblog just for the ephemeral sites that didn’t deserve discussion.”
There’s an abundance of information around on how to set up a sidebar with low threshold links on your blog; Anders Jacobsen has a particularly simple way of doing it for Movable Type.
(My sidebar’s a bit crowded right now, so I’m just going to stick to linkdumps in the body of entries for the moment.)
After I had grasped the concept behind Mailinator, one of the first things that came to mind was, won’t companies start blacklisting mailinator.com email addresses?
Paul Tyma, mailinator’s creator, has answered the question:
“1) Its likely that registration sites will start banning mailinator addresses. The definite first on the list are the ones that already ban yahoo and hotmail addresses and such. The trick is that they already have an infrastructure for banning. If their system has none, its a pain to add and may not be worth the trouble.
2) We have a few aliases set up, but as you can imagine, those just prolong the life. Its possible that enough aliases could become such a chore to track that most registrations will still get through.”
It’s the traditional problem with blacklists. They’re a cat-and-mouse arms race where the “attacker” always has the upper hand, because it always takes the “defender” a finite time to respond. The list of domains that will redirect to mailinator is growing steadily already. If you discover that some site has blocked mailinator.com addresses, don’t worry–there are plenty of alternatives by now.
Turns out that Paul Tyma is also one of the guys behind Dash-O and Dotfuscator, the popular Java and .NET code obfuscation tools. Interesting guy. Have a look at his home page for some recent articles he’s written:
The “Is programming…?” article dovetails with two recent articles by Bob Cringely: “Body Count: Why Moving to India Won’t Really Help IT” and “May the Source Be With You:
IT Productivity Doesn’t Have to Be an Oxymoron, but Outsourcing Isn’t the Way to Achieve It“. Long-distance outsourcing worries me. It makes me think that there won’t be much of a market for programmers in the UK in ten years’ time, and that I’ll have to do yet another career change. I’ve tried teaching; maybe I’ll become a plumber instead.
His Java article is interesting because I’m start starting to learn Java. He addresses the performance issue, which is something that I’ve always disliked about the language. Server-side Java has never bothered me, but GUI apps have always felt…sluggish. Now I understand some of the reasons behind this.
He does, however, point out the SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) libraries, which are a set of platform-specific GUI widgets that drive the underlying OS at a much lover-level than Swing does, with a resultant increase in performance. The Eclipse IDE is based on SWT, and it certainly feets nice and snappy. (Unfortunately, SWT seems to be severely under-documented, which is going to make it tough to learn.)