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Author: Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

Categories
Business Cloud datacentre

What to look for when choosing a data centre

the new Timico Network Operations Centre in Newark has gone liveA data centre’s a data centre isn’t it? Power, aircon, security and diverse connections in and out of the building? Pick a location and a Tier level – 1,2,3,4 to determine the resiliency and cost. Throw in some green credentials and your uncle’s name is Bob!

Well you could put it like that. You wouldn’t be looking at the whole picture. Before building our Newark data centre we at Timico did a fair bit of market research. We looked at the needs of our customer base and what was available in terms of infrastructure technology that fitted the bill. The latter ranged from getting all the electromechanical bits right and ensuring that the cloud story was absolutely up there. When talking cloud we are talking the connectivity, storage processing and virtualisation infrastructure.

There was one piece of the story that we found compelling. This was how to make sure

Continue reading “What to look for when choosing a data centre”
Categories
chromebook Cloud End User

ChromeOS – quick play

I realise that this is of little interest to most of you but I’m having a play with ChromeOS. I have it running on a virtual machine on my Dell laptop. It’s a bit slow but that is going to be because of the VM rather than the OS itself and certainly not due to the lack of bandwidth. Also every now and again it crashes, notionally due to lack of memory.

Initial impressions are good though it’s not perfect. For example in order to try out the online music app it asks you for your credit card info even though the app is free. Apple does this which I hate. I have subsequently found that you can bypass the Apple credit card capture page by not filling any of the fields and clicking “next”. Google won’t let you get away with this which I don’t like.

I have to fill out this form in order for Google to tell me whether the music streaming is “available in my country”. A simple “googling” tells me it is only available in the good ole US of A so it is a bit of a waste of my time and certainly irritating that a global organisation such as Google would have a product that was restricted to that country.

Next I tried the image editor and was a little disappointed to see it had pretty limited editing tools – crop, autofix, contrast and brightness. I need to be able to resize for the web as well as crop. Still it was easy to find a photo to edit. I just stuck one in Google Drive and hey presto it was there online. I use IRFanview on the laptop which doesn’t seem to be available for ChromeOS.  There do seem to be lots of photo editing apps in the chrome Web Store though so that is probably ok.

I have a good feeling about ChromeOS. At £229 a Chromebook is not expensive to try out though I do have an issue with having too many gadgets at any one time. I want to play with ChromeOS, Windows8 and Windows8 running on a Nokia Lumia 920 over 4G. It isn’t manageable though to have so many gadgets, especially as you have to sign up for a 24 month 4G contract with EE to lay your hands on the Lumia. My friend Kory raves about the Samsung Chromebook though doesn’t recommend it as a primary system yet.

The general Google ecosystem really is heading in the right direction. I’m building up to a bit of a post about the Google versus Microsoft battle for the desktop with a specific slant on Unified Communications. It will have to wait for another day though. It needs more time.

So long…

Categories
Business Cloud datacentre

Nobody around here complaining about the weather

cooling plant monitoring screen in Timico's Newark data centreWe often hear people complaining when it rains – great weather – if you’re a duck. Well it’s stopped raining here in Newark although I understand the river Trent is still running high and I see from Facebook that trains are delayed due to flooding.

It’s bloomin’ cold out though. Staff arriving for work are wrapped up well, scarves around their faces, hands thrust firmly in pockets. It may come as a surprise to many of you that in this freezing cold weather the old “duck” saying has a modern day equivalent which is “great weather – if you’re a data centre”.

Uh? 🙂

Continue reading “Nobody around here complaining about the weather”
Categories
End User scams security

Great phishing season

All you anglers out there will appreciate this little phishing effort from “Lloyds Bank”. I picked it up from our spam filter – pleasing to see that it works. I do wonder what percentage of recipients of this kind of email actually fall for it.

This one isn’t a bad attempt though as is the nature of these things they have speled departament wrong & the use of grammar isn’t quite how I like it. Should have worked harder for their English GCSE. They might have got a proper job instead of having to resort to crime. The italics are mine.

The inset photo is of me with a phishing rod on the pier at Whitby, Summer 2008 (fwiw – it’s the nearest I could find that had anything to do with the subject).

Dear Customer,

This is an important Lloyds TSB Bank Security Message. We reviewed your account and we suspect that it may have been compromised. Assuring the security of your account and of Lloyds TSB Bank’s Network is our primary concern. Therefore, as a preventive measure, we have temporarily limited your account. Please take the following steps in order to restore your account access and ensure that your account has not been compromised:

1. Please Download the Login Form attached to your e-mail.

2. Login to your Lloyds TSB Bank account and fill in all required information.

3. We will review your activity to confirm that you are the account holder and we will remove any restrictions placed on your online banking account.

If you choose to ignore our request you leave us no choice but to suspend your online account indefinitely.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are strictly advised to match your information rightly to avoid service suspension.

Kind regards,
Lloyds TSB Bank Online Security Departament.

Please send us any scam/phishing emails you have received. Please do not reply to this e-mail. Mail sent to this address cannot be answered. For assistance, log in to your Lloyds TSB Online Bank account and choose the “Help” link on any page.

Copyright Lloyds TSB Bank Plc. 2012 – All rights reserved. Email ID # 705

Categories
broadband Business

#FTTC video outtakes #broadband #fibre

superfast broadband video case study camera

Broadband video case study – the outtakes

Just browsing through some bits of video left on the cutting room floor after we finished the FTTC case study. Thought a couple or three might be of interest.

The first one was taken with a GoPro camera positioned inside the cabinet filming the door opening and the Openreach engineer coming in to do some work. In this one you can see one of the cameramen filming the cab from the outside.

Bit like the David Attenborough nature stuff where at the end of the programme they show you how they did the filming. Nothing particularly dramatic such as a close encounter with a shark or a yeti. We were however filming outside a school and a very concerned headmaster did come out so see what was going on. He went away though I sensed that he would have been happier if he had shooed us away.

The second film is a short one taken from the outside with the open cabinet so that you can see the workings. No GoPro camera inside this time – obv we had to do multiple takes to get all the different angles in.

The third is one I took of the BT crowd in my conservatory. Of course you only see me in the case study but in actual fact there was a huge support team including the outside catering van, make up artists, continuity, clapperboy, director, producer, personal masseuse etc – you get the drift. I couldn’t fit them all in the conservatory so you get four.

Some of them will be at my Xmas bash so if you are coming to that you will be able to chat with them in person. Not often you get the chance to meet the people behind the movie eh?

Some of you have asked for a video showing the process of the installation. I didn’t get any of that off the production team but I will ask. Bear with…

Categories
End User events

Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll and a quiet cup of tea backstage? – Rolling Stones at the O2

Inside the O2 for the Rolling Stones Concert 25/11/12I’d like you to hold out an arm at full stretch rolling stones in concert at the O2with your little finger sticking out. Left or right arm – it doesn’t matter which. In the mid 80s I went to see Bruce Springsteen at Roundhay Park in Leeds. There was an enormous queue of cars coming off the M1 to get there and we eventually had to abandon ours in a side street and walk the rest of the way. When we got to the park it was packed and we were so far from the stage that Bruce was half the height of the fingernail that you see before you, assuming you followed instructions 🙂

Last night at the Rolling Stones concert at the O2 was a different story. Thanks to the O2 angel - very helpful & had our tickets and wristbands ready to collect.generosity of O2 we had great tickets – maybe two cricket pitch lengths from the front of the catwalk. Mick Jagger was two or three times the size of that fingernail.

You’ll all have read or heard the reviews already so there’s no need for me to go in to detail. I will say that Mick’s voice was incredible showing no signs of age.  Although most of the band looked pretty shrivelled the quality of the entertainment was top notch and we got to see Bill Wyman, Mick Turner and Jeff Beck join them at various stages of therolling stones gorilla - you know it makes sense evening.

The O2 as a venue has to be the best place I’ve been to see a concert. The sound quality is great and it is really easy to pop to the bar to bring drinks back to your seats. We had access to the O2 lounge which meant we could check our coats in and grab a couple of cocktails before the band came on stage. The lounge also has a lift that takes you up to just behind where your seats are. Life is made easy.

The only disappointment of the night was that they didn’t play “Satisfaction”. Apparentlycrowded tube - that's Dan Cunliffe of O2 wholesale in shot they were running late and hit the hard stop time of 23.00hrs. They were on stage for nigh on 2hours and 30 mins which is good going at the age of seventy.

After the gig we hit the O2 lounge again and just managed to catch the last westbound tube at 23.45. Would have been a bit of a problem had we missed that. There is no way we could have caught a cab with that many people there.

The short tube ride into town was a story in itself. We were crammed in like vacuum packed sardines – not the ordinary tinned variety swimming in tomato sauce. I wanted to take a photo but my phone had run out of juice so a friendly Dutchman named Robert Jan Pabon did the honours and then emailed it to me. The power of communication. Robert was there with his wife Katja. Lovely couple. We got very close, on the tube – there was no choice :). Thanks for the pic Robert. Have a safe trip back to Holland.

The guy in the photo is Dan Cunliffe from O2. Top bloke. You have to hand it to O2. They know how to do business.

It strikes me as I write that the world has changed massively since the Stones started their careers. At the time there would have been no Personal Computers – we are talking almost back to the days of Colossus at Bletchley Park. No mobile phones, no internet. Even the TV probably had only two or three channels (all you need) and was in black and white. All they really had was sex and drugs and rock and roll. Ahh the good old days…

Bellowhead at the Engine Shed in LincolnI’ll leave you with the observation that it’s been a weekend of gigs – the Rolling Stones last night preceded by Bellowhead at the Engine Shed in Lincoln on Friday. Bellowhead were fantastic and I urge you to go and see them. I bought their LP – my first vinyl purchase for perhaps 25 years. Apparently it’s coming back into fashion. Get with it you lot.

Thanks again to O2 for a terrific Sunday evening out. Quality.

PS check out the crowd video here.

PPS you can put your arm down now!

Categories
Business virtualisation

The complex weave of the modern IT world

Cisco certificationsCisco, as you may know, has introduced a new set of professional technical certifications based around the data centre. This is a natural move. Cisco already has Voice, Security, Routing and Switching and Design certification streams and the Data Centre is a big part of its future.

At Timico we use a Cisco data centre fabric with UCS blades running on top of EMC storage. On that infrastructure we run VMware. We also run Microsoft applications, use Cisco at the Edge of the network and Juniper in the core. Most of our ISP server estate is Linux based.

That’s an exciting technology mix. It’s also a lot of areas of specialisation and not only are our engineers often doing training courses but we are always on the lookout for specific talent, especially in the virtualisation world.

Where is this conversation leading. I guess I’m concluding that it will be increasingly the case that our customers will not have the right mix of skills in these technology areas to be able to effectively develop solutions for their own business. The role of an IT department, apart from servicing their own stakeholders, will be more and more strategic focusing on the selection management of their supplier partners.

Categories
Business olympics spam

Unsubscribe UKTI

I’ve just unsubscribed from the UK Trade and Industry mailing list. I think I must have got on it from being at the Global Business Summit at Lancaster House during the Olympics. They need to improve their data base. I’ve just been spammed with an invitation to “Business Hindi for Beginners”.

Previously it was “Meet the Sports and Infrastructure Expert: Russia, Brazil and Israel” and before that it was “Business Japanese for Beginners”. Then it was “Financial, Professional and Business Services Roadshows for the ASEAN region (Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia)”.

Maybe I’m being ungrateful because I did have a good day at Lancaster House. I guess it underlines the importance of accurate mailing list demographic data. Never mind. They’re gone now.

Categories
End User security spam

Automated spam calls to mobile – what to do

unwanted automated phone callsThe scam business continues. Just got what I think was another PPI mis-selling call via automated call to my mobile. The originating number was 07588034908. I was expecting a call and was just trying to figure out if this was it at the same time as answering the phone so I missed the first half sentence. I just caught the words “to claim your compensation press 5” so I hit the cancel button.

This is the first time I have had an automated phone call. I stayed with some friends in the USA once and they never used to take a call at home until the person had started to leave a voice mail so they knew who it was. They got so many automated calls it had become a real nuisance.

It started to get like that here to the point that the ICO has begun to address the problem. It may be that the ICO makes headway but I’d like to bet not. The law is complex with many areas where it is not easy to prove guilt. It is also difficult to know whether you have given permission for your number to be called by accidentally not unchecking a box at some stage of an online registration process. The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) certainly doesn’t seem to be effective.

There is more info on this subject on the ICO website here. It covers unwanted marketing calls, texts and faxes and tells you what is and isn’t allowed and what you should do if you get these unwanted communications.

I just registered the above phone number as the source though often these are pre-pay sims where the operator doesn’t know who the owner is. I rang it back but it is obviously just a machine making outbound calls. If we all register incidents as they happen we may at least make some progress.

The PPI mis-selling compensation industry may not be outside the law but the methods used to drum up leads must surely be pretty borderline.

Categories
Cloud competitions End User

Mugs mugs glorious mugs and colo – fantastic offer

You find me in a playful mood. This is despite the fact that my rear driver side tyre picked up a nail this morning and I had to divert via Tanvic Tyres in Newark to get the puncture fixed. Tanvic are a customer of ours and did a great job.

They made my wait easy. There was a convenient coffee machine in reception, a PC offering me free access to the internet and the whole job was done for the really good value of £17. Use them.

The only downside was that I had to sit through the Jeremy Kyle Show. You have to like that kind of thing to want to watch it & I felt sorry for the bloke manning the desk, exposed to it day in day out. He didn’t seem to mind. A happy place to work 🙂

Anyway I digress. It feels a little like the Two Ronnies show where Ronnie Corbett told a joke from his chair and continuously got sidetracked. Look it up on YouTube if you are below a certain age. They were funny stories. Classic show.  They don’t make them like they used to.

The other great show (while we are digressing) was Morecambe and Wise. They were unmissable.  My kids still like to watch them today. A couple of years ago a new friend came to our house for the first time. His name is Ervin Nagy. He is a famous Hungarian Concert pianist believe it or not and he now lives in Lincoln. We showed him the Andre Preview sketch where Eric tries to play Grieg’s Piano Concerto by Grieg. Ervin was in stitches. Their comedy transcended language and culture.

fantastic Timico mug colo giveawaySo how does any of this have anything to do with mugs and colo. It doesn’t really. It’s just the preamble to my latest and greatest mug giveaway offer. No competition this time. Just straight talking business.

I am offering a free Timico mug (the photo inset shows the mug with a branded Timico pen which I am also willing to throw in – just ask) to anyone buying colo from us between now and the end of 2012. It doesn’t matter how much colo you buy but it has to be new business. As an added extra I will chuck in a free blog post on a subject of your choice for the first five orders.

The colo will be in our spanking new data centre in Newark. If you want to come and see it let me know and I’ll organise a visit. Maybe you need some DR space or have run out of room in your existing rack or are exploring colocation for the first time. 24×7 manned Network Operation Centre? Look no further. We are the colo kids.

That landing page link includes a phone number to call or a button to press for a chat. Let me know when you have placed an order. I’ll send you the mug and pen and we can chat about the subject of the blog post. It can be on any subject, within reason and decency though you will have to trust me with the final copy. There’s also a mug for anyone referring a customer to us. Again, let me know you have done it.

Just a bit of fun. You know it makes sense 🙂

Categories
Cloud End User mobile apps

Delighted shepherds and Clerkenwell Screws!

The great thing about mobile phone cameras is that they give you the opportunity to take spur of the moment photos when you see something nice or fun or interesting. Often I am not quick enough “on the draw”. Yesterday I saw a shop called Clerkenwell Screws Ltd. What a great name I thought. I envisaged a tweet saying “need a screw in Clerkenwell?” with the photo attached. I was on a bus en route to a customer meeting but couldn’t get through my phone security quickly enough (ie tap in my pin number) before we had moved on.

Probably a good job I didn’t get the camera out in time really.

So this afternoon my office filled with a marvelous light and I stood up to look at the sky. What a wonderful sky. I got the camera out and captured the moment – the sun didn’t move as quickly as the bus (though there wasn’t much in it!) The camera technology doesn’t really do the sight justice but I leave you to decide for yourself. The photo is entitled “Clouds over Newark at dusk in November” by Trefor Davies.

Wonderful sky at dusk over Newark

Btw you can check out Clerkenwell Screws here. I don’t think they have a website.

Red sky at night shepherd’s delight. That’s all folks…

Categories
Business voip

Plug for ITSPA Christmas Dinner (hope it isn’t turkey)

The ITSPA Xmas dinner - you know it makes senseI’m going to the ITSPA Christmas Dinner on 5th December (2012). Are you? This year it is at Roux at Parliament Square c/o Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Parliament Square in London.

It’s a great opportunity to network with people in the VoIP/Internet Telephony space and we have Peter Dawe, founder of Pipex1 coming along to do a bit of a talk – amusing anecdotes, incisive views etc.

My one concern with Christmas dinners is that I find turkey to be such a boring meat that it should be reserved for Christmas Day itself, assuming we have to have turkey, and not produced on any other occasion just because Christmas is “just around the corner”. I don’t mind Christmas pud though. I quite like Christmas pud with a bit of brandy butter.

That is all. If you want to come along email [email protected] or call 020 3397 3312.

1 many of you won’t be old enough to remember Pipex 🙂

Categories
End User piracy surveillance & privacy

Golden Eye – not just another James Bond villain

You will no doubt remember the case of evil villain ACS Law where consumers were bullied into stumping up cash with the threat of being taken to court for online copyright infringement. Victims often had no idea of the legality of what ACS Law was doing or where the burden of proof lay and often found it easier to just pay up rather than fight their case in court.

The spectre of ACS Law has been released from its high security bottle, has morphed into a new disguise and is once more on the prowl for hapless victims. The name of this new ghoul is Golden Eye. Just hearing that name should make you shudder.

Golden Eye are trying, through the courts, to compel Telefonica UK  to release personal information about O2 customers so that they can spam them with speculative claims about copyright infringement and perhaps grab a  quick settlement fee. Golden Eye are not the copyright owners, but rather hold an ‘enforcement-only’ license with no specific mandate from the 12 other porn studios who they act for.

The Open Rights Group is trying to intervene on behalf of O2 customers. This isn’t about stopping copyright owners pursuing their legal rights although in my mind it is not easy to provide a high enough standard of evidence to prove guilt here. It’s about privacy. The case is currently at the appeal stage because the judge initially did not sanction the handing over of some of the data saying:

“that would be tantamount to the court sanctioning the sale of the intended Defendants’ privacy and data protection rights to the highest bidder. Accordingly, in my judgment, to make such an order would not proportionately and fairly balance the interests of the Other Claimants with the Intended Defendents’ interests.”

Golden Eye apparently takes around 75% of the revenues collected.

There is more detail on the ORG website. I guess the real point of this post is to encourage you you help ORG with their legal costs in pursuing this case by making a donation. In particular if you are an ISP it is in your interest to stop this kind of company coming along and worrying your customers on a speculative basis.

I have made a donation on behalf of Timico and encourage you to follow suit. There is a “donate”  button on the ORG site and I repeat the link here.

Categories
Engineer Net olympics peering

A funny thing happened on my way to #LINX79

Today is the quarterly LINX meeting. LINX79. It’s been going for a few years now – you can work out how long yourselves.

These are great meetings. You can learn more in two days here than in the rest of the quarter in between. LINX continues to grow. It in part reflects the growth of the internet but also the fact that LINX some time ago hit a critical mass and is a great place to peer if you provide connectivity to the internet.

LINX has 443 members. Last year the membership grew by 49. So far in 2012 they have had 86 new applications – that’s double the run rate of 2011! Since LINX78 only 3 months ago the peak traffic has grown from 1.431Tbps to 1.538Tbps and connected capacity has grown from 5.958Tb to 6.14Tb. What that is saying that the traffic is continuing to grow over and above the huge peaks we were seeing during the Olympics which themselves drove a significant rise.

For the sake of comparison if your broadband connection gives you 10Mbps (as I recall the UK average is now around 12Mbps) then the 6.14Tb capacity at LINX is about six hundred thousand times faster.

Colin McFarlane speaks his lines to Trefor Davies on the train to LondonNow to the “funny” bit. I bumped into a neighbour of mine on the platform at Newark Northgate station. Colin McFarlane is an actOr1.  He lives round the corner from me. Colin is working on a very interesting project that should hit the streets next year. It has a technical slant that I will talk about sometime in 2013.

You might know Colin as the Police Commissioner in one of the Batman movies or working with Rowan Atkinson in The Thin Blue Line. I’m sure he’s been in other things but not being much of a TV watcher I don’t know them.

Colin was on his way to Paris to record a cartoon voiceover and on his way was stopping off in London to audition for a stage show. He had a wodge of scripts in his hand and asked if I would help him to remember his lines.

Bear in mind we were in the quiet coach. So there I was reading a classic black American script in an American accent whilst Colin performed in the seat in front of me. I could almost hear the audience, breathless in anticipation of what was to come. Being in the quiet coach we could hear a pin drop. Very dramatic!

We finished the script, the rest of the coach applauded (very quietly) 2, the train pulled into Kings Cross and we went our separate ways – he to his audition and me to the TUC centre for LINX79. Colin did tell me the name of the play but I won’t share it in case he decides not to take the part. He is bound to be offered it, natch.

1 I left the capital O there to make sure you got the pronunciation right 🙂

2 Only joking there, they didn’t – I’m sure it was my fault not Colin’s, or maybe we were being suitably quiet

 

Categories
charitable End User

Children in need cookie sale

cookiesIt’s that time of year again – Children in need time. I guess there are always children in need but at least we get our minds focused every now and again and empty our pockets out for the cause.

This time we have cookies. Fabulous cookies baked by the wonderful people that are Kirsty Watt and Leslie Young. The good folk that are the Timico staff responded appropriately.

I offer here before and after scenarios.

The before is what the cookies looked like before they were eaten. The after is what they turned into – a jar of cash.

So this is the deal. Whoever can guess the amount of cash in the pot gets a prize. To give you a clue I asked for a minimum donation of a pound for each cookie.

As usual its a fantastic Timico mug on offer for the nearest right guess. If you get it exactly right I’ll throw in a quality Timico pen guess how much cash in the pot complete with the Timico Connect Host Manage branding.

Hey, you can’t ask for more than that.

No staff entries allowed for this one as some of them already have a good idea how much we raised.

I’ll give you until close of play Monday to enter.

That’s all…

 

Categories
competitions End User

Hitler he only had one ball…

Hitler he only had one ball, the other was in the Albert HallIt’s been a surreal week (starting last Saturday). Monday I chaired a couple of sessions at the annual ISPA conference. Monday night I went to the Albert Hall for the first time.

Sound dampening balls at the Albert HallI am very proud of all my kids. On this occasion it was the turn of number three. I know he reads this blog and I don’t mind if I embarrass him a little by telling him that on Monday night I was massively proud of him.

I was at the Albert Hall for the Schools Prom in which he was performing in local Lincoln youth jazz big band Jazz Vehicle. They are run by an inspirational guy called John Crouch (Mr Crouch) who weaves magic with his musical baton (wand) and has turned them into a national award winning ensemble.

You really need to hear this band to appreciate the quality of their playing. They are fantastic. I sat in the Albert Hall welling up with pride. For my boy it was a life enhancing experience. I am thrilled for him. He is a good boy and deserves his success.Ticket for Schools Prom at the Albert Hall

Tuesday morning I had a meeting cancelled but tagged along with my pal Sue Black @Dr_Black to the Grauniad offices because she was recording the Tech Weekly Podcast with Aleks Krotoski. Sue has been instrumental in saving Bletchley Park and importantly the Turing Papers for the nation. Google it.

At the Guardian we bumped in to tech editor @CharlesArthur who mentioned that one 0f  the subjects they were covering was 4G and I was invited to stay and participate.

That night I went to dinner with Dario Talmesio, Principal Analyst at Informa covering the European mobile operator market. Very interesting and knowledgeable guy. We ended up at the Phoenix Artist Club where I’m holding my Xmas bash. It was open mic night and the place had been taken over by a crowd of gay dentists! You couldn’t make it up!!

Wednesday morning I was at the RAC Club with Dave Hamer to hear former British Ambassador to Washington Sir Michael Sheinwald discuss the US Presidential Elections. The RAC Club is a class act. 30m swimming pool, classy Turkish baths and only £800 a year membership. The problem is the four and a half grand joining fee. Ah well.

Lunch followed with some great company. It finished at 5pm!

Today I’ve been back in the smoke for an ISPA Council meeting. I’m looking forward to a quiet weekend…

Tomorrow is Children In Need Day.  Look out for my cookie competition post 🙂

PS if you don’t understand the Hitler reference I’m not going to explain. Sorry!

 

Categories
Business fun stuff

I met the girl from Ipanema

You know what it’s like. You are in the lift heading down to check out from your hotel and a gorgeous blonde gets in on the third floor. You don’t want to stare too much at her so you focus on looking somewhere else. Nothing is said. She gets out at the ground floor, you get out at the ground floor. You go your separate ways and the “incident” disappears into memory. Mine not hers.

On this occasion I went to the checkout desk and she greeted someone who was meeting her for breakfast. Blow me down if it wasn’t my old mate Phil Smith. I called to him. They came over. He said he was now working for a new company called Ipanema and the girl was one of his colleagues over on a business trip from the Americas.

I was thrilled. I had just met “the girl from Ipanema”.  Now I can’t stop humming the tune…

That is all!

da da daa de da dada de daa

Categories
End User fun stuff

Alex Murphy is dead – long live Alex Murphy

The view from the Royal Box at Twickenham

Alex Murphy - dead man walking

A year ago last Saturday Alex Murphy died. Tref in the Royal Box at TwickenhamThis was no staged death of the line fluffed comedian, booed off by an unforgiving crowd or the fate of the failed gladiatorial actor staring up at the inverted thumbs of angry Roman citizenry in a modern Coliseum.

Alex was playing rugby for the Commons and Lords at Twickenham. He died that day. Kaput. His heart stopped, it beat no more, the blood of his life had run its course. This was the ultimate act of finality.

Had Alex been playing anywhere else thatengland and fiji teams line up would normally have been it, his memory consigned to legend, an anecdote on the rugby tour of life. Fortunately this was Twickenham, HQ, and home not only of English rugby but of the equipment that could restart Alex’s heart.  Restart his life. The fact that there were two doctors at the pitch-side watching the match was an added bonus.

So on Saturday we celebrated Alex’s first birthday, the second time around. Alex is a council member at the RFU and very generously invited some of his mates down from Lincoln to watch the England v Fiji Autumn international. We got the works, greatCraig Miller gives England team coach Stuart Lancaster a few tips seats, access to the very exclusive members bar and the post-match players dinner.

Because I know that some of you will want to see what it’s like at Twickenham I have selected a few photos plus a video that I had forgotten I took.

The video has 5 people in it. There is a prize if you can guess all of their names. I‘ll help out by telling you that three of them are Paul Clarke, Craig Miller and Huw Edwards.

There is also a vid of the song sung by the Fiji rugby team to entertain us after the dinner. The quality ain’t great but it is worth putting up because of its historic nature.

Dead men naked they shall be one with the man in the wind and the west moon. Alex Murphy is dead. Long live Alex Murphy.

Categories
Engineer mobile connectivity

Train WiFi – the unexpurgated truth (as far as I can see it)

test data for WiFi versus O2 cellular on Eastcoast trains - click for full size imageThe only sensible way to travel to central London is by train. Whilst it isn’t cheap it is fast and has the benefit of allowing you to usefully use the time doing work and of course tweeting and writing blog posts.

I was tweeting away during one such trip and one of my pals, @HmmmUK, suggested I write a post on the connectivity on board the train. This is that post (said in a dramatic booming sort of voice).

Finding out all about the service was easy. Icomera, the company that provides it, proudly boasts about it on their website. I had thought it was satellite based but surprisingly it is based on a combination of satellite and 3G.

The connectivity is based on the good old “Moovbox M800” which you may not have known “provides a central network connection moovbox m800 - it's a cool name - thanks to Icomera for the picfor all the real-time communication needs of urban and suburban rail systems…

…combining up to eight cellular WAN radios with an aggregated downlink speed up to 28Mbps (in our dreams). The Moovbox will automatically change between network types including HSPA, 3G UMTS, EDGE and GPRS to deliver the best connection possible depending on network availability. The M800 can also be configured with a DVB-S satellite module for connectivity in areas where terrestrial networks and unavailable. Each cellular radio supports two SIMs allowing it to switch between different cellular providers and thus the best available network. Where a track-side or depot Wi-Fi network is present the Moovbox will use this as a preferred backhaul alternative at speeds up to 54Mbps.”

Icomera is a Swedish company which explains why I’ve occasionally had Swedish language adverts pushed to me when using the service. The ground station is in Sweden with a Swedish IP address.

To make this post a little more interesting I decided to test the on board WiFi against the O2 sim in my phone. I did this on a 2 hour 20 minute journey between Lincoln and London Kings Cross (the train was late – it shouldn’t take more than 2 hours 5 mins 🙂 ). After Newark I did continuous testing using speedtest.net on both laptop WiFi and phone sim.

Although I tried to start each test at the same time in reality one normally took longer than the other so the finishing times do not coincide. I managed 88 cellular tests but only 55 using the WiFi which suggests that the WiFi tests took longer to perform.

This is borne out from the average results which were better for O2 than for the WiFi.

Average Download Speed bps Average Upload Speed bps Average Latencys ms
O2 mobile data 2002 872 203
On train WiFi 985 618 231

The recording process was not perfect. We have to remember that I was hurtling through the English autumnal countryside at 125mph for much of the time (must have been less than that seeing the train was late) and there were times when the speed test stalled due to no connectivity and continued when it picked up a signal once again.

It felt like it did this more often for the O2 sim which you could understand losing connectivity in parts of the countryside whereas the satellite should have had a continuous connection. That said the fact that I was able to perform more speed tests with the former is telling. Of course it may have been down to more people on the train using the WiFi than their cellular connection but I can only report my own experiences. The numbers speak for themselves.

Cellular WiFi
Fastest Download (bps) 6176 3930
Fastest Upload (bps) 3233 1580

Although I do use the on train WiFi I have on occasion resorted to the cellular connection in my laptop (O2 in phone, Vodafone in laptop) and whilst this test used O2 not Voda I suspect what it is telling me is that it makes more sense not to bother with the onboard WiFi and just stick to the mobile networks.

It also makes me wonder what sort of cellular connectivity they have on the Moovbox M800. I guess must have a lot of people hooked to it on that train!?  They must use some sims because the latency seems low for a satellite only connection. In fact thinking about it I wonder if they used a satellite at all on my trip?

Icomera looks like it has established a nice little niche in transport based connectivity but I suspect that passenger expectations in the UK have overtaken what Eastcoast is providing.

That’s all for now – click on the header image for a full size graphical representation of the test results. You will see that there are many more “good” results for the cellular connection than the WiFi. Also it’s no surprise that the best cellular readings come when the train is in or near a station.

Categories
Engineer voip

What’s in a bowl of fruit – IPCortex RaspberryPi

bowl of fruit - click to see IPCortex RaspberryPiIt never ceases to amaze me what we can do with technology. The most generous Rob Pickering of IPCortex sent me a RaspberryPi microcomputer loaded with a cut down version of his PBX.

It was the work of minutes to set up a couple of Lincoln area code (01522) SIP trunks and then define some client devices with which to make phone calls. I then downloaded the 3CX SIP client for Android, free from the Google Play Store, stuck in some simple credentials (user name tref etc) and I was away.

The IPCortex bearing RaspberryPi is ipcortex on raspberrypi screenshot currently plugged in to an Ethernet port in our kitchen. Click on the photo to zoom in. I don’t think my wife has noticed yet but no doubt she will. At that point I will move it to the switch in the attic and leave it there for a general play.

The IPCortex lets me configure any SIPipcortex on raspberrypi - click to enlarge client for the RaspberryPi. In this case a softphone was used and we needed to generate some dummy mac addresses – shown in the photo as 0000001 etc. Ordinarily you would input the MAC address of your deskphone.

In one of the images you can see that there are three users set up – Tref, Joe and John. You might need to click on each image to enlarge for a better view.  I took these screenshots lying in bed this morning. It’s just great what you can do from your phone. You can see the internal IP address of the IPCortex/server plus a glimpse at some of the features.

The 3CX is great for a play but I haven’t3CX SIP softclient running on Samsung Galxy S3 and hanging off the IPCortex on RaspberryPi figured out its ideal set up yet. It currently assumes it is the main phone you want to use when dialing out but I have a number of clients I play with on my handset and I don’t want it to be the main one. I have to switch the 3CX off for normal operation of other phones. It might just be a question of me needing to play with the Galaxy S3 more.

The call quality was great. I made WiFi to PSTN, PSTN to WiFi and WiFi to 3G.

I can see possibilities for home workers and consumers with this technology. You could envisage giving the kids an extension hanging off a local number – press 1 to talk to John etc or they could have their own DDI.

The time is not far off where people manage their own call routing – for example forwarding to their own mobile when not at home. If their package includes free calls to mobiles, or just to family mobiles then this would be a no brainer. This functionality could easily be embedded in a set top box along with a media server, which coincidentally (not) is what me next RaspberryPi project is going to be.

That’s all for now. I’ll report back as I get more to say on this subject.

Ciao…

PS no comments about the untidy cable. I couldn’t find a shorter one and my wife will have enough to say anyway when I get home.

PPS Thanks to Rik Wheeler for helping with the setup and being at the other end for the 3G demo calls.

Categories
competitions End User

Jordan Watson man of action

Jordan Watson - click to see full frontal photoTimico is a great place to work and although we work hard here we also like to have a bit of fun. Last night Jordan Watson was out with the boys and the conversation somehow came to dress down Fridays.

Through his beer tinted specs Jordan accepted a bet that he wouldn’t turn up to work this Friday in a romper suit, or his “onzer” as he calls it. Jordan, who works on the Timico tech support desk boldly took up the challenge and appeared this morning in a very nice (and very cozy by the looks of it) blue and white onzer.

Note the one piece fashion item, purchased for a tenner from Primark (a value for money high street department store I’m told) comes complete with penguin faces on his feet. A fun thing to wear for both work and play.

Jordan Watson, man of action.

I’ll finish off this Friday, fin de semaine, post with a couple of parting comments. One is that I recently upgraded my SG3 to Jelly Bean with no problems but without yet seeing what it can do for me. This morning I found out that I can take photos by just saying “smile” or “cheese” or “capture” or “shoot”. V cool. The header photo, which you can click to see the whole of Jordan, resplendent in his attire was taken by saying cheese. Note I found it has to be exactly “cheese”. “Say cheese” didn’t work. Impressive.

Secondly, because we haven’t had a competition for a while I’m offering a magnificent Timico mug as a prize for the best caption for the photo of Jordan. Timico staff may enter.

Categories
broadband Business

Superfast broadband video case study by Timico and Openreach

superfast broadband video case study camera

Superfast broadband video case study

“Never before seen footage of the inside of the Davies household now viewable on tinterweb.”

This is it, the video you’ve all been waiting for. Well I have anyway. A few weeks ago we shot some footage around and about Lincoln and chez Davies for a video case study of a Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) aka superfast fibre broadband installation.

Get your popcorn and fizzy drinks ready and settle in to your favourite armchair to watch this much anticipated movie. I don’t have an agent yet but if any major studios are interested in talking then you know how to get hold of me.

That’s all folks 🙂

Link to what BT has on their website http://www.btplc.com/ngb/News/Timico.htm

Categories
End User phones

Most popular blog posts

Samsung Galaxy S3 seen next to a Samsung Galaxy S2The most popular blog posts at the moment are those talking about problems with the Samsung Galaxy S3. In the last month I’ve had just under 7,000 page views of the “Galaxy S3 not charging” posts here and here (in order of popularity) and over 4,600 views of the “problem with headset socket on Galaxy S3” post. That last post has had over 14,000 views since it was written (as an aside it’s surpassed only by the “how to bypass Pirate Bay filters” post which has had over 18,000 views).

That’s a lot of problem phones out there.

Categories
Engineer internet

miscellany submarine cables and submarines – dive dive dive

submarine cable map courtesy of http://www.submarinecablemap.com/Visiting my old alma mater today, Bangor University. It’s nice to get invited. We are opening a new Laboratory and then the Annual Engineering Lecture. This year it is entitled “Submarine Engineering across the years”  and is to be given by Rear Admiral (retd) Paul Thomas CB, FREng, FCGI, FIMechE, Hon FNucI, Hon FSaRS. That’s more badges than most of us could possibly dream of!

The subject is quite convenient because some time ago I bookmarked a website http://www.submarinecablemap.com/ thinking it was cool and would come in handy some day. Well now it has and whilst absolutely  nothing to do with today’s lecture it is fascinating to see where all the undersea cables are. The whole internet is underpinned by relatively few connections really.

If you click on an individual cable line it tells you who owns the cable, how long it is, when it was laid and where it lands. This is big business. Some of these cables are very long. SeaMeWe3 for example is 39,000km, stretches from Germany all the way to Australia and South Korea and is owned by a cooperative of 16 organisations.

Keeping it topical, some governments, ours included want to monitor the traffic running though these cables. When you look at the map it makes you realise how absurd this is.

I have visions of Rear Admiral (retd) Paul Thomas in his sub pootling along following the cables to find his way home – a bit like the pilots in their Sopwith Camels during WW1 following the roads and railway lines. Fiendishly clever. Splice the mainbrace, Klingons on the starboard bow, land ho, take her down number one, dive dive dive, etc etc etc.

I’ll let you know how the lecture goes 🙂

Categories
Cloud Engineer virtualisation

Think global act local – vmware survey

vmware surveyI’m not an angry person but some things can certainly irritate the heck out of me. Today it is survey forms. It’s not concept of filling in a survey – I don’t mind doing that sometimes, especially if I have a particularly good or bad experience.

I should explain:

I just downloaded VMware  player for my laptop. I got the usual message “this may take several minutes” and for once it did take several minutes – usually the installation is quite quick regardless of the message. Coincidentally a survey from VMware popped up on the screen as I was wondering whether o believe the message and go off and do something else in the meantime.

I started to fill in the survey, it was a simple one, and fortunately for VMware the installation  finished just as I came to the bit about rating the experience. I didn’t really have anything bad to say. They warned me it might take some time and it did.

What annoyed me though was the fact that when it came to selecting my country of residence the name at the top of the list was the good ole United States of Americay. Now hear this VMware. It doesn’t do anything for me having the USA as the first name on the list. It just it just makes me irritated to think that you, an American company think it is more important for your countrymen to have life made easier for them but not anyone else.

Either they need to have every country in alphabetical order or, more cleverly, their survey system could recognize the country in which the survey was being completed and push that one to the top. It isn’t difficult.

If you want to be a global company you need to change your culture accordingly. Simples.

Categories
broadband End User mobile connectivity

When did you last phone “home”?

landline use Timico VoIP phone app for iPhone available from Apple App Store

Landline use in decline

Landline use seems to be in decline. When I got into the office this morning I called home. I’d lost a tie and thought I might have dropped it on our drive.

When I want to call someone my usual way is to go to the logs on my phone and click on the relevant number/name. As often as not the person I want to talk to is high up on the list of recent calls – wife, kids, stockbroker, shrink (etc).

I called my wife’s mobile. She didn’t answer. So I called “Home”. I had to scroll a very long way down the list of logs to find Home. In fact I last called Home at 20.08 on the 1st November. 70 calls or text messages down the list. Anne answered the Home phone and you will be happy to know that she found the tie, a very smart blue bow tie, and has it safe in the house.My point is that we are using our landline less and less. Typically for calls to grandparents. I’ve even taken to answering the home phone by saying “Newport Arch Chinese Restaurant” as quite often its a scammer on the other end of the line.

Everyone in our house has a mobile phone. All the adults are on all you can eat plans and it makes no different whether we use the fixed or mobile phone. Nobody rings me on the Home phone. The kids rarely use their phone for voice calls. They either text their friends or they use it to access the internet for Facebook Messaging. The youngest often goes online on the XBox if he needs to chat to a friend!

I’d like to bet that for a large proportion of the population the landline number is hardly used at all and is effectively only there because you need a landline to get Broadband.

There have occasionally been calls for BT (Openreach) to provide data only lines, known as “naked DSL” without the costs and overhead of the voice service. BT has always pushed back on this, saying there is no demand and that the costs would not be greatly reduced.

It would be interesting to see how many households don’t use their landline at all. My bet is that millions of us would put our hands up and voluntarily relinquish possession of our old fashioned phone. It might be worth having the debate…

Categories
End User engineering

Introducing the Nook Simple Touch Glow Light – billstickers will be prosecuted

This post isn’t really about the Nook Simple Touch Glow Light, worthy subject though it may be. This is a very simple post about a man putting up a poster on Platform 4 of Lincoln Central railway station. That is it!

Sometimes you have to keep things simple:)

The video is 3’44” long. It’s longer than I’d normally post, knowing the attention span of the modern internet user. On that basis it is almost a book in blog post terms, or a full length feature film in YouTube parlance.

I have taken this ambitious step because this video is a work of art. It takes a second or two for the Galaxy S3 to properly focus so you need to bear with me there. It’s a bit shaky too, partly because it was windy (that’s my excuse anyway) and I didn’t wait until the job in hand was totally finished because my arm was getting tired and it was taking too long.  About two thirds of the way through I zoom in so you do eventually get a closer look.

Just like the ride on the Number 205 bus you could call this video an historic representation of a moment in time, on this occasion in Lincoln. It is also a study in poster technology and the craftsmanship by which the said advertising medium is skilfully erected. I say erected for this is no mere “slap on a bit of glue and shove it up” job.

There is very little dialogue in this video and whilst the main actor has his back to us most of the time1we do get a glimpse of his character when he smiles briefly at the camera just after the three minute mark.

Let me delay no further. I present to you “how to put up a poster” Act one, Scene one:

Stick no bills, billstickers will be prosecuted etc etc etc.

Oh and finally if anyone wants to send me a Nook ereader I will happily do a review. Up the revolution!

1 the cognoscenti will understand that this is unavoidable in the poster erecting trade

Categories
End User food and drink fun stuff

amusing anecdote – the Ivy restaurant beckoned briefly

The Ivy Restaurant - you know it makes sense :)Received an email out of the blue yesterday. It was one of those legitimate spam emails selling something but from a “respectable” company.

For some reason I read it and found it was an offer to go to lunch at the Ivy restaurant in London.  What’s more it was for a lunchtime meeting on BYOD which is a subject I am interested in and it had a good speaker.

I took a look and it was from someone who was notionally a competitor though I’d never heard of them. I accepted the invitation – within a fairly short time of it arriving.  They must have known I was a competitor – they had my contact details – they sent me the email. I was quite looking forward to lunch at the Ivy.

This afternoon I got an email from the company telling me:

“Hi Trefor, Thanks but unfortunately the event is full now. Kind Regards, xxxxxx”

I found it amazing that the gig sold out that quickly1 – within an hour or two of the announcement. I mentioned this and wished them good luck with the event.

There isn’t really a moral to this tale other than to get your mailing list right. I might never know what it is like to have lunch at the Ivy, unless someone wants to invite me…

1 it took the trefor.net xmas bash 6 days to sell out though admittedly this is for over 200 people.

Categories
End User scams

Obnoxious PPI pests move into sms

I’ve had a few calls from pests lying to me that could recover mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance (PPI). I know they are lying because I have never taken this sort of insurance out.

Today I received a text message from 07879989478 saying:

“Records passed to us show you’re entitled to a refund approximately £2130 in compensation from mis-selling of PPI on your credit card or loan. Reply INFO or stop”

I wouldn’t dare risk replying and am going to see if I can find out who owns the number. It is almost certainly an anonymous PAYG job but I quite like the idea of an expose.

Lets see how I get on.

tata

Categories
Business Regs surveillance & privacy

Draft Comms Data Bill Select Committee appearance for oral evidence #ccdp

portcullisYesterday I gave oral evidence to the Draft Communications Data Bill Joint Select Committee1. It’s the first time I have been asked to give evidence like this and something one has to take very seriously.

I was with three others: Caspar Bowden who is a colleague on the ICO Technology Reference Panel, Dr Gus Hosein of Privacy International and David Walker, a security consultant. The committee has been seeing groups according to their rough views on the draft Bill and readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear2 that this cohort was one that had concerns.

The afternoon’s evidence sessions were reported by the Beeb.

I’m sure that I will already have mentioned that the potential consequences of this Bill becoming Law are so great that it merits the most comprehensive discussion before hand. Today is the last day of evidence sessions with the Home secretary Theresa May being up before the committee.

I don’t have access to the inner thoughts of the committee but I did get a sense of the following:

  1. the fact that many communications use encrypted traffic and that this is likely to cause problems is recognised
  2. the issue of dealing with overseas providers is not likely to be an easy one
  3. the process of oversight of the RIPA system notices needs overhauling, especially if the Bill proceeds
I’m also hoping that the message got  through that nothing can ever be totally secure and that any data gathered under this Bill/Act would eventually make its way into the public domain with disastrous consequences.
I don’t have a handle of the timetable for the rest of this process (enlightenment anyone?) but it wouldn’t surprise me to see the Bill move forward in some reduced form. In the meantime we have to keep up the pressure. More in the fullness of time, a week is a long time in politics etc etc etc.

1 bit of a mouthful/oral evidence/geddit?

2 some previous posts include this one

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