Category: Apps

includes software

Delighted shepherds and Clerkenwell Screws!

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 21 November, 2012
No Comments on 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.

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…

Tags Clerkenwell Screws, Newark

Apps broadband End User social networking

Home broadband data usage growth

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 29 October, 2012
2 Comments on Home broadband data usage growth

Broadband data usage growth driven by photo uploads

I’m installing a RaspberryPi computer at home carrying an IPCortex PBX with SIP trunks. I just needed to find a free IP address and found myself checking out available addresses so that I could provide a static one to the IPCortex.

I just happened to find myself looking at my home broadband data usage and came up with some interesting stats.

The first chart plots the growth in my overall usage for the last four years. It actually shows almost an order of magnitude (20GB to 160GB) growth from the lowest point in 2008 to the highest point this year.

I realise this is not scientific but you can easily see the trend. The rise in upload usage in the May/June time frame (2nd chart) this year coincides with my taking proud possession of the Samsung Galaxy S3 and the fact that all photos now get backed up to Google+.

The final chart shows the growth in photo storage needs this year and you can see a very good correlation between photo storage and the growth in bandwidth upload usage.

The numbers don’t exactly match because we use the home broadband connection for other applications and I, being both gregarious and fertile, do not live alone.

I haven’t drilled into specifics but a reasonable chunk of the photo storage space is now used for video. I do both a daily (ish) video diary for the kids and take lots of “generally interesting” videos. Check this one out from the weekend visit to the Beamish Open Air Museum in county Durham.

Tags data, Galaxy S3, google, Samsung, storage, usage

Apps ecommerce End User

How to avoid giving Apple credit card details for iTunes setup

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 9 October, 2012
1 Comment on How to avoid giving Apple credit card details for iTunes setup

One of my beefs with Apple has been that you have to give them your credit card details when setting up an iTunes account. For the uninitiated, the independent of mind majority, you need to sign up to iTunes to be able to download apps onto your iPad/Pod/Phone, even if the apps themselves are free.

The signup process involves filling in payment method details which I have always objected to.

Last weekend my dad acquired an iPad at the tender age of 78. He understandably didn’t trust Apple with his credit card details. We set him up without iTunes but it was clear that he would need to install some apps to make full use of the device – Facebook, Google+ and Skype in particular.

The www told me it should be possible to not to have to provide the card details but none of the instructions seemed to match what I could see on the sign up screen.

In the end

Tags Apple, avoid, bypass, card, credit, details, iTunes

Apps End User gaming internet

Electronic Arts infrastructure fails under weight of demand for FIFA2013

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Saturday, 29 September, 2012
No Comments on Electronic Arts infrastructure fails under weight of demand for FIFA2013

I had to pop into town yesterday to buy FIFA 2013 for my 12 year old. It was the price I had to pay for his cooperation with the BT case study filming when he got back from school. It cost an arm and a leg – somewhere in the region of £85 including 5,000 Microsoft points.

There would have been a lot of people getting around town without arms and legs because there must have been hundreds of the games piled up behind the counter at Game Station, all on pre-order. In fact if you hadn’t pre-ordered it you would have been out of luck as they were all spoken for.

My lad got home from school and immediately got down to business with the XBox. That’s when things started to go wrong. He traded 3,200 Microsoft points for 5,200 FIFA points. However the FIFA points did not appear. These are expensive virtual tokens (massive gross margin I’d imagine) and whilst I was sure that we would resolve the issue – @EA support has been great in the past – on this occasion the support was totally unobtainable.

I began to tweet my dissatisfaction – that’s usually a good way of getting a response (unless you are @eastcoastuk). Every minute I spent on hold I tweeted the fact with increasing levels of annoyance. Looking at the @EA twitter account I could see they had over 1 million followers. I gave up after 20 minutes.

Later the lad found out online that EA had had to switch off their points system because it had been overwhelmed. This was another Olympic ticketing/Ticketmaster moment. The next morning the system is still down for maintenance.

It surprises me that in this day and age of scalable online computing resources that businesses let themselves down like this. I often hear complaints in our house that the FIFA servers are down or too busy.

As I write the @EA twitter follower count is down to 999,901 – clearly a few disgruntled folks out there.

Tags @EA, Electronic Arts, FIFA 2013

Apps Engineer virtualisation

Meet John Milner VCP5-DV, MCTS, MCSA+M/S, MCSE+S, MCITP: EMA/SA, A+, S+, eater of cake

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 28 September, 2012
1 Comment on Meet John Milner VCP5-DV, MCTS, MCSA+M/S, MCSE+S, MCITP: EMA/SA, A+, S+, eater of cake

John Milner started with us earlier this year to help with our virtualisation programme. He has a string of great qualifications and has now just passed his VMware Certified Professional – Datacenter Virtualization examination.

We are proud of him and glad that he has come to work at Timico. He has made an instant impact. He’s one of those guys you can chuck a job at knowing it will get done in a totally professional manner. We seem to be very lucky with the quality of our engineering staff all round.

In keeping with the cake making tradition we have here at Timico John has brought one in for everyone to help him celebrate his success. It says much about the character of the man that he admitted that the cake was actually baked by his sister. After all you can’t be good at everything:)

I of course am on a health kick and will not be partaking. It has been made easier by the fact that I’m sat at home waiting for a film crew to turn up but more on that later…

Well done John & keep up the great work :))

Just for the record & any SEO (smiley face) I repeat his qualifications here for your perusal: VCP5-DV, MCTS, MCSA+M/S, MCSE+S, MCITP: EMA/SA, A+, S+, eater of cake

PS John – sorry if this is a somewhat personally embarrassing post having nice things said about you but credit where credit is due 🙂

Tags A+, eater of cake, MCITP: EMA/SA, MCSA+M/S, MCSE+S, MCTS, S+, VCP5-DV

Apps End User google mobile apps

plot lost with sat nav plotted route?

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 18 September, 2012
4 Comments on plot lost with sat nav plotted route?

I’ve been driving around the country a fair bit recently although by and large it is still easier to catch the train. I’ve even been using the Google Navigation on my Galaxy S3 so I must be visiting places I’ve never been before.

The funny thing is I’ve found that when I’m in the car I have started talking to the sat nav person. When he says “turn left now” I say ok got that thanks!!! I even do it when I’m not on my own in the car!!! Am I losing the plot or is this normal behaviour? My friends need to tell me though I’m not sure there is a cure.

When I’m out and about I also usually wear a Timico polo shirt or fleece. I’ve found that staff at the coffee counter think I’m driving a truck. I quite like this. The romantic notion of the freedom of the road.

When I were a lad I hitchhiked from Greece to London. One lorry gave me a lift the whole way. I was very lucky. He even got me signed on the ferry as a co driver. The guy behind the desk was very suspicious & didn’t believe him. I had a goatee beard, a collarless shirt and wore a leather hat. I still got onboard and even had a free driver’s meal. Happy days.

That’s all folks.

Tags Google Navigation, talking

Apps Business ecommerce

IT problems, printers and online support models

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 18 September, 2012
5 Comments on IT problems, printers and online support models

Usually I offload any home IT problems to the kids. Last night though I spotted one of them carrying the (wireless) printer into the living room. Omg wtf I thought (the kids will probably read this).

Turns out the printer is knackered. Print head stays stuck in place. The lad in question was moving it into a brighter room to try and get a better look. He is a good lad. There was of course nothing obvious so we plugged it back in. Still didn’t work & came up with an error code.

I searched online and found that this type of error, if it didn’t fix itself, needed a return to base to fix. Ah well. That’s why I took out the insurance policy – I do this for printers only because they are notoriously unreliable (assuming I can find the bumpf though usually PC World are good at keeping a record).

In one of my searches for the error code I came across “justanswer.com” which seemed to show promise. At first I thought it was a Kodak support site and filled in the online engagement box with the details of the problem. Next think I know the details of an advisor came up highlighting his technical background and suggesting that the assistance might be worth £21 but giving you the opportunity to suggest another figure.

Very innovative. Being tight I moved off the page. After all I had already determined that the printer would either fix itself or need sending back. It seems like a good model for the total novice though. It is reasonable to pay someone for their expertise.

I rebooted the printer one last time and hey presto, it worked! Deep satisfaction…

Click on the header photo to see more of the page.

Tags IT, justanswer, printers, support

Cloud End User google

Dropbox or Google+

I’ve noticed I keep being given free space extensions in Dropbox. I’ve just realised all my photos are being uploaded there. That means I’m uploading to both Google+ and Dropbox, using wifi only.

I don’t mind this as long as Dropbox keeps extending the space. I’m not aware they provide unlimited storage aka G+ but hey. I did find a real use for Dropbox recently when my S3 battery stopped charging. The USB port was only intermittently visible & I couldn’t move files across the the laptop. I shifted some “important” stuff into Dropbox before the battery finally went and I now still have those files. I also used Google Drive.

It probably doesn’t make sense to use both but for the moment it’s easy enough to do and I haven’t hit any problems.

That’s all…

Tags Dropbox, google, Google Drive

Apps competitions End User

Mobile Phone #Photo #Competition Shortlist – some great pics – get voting

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 18 July, 2012
106 Comments on Mobile Phone #Photo #Competition Shortlist – some great pics – get voting

It’s been a tough one but boy have we got some great pics in the trefor.net phone photo competition. The standard of entries was very high and the judges have had to be brutal in the shortlisting process.

For total transparency the judges were myself and Scott Wroe – Timico’s head of graphic design. Neither of us entered the competition ourselves. We had around 150 entrants and although I did suggest that we would have a separate class for “edited” photos in reality most of the entries were straight off the camera so we have bundled them all into one single mega category. If you entered but have been left out of the short list I’m sorry about that but we have tried to be as objective as we can.

I did get a few suggestions for a polling process but to keep things simple and to allow you to give your views on the photos I’ve decided that voting will take place using the “comment” method. In other words chose a single winner and leave a comment telling me which picture you think that winner should be. By all means tell us what you think or how you went about chosing that particular photo as your winner.

You have until 5pm Lincolnshire time on Friday 27th July which is when the Olympic games start and when I go on holiday. I will count up the votes at that time and tell you who the winner is.

One vote per person please. A person is defined by a discrete email address. By all means get your friends to vote for you. Please don’t abuse the process by conjuring up multiple email accounts and voting for yourself many times. This is a white hat blog and its readers are trusted.

I will award as many prizes as looks right. If there are 5 photos that get far more votes than the rest then there will be 5 prizes – Timico mugs. The standard of the competition has been so high that it merits a better first prize than the mug. I will take the winner out for a curry or simlar provided that person is within sensible easy reach. Perhaps we can meet in London or somewhere.

We have had entries from as far afield as India, Indonesia and New Zealand. A meal out won’t be practical in these cases so if you win you will have to settle for the mug and the deep satisfaction of knowing that you have won a major international photographic competition which will be forever visible as long as this blog remains on the world wide web.

My thanks to all of you who took the trouble to enter and good luck to all those on the shortlist. Get voting…

PS I’ll sort out the prizes when I get back from holiday.

photo 1 - click for larger version — photo 1

photo 2 - click for larger version — photo 2

Tags competition, phone, photo, shortlist

Business business applications

Dell Vantage Club & Google+ instant uploader

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 16 July, 2012
No Comments on Dell Vantage Club & Google+ instant uploader

Another interesting photographic weekend with the Galaxy S3. I was in Liverpool for a family party, staying at the Crowne Plaza on the Waterfront. Lots of photos – 3.3GB worth – 1,134 files. The hotel had a free option on its wifi, notionally for email & light browsing. I didn’t do any speed testing but when I got home, 150 or so of the pics had already been uploaded to Google+ using the free wifi and instant uploader.

This has to be the way to do it. You find your pics automatically backed up without thinking, as long as you chose the “wifi only” setting on the phone. The rest of the pics were taken off the phone before they had a chance to upload – I’ll have to adjust my “transfer policy” to give them time to upload.

The inset photo is of me and me dear old Mam on Friday night at a private Davies dinner in the hotel. The header photo is the view from the private room at the SoHo House club on Greek Street in London Town. I was there for a Dell Vantage Club event where the topic of conversation was BYOD. I have to say I am becoming increasingly impressed with these Dell events. Dell is restricting the Vantage Club to 350 CIO/CTO types and it is a great forum for networking with others in the industry. I even bumped into a Timico customer there – great stuff.

PS I’m going to also have to start a policy of filtering the photos I keep on the laptop and offloading the rest to an external hard drive where they will provably never again see the light of day.

Tags Club, Crowne, Dell, google, Greek, House, instant, Liverpool, Plaza, SoHo, street, uploader, Vantage

Apps Business internet Regs

Communications Bill – is it going to look at the right subject matter?

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 7 June, 2012
1 Comment on Communications Bill – is it going to look at the right subject matter?

Having mentioned the comms bill in my last post I now find that the expected Green Paper is not now going to be published. Instead over the coming months five seminars will inform the communications review.

The seminars will look at:

The Consumer Perspective
Competition in the Content Market
Maximising the value of spectrum to support growth and innovation
Driving investment and growth in the UK’s TV content industries
Supporting growth in the radio (audio) sector

“The UK’s communications sector is one of the strongest in the world” said Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. “We must ensure the sector can grow by being at the forefront of new developments in the industry. It is essential that we set the right conditions for the industry to enable businesses to grasp the opportunities created by new technology.”

Communications Minister Ed Vaizey added “The communications industry is a key part of our economy. Through these seminars, we will look in detail at how best to drive investment and competition. We want to shape the Communications Bill so that we have the right framework to secure our place as Europe’s tech hub.”

Much of the blurb up until now is lifted straight from the DCMS website. I can’t argue with any of it though some of it seems to me to be very much born out of subject matter that government can get its brain around.

For example content providers, ie TV companies in the main, have been asking for a level playing field – the clues lie in the bullet points provided to us as a guide on what is likely to be discussed in the Seminar – how important is exclusivity in supporting investment and innovation, how much choice do consumers have and how open is the market to new entrants?

The bit about spectrum is also an easy one to grasp. Although there are legal minefields to tread at the end of the day it seems about making best use of the spectrum available.

This is all fair enough but I do find myself asking how much innovation and growth this is really promoting? It’s all about extensions to old business models.

I humbly suggest that what we really want is to create an environment that supports innovation in the new world we want to be encouraging the next Google or Microsoft to start up in the UK. We do see some signs of progress. The reintroduction of EIS Tax relief for entrepreneurial investors and the effort to create an emphasis on computer programming in schools spring to mind.

I think though that we need to think a lot bigger than we are doing. How about a 10 year moratorium on capital gains tax for new technology startup investment? I bet that would result in many Californian based VC companies moving to the UK. How about government loans or matched funding for high risk high tech projects. How about creating an immigration environment that would encourage talent to want to come to the UK instead of Silicon Valley?

Perhaps I’m being naïve in thinking that “communications” extends beyond programming content and next gen mobile. Everything I do these days involves communications in some form or other.

The government wants the private sector to haul in the slack created by cuts in the public sector. It needs to come up with creative and innovative solutions to stimulate this. It also needs a level of understanding in government of issues relating to technology and the internet. Many of the noises that we have been hearing are counter-innovative and have been about constraining how we can use technology and not the opposite. C’mon guys. Move it on.

Tags Communications Bill, Ed Vaizey, Jeremy Hunt

Apps End User mobile apps

phone storage capacity – miscellaneous musings after the Diamond Jubilee weekend

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 6 June, 2012
3 Comments on phone storage capacity – miscellaneous musings after the Diamond Jubilee weekend

You may have noticed I have a tendency to stick photos in blog posts. I like to think it adds a bit of colour, enhancing the reader’s experience 🙂 I take most of them using my Galaxy S2. I always have it with me whereas it is a pain to carry the camera around. The camera does take better pics in the main, user skill level permitting.

I always seem to have 11GBytes or so free space on my phone and never get anywhere near to filling it up. My camera uses up its battery before filling up the memory. This would probably also be the case with the phone but I husband the power levels on that device – it’s mission critical.

After the weekend I transferred 1.4GB of photos and videos to my laptop – the total space used on the laptop by vids and pics as 167GB!

I could still fit all the music on my hard drive onto the phone and still leave room for photos. I have 10.5GB worth of music though I hardly ever listen to most of it (I really do need to change my play list but I like Pink Floyd, Donna Summer, Bronski Beat and Joe Jackson 🙂 .

The size of the photo and video storage space is going to grow far more quickly than that I use for music which is pretty static – it’s an age thing. The chart on the right shows the growth in storage used for video and photos on my hard drive over the past 11 years. the last column is 2012 which has 7 months to go & we haven’t hit the summer holidays yet.

I store these pics in a variety of places. The question is how much is it worth to me to store them all online. 100GB is $199 pa on Dropbox. Microsoft SkyDrive is £32 per 100Gigs. Google Cloud storage is $12 a month ($144 pa) for 100GB but you also have to pay $0.12 per GB data xfer costs (from USA and EMEA – $0.21 from APAC) to access what you have stored (uploading seems to be free). I guess that’s ok – thats only $12 to retrieve the whole lot.

Assuming I want to store all my photos on Google that would cost me twenty bucks a month (y’all) – roughly fourteen quid. I’m a heavy user but whatever the right number is for you this is probably going to be a cost we will all have to factor into our monthly household budgets in future.

That’s all folks…

Tags cost, diamond, jubilee, online, party, photos, storage, street

ecommerce End User

Yellow Pages shock

I realise it shouldn’t have come as a shock to me but one day over the long weekend I got home to find a copy of the Yellow Pages directory on the doorstep. It was a shadow of its former self, so much so that the notion of someone being strong enough to tear a telephone directory in half is now a pathetic anachronism.

It is extremely unlikely that it will ever be opened in our house. Even my wife, the least web/tech savvy of us all, would use the internet to look up services. You do have to ask yourself who is going to use it, or even who advertises in it. I guess they are still after the reasonably significant percentage of us that are not yet online. The size of the actual directory (click on header image for full shot so compare with car key – also it was only around 1cm thick) as a percentage of its former self probably reflects the percentage of people still offline.

Tags Directory, Pages, Yellow

Apps Engineer mobile connectivity

Did you know? some facts from around the world on LTE / 4G

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 16 April, 2012
2 Comments on Did you know? some facts from around the world on LTE / 4G

Did you know¹ that LTE was launched in the USA in December 2010 where a most aggressive competition between operators has been taking place, led by Verizon? In the USA LTE has high penetration across all devices, comes at no premium over 3G data services and LTE users typically use around 50% more data than 3G users.

LTE was also launched in Germany in December 2010 but has had a slow adoption rate with the initial focus being on fixed/mobile substitution. This I understand is in part due to regulations ensuring that owners of LTE bandwidth have to service “the final third” as part of their licensing arrangements. There isn’t much of a choice of devices on LTE in Germany.

South Korea was relatively late to the game here. They launched in July 2011 but had nationwide coverage by mid 2012 and has the highest penetration rate, focussed mainly on selling to consumers. LTE has brought innovative new services to the South Koreans eg richer high quality interactive maps.

Norralorrapeople know this. Brings the scheduling of 4G in the UK into perspective doesn’t it?

¹ source Ericsson & GSA (Oct 12^th 2011)

Tags 4g, London, LTE, O2, Timico, trials

4g Apps Engineer mobile connectivity

Samsung media event date announced – should we get excited – 4G & photos

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 16 April, 2012
No Comments on Samsung media event date announced – should we get excited – 4G & photos

I have to be careful here because whilst I am a Samsung fan I have no desire to be labelled a fanboi in the manner of Apple afficionados. Samsung has announced a media event at Earls Court on Thursday 3rd May and the speculation is that this will be the Galaxy S3 launch. This might be exciting.

I use a Galaxy S2 which is as far as I am concerned still a great phone. There has to be a lot of new functionality for me to want to upgrade – certainly more than appears to have been the case with the various flavours of iPhone churned out over the last 12 months.

What might these improvements be?

Tags Galaxy, google, S3, Samsung, YouTube

Apps End User mobile connectivity

My data manager – wonderful app from Mobidia

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 9 March, 2012
1 Comment on My data manager – wonderful app from Mobidia

Discovered My Data Manager this week thanks to Rob Bamforth of Quocirca. It’s a wonderful little app that lets you see how much data each app uses on your smartphone (I must stop calling it that – it’s so 2011).

I have only been using it since Tuesday when I was out of the office for a couple of days. It may be seen that in that time I notched up 46.3MB of mobile data usage and 36.9MB of wifi. You can see for yourself what I was using it for – I am a very connected person or addicted to Twitter – you decide.

Other than being a reflection of social habits and mobile usage the data does suggest that in a month I am likely to use around 480MB which is just under the threshold of 500MB typically used by mobile networks for “fair usage”.

I don’t believe it. I’m sure I use far more than that though it is divided between the iPad and the mobile. I’ll see what the number for the whole month looks like and report back. It would also be interesting to hear from others what their usage profile is (without giving away any secrets! )

The rest of this post is just a bit of fill in so that the text finishes off roughly in line with the bottom of the picture on the right.

Anyone else wishing to engage in polite conversation, inanities and observations regarding the rugby internationals coming up this weekend should do so through the usual channels.

I’m off to see Wales v Italy in Cardiff. Look out for me on the TV. Taking one of the kids. It was his idea.

There are still tickets available – not surprising at £75 high up in the corner!! I would also like to remind those who still owe me for bets on the England v Wales match it’s about time they paid up 🙂

Tags mobidia, my data manager, Samsung Galaxy S2

Apps End User online safety

Pipe dreams and privacy – is your private life a thing of the past? or no Google doodle for privacy muddle

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 2 March, 2012
No Comments on Pipe dreams and privacy – is your private life a thing of the past? or no Google doodle for privacy muddle

Today is all about privacy. No Google doodle to go with it because Google is at the centre of the debate with its harmonisation of privacy rules across all of its services.

The European commissioner of justice, Viviane Reding says there are “doubts” over what Google has done. I’m not going to go into detail on the ins and outs – read about that in the Guardian. Commissioner Reding though in my experience is someone worth listening to so she is expressing concern there is likely to be something in it.

It is worth thinking about privacy for a moment because in our modern age it is a hugely complex subject.

If I do a search for “Trefor Davies” Google comes up with

Tags Facebook, google, privacy, Viviane Reding

Apps broadband Cloud End User

A Home Packed with Technology

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 3 February, 2012
5 Comments on A Home Packed with Technology

I have decided, and I haven’t told my wife this, that my house needs to be a case study for the connected home. The technological home of the future. The question is what does this connected home look like?

I have Cat 5 cabling downstairs a switch, wifi and shortly I will have FTTC. This is all very well but other than working from home occasionally and accessing the internet what am I going to do with it all.

I would welcome suggestions for services or technology that will be of use in the home that I should be testing.

Thanks in advance

That’s all folks.

Tags connected, FTTC, home, technology

Apps End User google

email “like” buttons

I have just decided that someone needs to invent the email “like” button. When someone sends you an email saying, for example, “that was a great blog post Tref” it is a real waste of everyone’s time and effort to reply saying “thanks very much”.

Really what we need is a means of communicating back a thumbs up or a like without the original sender having to open the email just to read the word “thanks”.

Simple.

Apps Engineer media olympics

2012 – Summer of Sports on Steroids – BBC estimates more than 2x Football World Cup traffic levels

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 11 November, 2011
5 Comments on 2012 – Summer of Sports on Steroids – BBC estimates more than 2x Football World Cup traffic levels

2012 or as the BBC puts it “Summer of Sports on Steroids” ¹ is going to be another milestone year for the ISP industry with the UK playing host to the Olympic games and another record anticipated for internet traffic levels. On Wednesday at the ISPA conference we had Jane Weedon, Controller of Business Development at the BBC talking about their preparations for the games.

The coverage in 2012 is going to be comprehensive with pretty much 100% of the sport available to watch as it happens – up to 27 simultaneous channels at the peak towards the end of the second week. This will have grown from perhaps 15-20% of coverage at the Sydney games 35% in Athens and 65% in Beijing (click on the header photo for graphic illustration).

The peak traffic during the South Africa Football World Cup hit 450Gbps with everyone going online to watch the England v Slovenia match. For perspective this year so far iPlayer traffic has peaked at 220Gbps.

So look out ISPs.

The forecasting of traffic levels for these games is in reality going to be very difficult. On the higher demand side the games are on home territory and will appeal to a wider demographic than the Football World Cup. To counter this device proliferation may lead to the streaming being distributed over a wider range of media – 3G mobiles and tablets, public WiFi zones, offices providing big TV screens and the fact that many folk may well take the two weeks of the games off on holiday.

Medals success for Team GB is also going to be an influencing factor.

The Beeb has gone into significant detail in estimating demand on a session by session basis and has come up with a forecast of 10 x the traffic levels for London as they saw in Beijing. That’s 1Terabits a second ²at the peak in streams averaging 1Mbps.

That’s enough Olympic bits for the moment but there is so much interest in this subject looking ahead I’m going to be looking out for more Olympic stories to share.

¹ Steroids is perhaps an unfortunate word to use in this context

² Nobody is going to hold them to this forecast but it certainly gives us all an indication of what to expect

Tags 2012, BBC, iplayer, Olympics, traffic

Business gaming internet Net ofcom social networking UC voip

The Demographics of Communications

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 4 November, 2011
2 Comments on The Demographics of Communications

It’s a bit of a dank dismal day here in the shires and I have the office aircon on “heat”. Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind this weather – it reminds me of my childhood and in particular of wet Sunday afternoons spent watching the black and white cowboy film on BBC2, maybe playing a game of Monopoly and then the excitement of Songs of Praise with Harry Secombe after tea. The highlight of the day was the comedy on Radio 4 at 6.30 or 7pm.

I’m not sure why I’ve “gone nostalgic” all of a sudden especially when those Sunday afternoons were really boring and often used to lead to rows amongst us kids.

These days our kids still argue despite having an incredible range of things to do on a Sunday. After the F1 there’s the XBox and, well more Xbox. Then there’s the Xbox!

Reality is that other than the Simpsons the kids only watch TV when one of their parents decides

Tags FTTC, internet, TV

Apps Cloud End User xaas

Computing As A Service – family bundle #CAAS #Tesco #Acer #Microsoft

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 24 October, 2011
5 Comments on Computing As A Service – family bundle #CAAS #Tesco #Acer #Microsoft

I know I said I might well have bought my last laptop for the family but my wife’s 10 year old PC is spinning the last few thousand rotations of its hard drive and software is starting to malfunction. So she is getting our daughter’s 7 year old perfectly good machine and we are buying the final year 6^th form girl a laptop.

The Tesco website has an Acer 5742 for £399. It has an Intel Core i3, a 750gig hard drive and 4 gigs of RAM. The crunch though is the copy of Microsoft Office 2010 home and business £204.22. She ain’t getting that.

It’s a graphic illustration that the money isn’t in the hardware but in the software. You do also have to wonder

Tags Acer, CAAS, Microsoft, Tesco

Apps chromebook Cloud End User

An Everyday Story of a Family, its Clunky Old Computer, and Cloud Based Services

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 22 September, 2011
7 Comments on An Everyday Story of a Family, its Clunky Old Computer, and Cloud Based Services

My wife’s PC has nearly ended it’s useful life. It was bought for our oldest son at the age of 10. He is now about to start his second year at university and is already on his second laptop.

During the intervening ten or so years the PC has been flattened and rebuilt a couple of times. For a few years it was the “family” computer and thus had every kind of game added and removed and goodness knows what other software.

Now it is clunky, takes ages to boot up and a source of frustration for the love of my life. To make things worse last weekend my daughter did something to it and now Microsoft Office does not work. The original CD was lost some time ago. Doesn’t sound good.

Last night I went all cloud based services on the dodgy old thing.

I set Mrs Davies up with a

Tags google, Microsoft, open office, PC, tablet

Apps competitions End User

My camera keeps ringing – massive prize competition

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 16 September, 2011
2 Comments on My camera keeps ringing – massive prize competition

I had a full day of meetings in London on Wednesday. At 2.30pm I finished one and I needed to be in Westminster for the next one at 3.15. It was a beautiful sunny day so I decided to walk and made my way down through St James’ Park to Horseguards Parade.

We do have an impressive capital city and I happened to be there as they were changing the horseguards. With a few minutes to spare before the meeting I joined the tourists and got my Galaxy S2 camera out. As I was taking a photo the camera rang! Annoying huh? They will add phone functionality to useful personal gadgets.

That particular photo was lost but

Tags competition, Galaxy S2, horseguards, Timico

Apps Business Cloud virtualisation

UCAS should have a cloud based virtual system that can scale with demand

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 30 August, 2011
6 Comments on UCAS should have a cloud based virtual system that can scale with demand

The A Level results were released just before I went on holiday. For me the noticeable bit was the fact that the UCAS system failed to cope with the demand for people wanting to see how they got on. Someone from UCAS came on BBC Radio to discuss this and mentioned the fact that due to next year’s University course fee hikes they had planned for a huge increase in visits but in the end the capacity was still inadequate.

This is clearly an example where a cloud based implementation would get by the problem. UCAS would have been able to increase the resources available just for the period of high demand which is of course only for a few days in a year. Lets hope they get their act together for next year when kid #2 goes through it all.

PS I’m back – didn’t have time to write this in the mad rush before going on holiday.

PPS It’s good to be back 🙂

Tags UCAS

Apps Cloud Engineer virtualisation

PCoIP over VMWare View (for Keeping Up with the #Cricket Wherever You Are)

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 12 August, 2011
7 Comments on PCoIP over VMWare View (for Keeping Up with the #Cricket Wherever You Are)

I’ve been trying out thin client software at the office, specifically PCoIP running over VMware View.

It’s going very well. The station I sat at had just a keyboard, mouse and screen with a small connector box hooking me up with the network. I was running a virtual instance of Windows with the actual application running on a virtual machine in our data centre.

You wouldn’t know that there was no PC in a box underneath the desk. The beauty of this technology is the fact that I can install a virtual client on my PC at home (or anywhere else) that will allow me to log in and replicate my work environment. It consumes much less power and also makes management of the whole estate much easier. New users can be provisioned in seconds – the process of building a PC can take a day.

The experience is great – in fact I didn’t know I wasn’t sat at a PC when I started using it. The header photo shows the workstation set up (a bit untidy – click to see more) and the inset photo (right) is of the EVEA connector box. You can have up to 4 monitors using a DVI splitter plug – something our geeks really like.

The box is an EVGA PD02. They retail at around £216 plus VAT. When you add the costs of the licenses the individual per unit cost is roughly the same as a fully loaded new PC so the cost saving is in the management – IT staff headcount I guess if you were looking at a large estate.

Note England are doing well in the cricket against India which is why I sat at the workstation in the first place – I wanted an update of the score 🙂 . Invitations to the Oval test gratefully accepted.

Tags cricket, EVGA PD02, PCoIP, VMWare View

End User gaming

The language of the XBox Live hack Call of Duty World at War Nazi Zombies

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 10 August, 2011
6 Comments on The language of the XBox Live hack Call of Duty World at War Nazi Zombies

I have spent all my life learning new languages. It began with simultaneous Welsh and English, moved on to French and then on to Fortran, assembler and Basic.

After that came the language of business interspersed with Ethernet, Internet Protocol and a thick compendium of acronyms long and short pertaining to the world of communications. It continues with social media – tweets, likes, hangouts, circles.

Now I find myself even having to understand the world of online gaming as my youngest son’s Xbox live account has been hacked. He was playing Nazi Zombies on Call of Duty: World at War and received a message on his screen saying “haha you’re dead” or words to that effect. His rank has also been reset and he can no longer play online because he needs to be level1.

Following me so far? I’m sure you are (dudes). Apparently he was in a “modded” lobby and the only thing you can do is send a complaint about the user seemingly doing the hacking and not use this type of lobby. If you find yourself in one by accident get the heck out of there quick via the centre guide button on the controller or turn of the system before the changes can be stored on THEIR servers or you will find yourself neg xp a second time.

You also need to watch out for “infection lobbies” and, for WaW the “God mode mod” where you will see players flying all over the map, who you can not kill no matter how much you shoot them. When you score a kill the score will be incorrect and things may display incorrectly on the HuD, too.

I hope that helps – always happy to provide advice. The only thing I’m not totally clear about is the fact that I think he has now lost the cash he (I) forked out in points to buy the game in the first place.

If I were you I wouldn’t let them play this sort of stuff but I‘m clearly not the best role model. You try dragging a kid away from the screen, innit.

Sorted.

Whateva.

Nng

Tags hack, live, Nazi, WaW, XBox, Zombies

Apps End User mobile apps

Time is money

In the interest of research and proper use of the technology I followed the hashtag #londonriots. On Tweetdeck that hashtag stream is moving so quickly as to be not of any use. My own stream has, at a guess, 70% of tweets relating to the riots.

This is of course the complete other extreme to my offline experiences on holiday. People are clearly mesmerized by the whole situation. I can understand it – I was in Austin Texas during 9/11 and it was difficult to do anything other than watch events unfold on the TV. Today they combine TV and Twitter.

It does underline the way our lives have changed. This is an addiction to data. We take onboard so much information it is impossible to know what to do with it. In fact most of it is discarded which underlines the total waste of the time spent gathering it in the first place.

I could apply the same logic to photos. Last week on holiday I took 849 photos consuming 2.3GB disk space. That’s more than the 1.54GB (2,177 photos) as much as I took in the whole of 2003. Year to date in 2011 I have taken 9,985 photos using 49.9GB of disk space and there is still almost half the year to go. Ok this does now include videos and the photos are of higher quality than in 2003 but it is still a big change and very representative of the information overload in our society.

The point is how to manage all this data and how to apportion the right amount of time to it. I still don’t have the answer but it is somewhere in between how I got on on holiday in Mull and the start of this week with all the online reporting of #londonriots. What I do know is that whoever cracks the problem, if there is a solution, is going to make a lot of money out of it.