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.
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.
I may flatter myself in thinking that the readers of this blog are savvy intellectuals, sophisticates, oozers of erudition, people of the world – both real and ethereal. They appreciate the finer things in life. I can tell by the standard of comment. That being clearly and undeniably the case I am pleased to be able to present, for your entertainment, a further series of photographs very much representing me enjoying the good things in life.
Before I go any further however we should clear the air. If you are of a jealous disposition you should not read on. Also political views are not part of this debate. After all even Aneurin Bevan MP, socialist hero and creator of the National Health Service, used to save up so that he could indulge once a month in a seriously hedonistic night out at the Savoy Hotel. The envious should leave now, reading no further, and immerse themselves in the cold bath of self pity. Go.
Today’s photographs are a selection taken from an extensive collection assembled over two days of my stay at the Celtic Manor Resort Hotel whilst watching the Wales Open Golf Tournament. I was there as a guest of Wesley Clover, the Terry Matthews VC business. Note there is a megaprize competition at the end of this post – haven’t had one for a while.
I have included a range of subject matter that gives you the best flavour of the experience. I warn you now, if you expect to see anything of the first 17 ½ holes then you will be disappointed for most of the action takes place from the corporate hospitality tent overlooking the 18th green. For the cognoscenti the 18th is a monster 575 yards par 5 and if you don’t hit the green with your approach shot you are knackered. Your ball will either end up in a bunker or if it falls short, the water. You need to know that the front fringe is mown short and slopes steeply back into the lake before it.
After a hard day of watching golf I retired to the relaxing comfort of the spa. There are no photos of this bit as it would not have been appropriate. Also the steam from the steam room would probably not have been good for my phone.
Later we were ferried by Keith in a Mercedes limo to the excellent Clytha Arms near Raglan to participate in their annual Cider and Perry Festival.
The Clytha Arms is great. If you have never been you should make a detour to visit. In fact the same applies for any of the locations I mention herein. The Clytha is a classic country pub and the meeting place for the local hunt. The food is great though we didn’t partake, saving ourselves for the curry at the Kings Arms back near the Celtic Manor. The Kings Arms as some of you may know is sadly no longer a pub but at least it has been replaced by a purveyor of fine curries. Before I finally leave the subject of the Clytha I should tell you that most of the attendees at the cider festival seemed to be staying in tents at the back of the pub. There are 100 pitches available. A bit crammed in it looked to me but hey…
Btw I make no apologies for being photographed drinking at a cider festival. We all have to let our hair down sometimes (#2 back and sides – mine).
There were plenty of small souped up cars with big attention-seeking exhausts in the car park. Apparently a regular feature of the country life if you are a young man. When we turned up in our Celtic Manor transport it must have seemed quite a contrast. We were obviously not camping. Incidentally I’m a bit dismayed that I left my Cider Festival souvenir glass in the limo on the way home. Ah well.
I should also mention that one of the reasons for going was that one of our party was Simon Gwatkin (seen wearing jacket in the pic). The Clytha used to be Simon’s local and he wanted to taste one of the Gwatkin Ciders on offer at the festival – never tasted it before. We all had one. We needn’t have bothered. It was rough as anything!
After lunch on the first day we were treated to an interview with the brothers Molinari. These boys were part of the victorious Ryder Cup team from last Autumn. Having seen the course (18th green), the hospitality area and hearing stories of hte celebrations I wish now that I had made the effort to go.
Before I finish I have a little competition for you. Who are the two guys I’m being photographed with in the last photo? Usual prize. None of those in attendance at the golf are eligible to enter in this case.
The last photo is of me in front of the Bentley Mulsanne usedto ferry me to the railway station at Newport. That’s Terry Matthews’ chauffeur Michael in the photo with me. The car is a very nice 7 litre twin turbo job (not that I’m particularly a car person) that retails for £259,191.07. The seven pence seems a bit petty to me but who am I to say???
Oh and by the way Miguel Angel Jiminez was waiting in reception with me for a car and I was with Gareth Edwards in the lift though we didn’t speak – the lift was full and someone else was chatting to him 🙂
who are these guys I'm with? Megamug prize competition
It was only yesterday that I waxed lyrical about the British summer, cricket, olympics et al. Well there are as we all know two aspects to our summer. One is as described yesterday. The other is the reality of today. This is the reality of rain stop play, of umbrellas and Cliff Richard singing on the Wimbledon Centre Court (a thing of the past since they built the roof of course but technology will never completely make the summer) and the family sitting in the kitchen whilst you try and get the barbecue lit.
This post is published in the interest of editorial balance. The views expressed herein are totally independent and whilst biased towards sunshine are able to appreciate the richness of countryside that our variable weather brings, except when my glasses get wet.
I’m now on my way to London for the ITSPA vendor workshop. That is all.
Today is one of those absolutely stunning British spring mornings. You feel it everywhere. The smells, the gentle warmth of the lightest of breezes, the clear blue sky with just the faintest of clouds somewhere on the far horizon, the birds singing happily to themselves in the bushes. It’s the kind of day where I’ve often thought about turning the car around and heading for Skegness instead of going to work. I’m a rebel at heart. I didn’t do it today – not enough holiday to spare 🙂
We are in for a fantastic summer. Forget banking problems, the Euro, Greece, Spain (et al). Forget that jobs list1. Think cricket, tennis, Olympics, Diamond Jubilee, festivals, even think European Championship football if that is your bag. Think tall cool drinks under shady trees, picnics on the riverbank watching the boats drift slowly by. Lie back and gaze up at the rays of sunlight filtering though your straw hat. Light up the barbecue then, when you have eaten and your faces are sticky with bbq sauce and butter off the sweetcorn, throw a few small logs on the embers and enjoy the firedance, plucking away at your guitar until it gets dark and the empty bottle of wine or the realisation that it is almost bedtime tiredness drives you inside.
Life is short. Enjoy it.
1 except for the mowing the lawn bit – that needs doing to make everything else enjoyable, besides I like mowing the lawn.
There is a big pile of junk mail in my pigeonhole – downstairs behind reception. This morning I took the unusual step of looking at it. I have to do this once in a while because every now and again something turns up that is not junk. Very infrequently.
Today it was, as usual, junk. One flyer did catch my eye though. An invitation to “Submarine Networks World 2012“. I noticed it because I thought it was a wonderfully badly targeted piece marketing – a good subject for a blog post. Maybe they saw my piece on the Virgin undersea cable near the Isle of Man and figured I would be a good guy to have along.
The flyer arrived airmail from Singapore. Hmm, Singapore eh? I quite like Singapore. Before Timico I did quite a bit of globetrotting in my job and Singapore was a paradise in the Far East that one could rest at between visiting countries where the signs were totally illegible to the Western eye. I used to stay at the Hyatt Grand Regency on Orchard. Beautiful hotel, great bar, fantastic service etc etc.
So now I’ve changed my mind and I’d like to go to the conference. I don’t want it to cost anything mind you. Certainly not the S$4,190 it costs to attend or the business class airfare (it’s a long flight and I need to be in the right frame of mind when I get there). I don’t even want to pay the S$319 room rate at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel though I’m sure that’s good value for the quality of the accommodation.
In fact I’ve convinced myself that this is the one conference I absolutely need to attend in September 2012. If someone will stump up the cash – £7k will probably cover it – I’ll go. In return I promise to write a blog post condensing my learnings into three concise, highly readable and absolutely on the money paragraphs that will save you the effort of having to go (there could be a business idea here 🙂 ). The post will undoubtedly include pictures of palm trees and the Indian Ocean (Pacific?).
All that aside this is still not very well targeted advertising. This is surely a business model that needs to change.
Had an email overnight from someone at WAYN.com – “the world’s largest travel and lifestyle social network” – sigh! The email source address was whereareyounow.net. I checked. WAYN now has 19,720,691 members.
Good luck to him. I wish WAYN and all who travel with him well but I have to say farewell, adios, auf wiedersehen, goodbye, waving tearfully from the jetty and turning my back slowly on the departing entourage as it moves off on its travels around the world wide web.
I’m sorry but I am not ready for another social network. WAYN has budget mind you.
Ever wondered how they go about deciding where to put a new cellular base station? It’s a fairly complicated process. It’s also very much site specific, awkward locations, landlords, etc. but as an average the following table is a fair reflection of the effort (source Accelera Mobile Broadband with some O2 validation).
Activity
Effort
(Man Days)
New site verification
1
On site visit: site details verification
0.5
On site visit: RF survey
0.5
New site RF plan
2
Neighbours, frequency, preamble/scrambling code plan
0.5
Interference analyses on surrounding sites
0.5
Capacity analyses
0.5
Handover analyses
0.5
Implementation on new node(s)
0.5
Field measurements and verification
2
Optimization
2
Total activities
7.5 man days
Now just imagine the urban 4G/LTE scenario we have been discussing, where there are ten times as many small cells as in the existing macrocell model. Research org ABI has forecast that there will be 5 million small cells by 2015.
That’s a lot of site surveys using the traditional model. A lot of man days. The only sensible answer is to deploy Self Organising Network. SONs seem to have some way to go before they are mature enough for full scale deployment but there is time, in the UK at least.
A SON has, in theory all the features you might expect from the name. Cells should self-configure, regularly self-optimize parameters and algorithmic behaviour in response to observed changes in network performance and atmospheric conditions. Self-healing mechanisms can be triggered to temporarily compensate for a detected equipment outage whilst waiting for a permanent fix. Nirvana really – plug and play. As we have already found out in the lamp post story plug and play is probably some time away but it will come.
Many of us own a domain name. I have a few – trefor.net, philosopherontap.com plus all the kids own name domains. Not many of us own a generic Top-Level domain though. In fact gTLDs (.com, .org, .uk etc) are typically managed by not for profit national infrastructure players such as Nominet although there are some in private hands.
In June 2011 ICANN announced that they would be looking to stimulate innovation on the internet by making it easier for you to own your own gTLD. You could have non latin script versions – for example Cyrillic, Chinese or Arabic. There was a rush of applicants, $185k payment in hand. Unfortunately the ICANN registration system had a bug in it and they were unable to complete the registration process on the originally planned date of 12th April. The system was therefore frozen whilst the engineers looked for their magic wands.
Looks like they fixed the bug on Monday and the system started working again. You have until midnight on 30th May (presumably Californ-eye-a time) to get registered. When the system went down they had 1,268 registrations. That’s a lot of new gTLDs. They won’t all end up as production entities but we are clearly going to see many new domains hit our screens.
We can’t see the actual domains applied for yet – they won’t release that info until the end of the registration process. Most major cities will have one – London, Berlin, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch et al and I understand that Nominet has applied to have .cymru and .wales. I quite like the idea of having [email protected] but I expect there will be a few other Davies’ interested as well:)
I’ll write a post in Welsh when the .cymru domain comes out – those of you not fortunate to have been brought up in God’s country can read it using Google translate.
PS don’t think it stops at $185k. You will need a few million to do it properly.
PPS They would have a lot of fun with .llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch – think of all the spelling mistakes/repeat attempts to get it right 🙂
I’m sat in a pub in Covent Garden in a race against time. I’m meeting Dr Sue Black at 4pm for a chat about stuff. She is, unfortunately, on a train stuck in the sidings at Wimbledon because someone is trying to commit suicide in Wimbledon station.
These things happen. V sad. The problem is that my phone is running low on juice as is Sue’s. I have the laptop but nowhere to plug it in. I could probably move to find somewhere to charge my phone (I only have a USB cable to attach it to the laptop) but I then run the risk that Sue’s phone battery will run out and she won’t know where I am. I don’t actually need the phone at my end as long as I have power left in the laptop because we are staying in touch using Twitter.
I have plenty of time. It is now 4.48 and my train is not until 7.06 (pm). I can plug both phone and laptop in on the train so I just need to husband resources until then. Also there are only so many glasses of mineral water a man can take…
Little glimpses of life in the early days of the mobile internet – real life drama lived out in Twittercolour on the www.
It’s a glamorous game, the internet. You get to go to all sorts of exotic locations. On this occasion it is the Travelodge in Covent Garden – a bargain at £47.50 a night (note bar set for other Timico staff 🙂 ).
On this occasion it is very handy for the LINX77 meeting at the TUC Congress Centre. We always have a social evening after the first day. Being a lightweight I left at 9.30 to hit the hay but was able to snap some interesting views on the way back to my room. Some were just plain artistic with their neon lights on display (as editor I make the call) and some were downright illuminating.
I first give you the artistic shots. It is worth reading the illuminating bits at the bottom, especially if you are used to paying £8 for a gents trim at the barbers as I am. Matilda stood out for me – very colourful and I’m sure I would have enjoyed the show. The theatre was at 7 Dials, You probably know it. It’s on the way to Covent Garden from Kings Cross Station. There are lots of nice looking bars and restaurants around that area.
You need to scroll down to after the picture of me and the lads at Laredo mexican restaurant to see the haircut bit. The first thing to observe is that the hairdresser is named Sassoon – presumably after the WW1 poet, Siegfried. I’ve read his stuff.You have to click to enlarge the pricelists – I photo’d them through the shop salon window. If you look carefully you can see that a cut can be as much as £145 if you want it doing by international creative director Mark Masefield. If you want to leave the salon with dry hair that can put you back another £50 – plus £10 if you want them to use an iron !!! It takes years of practice to get that iron bit right – they have to try it out on students first. Then if you want a bit of colour in your hair that’ll be another £230 – for a full head mind you – it’s cheaper if you only want half of it doing. I can’t imagine anyone asking for the half – unless they just do the front so it looks as if you have had it all done when someone is looking straight at you. Add tips into the mix and I reckon you can kiss goodbye to a monkey (all London hairdressers tawk loik vat yanow).
At least when the hairdressers at Sassoon talk about where they are going on their holidays it will be somewhere nice. You of course will not be able to go anywhere other than Butlins because they will have all your money.
I normally get mine cut at Antonio’s on Wragby Road in Lincoln – as I said £8 for a quick number 2 back and sides – in and out in 5 minutes. Check him out in this promotional video which some of you will remember from my pigeon racing days.
I’m in the wrong game and it is now 11pm – I wanted to be in bed by 10 – night all.
Ever thought about where to site your mobile data connectivity service? I have to admit I’ve not spent much time on it myself. I’d probably come up with a topographical map of where I was providing the service and plan a series of base stations to give me optimum coverage – most bang for my buck. Nothing new really.
That’s why the chart on the right makes interesting reading. Provided by Ruckuswireless the graph shows the relative demand density for data usage in Mbps per 10m2 based on type of location. Most of the high demand locations are indoor. The high street, which is where most of us would think of putting in capacity ranks 8th.
Today I’m headed for LINX77 in Laandan. if you’ve never been you need to go, assuming you are in the networks game. It’s a great opportunity to meet people – network actually.
To get to Laandan I have to catch a train. Driving into Central Laandan isn’t practical. This morning I worked from home first thing and caught the 11.35 from Lincoln Central, due to connect with the 12.16 from Newark.
I had plenty of time when I got to Newark. A train pulled in. Apparently it was the 9.06, running a smidgeon late. Uhoh! I don’t know whether I’ve ever told you but me dear old mam is from Mohil, County Leitrim and one thing she has passed on to me, apart from a love of (warm) Guinness is a bit of the “luck o’ the Irish”.
Click on the header to reveal more. A train pulled in (very late)
I’m a fairly egalitarian sort of guy. If someone says to me they have heard we built a new data centre and “can they come and see it please” I go all misty eyed and rearrange my diary to fit in. Whoever they are.
In the case of this post it is two hugely differing groups of people. The lot on the left threw away their ties after their ALevels as symbols of repression imposed on them by a controlling Establishment. They are first and second year students from the Lincoln University Computer Science Department. I was pleased to find out that among their courses they study are networking and virtualisation (plus the c-word).
The extremely respectable bunch on the right are clearly well practiced in smiling for the camera (Galaxy S2). They are the collected CEOs of all the District Councils in Nottinghamshire for whom we got out the good biscuits.
I enjoyed meeting both sets of visitors and have to say to the students that I’m sorry they didn’t get any biscuits but there weren’t enough packets to go round:). Thanks go to Timico’s Ian P Christian for the tour on both occasions.
In the wifi hotspot game first mover advantage is becoming critically important. Experience shows that landlords everywhere are initially happy to allow a network provider into their mall/stadium/building. Once in however they decide they don’t want the hassle of doing it again or don’t really like the infrastructure they are now stuck with but have to keep.
As a result there is a market for the first movers in reselling capacity or subletting space on their infrastructure. We are therefore seeing a land grab in places around the world where operators are snapping up as many sites as they can.
In London The Cloud is looking at 1 hotspot per 200 persons. Time Warner is putting 15,000 wifi access points in Los Angeles and PCCW have 10,000 hotspots in Hongkong where peak time traffic has 50% going over wifi instead of mobile networks. For PCCW in Hong Kong their resold wholesale wifi capacity is their single biggest revenue stream1.
Spectrum is the key resource in the mobile network game. It is what the operators paid billions of pounds (arguably too much too soon) each for during the 3G auctions. Users for the services weren’t there and nor were the handsets that would encourage bandwidth consumption.
It is a different game today. Don’t be surprised to see even greater sums of money paid for 4G spectrum. It would be commercial suicide for a mobile operator to not have any.
Spectrum when allocated is then divided into 20MHz bandwidth slots. 20MHz of spectrum allows for an 80Mbps data throughput using LTE. If you double this to a 40MHz slot you double the throughput. The higher the spectrum frequency you have therefore the more capacity your network can handle.
The downside is that the higher the spectrum frequency the lower the range and the harder it is to penetrate objects such as buildings. The lower frequencies are preferred for rural deployments – Vodafone in Germany used 800MHz for this. There isn’t a “right mix” of spectrum to own however. Vodafone operates in 30 markets and each market has different spectrum requirements.
The mobile networks are built up from thousands of base stations around the country, connected back to the operators’ core networks using a variety of backhauls. Once the media hits the core network the voice/data session is directed as appropriate.
The backhaul technology has developed over time from E1s/ATM to Ethernet (fibre) with wireless connections thrown in where necessary.
Base stations, known in the business as Macrocells, contain the transmission and battery backup equipment to support a variety of call and data handling capacities (typically up to 250 simultaneous users) dependent on location. This equipment has historically taken a lot of space – it would probably fill the average master bedroom at home, requires expert installation and, because there is a mast involved to hold antennae at some height, needs Local Authority planning permission.
Technology developments mean that this kit can now fit into a single wardrobe.
If you’re wondering what these seemingly random travel related posts are its because I’m in Dresden this week at the IWPC workshop on LTE small cell deployment strategies. Very interesting. These are long days though so you will probably have to wait until I get home for a report.
The video is of the funicular railway that took us up to the Luisenhof restaurant in Dresden. The view from up there is spectacular, or so I’m told. It was chucking it down when we were there so we couldn’t see much. We probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway – far too engrossed in the subject of LTE small cells.
The pic on the right is a sample of what the very excellent restaurant had to offer.
Ok you all. What do you know about luxury travel? Have you ever been on a coach where the seats move sideways so as to not have you crushed against the person next to you? Well I have. Here is the evidence – you might need to click to enlarge each pic to see what I am talking about. Technology at its best. Manyana…
It’s a funny old world. A judge orders ISPs to cut off access to Pirate Bay and visitor numbers to the site increase by 12 million. A government says it wants to increase the amount of regulation on the internet and the membership of the trade association shoots up.
The membership of ISPA normally hovers just under the 200 mark. The nature of our industry is that companies are bought out or merge with others to get scale. So in any given year the we get perhaps 10 or 15 new members but 10 or 15 disappear off the UK internet map and on the whole the number stays the same – ish.
Things are changing. The threat to the industry stemming from potentially onerous new regulations placed upon service providers, such as the upcoming Communications Bill Green Paper, has prompted six new service providers to join ISPA in the space of one month. This is a veritable tidal wave in the scheme of things.
I could never be a politician. The Queen’s Speech today included a Lords Reform Bill, Draft Communications Data Bill, Banking Reform Bill, Energy Bill, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill, Children and Families Bill, Pensions and Public Service Pensions Bill, Crime and Courts Bill, Croatia Accession Bill, Electoral Registration and Administration Bill, Defamation Bill, European Union (Approval of Treaty Amendment Decision) Bill, Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill, Justice and Security Bill, Small Donations Bill together with Draft Draft Care and Support, Local Audit and Water Bills and Carry Over Bills on Civil Aviation, Financial Services, Finance (No. 4), Local Government Finance and Trusts (Capital and Income).
I’ve listed them in one long string for effect. I guess I must be interested in the outcomes of some of them as they affect me – comms data for one. It has to take a very particular sort of person to want to become a politician. We pay politicians to sort this stuff out but do have to keep an eye on them because as we all know they can get a bit out of control.
The Communications Data Bill which caused such a lot of fuss a few weeks ago when it was leaked to the Sunday Times that it would include surveillance seems to not be getting any attention in the media today with things like Lords Reform hitting the headlines.
This must be remedied. We must rally the troops, man the battlements. In fact I think Shakespeare foresaw all this as you will see from this early version of another monarch’s speech:
Scene 1. France. Before Harfleur (Life of King Henry 5th)
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the web up with our English censorship.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest browsing in the privacy of his own home:
Since publishing the original post on this subject that described how to access Pirate Bay using free proxy servers I’ve had a few people point out other ways. Some were left as comments on the post itself. Some came in by email.
The most innovative is where Google Translate service is used as a proxy server. Take a look at this link:
That page is the normal Pirate Bay running though the Google translate servers, translating any African on the page to English. Obviously there is only English on the page so it displays like normal. Apparently, according to “umm hmm” from the TheSlyrateBay.com who fed me the info, this is not a preferred method as it can sometimes be slow and a bit clunky if the Google servers are experiencing high traffic (fwiw).
Many sites have been also set up as proxies to provide easy filter bypass to get to Pirate Bay – some have been pointed out in the comment stream of my earlier post – others will be easily findable online if you look – it won’t be hard.
I realise that most of you reading this blog think that life at an ISP is exciting. We seem to only do fun things you say? Pigeon versus broadband racing, major industry parties at the London Transport Museum to celebrate the end of the IPv4 address space, Charity world record attempts, 4G testing on double decker busses in London, cake baking competitions, Christmas parties, offsite seminars in 5 star country houses etc etc etc.
You would of course be completely right. What you don’t necessarily see is all the nitty gritty hard work that goes on back stage that keeps the show on the road.
Just happened to notice which search engine is being used to access this blog today. Percentage numbers are Google 94.02%, Yahoo 2.99%, Bing 2.72% and Ask .27%.
In the UK the regulator has been forcing BT to lose market share due to its significant market power. I wonder why it doesn’t do the same thing for search.
We all need our private space. This true in our virtual lives as much as in the touchy-feely-smelly real world that we once inhabited. In those days man could retire to his shed if he felt the need for a bit of time to himself. He would only let you in if you were a pal.
There are no sheds online. What do we do about privacy when using the internet? The fact that Google seems to know what I’ve been up to is a concern. Do we all sign up with proxy services? The proxy service provider will still know what you are up to. Switching on “private browsing” seems a bit of a faff and all that does is prevent PC from storing usage data.
A reader (thanks HmmmUK) just Tweeted me a link to the Google Opt out page:
“Opt out of customised Google Display Network ads
Opt out if you prefer ads not to be based on interests and demographics. When you opt out, Google disables this cookie and no longer associates interest and demographic categories with your browser.”
I thought “great, the answer to the problem” and proceeded to that page to opt out. Then I paused
I’ve ordered a Samsung Galaxy S3. I don’t know if it is the right thing to do. Part of me says moving to a new phone means that you should be moving to a significantly better device – I have an S2. Every new phone seems to be “just an iteration” of the incumbent spec. Certainly that’s how it seems with the iPhone and also with other devices that Samsung has brought out since the S2. I’m still on the original iPad!
On the other hand we live in a very fast moving world where even the smallest competitive edge can make a real difference. Can we ascribe this to our use of smartphones? I don’t know, perhaps. I think the S3 probably has just enough on the S2 to make it worth the upgrade. I need to do it because otherwise before I know it everyone else will have moved on to the S7 or S8 and I’ll be so far behind the times I will really have to think of packing it all in.
How to bypass the Virgin Media web filter to access Pirate Bay
Before you start reading this post, and many thousands have, take a look at Broadbandrating – if you are looking to move ISP then the site will help you choose which one to go for.
Now the post:
Industry colleague Gary Hough left a comment on my blog post on Pirate Bay the other day. He has now written a guest post (tagged on to the end of this one) outlining how easy it is to bypass web filters to access “blocked” sites. I asked myself whether this was a responsible thing to publish. After all it flies in the face of the process of Law and Order and I am not in favour of promoting unlawful activity.
However the process described below is such common knowledge1 and there are so many sites out there providing proxy services used by millions of people that I feel that the story needs to be told in an environment/on a vehicle that promotes sensible discussion of the issue. We certainly need those in places of power to have the opportunity to read about and properly understand the problem.
The issue is not just Pirate Bay or any other site promoting the music downloads that have engendered such emotion within the Rights Holder industries. The issue is the fact that the same process can be used to bypass any web filter. This means that were we to enforce blocking of other types of website – pornography, for example, or sites promoting racial hatred or extreme political views the blocks would be ineffective.
Seb Lahtinen is very active in the UK internet scene and amongst other things runs the LONAP peering exchange used by many of the country’s ISPs and hosting companies.
Seb is also a pal and is standing for re-election as non-executive director of Nominet, the UK’s Tier 1 registry for .uk domain names and safe pair of hands for what is one of our critical strategic infrastructures.
He is a serious minded individual and I’m sure makes an impactful contribution to Nominet’s board. I have already voted for him and thought I’d help out but giving him some airtime. I asked him three questions:
UK Cookie legislation (DIRECTIVE 2009/136/EC) became law on May 25th 2011. This is the one where websites are meant to give you the opportunity to opt out of visiting them if they are using cookies. Cookies can be very “invasive of privacy” though in varying degrees and some potentially not at all. The law, whilst being passed with good intentions has had some unintended consequences, notably affecting some cookie functionality that is useful and likely unintrusive.
I imagine that most of us with a website use Google Analytics. We all like to look at our traffic levels – well I do anyway. There has been some confusion as to exactly what is being required of website owners – rumours for example that sites only using Google Analytics cookies would not be made to comply as GA was “beneficial and not intrusive”.
You may or may not know that I am on the Information Commissioner’s Office Technology Reference Panel. This is an expert body of representatives from stakeholder groups in information and technology related industry sectors.
The ICO, which is the industry regulator, has given the UK a year to implement the cookie directive. This year is up at the end of this month and naturally there has been press comment and a flurry of businesses making adjustments to their websites in an attempt at compliance.
One year on exactly what will the ICO do re enforcing the law
Continuing with the day’s theme of the O2 LTE (4G) trials I found myself back in the Devonshire Arms with Cliff Saran of Computer Weekly. I’ll leave most of the story to Cliff and his column but I herewith provide you with the video footage of 4 more iPlayer streams – we could have streamed more but screen size becomes an issue.
At the Piazza in Covent Garden I uploaded a 298MB video in eight minutes at 9Mbps uplink speed.
In the Devonshire Arms I videoed the process of setting up the iPlayer streams and then uploaded that video again to YouTube so that we could compare performance with the Covent Garden upload.
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 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 🙂 .
