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Engineer

Pissup in a Brewery – Photographic Proof of a Great LONAP-Sponsored Evening

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 2 July, 2014

Pictures from the trefor.net Pissup In A Brewery held at the Fourpure brewery in London on Thursday 26th June

The Pissup In A Brewery, twas a good night. Sponsored by LONAP it was mostly LONAP members and guests. The rain held off, the food was universally acclaimed as fantastic, the beer was pure, copious and appreciated by all.

I’ve been to two other Pissup In A Brewery events, or Pissups In A Brewery. The first was with Bethesda RFC to a brewery in Liverpool, Castle Eden I think it may have been although time plays tricks with the memory, especially where a brewery is involved. We declined a tour of the brewery in order to maximise the efficiency of our two hours’ free bar. You can imagine the carnage of a coach load of rugby players let loose in the bar. We stopped in Rhyl for fish and chips on the way home. That’s all I can remember.

The other Pissup In A Brewery was at Batemans’ in AWainfleet. Wainfleet was once a port but the river has long since silted up and it is now a cosy village a few skims of a flat stone from the coast. It was a friend’s birthday and we didn’t find out until the end of the trip that he had paid for the lot of us.After the tour we retired to a pie and a pint on one of the local Batemans pubs. V civilised.

Last Thursday’s Pissup In A Brewery was held at Dan Lowe’s Fourpure brewery in South Bermondsey a stone’s throw from Millwall FC. Nuff said. You will note that the phrase Pissup In A Brewery gets repeated a number of times in the post. This is simply because the phrase to me seems to have become a brand in its own right. I can envisage having lots of pissups in lots of breweries. Reality is we might just repeat it next year, Dan Lowe and sponsorship willing. Like I said, twas a great night.

Thanks to LONAP for the sponsorship, thanks to Fourpure Brewery for having us, thanks to Richard Gibbs Catering for a great barbecue and thanks to all who came and enjoyed themselves and helped makeit such an enjoyable night.

Tags pissup in a brewery

competitions Engineer food and drink fun stuff

Pissup In A Brewery free tickets competition No 3 – corny football sayings

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 19 June, 2014
2 Comments on Pissup In A Brewery free tickets competition No 3 – corny football sayings

Yeehaw. Another day another competition to win tickets to the Pissup In A Brewery. Today is a big world cup football day for England so I thought that we’d keep it simple. Hit me with a corny or funny football related saying or quote. Best ones will get tix. eg it was a game of two halves, really pleased for Chalky, thought Nobby did well to get his head to that one etc. Can’t reuse these ones obvs – I’m sure you can do better. Read about other unbelievable but true competitions: What is my favourite beer? Win free VIP tickets to a Pissup

Engineer webrtc

WebRTC at #GBP14

genband sponsored car aat the #GBP14 conference

Thoughts on the WebRTC market and opportunity for service providers

Interesting place, Orlando. The weather patterns seem very repeatable every day. It starts with a warm morning and heats up through the day until the humidity and heat combination becomes uncomfortable at which point nature steps in and thunderstorms visit the land. Later the rain stops and the cycle begins again. It’s why it’s a very green place . It is worth however issuing a warning to Brits considering coming here on holiday. Summertime in the UK, that time of year when you all want to take off somewhere, is low season in Florida. As I write the pool has emptied and lightning lights up the land.

Although you have been seeing blog posts showing what a good time I’ve been having in Orlando I am actually here for business. Tomorrow I’m participating in a panel on Unified Communications. In the UK some people have been trying very hard to move the buzzword on. It’s tired they say. We need something new and fresh.

Engineer fun stuff

Announcing the trefor.net Pissup In A Brewery

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 11 June, 2014
3 Comments on Announcing the trefor.net Pissup In A Brewery

Ever been to a Pissup In A Brewery? Well we at trefor.net like to let our hair down and this summer are having a BBQ with a difference. It is indeed a “Pissup In A Brewery”, sponsored by LONAP and located at Dan Lowe’s Fourpure brewery in South Bermondsey, just 5 minutes from London Bridge.

Folk that have been to #trefbash events will not want to miss this. Get your tickets ere (Roll up, roll up roll up.) Scroll down for more information & lookout for some free ticket competitions over the next week or two.

We can start with a ticket for whoever can describe the best drinking game they have ever taken part in. My decision is final, I may award more than one prize and it may well be that the winner is drawn out of a proverbial hat (blessed are the cheesemakers or words to that effect).

Event registration for The trefor.net pissup in a brewery powered by Eventbrite

Engineer fun stuff

Gymnasium etiquette and staying in the zone

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 30 May, 2014
1 Comment on Gymnasium etiquette and staying in the zone

Last week I took the plunge and joined Lincoln University gym. Drastic measures are called for – the lifestyle in this networking game is too social networking oriented, and I’m not talking about online social networks.

Anthony took me through a 1 hour induction process measuring weight, Body Mass Index etc etc etc although they don’t pay much heed to BMI at the gym – too many muscular blokes there that render the measurement irrelevant. I can’t remember all the parameters they measured. All I know is that some improvement is called for. It’s been sometime.

So I’ve got a programme that lasts somewhere between 60 – and 90 minutes and I’ve now been through it 4 times in the past week including 3 consecutive days this week. We have had a bank holiday weekend in that time so there have been forces pushing back against the weightloss/fitness. By yesterday I’d lost 1.3Kg since the induction session which considering the bank holiday ain’t too bad.

Before anyone says anything Anthony tells me it’s ok to train every day as the weights programme exercises different muscles in a 3 day rotation.

Now the main thing about Lincoln University gym is that most of the people there, me apart, seem pretty fit. Course they are all about thirty years younger than me so no wonder. It is somewhat disconcerting seeing blokes not only doing chin-ups but pulling themselves right up so that their arms go straight down by their sides – aka gymnasts on the rings – I can’t explain it any better and didn’t think it would be appropriate to take photos. It’s a good job the gym has a high ceiling otherwise they’d be banging their heads on it.

The other reason for not taking photos is because of the extremely fit girls in the room. It’s hard enough not to appear to be staring without causing more of a stir by using the camera. This means you have to develop a survival technique. Be seen to be in your own zone. Not staring at others. It’s all about etiquette I suppose. Just sneaked in the selfie of me in the pic above.

This means plugging in earphones and generally staring straight ahead. In the gym nobody talks to each other. They all stare straight ahead, sometimes at themselves in the mirror, or they stare at weights, assessing which ones to use next, presumably. Obviously to participate in this enforced zonality one needs to have ones own sounds. I happen to have some good stuff on my phone – Donna Summer’s Greatest Hits, Abba Gold and other quality material that has stood the test of time. My selection is fairly limited though so after 4 sessions it has become quite repetitive. I’m going to have to get some new tunes.

In the meantime the gym does provide four channels of TV on a screen at each workstation (or whatever it’s called). Most of what’s on offer is either crappy daytime TV or quite naturally, music channels. The music videos are quite illuminating. I’m sorry if this is not news to you but a big percentage of them seem to feature semi naked women jiggling around on screen.

In my day we had Pan’s People and Hot Gossip but they were tame compared to what seems to be standard fare nowadays. I dunno. To understand where I’m coming from you need to realise that my fave movie is Mary Poppins. Nuff said.

Yesterday I plugged in to the gym sounds and fair play they were upbeat enough to up my pace and get my pulse going – the exercise did that, not the videos. The hardest part about going to the gym is that I have to walk home afterwards. Up Steep Hill for those who know Lincoln. For those that don’t know Lincoln Steep Hill is about a 1 in 1 gradient, or at least that’s how it feels even without having been to the gym. It’s not called Steep Hill for nothing.

You will be getting periodic updates on my progress in the gym, the regularity of which will depend on whether there actually is progress. If there is none I’ll be keeping quiet but expect to hear something soon:) My only short term problem is that at the end of next week I’m off to the Genband Perspectives conference in Orlando which will involve a week of conspicuous over consumption. It is the US of A after all. Let’s hope the hotel has a gymnasium eh?

Stay tuned. Hear it first on trefor.net.

Other really interesting exercise related posts:

There aren’t any. You will have to settle for these great food related posts instead:)

How to cook the perfect baked bean
Best pancake toppings
Important announcement on a Sunday morning

broadband Engineer H/W Net

Rural Broadband — a Lesson in JFDI (Part 3)

Post author By Tim Robinson
Post date Friday, 30 May, 2014
1 Comment on Rural Broadband — a Lesson in JFDI (Part 3)

Rural broadband service deployed by Tim Robinson has made a difference to his local community – Part 3

Readers who not yet read Part 1 and Part 2 of Tim Robinson’s post will want to do so now, whereas those who have done so and who are no doubt eager to plunge right in should get on with it!

The success of the farm project has encouraged us to deploy into other rural areas. For the less financially promising locations we have taken a very conservative approach to funding, generally getting most of the installation costs for new repeater sites paid for upfront by the very customers who are driving the deployment. This ensures our ability to remain profitable and also ensures a level of commitment from our customers. Also, early on we took the decision that all services would be provided on a one-month contract. People seem to like that. A lot.

We have so far chosen areas that that Big Telcos will have real trouble covering with FTTx but that we can easily reach from our existing backhaul. We are also deploying into a local business park that has particularly bad ADSL service Such facilities are a lucrative area for us and seem thus far to have been deliberately avoided by Big Telcos, but we cannot be complacent as they are likely to be targeted in the future. We have sought to be very supportive and provide a good level of customer service, and business users tend not to be lured by the promise of high speeds and free sport channels. People seem to like that. A lot.

Since 2010 nearly 100 customers have connected to the network. In answer to such demand, we have expanded from a single VDSL2 backhaul from AAISP to multi-homed Ethernet transit over VDSL2. More recently, we added an EAD fibre backhaul. Our VoIP service has been widely used by our customers as a way of reducing cost and improving audio quality, as even phone calls over 8km lines sound rather muffled in comparison!

Some random thoughts and lessons learned:

Don’t just sit there and moan at Big Telcos. Do something creative. Nothing will happen unless you do.
If you don’t ask, you don’t get. People are much more accommodating of having a rather ugly 60cm dish on their chimney than you might at first have thought.
Farmers and landowners are great to work with. They have a can-do attitude to most things, unlike the naysayers of Big Telcos and the local authorities. They also have cherry pickers to help with link tests, and 4x4s to pull you out of muddy fields.
It’s easier to seek forgiveness than (planning) permission. We are operating on the basis that our antennas are ‘de minimis’ and the local council have been extremely supportive of our service.
When FTTx becomes available, not everyone leaves. A lot of people actually have a strong dislike of Big Telcos and welcome the alternative!
Use a professional aerial contractor for all ladder work. You know it makes sense.
A bridged Layer 2 wireless network will eventually end in tears. Route, Route, Route!

Things that are holding back small ‘alt-nets’ from deploying more coverage:

There is no such thing as ‘BT Retail’, ‘BT Wholesale’ and ‘BT Openreach’. These exist only in the minds of the regulator and BT plc’s internal processes. They are all part of BT plc and they can juggle profit centres to suit their shareholders, keep the wholesale prices high and retail prices low. Until BT Openreach is physically and legally separated from the other two, there will never be a ‘level playing field’ in this market. I call upon the government to force the Openreach division to be hived off into a totally independent, Network Rail-like, not-for-profit company.
Cost of backhaul. With the incumbent monopoly charging for fibre backhaul in the way they do, there will often not be a business case for installing service to some of the more remote places – wireless represents the only sensible way of delivering the connectivity.
By all accounts, the BDUK government funding of rural broadband is an utter fiasco. The whole process has been shrouded in secrecy, deliberately restricted to BT as the only real participant, and is thus holding back our wireless deployments. This is because we as small operators don’t know where the taxpayer funded FTTx footprint is to be extended next. It’s like the government building a road but not telling anyone where it is going to be until the diggers arrive! Government funded FTTx is part of the national infrastructure and there should be total transparency of which cabinets will be upgraded, which postcodes are served by these cabinets, and which will definitely not be done.
Fibre business rates and proposed business rate liability on wireless internet antennas. These are not progressive taxes, and as such makes it hard for small telcos to invest in fibre or wireless infrastructure. I call upon the government to overhaul this iniquitous situation and instead find a way to raise funds in a more progressive manner, based on profit. Oh wait. It’s called VAT and Corporation Tax.

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broadband Engineer engineering H/W Net

Rural Broadband — a Lesson in JFDI (Part 2)

Post author By Tim Robinson
Post date Thursday, 29 May, 2014
1 Comment on Rural Broadband — a Lesson in JFDI (Part 2)

Rural broadband service deployed by Tim Robinson has made a difference to his local community – Part 2

Readers who have not yet read Part 1 of Tim Robinson’s post will want to do so now, whereas those who have done so and who are no doubt eager to plunge right in should hesitate no longer.

More often than not it pays to keep your mouth shut, however sometimes it pays more to be a blabbermouth! Had I kept quiet about the VDSL2 connection my friend Dave and I jury-rigged from his house to mine I’d have had a 40 Mbit/sec internet service all to myself. Alas, though, I was unable to keep such a good secret. I told my neighbours, who were immediately intrigued and wished to know more. Significant help was offered in exchange for a slice of the pie, so we ran an ethernet cable to the next door neighbour, and a cantenna-based 2.4 GHz link across the road to the other neighbor, and needless to say they were both chuffed to bits. Looking back on it all now, too, I think it is fair to say that without their encouragement and loads of assistance that just might have been the end of the story.

The roof of my house has a bird’s eye view of large swathes of the town, and this inspired us to consider the opportunities that this might open up to serve to the broadbandless burghers of Basingstoke. We decided after a couple of months that it was time to take things a bit further, to spread the net wider so to speak! With the addition of a cheap Mikrotik router, a Freeradius server, some clever MySQL queries from one of the neighbours, and a couple of rooftop antennas, I was able to get a basic configuration running that would allow us to bill users in a way similar to AAISP’s rather complex billing plan. And so, with just a few hundred quid’s worth of kit www.hiwifi.co.uk was born. It may not have compare to the American WWII effort at Iwo Jima, but it felt good nonetheless to get that first base station up and running, with the help of one of my pioneering neighbours. The first paying customers were all members of the Basingstoke Broadband Campaign who lived in my area and who were prepared to put their money where their mouths had been. And the rest, as they say, is history.

During all of this time the leviathan had not completely gone to sleep, as while I was extending the network out to Chineham and Beggarwood — which had even worse broadband speeds than we had over in our neck of the woods — BT and BDUK were plotting to use government money to overbuild my commercially deployed network and steal my customers. Well, that’s how it felt, anyway.

BDUK have since overbuilt a major part of my footprint, and it has been interesting as there was not a sudden and mass exodus from our 8 Mbit/sec service to VDSL2. As such, we had breathing space in which to look for ‘pastures new’, and we started to look further ‘afield’. (Puns very much intended – read on.)

Rather more recently, I was invited by Hampshire County Council to attend a Country Landowner’s Association meeting held in Winchester, to discuss rural broadband. The keynote speakers were Bill Murphy of BT and Maria Miller MP, (who was also Minister for Media Culture and Sport at the time), and needless to say the meeting did not go particularly well for either of them (though the lunch was quite good). There was a lot of animated discussion and, being a member of the awkward squad, I asked a few pertinent questions from the floor.

After the meeting a farmer and his wife approached and told me their long and sad tale. He had a load of farm buildings he’d converted into industrial units, and BT did not have enough copper to provide phones to all of them. The lines that did exist extended 8km to the exchange, too, so broadband was slow and flakey. Word on the street was that one tenant had been quoted £12,000 in excess construction charges to get one analogue line installed, and the farmer was having trouble letting some of the units as a result. He asked me the question I was waiting for: “Could I do anything to help?”

We looked at Google. I told him there was a problem in the way, that being a huge hill that blocked line of sight to his farm from my house. The response to that will forever remain ingrained in my mind. “That’s not a problem. That’s MY hill! Why not stick a repeater on top of it?”

The farmer took me around to his land and showed me what could be seen from where. He spoke to his neighbours, and quite literally elevated us and our survey antennas to new heights in his cherry picker, with cows looking on suspiciously from below. He generally oiled the wheels of progress in such a creative and ‘can-do’ way that within a few months I was connecting his farm, his home and the first of his tenants to our network!

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Rural Broadband — a Lesson in JFDI (Part 1)

Post author By Tim Robinson
Post date Wednesday, 28 May, 2014
3 Comments on Rural Broadband — a Lesson in JFDI (Part 1)

Rural broadband strategy- sometimes a community will haver to jfdi & sort their own solution

Trefor.net welcomes guest blogger Tim Robinson, Director of TxRx Communications Ltd. Tim’s post will run in three parts, beginning today and extending through to week’s end.

It is an onerous task to write a guest blog for one with as much credibility as @Tref, however this tale needs to be told, and the opinions herein need to be aired.

In the beginning there was ADSL. Historically, most of Basingstoke has suffered from bad broadband speeds. This all comes from having a telephone exchange in the town centre, and having most of the residential areas built in a doughnut-shaped ring around the centre of the town moving out 4-7km (as the copper runs) from the exchange. Thus, broadband was doomed before it was even a twinkle in BT’s eye.

As broadband became more of an essential utility and less of a luxury, campaigns were lead by frustrated people (including me) for whom 1.5 mbit was simply not adequate for doing one’s job, or keeping the offspring up-to-speed with the latest cat videos. We raised the issue with the Big Telco and others, but they all said nothing could be done. Unbeknown to us, though, there was activity between BT and our local council, and in 2010, there was a fanfare of excitement when it was announced that Basingstoke was going to be one of the first towns to get VDSL2 – colloquially (but incorrectly) known as ‘fibre broadband’.

The poor residents on the outskirts of Basingstoke breathed a collective sigh of relief, basking in the ‘knowledge’ that finally BT was doing something to help us. There was elation, and delight. Things were not all that they seemed, though, and the elation lasted only until the actual deployment plans began to be made known. That elation, in fact, quickly turned to disbelief, anger, and frustration. It seemed that BT were cherry-picking the cabinets in the already well-served Virgin Media areas close to town, plus a few others that met some secret internal criteria. The worst served parts of the town would continue to be unserved by the new technology! We were furious that BT had chosen to deploy VDSL2 into places that didn’t really need it, and omitting the places that did!

There were meetings. Beer was cried into. Letters to our MP written. There were Big Meetings with the campaign groups, the council, our MP and important people in BT. Above all, though, there was the spark of an idea. If some areas were to be served by VDSL2, why not pick up the backhaul from a VDSL2 connection and use wireless to provide internet service to the parts that were not included? Thus, this was the start of the JFDI^* approach to broadband provision.

I live at the top of a hill. It transpired that a friend — let’s call him ‘Dave’, as it is after all his name — lived exactly 981 metres away, and was one of the ‘chosen ones’ set to receive VDSL2. With an element of stupidly unnecessary risk on Dave’s part, involving antics with a torch and a drill at the top of a three-section ladder, my friend and I determined that we had line of sight to his chimney from my house. Leveraging that knowledge, we managed to get an 80 mbit wireless link from Dave’s house back to what was to become a data centre in my garage. Our excitement was palpable, akin to the feelings of those pioneers who made the first London to New York phone call. Soon after, one of my neighbours lent me an old laptop, which we set up in Dave’s loft and from which we ran constant iperf and ping tests to see if our contraption would actually work.

Convinced over a couple of months that this wireless lark might actually fly, I took the plunge and ordered a shiny new phone line for Dave’s house from AAISP, along with a shiny new VDSL2 connection. (Installation was not exactly smooth, but that is another story.) Finally, once the connection was installed, I linked the Openreach VDSL2 modem straight into the wireless link and fired up a PPPOE connection at my house. Bingo! Suddenly what was 1.4 Mbit/sec on a good day became 40 Mbit/sec…and this was a very good day, indeed.

^*To the uninitiated, JFDI stands for ‘Just Flippin Do It’. There are other alternative interpretations of JFDI but this is the one I am using.
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Engineer H/W

Good Day Sunshine!

A few years back the following kernel of ridiculousness went in one ear, hung around long enough to make a mark, and went out the other: To capture enough solar energy to run the state of Arizona would require enough solar panels to entirely cover the state of Arizona. I don’t recall where I picked up that too-convenient statistic and I never confirmed it in any meaningful way (or any meaningless way, for that matter), but for years I have been guilty of bringing it into the conversation whenever the subject of solar energy has come up, mostly I must admit because the very idea entertains me no end. With this firmly planted in mind, over the past two weeks the subject of solar roadways (or perhaps I should write Solar Roadways, as it is a patented technology and that is the name of the company that hopes to use it to change the world) has come up in my presence no less than three times. In each case, the person bringing the juicy tidbit up for discussion swore up and down that they had heard that this new solar technology idea was quite revolutionary, making use of a solar energy collection methods and materials that are far better than what has commonly been known up to this point. The conversations were quite disparate, the people involved knowing each other only tangentially at best, and yet I figured the whole solar roadways…er Solar Roadways thing had to be some kind of an Internet meme…something I missed on Facebook and/or Twitter that was just making the rounds. It was only with the third mention, that I started to think I should burn a pixel or two to find out exactly what had the masses in a renewed solar energy rage.

First, I thought I should try to find some kind of pointer to the whole “Covering Arizona” thing (Coen Brothers fans, rejoice!). I googled and googled again. Then a third time. I also binged, and more than once. Nada. Now perhaps I overestimate my Internet search skills — I think I am Top 10 worldwide, and neither you nor your friend nor your friend’s brother can convince me otherwise — but even if I am only marginally adept (and I am far far better than that), I figure something would’ve turned up if there is or ever was any truth in that wonderfully wacky supposition. Alas…

So myth debunked. Next I decided to bring myself up-to-speed on solar energy technology. My inner science geek was born when I was but a wee youngster and it continues to live and breathe within. Unfortunately, though, I cannot say I have kept up with the evolution and progress of the energy sciences beyond the level of layman (computer-based tech is just too much fun, and there are only so many hours in a day/week/month/year/life). So off I went in search of education, and immediately I learned that the raw cost of solar energy year-to-year has been dramatically dropping for some time and continues to do so. In fact, new concentrated solar technology is said to be up to five times most cost effective than those ubiquitous standard flat photovoltaic silicon panels, putting it on par with oil and natural gas. Also, prototypes have achieved a concentration of solar energy that is more than 1,000 times greater than those panels. Go figure!

Relieved of preconception and far better informed, it was time to put my proverbial pedal to the metal and find my way to the now-seemingly-everywhere subject of Solar Roadways. Be it the result of a well-executed publicity blitz or a news confluence resulting from the $1 million the company has raised in recently-launched and still-ongoing indiegogo crowdfunding campaign (or both), Solar Roadways is the annoying buzz on the solar energy front that is currently tickling our collective ear (The Verge, CNN, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, The Daily Mail). The tech and company is the brainchild of Scott and Julie Brusaw, an Idaho couple, who since 2006 have been working to develop solar panels that can be installed on roads and in parking lots, capable of collecting massive amounts of clean energy from the sun. Able to keep the streets on which they reside free of snow and ice, Solar Roadways panels — which are made from ruggedized glass and can connect to each other via mesh network (in the event one fails, the system will notify its need for maintenance) — can also illuminate those streets and display warnings via LEDs. They also are said to be capable of cutting greenhouse gasses by up to 75% (this, of course, assuming that the tech hits worldwide critical mass). And perhaps the most appealing aspect of this astonishing-seeming technology, even more so than vast practical applications and inevitable economic benefits Solar Roadways can potentially offer? It LOOKS like the future!

Solar Freakin’ Roadways!

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Engineer fun stuff internet peering

Dress to impress – LINX 20th birthday bash photos by @andyd #LINX85

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 20 May, 2014
No Comments on Dress to impress – LINX 20th birthday bash photos by @andyd #LINX85

Dressed to impress – terrific images courtesy of Andy Davidson from the LINX 20th birthday bash at the Cumberland Hotel in London. We are all v sophis.

Andy is a keen amateur photographer and is a member of a club – they have regular get-togethers to shoot a variety of artistic subjects.Ask to see more of his stuff. He has a career beyond the internet. He even appears in some of his own photos – very long armed selfies.

All work and no play eh?…

Engineer fun stuff internet peering

The night before the morning after @routerfixer #LINX85

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 20 May, 2014
No Comments on The night before the morning after @routerfixer #LINX85

photo booth at LINX85 - 20th birthday celebration

Photo booth pic from the LINX 20th birthday celebrations at the Cumberland Hotel. A great time was had by all. Slight oddity, considering the internetty nature of the event, that the photo booth would only print out “polaroid” style pictures rather than being able to email me an electronic copy (cf the image of my eyeball by the opticians last week). This photo is a photo of a photo.

The two serious looking guys are Clive Stone and Steve Lalonde.

It’s funny to think that the last 20 years, the life of LINX, represent a substantial part of the total lifespan of the internet. ARPANET dates back to 1969. So if you were born before 1969 you pre-date the internet. You will be able to tell because when you first sign up to Facebook and need to choose your date of birth, any year prior to 1969 on the sign up page will involve scrolling down to get to the right number. They make it easy for those born in the “internet age” – their birth dates are displayed on the initial screen.

While I’m in a historical perspective mood and looking for milestones in my timeline it occurs to me that in In 1995, one year after the founding of LINX, I bought the Bill Gates book “The Road Ahead”. At the time this was a visionary work by one of the world’s most successful high tech entrepreneurs. We would have to be patient as the “information superhighway” was still some time in the future.

This is no longer the case. We have been streaming down the information superhighway for some time now, a fact reflected in the success and growth of LINX as an Internet Exchange Point.

I will be 72 years of age on LINX 40th birthday. I won’t be in the internet game although I trust I will till be an user (:). It’s going to be an exciting next 20 years. We no longer need Bill Gates to provide the vision. The vision is whatever your imagination can come up with (teleporting aside).

In the meantime Happy Birthday LINX, and all who sail in her (!?)

Engineer engineering internet peering servers

The 3rd LINX router modelled by @neilmcrae and Keith Mitchell #LINX85

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 19 May, 2014
4 Comments on The 3rd LINX router modelled by @neilmcrae and Keith Mitchell #LINX85

So you think you know your routers? This SPARCstation, chain.demon.co.uk, was LINX’s 3rd router installed at Demon in Finchley (AS2529) in 1994. Before most of today’s ISPs were a twinkling of a Microsoft egg timer.

The SPARCstation is modelled by Keith Mitchel and Neil McRae who I realise don’t look old enough to remember those days but you would be wrong:)

The lads might be able to enlighten us re the throughput capability and route capacity of this box. It would be a far cry from the ~~100Mbps~~ 100Gbps toys that Neil plays with nowadays at BT. It probably didn’t need to support more than 20 routes!

Neil is holding the router, Keith has the cup of tea. Note that the box is being held higher up than the cup of tea. That’s in case Keith drops the cup – safety in mind.:)

One also wonders at which point racks were standardised at the U dimensions they have today. Many an ISP had rows of tower PCs stood on metal shelves. Of course U’s these days are often Virtual.

broadband Engineer net neutrality voip

VoIP not working over your broadband connection? We may have the explanation.

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 19 May, 2014
No Comments on VoIP not working over your broadband connection? We may have the explanation.

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

VoIP over broadband not working? It may be the router.

Routers provided by some major ISPs are preventing their customers from using VOIP services such as Skype.

For some time now members of the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association have been keeping a list of routers through which VoIP doesn’t appear to work. The routers themselves include functionality or elements of firmware that are either not user configurable or there are elements of the ISP service that mandate their router without an obvious means of using an alternative. This means that if a customer wants to use Over The Top VoIP services such as those provided by ITSPA members they usually can’t.

Unfortunately whilst this may well not be a deliberate act of anti competitiveness on behalf of the ISP it has the same effect as if VoIP was being blocked in the ISP network – interesting considering that some of these ISPs offer VoIP services of their own.

If you have such a router you probably can’t use Skype or any other VoIP service offered by the 100 or so independent providers in the UK. Whether this is deliberate or not is a moot point. The end result is that the ISP is affecting your ability to use the broadband service you pay for.

Most major ISPs are signatories to the Broadband Stakeholders’ Group Code of Practice and have undertaken to respect what is known as Net Neutrality or the promise not to favour any one type of traffic over another. This is a fundamental principle of how the internet works.

If an ISP provided routers over which 3rd Party VoIP services did not work whilst their own VoIP service continued to work perfectly well they would be flouting these principles. Effectively they would on the one hand be saying they are “good guys” which comes with obvious PR benefits whilst in practice being “bad guys”.

Dan Winfield, CEO of VoIP provider Voxhub says:

“This is an ongoing problem. It can affect customers that work from home at any time even if they have things up and running. A new update is shipped out by an ISP and effectively wipes out their phones. You can see the roll outs happening over a period of time as people call for support. The worse side of this is that customers get angry with us and we cannot do much. We cannot guarantee our service will work on home broadband as a result. When we roll out to offices, we always supply routers to get round the problem but this doesn’t work for home users.”

Not all ISPs are affected. It would be interesting to hear from any reader who has a broadband service but over which VoIP will not work.

Tags broadband, voip

Engineer fun stuff

Breaking strain of a KitKat – official definition

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 15 May, 2014
3 Comments on Breaking strain of a KitKat – official definition

The question of the day is what is the breaking strain of a KitKat? This came up in conversation in the Strugglers last Friday “early doors”. I don’t recall the context, it was in the pub. In the pub these things have to be written down, or immediately forgotten.

The act of writing things you hear in pubs used to be done on the back of beer mats. Nowadays it’s rattled off in an email addressed to oneself which is what I did in this case. Saves a fortune in beer mats. Extends their useful life. People will no doubt still vandalise beermats, primarily in the execution of the “who threw that beermat” joke whereby a couple of tears are made in one side of the mat which is then affixed to the nostrils. The person stands up and utters “who threw that beermat”. Always gets a laugh. Ish. The how many beermats can you flip game is not described here as it is not destructive to the beermat. I digress.

Continuing with the digression one has to ask oneself how many good jokes heard in pubs have been forgotten because they weren’t immediately written down. How many great ideas have foundered on the beer washed rocks of the tavern, inn or public house?

Lots. When I was a student in Bangor I used to occasionally hitch-hike the length of Wales to visit my grandmother who lived in Cefneithin, a small mining community between Llanelli and Caerfyrddin. She had a traditional Welsh approach to meals. A cooked breakfast would be followed by elevenses, lunch at 12, afternoon tea at four and then dinner at 6pm at which point, after a respectable interval I would be kicked out to the pub and return home to a plate of ham sandwiches waiting for me in the kitchen.

On one such occasion I went to the pub and woke up the next day to find a beermat with the words “parrot” and “coal” written on the back. They were the key points to a great joke I’d heard the night before. Only problem was I couldn’t for the life of me remember the rest of the joke. Ah well.

This doesn’t get us any nearer to answering the question of the day. Before we can answer we have to agree on the unit of measure used to define the breaking strain. If you look up “breaking strain” on Wikipedia you find yourself redirected to a page about Deformation mechanics. I had hoped to come up with a post here that illustrated an intellectual grasp of the necessary physics associated with KitKat breaking strains described in an easily understood way that further showed me as a true man of the people.

Unfortunately having stared at the Wikipedia page for some time my brain began to hurt. I pulled back before the activity got too dangerous. My brain too, like the humble KitKat, has a breaking strain. The units for the breaking strain of my brain are likely to be different to that of the breaking strain of a KitKat. I am unable to describe either for the reasons mentioned above.

In the interest of finishing off this post to our mutual satisfaction it is still necessary to somehow define the breaking strain of said KitKat. A sensible way to do this might be to describe it in terms of thumb pressure. This however brings with it problems.

Experience tells us that a four finger KitKat will be easier to break than a two finger job, assuming that you’re trying to break it along the vertical central line¹. This is because the additional width of four fingers over two fingers brings with it twice as much amplification of force due to leverage from the sides of the KitKat.

The breaking strain will therefore vary dependent on the size of the KitKat. We don’t need to worry about that here but in the table below the differences are examined. Laboratory testing (in the pub) has shown that there are distinct grades of thumb pressure:

Thumb pressure	Practical use
Very light	No effect on a KitKat. Only occasionally applied when a gentle nose scratch is required
Quite light	No effect on a KitKat. Used when attempting to turn over a page in a paper or novel, sometimes requiring the application of moisture to the thumb
Lightish	Feels as if it should have an effect on four fingers of KitKat but in practice does not. Usually the pressure required to scratch a bit of crud off your phone screen.
Moderately medium	This will always break a four finger KitKat and is the standard pressure for such a task. Also works on spaghetti when you are trying to get it all in the pan. Not good enough for two fingers.
Medium	Also used in breaking four fingers although borderline overkill for many people. Could work for two fingers in the right environmental conditions. Is usable on Breakaways but why would you?
Strong medium	The standard application for two fingers. Not really suitable for four fingers as can cause finger strain when the KitKat breaks unexpectedly easily.
Medium strong	As with four fingers in the Medium category this is almost overkill for two fingers. This amount of pressure is almost enough to break a thick slab of Cadbury’s chocolate although we all know this often takes a bit of a smack on the corner of a table to get it going. Also useful for breaking pork scratchings into smaller more manageable pieces.
Strong	Overkill for all types of KitKat and should only be used with caution on anything as thumb strain is a real danger. Will definitely work on thick slabs of chocolate. Not many people can exert this amount of thumb pressure. A recognised component of “plumber’s grip”
Uber strong	Only reached after completing 7 years plumbing apprenticeship. Very rare.

That’s it as far as KitKats and breaking strains go. Hope this has been of some use. Look out for future posts on quantification of willpower when offered another beer.

Images courtesy of @TomAndThat – follow him.

¹ For the purpose of this exercise we assume that the KitKat is to be broken into two equal halves along the central line. Breaking off one finger with three remaining requires totally different physics. We also assume that the KitKat is not being broken across the middle of all fingers. Ironically to do this for four fingers takes more effort than for two which is the total opposite to the scenario first described.

Snom Audio Lab

Dusan Aleksic is the Head of Hardware Development for Snom Technology AG

In the end of nineties Serbia was under UN sanctions and as a young electro engineer I was a part of the small team tasked with maintaining the gas masks in stock. I had an open issue before me: the carbon microphone was out of date and needed to be replaced. Unfortunately, the microphone in question was originally produced in another part of the former Yugoslavia and it could no longer be had. Also, copying it didn’t work as our punch tool machine was unable to make such complicated rounded holes with the strange patterns, and simply making holes on the microphone’s surface and trying to talk through them produced terrible results. We quickly realized that we would need to create a new design and establish a correlation between hole-shapes and design patterns of the microphone and its audio performance. In our audio lab we had a single B&K audio measurement system, which was a bit old hat but still in good shape and still in calibration range, and after some time the job was complete.

I moved on and became a part of the new growing network convergence world that first developed digital terminals and after that VoIP and wireless devices. In the beginning of the 2000s, VoIP’s early stages, the acoustical audio measurements become unimportant. People believed that the “mighty” DSP could solve any problem, and the knowledge on terminal devices and acoustic design had been pushed to the second plane: in most cases speech transmission quality judgment excluded electroacoustic components.

How It All Started

At snom technology AG we were aware of the complexity of VoIP terminal devices from the early beginning. We improved audio quality over the years by combining our acoustic experience with the latest DSP algorithms and our VoIP signaling know-how. Specifically, we solved various issues inherent in VoIP technology, including processing delay, network delay, network packet loss, need for VAD and CNG, countless types of noise, etc. And, of course, we addressed the main issue, that being synchronization, as by its very nature VoIP is an asynchronous connection, and sometimes audio packets are dropped simply because the sender and receiver are not using the same clock.

VoIP Audio Measurement equipment evolves in sync with VoIP technology, and as a VoIP pioneer snom has helped it to quickly reach a mature state which, improving overall overall audio quality through the use of various narrow and wide band codes.

Snom Audio Lab at a Glance

For modern telecommunications, old audio standards such as TIA-810B (Narrow band) and TIA-920 (Wide Band) fail to match requirements. These standards are focused on half duplex connection. Important aspects of the audio quality are not exposed, and many typical problems remain unresolved.

TIA-based audio optimized devices are unable to match customer expectations for perfect audio quality, and for that reason two years ago the snom development team began following the latest audio requirements for wide-band audio based on ETSI 202 739 and ETSI 202 740.

With ETSI, all requirements from the TIA standard are covered, but it doesn’t stop there. ETSI extends the requirements in frequency response domain and in loudness ratings, which requires high quality electroacoustic converters. ETSI also includes double talk behavior measurements and speech quality in presence of network impairments (packet loss, jitter) and, at the end, speech quality in presence of the background noise.

Today the snom audio lab uses Head Acoustic software and equipment, and I believe we have the best-in-the-market tool to create the non-compromise audio quality. We can fully cover all ETSI measurements, and we can do additional various HQS-IP items, such as TOSQA and PESQ, or spectral echo attenuation vs. time, or test our mockup designs to fix all over-limits distortions in the very early phase of the ID development.

Snom has put all of these tools and software to design the 7xx phone family, and with this product we deliver the best quality to our customers, this according to the latest requirements of modern telecommunication. Snom7xx, for example, has been built to pass the frequency response requirement based on ETSI 202-379 at every handset-to-ear pressure. The handset uses a specially designed high leak receiver that allows for the best sound quality at every handset. We use the most realistic artificial ear type during tests, too, which makes the receive curve extremely difficult to surpass.

On another front, high quality jitter buffer and packet loss concealment software in snom 7xx have been improved via the Head Acoustic network simulator in very bad network conditions. The speakerphone has excellent double talk performance, and algorithms such as background noise cancellation and adaptive gain control provide for voice clarity in every condition.
snom5

In the end, I am glad to appease the machine haters out there by saying that subjective tests are as important as objective tests, and I can remember many cases where the good objectively-tuned phone just provides bad audio. At snom, well-tuned audio devices mean a lot of objective tuning followed by subjective sessions, until the job has is finished.

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Partial shed

There follows herein two partial shed images. The first image is more partial than the second for reasons that are obvious when you compare the two.

Way back when I worked at Marconi there was a guy called Steve Meats who was a comedian and who as part of his act wore a partial trousers. This was a pair of trousers with the legs cut off at approximately knee height and which were sewn back on with some sort of suspenders. They were funny. The partial trousers have no relation to the partial shed.

The partial shed is still partial at the time of writing because the heavens have verily opened upon the space where the shed stands and ~~health and safety~~ common sense has dictated a withdrawal to the shelter of the whole house and a refreshing cup of tea.

I say whole house but the intention is not to leave the reader with the impression that I am in every room in our not insubstantial dwelling but that the house itself is not partial. This is good because partial houses can be very damp, especially in the prevailing meteorological conditions and dampness can lead to discomfort and wet socks. As a point of information I am not wearing socks at the moment. Summer is almost upon us and socks are not always needed at this time of year.

In revealing that the house is not partial I am of course not saying that it is impartial. This play with words would be a misleading use of an alternate definition for the word partial.

The partial shed requires the fitting of a roof for it to no longer be partial. Fitting the roof is going to require the use of step ladders and is better done in dry conditions. I am not optimistic that suitable conditions will be in play before Tuesday which is the next dry day according to the Met Office website.

The Met Office is reasonably accurate these days and I am happy that no further shed erecting will take place before then. This will be reviewed in the light of conditions on the ground, just as umpires will assess whether play can restart after rain has stopped play in a cricket match. The shed will not have had the benefit of ground staff running out to protect it with covers. The head groundsman at our house, ie me, has adjudged that little harm will come to it in the meantime.

It must be said that the process of erecting a (partial) shed is quite satisfying. A man easily rediscovers diy skills long considered lost, or at least vestigial. Instinct comes in to play. This should be seen as especially useful once the reader is armed with the knowledge that the shed is around fifteen years old and was originally a play house. Its disassembly and reassembly on its new site is the completion of its reincarnation as a shed/garden furniture store, a process that will also save the Davies household several hundred pounds by obviating the need to buy a new metal shed which is what I had my eye on.

Because the shed is old the construction process is not exact and the insertion of additional screws here and there has been necessary to get the job done. This has been made effortless by the use of the new Makita cordless drill/screwdriver which every man should have.

At this point I am going to call literary proceedings to a halt. The rain has stopped, we are into a sunny spell and I am off out to inspect the wicket. We may get this shed finished before Tuesday after all 🙂

A short while later… the rain did hold off long enough to get the roof on, with the help of Robert from the allotment over the back (thx Rob). Still need to get some new roofing felt on but the three pictures below otherwise show the whole process.

And finally the view from the inside of the shed looking out. Wahey…

Engineer fun stuff mobile apps Weekend

Warp drive & a forecast date for technology of teleporting

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 9 May, 2014
2 Comments on Warp drive & a forecast date for technology of teleporting

I was discussing my experiences of being without a phone for ten days concluding that the phone was something I’d rather have than not have despite the fact that to some extent the damn gadget takes over your life. It isn’t really a phone any more anyway. The percentage of its time spent making phone calls is tiny compared with all the other intergalactic communicating computer functions.

What is missing it seems to me is a Teleporting app. It just seems a natural evolution of the capability of the ~~hand held computer~~ personal computing device (it isn’t going to be hand held for very much longer). Who wouldn’t want to be able to just say “beam me up Scotty” and reappear in the pub saloon bar¹.

Yes this is all dreamland stuff but it is Friday afternoon and the weekend beckons. Clearly the problem is the lack of any technology available to make this happen. It would be easy enough to put together an App, integrate it with Google Maps for setting coordinates and provide a button with the words “beam” or “beam me up” (or even one with user-programmable text – let’s push the boat out). Of course it wouldn’t work but might look good.

The App could just be waiting for the back end tech to catch up and don’t worry, this it very much will do. We would also need more maps data than just for planet Earth

The question is when. When you think about it the answer to this is really obvious. Teleporting technology will become available at around the same time as dilithium crystal powered warp drives. Stands to reason, innit. This won’t be for a while yet but it will come.

I won’t be around to see it but that doesn’t matter. It’s the same principle as planting oak trees. You don’t do it for yourself. You do it for the enjoyment of later generations. The savvy amongst you (that’s pretty much everyone who reads this blog:) ) will have spotted that I’ve omitted to put a date against this. I don’t have an Alpha date let alone Beta or General Release. That’s cos I’ve been around the block. It can be fatal to put a date down that you are doomed to miss. Better to keep it vague.

This does make it harder to put a business case around it but lets face it. Business cases are often based on sales figures plucked out of thin air anyway. Either that or an analyst report that someone has paid a lot of money for so it must be right. Right?

The vagueness of the schedule also points to budget overruns. Whoever owns the project should factor in some additional capital up front. Lots of additional capital. Probably more capital than the Gross Domestic Product of the world. Totally buggers up the ROI numbers but well worth it. After all it is a Friday and the more time we have available to spend in the pub the better which is what Teleporting will do for us.

In considering the business case we shouldn’t forget ongoing operational costs. By buying additional drinking time it is going to mean we will be spending more money on beer. This is a difficult one to cost in because everyone drinks at a different pace although there must be an ONS report somewhere with an average number of pints drunk in a given time period. The average time saved by Teleporting would also need to be calculated and this will in all probability require some extensive primary research involving visiting many Public Houses ~~around the country~~ globally.

Finally we would need to forecast the cost of a pint at the time the tech becomes available. Hopefully the government won’t have upped the tax on beer too much by then².

So there you go. A take on the timeline for Teleporting. It will arrive at the same time as Warp drive…

¹ Mine’s a pint of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord bitter.
² I did say this was a dream.

Engineer security

Oops – was that the red button? Nuclear near uses

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 30 April, 2014
No Comments on Oops – was that the red button? Nuclear near uses

Following last week’s post in which we discussed the precautions taken by Nominet to withstand nuclear attack we beginning to realise how sensible this was.

A Chatham House Report Too Close for Comfort: Cases of Near Nuclear Use and Options for Policy describes thirteen incidents of near nuclear use. It’s almost like reading the notes used in preparation for a James Bond movie with words like “failed coup”, “Kashmir standoff” and “Operation Anadyr”. A tale of espionage, conflict escalation and mistaken identity. In fact it’s nearer to Johnny English and Austin Powers than James bond with stories like the president leaving the secret launch codes in his trousers pocket when they were sent to the dry cleaners.

The worry is that in a world you would think totally foolproof the causes include faulty computer chip, technical error and exercise scenario tape causing a nuclear alert.

The Chatham House report names and shames those involved – you could easily have guessed:

country	times involved in near nuclear use
US of A	4
Russkis	6
us (ie United Kingdom)	1
India	2
Pakistan	2
Israel	1

It’s quite pleasing to note that we, the UK, have only been involved in one incident. We are obviously far more reliable than the Yanks or the Russins. Innit. You must also forgive me for lapsing into the language of Hollywood when describing some of the countries involved. I ws born when the cold war was still in full swing – “my name is Harry Palmer and I work for the government for thirty pound a week”.

All I can say is, that as someone working in the internet industry, I’m glad the network was designed to be nuclear bomb proof and that Nominet have taken precautions…

competitions Engineer engineering

Winner of most number of names for trousers competition

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 28 April, 2014
No Comments on Winner of most number of names for trousers competition

You will all remember the kecks are ready mega trousers competition where entrants had to find the most names for that article of clothing. Well we have a winner. Liz Fletcher reminded me of this at #UKNOF28 last week and I duly delivered her of her prize – a large glass of sauvignon blanc. Would have been cheaper had she been a beer drinker but hey, let’s not nit pick eh?

Congrats Liz. Look out for other terrific trefor.net prize competitions as they happen:)

Other trefor.net terrific prize comps:

Spot the IP Phone
Royal baby name competition winners
The trefor.net TGIF megamug prize with pens and tshirt competition

PS Notice the hearing aid coming out of Liz’ head – she should invest in something a little more discrete

Engineer social networking voip

VoIP week on trefor.net and a Tweetup in Town after the ITSPA workshop on Thursday 8th May

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 28 April, 2014
No Comments on VoIP week on trefor.net and a Tweetup in Town after the ITSPA workshop on Thursday 8th May

From time to time we have technology themed weeks on trefor.net. The last one was Peering Week where we published around 20 guest posts on the very niche subject of Internet Exchange Peering. Next week is VoIP week.

VoIP is far from being a niche subject. Every man and his dog¹ uses VoIP if they but knew it. It’s VoIP week because at the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association (ITSPA) we are having a technical workshop on VoIP provisioning. VoIP provisioning is a very niche subject. Many people might also consider it to be a very boring subject.

Be assured that whilst provisioning is not every man’s kettle of fish (or words to that effect) it should be of interest to everyone involved in providing services. This is because the VoIP industry needs to coordinate how they go about providing their services so that they are not exposed to fraud.

For example if every VoIP phone was shipped with a default username and password that would be silly. It happens and people lose money when someone hacks in using said default username and password and starts running up big bills to premium rate numbers in the Philippines (or Senegal or anywhere really).

The industry needs the support of handset manufacturers in deciding how to go about methods of making their services secure that can be applied across many different brands of VoIP phone.

Details of the ITSPA workshop can be found here. The workshop and associated networking drinks will finish at 6pm. Thereafter we plan to adjourn to a nearby pub for a trefor.net tweetup.

This is open to anyone so if you are a regular reader/commenter/writer/tweeter (etc) on or with trefor.net you are welcome. Stick the date in your calendar and I’ll follow up with a venue when I’ve sorted one out. The Workshop is at 5 Fleet Place, London, EC4M 7RD so it will be around there somewhere.

Thursday 8th May trefor.net tweetup 6pm onwards.

Check out all the Peering Week posts here.

¹ Yes even the dog. Believe you me:)

Engineer engineering fun stuff

Hot Air Balloon lands on lawn at DeVere Wokingham Park #uknof28

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Saturday, 26 April, 2014
No Comments on Hot Air Balloon lands on lawn at DeVere Wokingham Park #uknof28

Those of you who shot off straight after the UKNOF28 meeting missed a sight. It was a hot air balloon landing on the lawn of the hotel. V graceful. I dashed up to the 10th tee to take the vid so that you could share the experience. Good eh? 🙂

No Technology For Old Men

Post author By Marcos Campos
Post date Friday, 25 April, 2014
No Comments on No Technology For Old Men

Lying in bed in a motel room alongside the Mexican border, I was awakened just after midnight by a deadbolt clunk from the room next door. A loud clunk, jarring even though the person behind it was probably trying to be quiet. Fifteen minutes later, that clunk again.

I peer out the window and catch a glimpse of a sturdy looking fellow, wearing a kerchief around his neck.

Truck headlights beam in through the window, and are just as soon gone.

Who makes quick visits at this hour? “Drug deal,” comes straight to my mind (which can be prone to fantasy).

I lay back down and stare at the speckled popcorn ceiling. The carpet in the room is clean and new, though both the pattern and the color are straight out of the 70s, and there’s your typical motel art on the walls. Sleeping here is a form of time travel.

Driving through this desert country, staying in this motel…it all reminds me of the movie “No Country For Old Men”, based on the book by Cormac McCarthy. And McCarthy got his descriptions of west Texas just right — romantic and rough (which I can attest to not only because I was raised in the border town of El Paso, but because McCarthy lived a block down from one of my childhood friends). My mind may very well be prone to fantasy, but a childhood friend was shot in a drug deal. Reality and movie fantasy are usually quite different things, but on the border reality can sometimes play like a movie.

I’m on a road trip with my soon-to-be ex-wife, driving a cheap mini van we picked up in Austin for the purpose of transporting three of our dogs to her new home in Mexico. Road trips are one of the things that my wife and I do well together, and we have taken more than a few, but now we’re at the end of a long divorce and a road trip seems a weird thing to do as one of our last married rituals. It’s strange, creating something new while at the same time letting go.

It’s Maya, the Hindu concept of the illusion of reality. Or delusion. We think we are in control, involved and participating, however it is all impermanent…only illusion. I know that’s not the exact definition (though I am not sure there IS an exact definition), however lately that has been my experience of the illusion. I am engaged in the external world, but at the same time I am a distant observer. I am creating the reality, and at the same time I am part of the creation — subject and object at the same time.

Actually, I find my current perception similar to when we come together in software development teams. We create something together, putting a little of ourselves into code and scripts while simultaneously letting go of that creation.

Look…basically I am just a dumb DIY kind of technologist, one without much formal education with which to back up my opinions, and one who sometimes thinks he doesn’t really know what is happening in technology at all. And yet, over and over again, I end up in rooms with Ph.D geniuses, deep into philosophical discussions on the nature of reality that are at the same time all about technology.

While working at IBM in 1997 I learned object-oriented programming by watching an IBM Fellows whiteboard lecture on VHS tape. Then, over the next year while working on frameworks for CORBA, my officemate and I often discussed the nature of reality — all in terms of object-oriented lingo. This colleague’s name was Simon Peter Hemingway (a name I always loved). We would often take long walks and talk about the nature of defining objects, with Simon trying to convince me that reality was an illusion. He held a Ph.D. so he must have known what he was talking about, right?

Last night I popped onto the motel wifi. No password needed. Welcome to the Wild West.

Once online I used my phone to make a Facebook post on a television show…is this what the technology has come down to? I won’t use Twitter because I just don’t see the point, but I use FB to communicate with friends. I’m paranoid about security of the server at work, but I trust my phone’s network access to the unprotected motel wifi. I see news reports that say FB is for old fogies. Maybe I’m too old now for the technology game…maybe I’m blind now to what technology is all about. Or maybe technology is just emerging so quickly into every moment that it all cannot be grasped by our meager minds (prone to fantasy or not).

Before actually starting in my intention was to write about leaving my job with a semiconductor company. Before yesterday — my last day with the company — I created software with a team of people designed to help other engineers design chips. In leaving, I thought I would be able to capture some insights on the Zen concept of letting go. You know, the whole you must empty-you-cup before you can fill-your-cup thing? I have this idea that if we bring mindfulness to our creation of technology that we will somehow create beautiful innovation. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to write about today, the stuff I mean to explore during what I see as a short break from working again on some full-time project somewhere. But then my hotel neighbor clunked his deadbolt, and…

A thread of thought launched…not, not a thread, a stream…like I was dreaming all of this, and I had to get down the raw truth of it before I forgot the elements of the dream.

I suppose I am still processing what it means to leave a project, a team, and a software system. My subconscious is sorting out what it means to leave something into which I’ve poured my heart.

The last scene in “No Country For Old Men”: The Sheriff has a dream in which he sees his father walking ahead, holding an ancient fire. He feels compelled to follow, even though his business on earth is left undone.

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Bed Rooms at the DeVere Wokefield Park #UKNOF28

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 25 April, 2014
No Comments on Bed Rooms at the DeVere Wokefield Park #UKNOF28

I expect the manager at the DeVere Wokefield Park kicks himself (or herself) every time he walks up the stairs in the Mansion House. This is the first sign you see. Took me a couple of days to notice it. Was there for UKNOF28

It would probably ruin the wallpaper if they tried to move the word Bed a little to the right:)

For reference this is how the signs look elsewhere in the hotel.

broadband Engineer engineering piracy

Broadband traffic management – a thing of the past? #UKNOF28

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 25 April, 2014
5 Comments on Broadband traffic management – a thing of the past? #UKNOF28

Broadband traffic management, once an essential tool in an ISPs toolkit is beinsed less and less as the cost of bandwidth decreases.

Broadband traffic management seems to have been ditched some time ago by the big ISPs. I may be behind the times here. Had a conversation with a couple of senior tech guys at major UK ISPs who told me they had dropped traffic management up to two years ago.

Traffic management at an ISP is basically where the network employs Deep Packet Inspection kit to examine the type of traffic. Bandwidth hogging protocols such as P2P would be throttled at peak times. They did this to save on costs and to improve the experience for other users. A peer to peer protocol will use all the available bandwidth on a broadband line. It only takes a few users to clog up the backhaul of an ISP.

When DPI was originally deployed P2P traffic represented up to 65% of network traffic. DPI equipment was expensive, didn’t scale well and at the higher end of ISP size never provided a return on investment.

Now with the DPI kit switched off the “problem” P2P traffic remains at the same level in real terms but now represents only 4% of total traffic, the majority being video services such as Netflix and YouTube (I assume). One ISP told me that when they switched off traffic management they saw a little blip in traffic volume but it was negligible in the great scheme of things.

This is quite interesting when considered in relation to the “piracy” debate. Although copyright infringing downloads may well be at the same level of a few years ago is it valid to say that people are increasingly resorting to the use of legal/paid for services instead? If so it makes the whole Digital Economy Act farce even more farcial.

Loads of DEAct related posts here if you want to take a look.

Engineer fun stuff

#UKNOF28 pre meeting curry

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 24 April, 2014
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Nuff said!

Ever wondered what the translation for Huawei is? #UKNOF28

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 24 April, 2014
2 Comments on Ever wondered what the translation for Huawei is? #UKNOF28

Huawei is the main sponsor for UKNOF28 in Reading. These are great meetings and couldn’t happen without the support of equipment suppliers to the community.

So at the lunch break we were discussing the Huawei presentation and I wondered what the word Huawei actually meant. Did it have a literal translation?

In a flash I whipped out my trusty droid and clicked on my Google Translate app.

The photos on the right show the process. I typed in “Huawei” and asked Google to translate it from Chinese into English.

Google, being the perceptive creature that it is asked me if I meant 华为 instead?

I suppose I must have meant 华为 so I clicked on it and hey presto Google gave me the answer.

I can definitively (ish) tell you that the translation for Huawei (华为) is, Huawei.

There you go. All part of the trefor.net service.

You heard it first on trefor.net (etc)

Nominet precautions for Nuclear attack on .uk #uknof28

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 24 April, 2014
No Comments on Nominet precautions for Nuclear attack on .uk #uknof28

Just heard a nice talk by Brett Carr on Nominet’s transformation of its infrastructure. For the lay people amongst you Nominet is the organisation that runs the .uk suffix. All domains ending in .uk. eg trefor.co.uk were I to be the owner, which I’m not because Trefor happens to be a small town in Wales and all place names went very early on in the domain name land grab.

.uk is considered to be a strategic resource for the United Kingdom. The wellbeing of our country depends on it – commerce etc. Nominet therefore has to be run very professionally. Whilst being a not for profit organisation Nominet is well known in the industry for being cash rich and in all fairness donates a lot of its surplus to charity through the Nominet Foundation.

The availability of cash also allows Nominet to use enterprise grade systems in its internal infrastructure. This is different to most of the internet which is run on open source software which by definition is free apart from the cost of support which tends to be managed using internal resources. Nominet’s use of Enterprise grade software is consistent with the strategic nature of its remit.

What is interesting is the extent to which Nominet goes to maintain uptime of its infrastructure. It has two data centres in the UK linked by resilient and diverse 10Gbps connections. Most servers are virtualized using VMware. A problem with one and the system fails over to the other. Problematic resources can be rebuilt very quickly. This is all standard stuff.

The interesting bit is the third data centre in Geneva. In the event of a catastrophic event happening to the UK, and not just to one of the UK data centres, the Geneva DC will continue to work supporting at least some of the .uk functions. We are talking nuclear strike type scenarios here. Data on the infrastructure design and how to rebuild the service is kept in a locked safe “somewhere in the UK” for later recovery.

This did raise a number of questions. If the UK has been hit by nuclear attack who will be left to rebuild the infrastructure? Will anyone care at that point? Where do you buy a nuclear bomb proof safe? The answer to the latter is apparently that there are four nuclear proof locations in the UK. Presumably the safe would be kept there. I dunno.

This post is beginning to drift here but as a kid we lived in the Isle of Man. My dad was the Director of Education there and as such he was guaranteed a place in the IoM government nuclear shelter. The cold war was still going strong during the seventies. Dad told them where they could shove their nuclear shelter. Why would he want to be “safe” inside with his family dying on the outside.

That hopefully is a threat of the past¹. Nuclear bunkers seem to be used as secure data centres nowadays. It is at least good to know that in the event of a nuclear attack your .uk domain name will still work. You now just need to make sure your website is dual homed so that you have something for your domain to point at when the balloon goes up. I recommend Geneva.

The barcode tattoo

First day in the office for over a week and on the way in had to wait at the railway level crossing because the barriers were down. A bloke stood in front of me had what appeared to be a barcode tattooed on the back of his neck, just below the hairline.

I wanted to take a photo or maybe have a go at scanning the barcode but I didn’t think this was a sensible thing to do with someone who was capable of having his neck tattooed in this way. Especially with 60 or so people stood around waiting.

Still, it leaves me wondering what the barcode format used was and what it said. I guess he probably thought it might come in handy in the event of him being rendered unconscious through of overconsumption of snakebite or special brew. A passer by need only scan his neck and tell the taxi driver where to take him. We shall probably never know:)

PS In future it would make more sense for everyone to have their own ipv6 address/subnet and have that tattooed somewhere discretely. Far more useful.

Engineer fun stuff servers

Stop Looking At My Finger, Silly Dog

Post author By Marcos Campos
Post date Friday, 11 April, 2014
No Comments on Stop Looking At My Finger, Silly Dog

My friend manages to piss me off and it’s not yet 8:00 in the morning. A thought flashes across my brain, “Maybe he’s not the root cause.”

This morning, the first text I see: Priority 1 emergency ticket.

Damn. I hope the server isn’t down.

As usual, my alarm went off this morning at 6:00. I look at my phone and see a text message that was sent late last night, an automated message from our Linux server passing along a support ticket. A surge of anxiety rushes through me. “Oh no, I forgot to re-enable the submit button in our application!” A suspicion, though I don’t really know yet for certain. I jump out of bed.

I check the emergency ticket’s timestamp. About 10 hours ago. “Oh please,” I pray-but-do-not-say as I head for my computer, “Please let it be that someone jumped in and handled this last night.”

Last night we performed a software upgrade to the server. The entire team on the phone, dialing in from multiple geographies, talking through headsets and typing commands on the server, a virtual everyone-from-home Mission Control. All talking on the same call, as we’ve done dozens of times before. The launch pad ready, countdown begun, I was walking us through the checklist and then gave the go ahead to deploy. But wait! There’s an error, a build error that is picked up by the programming group doing the deployment. We investigate and discover that the server is offline and end users are waiting. Finally, we call it. Abort.

Engineer gadgets

Pass me the 230-amp USB charging cable, please…

Post author By James Firth
Post date Wednesday, 9 April, 2014
3 Comments on Pass me the 230-amp USB charging cable, please…

The BBC has an article about a mobile phone battery that will charge from empty to full in 30 seconds.

The technology behind the brand new battery is of course exciting. Lithium polymer batteries have their drawbacks and I should imagine a battery that can be charged rapidly will be of even more interest to manufacturers of electric cars and renewable generators than mobile phone manufacturers.

But since Israeli start-up StoreDot chose a mobile phone to demonstrate their technology then I have to ask where the 230-amp USB charging cable is going to come from.

The faster a phone charges, the more current it requires. And to provide more current the power source needs to be more robust (typically larger) and the connecting cables need to be larger to carry the current safely without overheating.

Since it has become standard to use a 5-volt supply to charge a mobile phone I thought I’d work out how much current would be required to charge a typical phone battery in 30 seconds.

The answer is a whopping 230 amps, based on a 3.7 volt 2,600 mAh battery capacity like the one inside Samsung’s Galaxy S4 mentioned in the article.

In case you’re wondering how fat 230-amp cables are, you’re talking typical jump lead size.

In practical terms phone chargers would need to seriously increase the voltage to charge a phone that quickly, but they are unlikely to go much above 25 volts due to the increased risk of electric shock.

Even at 25 volts the current required would be over 45 amps.