OK, that’s a blindingly obvious statement. But if a reminder was needed, an interesting fact reported here is that just two Chinese Internet Service Providers serve 20% of the world’s broadband users, and they’re still growing! OK so it’s not a completely open market like in other countries but that’s still a huge proportion of the internet-connected population.
Archive for the 'Internet' Category
I produced a basic website for a group company and included a Google Map on the contact page. It was reported to me this morning that the map points to the wrong area. I obviously thought I’d made a mistake so went to correct it. However, the fault seems to lie with Google Maps embedding of it’s own maps. In this case I wanted a map for post code OL10 4HP in Lancashire and on Google Maps website it gives me the correct location. However if I then click ‘Link’ then ‘Customize and preview embedded map’ it changes it’s location to over a mile away. Now I’m sure it’s possible to somehow manually edit the embedded code to give me the original and correct map, but it’s a strange error on Google’s part.
Anyone else had this problem?
Yes this is a shameless plug, but it has some interesting technical and business aspects to it as well. The owner of the companies I work for has this year embarked on a personal business to buy and rent out cotswolds cottages for holiday lets. It is common to book holiday accommodation through an agent website or office which takes a commission from the rental fee. He wants to own, control and deal with the bookings for the cottages himself via his own website, www.parkluxurycottages.com under the name Park Cottages.
The website was developed by Cardiff-based developers Beanlogic with design input from Mark Boulton, who was recently tasked with the redesign of drupal.org
The site is up and running and has completed a number of satisfied bookings. We’re now working on search engine optimisation (SEO), visibility and a feedback system. SEO still seems like quite a black art to me, trying to second guess what algorithms Google uses to rank sites and use it to your advantage without getting penalised in the process. It is surprising how competitive search terms like “cotswold cottage” and “costwolds accommodation” are!
Following my recent problems with my home broadband, I decided to look around for a new provider. It wasn’t particularly that Plusnet had performed badly, I’ve been with them since 1 19.6k dialup connection was considered luxury, it was just that every time I called them to complain that my connection had dropped for another day or two, I had to convince them that my equipment wasn’t at fault and that there was a problem at the exchange. My problem only appeared to get resolved when somone else complained in the same area and I’d been complaining for three weeks! I was also less than impressed with the traffic shaping that BT was carrying out on its broadband customers and since BT acquired Plusnet I assume that Plusnet were or would be doing the same.
While checking out alternative providers, I discovered that my exchange had been enabled for ADSL/2+ via Be, a subsidiary of O2. This would give a potential connection speed of 24Mb and since I was getting a reliable 4.7Mb connection from a potential 8Mb on ADSL, I thought I might get a 12-15Mb connection through Be and all for the same price as I was paying Plusnet
Having signed up with Be for their Pro service and obtained a MAC code from Plusnet, I was very impressed with the migration process operated by Be. I received text messages at each key point including when my welcome pack and free BeBox had been despatched and I was activated after 8 days. I get a reliable sync at 12.5 Mb and my connection speed seems to max out at just over 10Mb, less than I expected but still a respectable improvement and I’m not done tweaking things yet.
My only disappointment is with the BeBox supplied which is a rebadged Thomson 585v7 wireless modem. The setup and configuration interface is awful, the worst I’ve ever seen. Just getting it to get it’s fixed IP address setup was a task in itself, the Be welcome letter referring to a DIY installation guide which wasn’t in the box! Since I operate my home network behind a Netgear FVX538 firewall, I really needed to get the modem into bridge mode so that it just passed it’s IP address to the netgear and didn’t get in the way with it’s own NAT firewall. This, it turns out can’t be done from the standard web interface, it has to be enabled via a config upload. The process can be found on the Be support forum, but I’ve detailed it here in case you need it.
Am I the only one to not care about apple products? I don’t doubt that they’re stylish and attractive but the hype around every product launch just leaves me cold. Every time Apple launches a product there is a fever among the tech and mainstream press just to here the messiah Jobs announce an iPod that’s got 16Gb instead of 8Gb and an iPhone 3G that’s actually not very good at 3G.
Apple’s business model is about packaging, interface and hype. They take existing technology, package it behind a slick package and interface and then hype the hell out of it, all at a very profitable price. If they can tie their own services and restrictions into the products at the same time then all the better.
I’m obviously not the target market since I don’t value style over everything else, actively rebel against anything that’s hyped and just want my gadgets to do their job. I don’t care if my mobile is 1mm thicker than an Apple. I don’t care if my laptop is 200g heavier than an Apple and I can happily survive without ever using iTunes. What I can certainly do without is the iHype!
Rant over!
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had continuing long periods of ADSL outage where I get no ADSL connection at all and the modem reports a ‘physical line error’. I’ve had a hard time convincing my ISP, Plusnet that it is nothing to do with my equipment or wiring as I’ve changed modems, cables, ADSL splitters and even changed my master socket (yes I know you’re not supposed to but BT haven’t called to check it so I thought I’d change it so at least I can be fully confident about my equipment). The connection simply disappears for over 24 hours, the longest period being nearly 4 days!
One of the problems I’ve had is that when I report the fault, it can take 24 hours for BT to run their tests and by then the connection has come back up and they say there’s no problem, it must be at my end. Finally during the 4 day outage, they found a fault at the exchange and supposedly fixed it last Monday morning. Everything worked fine until Monday afternoon this week when the connection dropped again. I reported it to Plusnet who have managed to test the line again while I have no connection and tell me that although ’some work has been carried out at the exchange’, the fault is still there. The connection was back on when I woke this morning.
Call me a cynic but I swear someone at BT is using the Sky Digital method of tech support: switch it off and if it works when you switch it back on, the fault must be fixed. Someone is arriving at the exchange with a fault report, rebooting some equipment and leaving again. Then the clearly faulty equipment is failing again a few days later.
If it isn’t fixed permanently this time, it looks like I’ll have to try and get it escalated as I’ve been without ADSL for over 8 days this month.
Update 06/08/2008: Having arranged for a visit from BT to investigate the fault last Friday morning between 8:00am and 1:00pm they decided not to show so I wasted most of the day at home for nothing. Apparently there “was a problem with the engineer and they couldn’t get to me today”. Got a call from Plusnet late afternoon on Friday to say that BT had received other complaints from the area and discovered that I was connected to a faulty line card at the exchange. One had been ordered and would be fitted ASAP. My internet came back on again on Sunday Morning and has stayed on so far. What a pathetic saga lasting over 5 weeks just to prove that BT had a faulty line card. I was offline for days at a time and they couldn’t diagnose a faulty line card as the cause?
At about 11:00am on Tuesday, my ADSL connection disappeared. I was at work so I couldn’t investigate until early evening when I discovered that the modem was reporting a “physical line error”. Having done the usual checks such as connecting the modem to the master telephone socket with nothing else connected and swapping out the ADSL micro-filter, I had to assume a line fault, although the phones were still working.
My broadband provide is Plusnet and I’ve always had a really reliable service from them so have never had to call them before. They ran their tests which failed and escalated the problem to BT and I waited for an update. The next morning at about the same time 11:00am, my ADSL came back on. Within 30 minutes there was an update on my support ticket from BT telling me that no fault could be found!
My guess? A dozy BT engineer disconnected ADSL on the wrong line on Tuesday and it was corrected the next day with no questions asked. Rather than take the blame, they just shifted it back to the customer who would normally just assume that it had been a problem at their end all along. Unfortunately for BT, some of us know better!
I almost always use the BBC News website for my news source. Sky news has always put me off by the number of popup flash adverts they insist on pushing in users faces. I noticed at the weekend that they have a new web site in beta stage. You can take a look at it here. I have also taken a snapshot of it below:
My first impression isn’t good. There’s too many blocks of content, none of which seem to blend together. This is a snapshot from this morning and when I looked yesterday there was a lot more black and red on the page so maybe they’ve toned it down a little based on feedback from the site but I think there’s too many visual distractions which hide the content. As soon as you open the site, a video starts running of the latest story and there are pictures and panels everywhere. It’s hard to see the news and that’s not good for a news site!
If that’s the best they can do, the BBC have nothing to worry about. What do you guys think?
I found a great JavaScript routine yesterday which allows you to zoom a linked image in a web page to full size without it opening in a new page or window. It’s called FancyZoom and it’s written by Cabel Maxfield Sasser. You can use it free for non-commercial websites and he offers a low-cost, one-off license fee for commercial use.
Using it is as simple as copying two folders into the root of your website and then inserting two lines of script into the header and an onload statement inside the body tag on the pages you want it to work on. You can selectively disable the zoom on particular images and it can show a title for the image when it zooms.
Nice work Cabel!
Only the other day in the Mozilla Messaging post, I was commenting on how I find it uncomfortable how much personal information companies like Google are keen to get stored on their servers. Today I read that Google is to test a new health care records system whereby Google store all of your health records and you get password access to them.
Personally, I find this scary. I don’t trust Google with this information because there is a reason they are keen to store it and that is because they can ultimately make money out of it. Will the company be searching the information internally for their own uses? Will Google employees have access to it? Will it be sold to insurance companies wanting to weed out the undesirables?
This is only a test of the system but you can bet that as soon as they believe it works, it will be rolled out in full. I wouldn’t sign up for it, would you?
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