Tag Archives: internet

Internet ratings

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Another hat tip to podnosh blog for another “educational” scoop, yet again proving the Charity Commission to be out of touch with the reality of learning.
[KENYON’s FARM Free range eggs]
(Podnosh seems unselfishly willing to read the most turgid official publications or the FT, so the rest of us don’t have to. And to put the crucial bots of the content online, entertainingly)
[Muller Fruit corner blackberry and raspberry yoghurt]
The UK Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, is more familiar with the internet than the Charity Commission are. However, in many ways, that’s a pity, because he sees the web as yet another opportunity to control the manifestations of “culture.” He thinks the internet is out of control so web sites should be subject to controls similar to those applying to broadcast media.
[tomatoes]
He told the Financial Times that there is a need to stop product placement on the internet and to put sex/violence ratings on content in You-tube videos.
[Lurpak butter]
As if these aren’t either ludicrous (suggestion 1) or heinous (suggestion 2) enough, he used the “governance” word….
[mushrooms]
….And he showed his sense of humour is at a culturally-dangerous low level, when he reported a child’s joke and completely missed the comedy.
[okra][onion]

You do have to stop and think when you read a quote from a nine-year old boy in Tanya’s report about whether we are sufficiently controlling this online world in which our children are roaming. It’s funny but it does make a very important point. He said: “I’m worried I’ll get lost on the internet and find I’ve suddenly got a job in the army or something.”

[Vegemite – not a patch on Marmite, btw]
He said “It made me laugh and I’m glad it made you laugh too but I think it makes an important point” which was that children really are worried about the internet….. I kid you not.

(Maybe, when he was child, he was too scared of the video to post slices of toast through the VHS cassette orifice.)

[The Village bakery – Polski chleb/Polish bread]
The wit of a primary school kid goes over the Culture Secretary’s head. He assumes the kid’s in genuine fear at some level, because he doesn’t really understand the nature of a “joke.” (This is the Culture Secretary, remember.)

So it’s not surprising that he doesn’t know that nothing boosts a site’s attractiveness to teenagers like over-18 content ratings.
[Brazil nuts]
This blog has been brought to you by everything I’ve eaten in the past 6 hours.

Deutsche malware

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A Nelson-esque “Ha Ha” if you thought that other EC countries might be havens where the seemingly outdated Euro-values (justice, tolerance, protection under the law, presumption of innocence, free speech) are still observed.

The government of Germany (that’s the combined former East & West Germanies. Remember East Germany? That’s the one with the Stasi and a population that was so avid for freedom 20 years ago) has approved what the Register calls a Plod-spyware law.

This handy law will give the German government the “anti-terror” powers to monitor private homes, phones and computers. Don’t you just love the TWAT? Any government in the world can now take any powers they fancy just by invoking its name.

Instead of tapping phones, they would be able to use video surveillance and even spy software to collect evidence. Physically tampering with suspects’ computers would still not be allowed, but police could send anonymous e-mails containing trojans and hope the suspects infect their own computers (from the Register story)

Wow, government spam that carries malware! Did I put enough exclamation marks there? Here are more!!!!!!!

These powers will only be used in exceptional cases, yada, yada, usw. Oh yeah?

There have been already been several recent scandals about over-the-top surveillance in Germany (Lidl, Deutsche Telecom, usw) Although, unlike the UK, at least the Germans don’t yet seem to lose personal data on a biblical scale. But, if the Lidl surveillance is any guide, they see information on the dates of surveillees’ menstruation as worth gathering

XanderG made a beautifully phrased comment on a WgyDontYou post a couple of weeks ago.

I’ve never understood how we’re supposed to find a needle in a haystack, by chucking in more hay. So many of these measures simply add dead-ends and wild goose chases to an already massive monitoring system. How are we going to catch anybody with real malicious plans? (XanderG)

If a government REALLY cares about preventing terrorism, it is blatantly illogical to collect massive amounts of information on the general public. It’s well nigh inconceivable how much information is flying around in a noughts-and-ones format.

For instance, almost every person I passed in a half-hour walk was having a mobile phone conversation – including three dog-walkers and two cyclists. (Cycling, in traffic, ffs. Unselfish people, trying to cull themselves for the good of the gene pool) Pretty well every house in my low-income street has a relatively-fast broadband connection. There are enough traffic cameras and public CCTV installations in a 500 yard radius to provide a year’s 24-hour broadcast reality tv on every known channel.

Scale this level of data traffic up to the population of the UK and Germany. Unless half the population is engaged in monitoring this hurricane of electronic noise – using the most advanced pattern recognition and cryptographic algorithms known to science – anyone who is gathering this data might as well not bother.

Well not if they care about detecting real social threats anyway. It might come in very handy for finding people who are spoofing their address to get their kid into a school slightly out of their area. Or it might catch someone who hasn’t paid their car tax or is claiming invalidity benefit while working (as the threatening TV and billboard ads keep telling us).

It might not seem to make sense but I have finally figured it out, with the help of the Matrix and the Church of Scientology.

Clearly, the earth is threatened by a monstrous alien intelligence that eats human data. It can only be kept at bay by feeding it gargantuan stores of bytes. Earth rulers are doing us a favour by collecting all our data and recycling it as xenofood to stuff in the gaping maw of the evil extraterrestrial overlord Zarg. They can’t tell us the truth because there would be a global panic.

A question for the lawyers out there – Sending malware in spam may not be a crime if the German police are doing it. But would installing this malware become a crime if the recipient of a German-police email were to forward the spam to, say, a member of the German government? The government of another country? A major corporation? At what point?

Loyalty you just cant buy

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What must be the corporate Holy Grail is having a customer base so loyal to your product that it doesn’t matter what you do to them, they will just suck it up, keep paying you and ask for more. Before the Internet, I am not sure I ever encountered any examples of this loyalty, I am not even sure it existed.

As with much of life, the Internet changed everything.

We, consumers, are often subjected to watchdog type programs saying we should stand up and complain about bad service more – and I agree. For too long people have sat in quiet anger while companies have taken advantage of them.

With this in mind, it is ironic how some internet “companies” (for want of a better word) have managed to develop an almost slavish fan base who will defend them from even the slightest criticism.

Take Flickr as an example. Today it is having some massive database problems. It has been playing up for at least the last three hours, maybe longer. This is not the first time it has happened, and every few weeks it has has a few little “hiccups.” For most people, on free accounts, this is just something you would expect to live with – you get what you pay for some might argue (not me but that is another rant).

However, for people who have paid US$25 per year for a pro account things are, I think, quite different. The amount of money paid is not the issue. The fact is Flickr have taken a payment for a service. If they are unable to provide that service then they should be held accountable in the same manner as if it was a US$25,000 a year account. For some people in the world, US$25 is a monstrous amount of money so there is no argument to say it is “cheap” so we should expect a poor service.

Now in the flickr help thread, there is quite a mixed bag of comments (and hundreds of them). Basically though, they fall into some clearly defined camps:

  1. People who are outraged and annoyed with flickr for failing to provide them with a service they have paid for.
  2. People who, for whatever reason, feel the need to defend flickr no matter what.

There are some people who appear “neutral” but they generally make comments that fall into the latter camp, such as:

Get a life [aimed at complaining comments]. And learn that in that life nothing is perfect. Suck it up and be patient. (link)

What a day for this to happen! The day after I signed up , but I must add to the chorus saying, ‘Thank you Kevin for letting us know what’s going on’, there are many many sites out there who would simply leave their users in the dark. (link)

No problem Sir. Thanks for informing us… fail in the system is very normal, because it is created and made by man… very human. Dont worry. Thank you… and take your time (link)

These are not neutral posts – the are basically people who are happy with bad service. I am all for having some tolerance over problems but tolerance is not the same as cheerful acceptance. “Take your time” was too annoying for words. The idea that flickr is great simply because other people wouldn’t tell anyone is nonsense as well.

On the side of the slavish Flickr Fans there is one commenter who really stood out- SF Lights. This person has made dozens of posts basically flaming anyone who complains about the service and then, when people make the inevitable threat to go elsewhere he points out there is no where else to go. Some examples:

Guide [a commenter], you can feel free to leave and go to a more mediocre photo sharing website. (link)

Seriously, learn your facts before posting ignorant crap here. (link)

Byebye Panos, Be sure to upload a video on whichever other great photosharing website you….oh wait, there aren’t any. (link)

He really does come across as annoying. One commenter (Panos) seems to think SF LIghts is flickr staff and I have to say I agree – It is weird to think of a paying customer making authoritative comments like this.

All in all, you have to read the thread to get a full feel for how much the flickr supporters are willing to bend over for this. The idea that their wonderful flickr could ever be at fault seems alien to them. The idea that you should be able to expect a service you have paid for to be fit for purpose seems alien to them.

Just to finish, I actually think this is a trivial fault – it takes about two minutes longer to upload pictures and sometimes you have to refresh a few times to get a page. However, imagine you were in a restaurant and had to order each item of food three of four times… Would you complain? Would you say it was the best restaurant ever?

Pic-lens FF plug-in

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Pic Lens is an amazing plug-in for Firefox.

I hate Firefox plug-ins in general. Mostly they just make Firefox even more of a memory hog and add irritating toolbars, without providing extra functions you might actually want.

Pic Lens is just brilliant, though, if you browse pictures often. This is a screen shot of it in operation – it’s a Flickr page with an image selected.

pic lens screen shot

It takes seconds to download and install this. As soon as you’ve restarted Firefox, you can go to any standard source of images (such as Flickr) and there’s a small red arrow in the bottom right of each image. Just click on the arrow and you are in a virtual gallery, with images shown 3 high along the walls. See the screen shot of the result of a search on Google images:

Screen shot of Google images

You just scroll around until you find what you want, zooming in and out and along the gallery by mouse actions. Click on an image to see it larger. (Admittedly, you have to go out to a normal view to find the URL or to comment, as far as I can see so far. I might just be too inexpert.)

It’s intuitive to use, once you stop looking irritatedly for a menu. You can work out the elegantly designed controls by trial and error if you’ve ever used a PC in the past decade. The screen looks beautiful. Images look much better on a black background with all the normal irritating screen bits and pieces.

But incredibly, it’s also really fast. It’s much faster than moving around Google or Flickr under your own steam.

I’ve only found three major drawbacks so far. As I already said, it doesn’t take you straight to the context URL, so you can’t find a website or comment on Flickr pictures from inside it. You have to close it to do anything else – which is difficult because the other drawback is that you can just get sucked into looking at thousands of images and always want to see just one more.

It is brilliant.

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web

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It’s the 15th birthday of the release of the source code for the World Wide Web, according to the BBC.

Just 15 years. And it’s already almost impossible to remember how we lived before tinterweb.

The first ever web site was http://info.cern.ch. It’s still there (the site not the same web page…) It is pretty rubbish, which is oddly comforting. (No reasonable menu, you can only find the other pages by going to the sitemap, elements don’t fit exactly, in IE6, and they use style attributes in tags instead of the class definition 🙂 ) There’s some screenshots of Tim Berners-Lee’s first browsers, which could give present-day browsers some serious competition.

It links to CERN’s proper site which is brilliant, although most of it is so far over my head that i might as well be reading an umbrella.

The web itself has become indispensable. Especially for finding out anything you want to know – instantly. It’s true that much of what you get is spurious, but the more of us that develop a built-in bullshit detector the better.

And mostly, it’s great that the web has grown so fast precisely because it was designed to be free and open and collaborative The BBC reported Robert Cailliau:

“We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favour of that.” ………
“If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now.

(Maybe someone should tell the DRM fanatics.)

Was it something we said?

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Our ranting has become notably less authoritative recently. (Odd, as I feel at least as authoritative as I have ever been. i.e. not at all.) And consistently less visible.

Maybe somebody has an explanation. The whole blogternet can’t have (slightly) broken, can it?

  • A week or so ago, I tried to post a comment on a student post on Pharyngula – to be told repeatedly, in the face of the evidence – that I needed to have a name and an email address. Checked. Yes they were definitely there. I copied and pasted. I rewrote them several times.

    The helpful message (I paraphrase here, and use leaden sarcasm while I’m doing it) said I was probably being blocked as spam, but that I could try enabling javascript or cookies or allowing/ deleting the science-blog cookies. Tried them all. My comment stayed unposted. It wasn’t a great loss to twenty-first century thought, to be honest. Still…

  • This blog has been leaking Technorati “authority” like an authority-leaking sieve. Over the past month, we’ve been dropping a few links a day, according to Technorati.

    One day, it was something like 40 down today from the previous day. I’m pretty certain I would have noticed three months ago, if the blog had suddenly accumulated 40 links in one day, . So how could we lose them all in one day?

    Oddly, firestats and feedburner show that blog hits are much higher than they were when we had twice the “authority”, three months ago.

  • We’ve been intermittently vanishing from the Atheist blogroll over the past few weeks. This now seems to have become a permanent affliction. I hovered over the blog’s name on an Atheist blogroll site that has a static list. It said the the last post was on Friday at 12:38. Well, no. There have been a good few posts since then.
  • When the blog has appeared on the blog roll, over the past few weeks, it has taken at least an hour to appear. If the posts are queued somewhere for an hour, where is that please? Because it doesn’t seem apply to other posts that just appear after they are posted.

    When we’ve looked at the time stamps of blogs that appear long before ours, we find they’ve been written later. And magically appeared without falling into some warp dimension on the way. Maybe it’s crossing the Atlantic then? No, that doesn’t work either. There are UK-based blogs that pop up seemingly almost as soon as they are posted.

    We were even testing an ongoing hypothesis that the blogroll would only display this blog name when there were another more recent three blogs to put ahead of it. We never managed to falsify this.

    However, being ungrateful at being consistently fourth started to seem a bit churlish when we vanished completely.

    • TW has tried pinging the blogroll, in various ways, without any effect. Pinging Technorati seems to have an effect, in that Technorati will usually list a post within a few minutes of a ping. Or even respond to the auto-ping function and find the blog posts, all by itself.

As a side-effect, an increasing proportion of visitors are coming directly from search engines. There is a fair amount of entertainment value in working out how some of these searches would have led to here, unless every other blog in the known world had already been taken straight to heaven in the Rapture.

Anyone with any ideas about what’s going on?

Shares for all

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On the BBC Tech pages a blog by Kate Russell recommends a site called Gnu Trade where you can gamble on the world’s stock markets.

Now everyone will have their own take on whether gambling on market movements is a good or bad thing but even if you do not want to risk a penny it is possible to make money here.

That is because the site allows people who bet with cash to back players who are playing for fun. If you attract a real money player to back you and you make a profit – then some of that real cash gets sent to your account.

If you are sh*t hot (belatedly decided to think of family-friendly filters) at online poker you could probably make a lot of money, There are plenty of maths geniuses out there. It’s got to be easier than the lottery,

I can think of a few other potential unforeseen consequences, whether “good” or “bad”.

My grasp of economics is pretty shaky (as witnessed by my lifetime failure to even try to be rich) but I thought the things traded in stock markets related to people’s livelihoods. Food? Manufactured goods? Oil?

Stocks and shares aren’t just numbers. Entire national economies and people’s lives rest on them.

Aren’t international markets supposed to be “sensitive” to the slightest event? Share prices fluctuate within moments with the impact of a mysterious set of forces – from changes of government to the wildest rumours.

Wild rumours on the Internet? Surely not. Bizarre misunderstandings across cultural and language gaps? No, they can’t happen on the Net. The Internet isn’t allowed to lie. It’s like television (It said so in the Simpsons.)

Might not the international markets become ever more volatile? Easier to manipulate? Might not the implications be ever more destabilising?

It’s been so long now that economists have been saying that “free trade” is the answer to everything. Maybe we will soon find out if this is the case. Alternatively, you could think of it as a scientific test of chaos theory.

Pipex: Farce upon Farce

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Well, my opinion of Pipex was already very low. Before today I had them pegged as a terrible ISP with almost criminally poor customer service and basically inept technical support.

Today, they offended Forseti, and have managed to sink to a lower level on my opinion scale.

I wont fully repeat the tale of farce which has Pipex firmly in my “Bad Shop” category (in fact, I suspect they have more entries there than any other company), but in a nutshell after a month in which they were too inept to get BT out to fix my line (leaving me with no connection), they have still yet to get the service restored to the levels for which I am paying.

On Friday (four days ago), I spoke to technical support, who claimed to have carried out some tests and would now “escalate” the problem to BT. This is pretty much as far as I can push Pipex, as despite my only contract being with them, they do not have any form of service level agreement with BT – ineptitude, basically. Anyway, I was assured by the minimum wage arts student they have working as “technical support” that BT would respond to the fault within 1 – 6 days and get back to me.

Today, I had an SMS text message which informed me that Pipex Technical Support needed to carry out some more tests and could I ring them while I was sitting at the PC. This is a touch problematical, as I was at work miles from my PC, but never mind. Eventually I got home and had logged on by 1930 hrs to call Pipex as requested.

Now the farce got worse.

Every time I ring Pipex it annoys me. First off, it is an 0845 number so it costs money. Then the first thing they ask you is “if you are a residential customer, please enter your phone number now.” When you enter your phone number, you get presented with a list of options which runs “If you are a residential customer, press 1 now…” Why, in the name Kvasir do they ask you to enter your number first? Why?

When you finally get to press 2 for customer services, you are faced with an interminable wait, listening to some bored out of her head woman telling you “Thank you for holding the line. Your call is valuable to us.” Over and over. Why do companies think this is a good thing? What lunatic believes that the call is important or valuable, when you wait half the life of the universe for them to actually answer. And when they do, finally, answer it just gets worse!

After waiting a full 19 minutes (listening to how valuable my call is), the tech support arts student answered and went through the pointless list of “data protection act required verifications.” Finally, she asked me how she could help.

This left me a little confused, because she had just told me she’d called up my details and open tickets, so surely she should know I am calling in response to the text. Anyway, I explained I’d been asked to call and she went away. For four minutes. Eventually she came back and said that the “Technical Support” people (who was I speaking to?) had asked that I be contacted to confirm I wanted this escalating to BT. Slightly stunned, I said “yes” and she typed away and said, thanks – it will now be passed to BT. When I asked what had happened the last time they had promised it would be passed on to BT, she had no idea. She said it hadn’t been logged and didn’t know who had dealt with it. Now, I have the pleasure of another 1 – 6 day wait. Unless they text me half way through and ask if I want it to be sent to BT again…

This level of incompetence is mind boggling. I am at a loss to describe how frustrating, and how bad, Pipex customer service and technical support is. In August, I was given an identical run-around where over the course of a whole month they pretended to send the fault to BT, but never quite got round to it. It looks like this is going to happen again.

Showing that Loki really does have a monumental sense of humour, Pipex’s home page has a blurb which reads:

Pipex - Terrible Service - False Claims

Sadly, this leaves me speechless. If it really is their “customers that matter,” why am I being singled out for this poor treatment. What have I done wrong, which makes Pipex pick me as the only person they are happy to mess around month after month?

If so many people like them “so much they’d recommend” them, why dont they bloody recommend them. I wouldn’t recommend them to Bin Laden…

Pipex are a terrible ISP. Their technical support is so bad it has become funny. Their service is abysmal (for instance, what happened to NNTP access?). In short, Pipex is bad. Do not use Pipex.

What use are web applications?

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OK, this is a bit Luddite but I am unimpressed by the news that Adobe are entering the online document processing market, according to the BBC. They’ve bought the online word processor Buzzword, that lets several people edit a document online. It sounds like a good idea, in principle, but…

Have you ever tried collaborating on a document online? It’s usually a fiasco. At least, it is on Messenger, You change something. The other person changes something else. It saves over your changes. Or the program won’t either of you save because it’s trying to synchronise two documents. And failing to get either working.

One of you is bound to have a stylesheet that defaults to comic sans 18 point every time you press the return key. One of you is guaranteed to take Word’s offer of last Tuesday’s recovered version of the document, by accident, because it sounds more convincingly like the document you should be working on than the actual thing in front of you.

The problem isn’t the tech. It’s that two separate things are two separate things. They get out of synch. If you are both working on separate chapters and can merge the complete document that’s a different matter. But, in that case, why not keep two documents until you’ve finished your own bits?

Success breeds Success

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Abandoned Millstone at Prudhoe

Abandoned Millstone at Prudhoe,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

It is an interesting problem about the world of “Web 2.0” (and I hate that buzz word, I will make sacrifices to Odin as an apology), but one of the main promises it makes is let down by the fundamental way the processes work.

The web was touted as being able to democratise the world, allowing the most insignificant person the ability to have their message heard across the world. This was taken to a new level with the advent of Web 2.0 applications and now, everyone is supposed to be able to get video, audio or text out into the world with ease.

Partially, this is true. In the sense that pretty much anyone with a computer and net access can make a blog, upload video or audio tracks, the ideals of the Web/Web2.0 are sound. The problem lies with its finer implementations.

Think about your own browsing habits. Think about what blogs you read on a regular basis, what videos you watch on YouTube and what websites you visit. Think about how you find new things (Google? Yahoo?) and you can see that the vast majority of things will be the “highest ranked” for a given genre or search term. If you do a google search for something you are interested in, what are the odds you will delve to the seventeenth page of results and look at the sites there – much less link to them in your own sites and improve their page rank. Blogs are the same, Technorati page rank can spell a death sentence for a blog or, in equal but opposite measures, propel the blog to server breaking hits. Digg, Reddit and the like are all similar.

The basic flaw is a catch-22-like situation. Until your website/blog/whatever becomes popular no one can find it, but it wont become popular until people can find it. Certainly there are workarounds – for example, when Technorati indexed the Atheist blogroll it was a surefire way for otherwise low-profile atheist blogs to get disproportionately high rankings – but these are far from certain. However, once a blog or site (or whatever, I will use the terms interchangeably to mean generic things on the web) gets that high ranking, the success will breed itself.

This crops up in many areas: for example, on Technorati the most popular blog is engadget, so more people read its posts and more people favourite or link it, meaning it gets more popularity. Moving away from blogs themselves you get situations like the “Top Five / Most Emailed” on Scienceblogs – these posts get more exposure to the general public and, as a result get more hits and remain in the top five. It gets to the stage where a “Popular” item can be an order of magnitude away from the “normal” items, simply because its success breeds more success.

Pinhole Effect on FarmhouseMoving to the picture starting this meandering, Flickr has a variety of ways in which you can grade your pictures – interestingness, most comments, most views or by the number of times they have been made a favourite by someone. The picture from Prudhoe Castle (above) is the winner of the “interestingness” stakes. Despite being on flickr for months, it has only generated 98 views, 2 favourites and 5 comments – but this is enough to top the polls over pictures which have had more views, more favourites and more comments. So, in the interests of breeding further success, I am posting the picture here to see if it gets more comments, more views or more favourites. To see if the effect is repeatable, I am also including the picture which currently has the most comments (and a lot of views, but no where near the most).

Whatever happens, on the web as in real life, it seems that the more successful you are, the more successful you become. Breaking into that “winners circle” is not an easy thing. Despite the golden hopes that the web would democratise everyone, the reality is that (with the support of Google et al), the web is concentrating the provision of information into small, partisan, groups.

Is this a good thing?

[tags]Democracy, Web, Web 2.0, Internet, Philosophy, Society, Culture, Success, Random Thoughts, Prudhoe Castle, Prudhoe, Castle, Photo, Flickr, Photographs, Technology[/tags]

Terrible Pipex Service – Fiasco Continues

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Well, I will try to keep this short and I promise to try and find a new topic to complain about, but surfing the internet at snails pace is painful.

I mentioned yesterday the fiasco I was having with Pipex, and their final suggestion was to do some tests for 24 hours then call back. Well, I carried out the tests and called them back. If only it had been that simple.

After a short lifetime listening to a bored “we value your call” (obviously they value it, I am paying to call them….) I got through to an operator who went through the questions required by the data protection act (I assume if it wasn’t for that darned act, they would happily give my details out to every one…) and once more I was asked what the problem was.

I explained, in detail, what had happened and the tech support creature started to ask me the standard questions about “had I checked the filters…” (etc). Fighting the urge to scream, I reminded him that I had already gone through all this and I was just calling with the test data so they could escalate it to BT. Rather than ask what the data was, he asked me “what sort of speeds” I had been getting “over the last few weeks.” I was stunned. So much for the 24 hours worth of tests nonsense. Anyway, I told him that before the “fix,” I’d been getting a consistent 4 (and a bit) mbps downstream and the line reported it was an 8mb connection and since BT fixed the exchange I was now on a line which reported itself as 500kbps. Then it got really comical.

The “technician” asked what sort of download speeds I was getting. I said 350 – 400kbps on average. He then explained to me how 350 – 400kbps was “about 4 meg.” This jaw dropping announcement left me silent for a moment or two while it really sunk in that he thought three hundred and fifty kilobytes per second was “about” four megabytes per second. What abstract definition of about do they use at Pipex? When I, politely, explained that 400kbps was “about” half a mbps he went quiet for at least 30 seconds. The silence became painful after a while and I genuinely wasn’t sure if he was still there.

Eventually, he found his voice again and said he would carry out some tests. After a few (silent) minutes where all I could hear was his frantic typing on a keyboard he confirmed the line was reporting it was a 500kbps and he would escalate it to BT – who would deal with it “in 1 – 6 days.” Wonderful, now I know that this time next week I will call Pipex again, who will say “sorry, BT had a problem, they will investigate in 1-6 days” and so on, ad infinitum.

Fundamentally this shows yesterday’s tech “support” person was lying through his teeth when he asked for the tests to be carried out. Today’s person didn’t care about my results and ran the test himself before sending it on to BT.

It amazes me that Pipex is still getting such rave reviews from people when they, basically, have untrained buffoons running their call centres and spend more money getting a low-life Z-lister like David Hasslehoff to front their campaigns than they spend on providing a service. As far as I am concerned Pipex is the worst ISP I have ever used (it is now even worse than Tiscali who used to be top of my List of Hate, comically Pipex’s fall from grace came when Tiscali bought them…) and I have no idea why every few weeks I get an email telling me how popular they are, how good their service is (for everyone else, obviously) and how I should recommend them to my friends. To be honest, there isn’t anyone I hate enough to recommend Pipex to them.

Please, feel free to spread the word.

[tags]Pipex, Bad Shops, Bad Customer Service, Pipex Sucks, Pipex Bad ISP, Bad ISP, ISP, Internet, Rant, Technology, Network, Tiscali, David Hasslehoff, Internet Service Provider, BT, ADSL, DSL, Modem, Networking, Orders of Magnitude, Bad Mathematics, Bad Networking[/tags]

Pipex – Terrible ISP

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Long rant – if you are reading this on Planet Atheism / Planet Humanism (or just aren’t interested) and you don’t want to know about my troubles with a UK based ISP please skip this 🙂 If you know anyone thinking of getting a new ISP, simply tell them to avoid Pipex at all costs.

My problems with Pipex continue unabated. I am in the process of trying to move away from them and get Sky Broadband but I am hitting hurdle after hurdle.

Following on from the fiasco where I had an entire month without internet connection, despite repeated false promises by the customer services staff and the only offer Pipex could make to placate me was to promise me an extra months connection for free – when this free month will be is anyone’s guess, I am still being billed each month – the connection still sucks. Pipex technical support have reached new levels of incompetence and it is getting to the point where I am tempted to simply cancel this phone line and get a new one…

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Firefox Memory Hog

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Now, for almost as long as I can remember (yes, I have a short memory), I have been a big fan of Firefox. I work on web applications so I have quite a few browsers installed, but generally I stick to Firefox for most browsing, with IE as a “backup” for those odd little sites which are cabbaged in other browsers. Opera is installed, but it doesn’t get used as often as the “big two” and the Seamonkey / Mozila etc browsers are hardly touched (anyone use Amaya for browsing?).

Recently, Firefox informed me that it had been updated and needed a restart. I dutifully complied and everything seemed to run fine.

As the hours and days passed, I noticed that my system was becoming slower and slower – web pages were taking an eternity to open and when I was running Photoshop or other system intensive applications everything really was starting to slow down. For reference, my system is an Athlon 64 x2 3800+ (Dual processor) with 1gb of ram. You would hope, that it would be fast at web browsing and basic office applications. It was, until recently…

Some initial research revealed that crap-shop-crap-ISP Pipex was providing me with a fraction of the broadband service they claimed, which explains the slow web pages (somewhat), but the problem remains in locally hosted pages. Despite my disgust with Pipex, they can’t really be blamed for everything else slowing down either.

Eventually, I cracked and bothered myself to look into this. Opening task manager reveals a possible cause of the problems. Firefox is a massive memory hog. I mean massive.

An example I had Firefox open with nothing other than this blog displayed. IE was running with this blog, Flickr, eBay and gmail tabs open.

Firefox was using 164mb of RAM vs IE which was using 98mb. IE had more tabs open and the tabs had more data-heavy pages.

What on Earth has the world come to. I tried opera with the blog page and flickr open and it hardly registered a byte. Blimey.

It seems that firefox, at least with this current “Upgrade” has become a worse memory hog than IE. Opera is like lightning in comparison to Firefox, but it always has been – seeing IE more responsive and less memory intensive is pretty shocking. I am going to look into this a bit more, but I would be interesting in hearing any other experiences on this subject.

[tags]Firefox, Mozilla,Internet Explorer, Opera, IE, Technology, Web Browsers, RAM, Memory, System Resources, Computers, Computing, Software, Problems, IT, Upgrade, Pipex, ISP, Amaya, Internet[/tags]

A cheesy website

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You might recogise the concept of “watching paint dry.”

That is an Xtreem sports activity, in comparison to watching cheese mature. Online. For 9 months. According to the BBC website:

Over the last nine months, more than one and half million people have viewed the site to watch a round of Cheddar cheese as it slowly matures

The nail-biting wait is now nearly over. Phew.

On Wednesday, the 44-pound handmade cheese, named Wedginald by its creators, will undergo its nine-month grading test, live on web TV.

(Wedginald? Hmm.)

Satano-Christian link farm

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There was a link to an anti-Harry Potter blog in a post on the New Atheist blog a while back – 27 July, in fact. It takes me a while to catch up…

But it was still too good to pass up. Although it’s pretty obviously a joke. Well, I mean a deliberate joke here. Although that would be a pity, because it would be much funnier if it wasn’t.

The site is called Exposing satanism Here’s a representative sample:

I have heard many bad things about these books and movies, there would be countless instances of witchcraft, cursing, brewing of drugs made by boiling alive babies pulled from the earth, sexual congress with goats and many more things not fit for young readers’ and viewers’ eyes, but what I found was much worse still than I had feared.

(I haven’t seen Harry Potter 3 yet, but the goat thing suggests a change in style of several orders of magnitude.)

I’m just smugly thinking to myself “All very amusing but it’s a bit too over the top to be a credible parody” when I spot a link to something called Christian Resources Net Directory with a suggestion to vote for this site as a top Christian site.

“What a spiffing wheeze!” I think, momentarily transported to an alternate 1940s boarding school universe. “I will vote for this fine parody site as my top Christian site.”

Gratifyingly, on CRN this is indeed Number One, with an impressive number of votes (5462), although I must confess that my own inept attempts at keeping the right Firefox tab open increased the total by 3.

What other gems hide behind that CRN list of links to Christian sites? I try “creation vs evolution”. Only one link and that it is the Answers in Genesis This concept would work very well if you are trying to do a homework assignment with questions like “Name the band that Phil Collins used to be the drummer of?” Otherwise, it’s quite difficult to see what use it would be so I’ll skip it. I don’t know enough about Genesis to even frame any more questions. It’s just not my style of music.

What about cults? That has an impressive 6 category entries. (Impressive because most categories have 0.) Bah, the first two are links to the site that took me there in the first place. Skip them.

Altruistic or Cult claims to be:

Confronting the altruistic values of Christ to the Seventh-day Adventist Church while recovering from their delusive power strugglings of falsified teachings

Huh? Does that have a meaning? In the site preface, the language is no closer to English:

This book is being printed of necessity for all such as it may pertain to, and to all others of public freedom of speech and expression; believing and advocating these liberties as equalitarian, and further refuting the idealist concepts and butcherings of the Way, Truth and Life of Jesus Christ – the authentic Christian’s Saviour, Master and Friend.
Like most cults, Seventh-day Adventist cultic practices have identical terminological definitions similar to doctrinal prerequisites – but diction them abstractedly different in contextual realism and verity to Biblical interrogations and conductive evaluation – signifying an astringent and interpretive critical analysis from Biblical unmixtured sequencing and paradynamical reasoning of common sense.

The literary reference here must be that baffling spam that floods your email inbox with random collections of verbs and nouns to trick you into opening a Trojan attachment, while convincing the spam filter that it’s a real email because it uses words that are in the dictiionary. (Some of them anyway, although maybe not as the same part of speech.) Oh, bugger. I realise that I’ve already gone to this site and of my own free will. I’ve probably opened my PC to yet another incursion.

What about Bible – The real world then? Wasn’t that the name of a TV “reality” programme? The Biblical version, perhaps disappointingly, doesn’t stick a load of teenagers in a shared flat and watch them argue about the interpretation of Leviticus 17:4.

The page just has a quote from Revelations and a few links to other similar pages with even less content. They all have shedloads of Google-Ads though, maybe to trick unthinking Christians into assuming that these are in fact the site content. It’s clearly meant as a parable, then. It’s saying “Welcome to the real world, kids. It’s run by Mammon.”

Charmed as I am by the idea of Ex-witch Australia, it hasn’t had a post since January. Its posts start with the quaint “G’day” just in case you doubt its antipodean ex-witch authenticity.


Watchman Fellowship is so visually busy it’s hard to see what it’s about. It’s got a montage of celebs with cultic associations and a list of their names. Is it dedicated to saving celebs from cults, then? No, its “mission” statement says it’s an

independent, nondenominational Christian research and apologetics ministry focusing on new religious movements, cults, the occult and the New Age.

The most common request Watchman Fellowship receives is for advice on how to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with friends and families who are members of cults and new religions. We are also often asked for recommendations on the best resources to prepare for, or use in, evangelism. In response, we’ve created these special sections linking to some of our best resources to help you in reaching out to friends and loved ones.

There follows a list of “sections” on “Witnessing to Jehovah’s Witnesses”, “Witnessing to Mormons”, “Understanding those in the New Age” and “Recovering from Spiritual Abuse.”

Witnessing to Witnesses? It’s got to be a tongue twister. Not that I can’t improve on the original. Try saying “Witness witless witnessing to witless Witnesses” aloud a few times. Fast. Ha. Couldn’t, could you?

Bloody Hell. You have to buy these special sections to find out what’s in them. And there I was admiring the almost uniquely altruistic lack of Google Ads. But I didn”t pay enough attention to the forest of other ads lost in the jumble of the page. (I have to say “almost unique” beacuse the antipodean former magic user seems advert-challenged, to his/her credit.)

Which topic brings me neatly to a link at the bottom of the Bible-the Real World page. A link to the Top 1000 Christian Sites. Top thousand, that was. The heart sinks as the mind boggles.

JCSM’s Top 1000 Christian Sites is a free, traffic sharing program. We welcome the best Christian sites in the world, so we can bless them and share traffic with them.
Join for free or visit one of the sites below, today!

There aren’t a thousand, yet mercifully. The lowest ranked site is in the 109 position. Its stats make depressing reading indeed. It would possibly constitute cyber-bullying to actually post its url here but I have to tell you that its average weekly number of page views is 0.1. Its total number of page views EVER seems to be 3 and it’s not a new site.

Well, you will be pleased to note that Christian-esque charity exists even in the cold rationalist heart. I clicked.