#VirginMedia and the ever so British complaint
I had an odd interaction with Virgim Media the other day on Twitter. Below is a transcript.
Me: The new #VirginMedia combined modem/wireless router is flaky at best. So I’ve wired my Netgear router to it. All now good.
Virgin Media: Glad to see you’ve managed to find a combination that works for you Dan. PM
Me: Odd response from @virginmedia: Glad to see you’ve managed to find a combination that works for you Dan. PM
Virgin Media: With any product some customers will like it & have no issues, where others won’t. We’re just [happy] your netgear is working good. PM
Apart from not quite understanding the PM sign-off, I was more than a little perplexed. I was, in a very British, polite way, bemoaning some hardware that had been supplied by Virgin Media, for which I pay a handsome monthly rental fee. Their response congratulated me on my ingenuity and expressed happiness that I’d managed to find a solution that bypassed some of the functionality I was paying so handsomely for.
Had I had more than 140 characters to play with, and had I not been British and reserved, my tweet might have instead read:
The new #VirginMedia combined modem/wireless router is an utter bag of shit. While its modem functionality seems to work well, its wireless capability sucks donkey balls. On very rare occasions my laptop can connect to it, but it has always dropped out within a minute. (My iPhone behaves similarly, btw, so it doesn’t seem to be a client issue.) I’ve now resorted to connecting my Netgear router (fab, btw) to it using an Ethernet cable, and connecting my clients to that. It’s a much easier solution than bemoaning the issue over the phone and waiting for days for an engineer to turn up (between nine and six) to tell me that it’s a client issue.
My first 100-comment post
Today marked a milestone for Tangential Ramblings. One of my posts notched up an incredible 100 comments.
To put that into perspective, the entire blog has recorded 2,349 comments across its 1,703 posts, an average of 1.38 comments per post. If I blogged to generate comment, I would have given up the best part of seven years ago.
Putting aside the 100-comment post for a moment, the next most comment-heavy post has seen 17 comments, and only six posts have hit double-figures.
The post that has stood out as an outlier is titled iTunes cannot read the contents of your iPhone [solved]. Its title is an iPhone error message that I encountered some 12 months ago, one that I researched and eventually solved. There wasn’t a single solution out there that I could use, so I wrote one.
And in so doing, I’ve helped 100 people who’ve suffered the same issue who were happy to comment. And, I expect, ten times that number who haven’t commented.
That’s reward in itself.
For those that are interested, below are the top seven posts by number of comments:
- iTunes cannot read the contents of your iPhone [solved]: 100 comments
- Grouping of phone numbers: 17 comments
- Pi to 110,100 binary places: 11 comments
- How are you? Not bad: 10 comments
- SUMPRODUCTIF: 10 comments
- Invention: Sellotape with a coloured tear: 10 comments
- The happiest day of my life: 10 comments.
Google’s administrative nightmare
The Google Apps administrative experience has become a proverbial dog’s breakfast. And by dog’s breakfast, I mean a fucking mess.
Packages and products have been bolted together under a single login, and the administrative interfaces have been bolted together in a similar fashion. Separately, they probably made some sense. Together, they most certainly don’t.
Below is a list of the dashboards and administrative homepages that I’m aware of, how each is accessed and a brief description of what I *think* you can do from each:
- Account settings: This is accessed from the various product interfaces. Click on your username and hit Account Settings. It allows you to change your password and see the products that you’ve registered with
- Mail settings: This is accessed from the cog at the top of Google Mail. It allows you to configure your Google Mail experience. There are similar pages for some of the other product offerings, such as Google Calendar.
- Manage this domain: This is accessed from the Manage this domain link in the header bar of some of the Google products, such as Google Mail. It’s vast in its complexity, with settings pages for each of the products. It should be noted, however, that these settings pages are in no way related to the settings pages in bullet 2 above.
I kind of get it. I think the Manage this domain feature comes with me being, as it were, the master of my domain. I own osirra.com, so I am responsible for its master settings: what you can and can’t do in it, how Mail should be configured for each and every one of my three users (one of whom is four years old), how names and dates should be displayed, what logo to display (it took me an age to find that the other day), yada-yada.
Mail settings, along with its sibling settings pages, operates a level below this, allowing users within the domain to tinker with the lower-level features of that product: filters, look and feel, labels, forwarding and the like.
And account settings are specific to the user account, allowing you to change your password and access the products.
But the hierarchy is far from clear. And the navigational tools to drive you to the various admin. pages don’t do a good job in informing you what to expect, or whether you should be going there in the first place.
It took several weeks for me to uninstall Rapportive, a Google add-on furnishing me with additional information about people with whom I interact. I simply couldn’t remember where I’d added the feature, and couldn’t for the life in me remember where to deactivate it. I eventually managed to find it, but don’t ask me where—that information is long gone.
Maybe the cumbersome user experience is exacerbated by my very flat (and narrow) organisational structure. I am account owner, product user and domain administrator in my little world. But I can’t help but thinking that it would be similarly bad in a larger organisation.
Google needs to sort this out. I can’t go on like this.
Google’s TV advertising
Google’s recent forays into TV advertising in the UK have prompted some debate. I first encountered it in the middle of last night’s Britain’s Got Talent finals. And I enjoyed it. (More so than the Britain’s Got Talent finals.)
The advertising is very aspirational. It revolves around content, predominantly email, to children not yet old enough to appreciate it. Content that can be looked back upon with affection years later.
Malcolm Coles speculated that it marked the end of Google.
Gmail advert on TV? Google’s finished then …
I fundamentally disagree.
Google is trying to give its core non-search offerings wider appeal. It’s trying to crack markets that are not yet enjoying its products, both those online and those offline. And, in my view, it sees TV as a valid and viable route into the latter. Just as it undertook a sizeable poster campaign recently extolling the virtues of Chrome.
The fact that Google carries advertising does not mean that it cannot and should not use other media and providers to advertise its offering. Just as Ask advertises on Google. And ITV uses posters to advertise its upcoming programmes.
I think this move is a sign of maturity from Google. It shows that they acknowledge that they are not monopolistic in the advertising space, and that they must exploit other media to grow their market share.
I like the adverts. And they’re likely to appeal, in my opinion, to the older market in which I expect they’re less well-established. (In no way am I suggesting that these two sentences are related, btw.)
My confidence in avast is slipping away
I used to rave about avast. Lately, the glitter has come off.
First of all, what is avast? It’s, on the whole, a non-intrusive antivirus package that sits in the corner of your PC keeping it protected and safe. I pay for it, as I use it for business. But it has a free home offering which, on the whole, I recommend. Both of my parents use it, thanks to my recommendation.
But below is a synopsis of a couple of issues I’ve faced recently that have downgraded its reputation for me.
On 11 April, a new virus definitions file downloaded in the background to my PC completely destroyed my internet experience. Suddenly, I was unable to visit any http pages, although https pages could still be accessed.
Twitter was full of people with the same problem. The only immediate remedy was to disable the software (which freaked me out), go to AVG’s website, download the competitor’s product, and start using that. Which I did. To do so, I had to uninstall the avast software package.
I fully intended to go back to avast once the problem was fixed—partly because I was paying for the privilege, but mainly because I had developed a brand loyalty since initially subscribing to avast over five years ago. After a couple of weeks, to my word, I switched back.
My mum emailed me this morning asking for help. Her iGoogle homepage had lost all of its gadgets. This evening, I called her, hoping that she’d simply logged herself out, or had switched to classic view instead of the iGoogle view. The problem was not quite so simple. So I logged into her machine remotely using Copilot, and worked at solving the problem.
Nothing was coming up trumps. I tried restoring a backup of her Google settings (something I didn’t realise you could do), but still her gadgets wouldn’t appear beneath the picture of Bugs Bunny she’d chosen as her theme.
So I Googled the issue, and eventually happened upon one reporting a conflict between certain webpages and avast’s WebRep feature. Now I was aware of WebRep. Not the name, but the reality of it. It basically gives ratings of sites that you visit, or those that pop up in search results. It’s like a mobile phone signal icon, bright green, giving each site a number of bars. I’m not quite sure what the bars signify—site’s reputation, safety, something of that ilk, I expect—but it wasn’t particularly intrusive (or so I thought), so I never bothered uninstalling it.
Looking into it, it appears that avast had installed a Firefox extension on my mum’s machine on a recent update. And this was killing iGoogle. Likewise, I have had a Chrome extension installed. And as it turns out, this is the reason my Facebook and Google Reader pages have been hanging and running like dogs for the last few weeks.
Apparently, probably with my and my mum’s unwitting consent, avast installs extensions to Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer, and automatically checks for new browsers with the intention of installing sister extensions.
I have uninstalled the extensions on both of our machines, and our respective web experiences have, it seems, been sorted.
For the first issue, I completely forgive avast. We all have off days. And it seems that avast had one on 11 April. It would have been nice if they’d publicised the severity of the issue on their website (rather than a rather muted piece on their blog), but beyond that, I was happy that they fixed the issue quickly and I could get back to normal.
As for the second issue, I cannot forgive quite so easily. If a software provider wants to install an extension to my browser of choice, I want to be informed of this. And I don’t mean small print. I mean that I should actively decide whether or not this is something that I want to happen. I didn’t, and the impact was severe.
I’m staying with avast for the time being. But if there are any further issues, I’ll be hunting for an alternative.
Devolo power-based internet: dreamy
We had a loft conversion built last summer. The signal from the Belkin wireless router two floors below was not sufficiently powerful to be reliable up there, so I introduced an interim LinkSys wireless router on the intervening floor. The idea was that when connecting from the top of the house, you’d use the wireless signal from the LinkSys, which in turn connected wirelessly to the Belkin which went straight out to the internet. Rob was hugely helpful in setting this up.
But while connection to the LinkSys was strong and reliable, it seems that the onward wireless link was unstable. In short, I think that relying on two wireless hops was asking too much.
I was directed by Steve (megastar) to use a power-based connection. The idea is that the copper wires that support your house’s electricity are used to transmit data. I’m not sure that this is what Edison had in mind when he discovered electricity, but by golly it’s a fabulous idea.
I went ahead and bout the Devolo dLAN 200 AV Wireless-N Starter Kit from Amazon fr £89.99. It arrived on Wednesday and I installed it on Saturday.
The device consists of what look like two regular electric plugs, each with a small transformer-sized pack on it. An Ethernet cable, an Ikea-esque word-free instruction page and a redundant CD complete the box’s contents.
It’s sublime. You plug in one of the plugs near your router and connect it using the Ethernet cable. You plug in the other plug in the troublesome area of the house. The second device emits a wireless signal, the password for which is on the back of the device. You connect to this wireless network and the electricity’s copper wiring connects that device to the other one, which connects on to the internet via the aforementioned Ethernet cable.
So far so good. The only issue that had me worried for a while was that the 16-character password didn’t seem to work for Apple devices—iPhone and iPad specifically. It turns out that the hyphens separating each quartet of numbers that were not required by Windows were required by iOS. Odd UX fail by Apple there.
How much should a DNS change cost?
Ten or so years ago, the trend in government was to outsource IT. It was perceived that government should focus on its remit—policy-making and serving the UK people—as opposed to worrying about the IT systems needed to support these tasks.
So now, the majority of the Whitehall Departments have a largely single-sourced model. HMRC is supported by Capgemini (under its Aspire branding); Defra by IBM; the Cabinet Office by Fujitsu, and so on. And these deals can last anywhere from five years upwards.
This is great. It means that the civil servants can focus on the task at hand, while IT support is at the end of a phone line, and the blame for glitches in high-profile IT problems can be outsourced to the private sector. Except it’s not that great.
A single-source model sounds wonderful. There’s never any doubt as to who to go to when you have a problem or indeed a requirement. But the problem is that this comes at a price. The largely Tier 1 suppliers enjoy the luxury of operating in what is effectively a monopolistic market for the term of the contract. And for this reason, prices go up. I heard only the other day of a large IT provider charging £28,000 (twenty-eight thousand pounds) to make two DNS changes on behalf of a Department. No matter how you do the maths, it’s incomprehensible to get anywhere close to this number in a rational world.
In the event that the commercial model allows the Department to award business to other providers, competition is introduced. But system integration almost always rests with a lead (Tier 1) supplier, and that Tier 1 supplier has a monopoly over this piece of the pie. So the lower price that might be secured by awarding the business to the competition will likely be counterbalanced by an elevated price for integrating that work into the Department’s IT estate, and so the Department loses out either way.
I wonder whether shame is the answer to all of this. If the general public was made aware how much the Tier 1 suppliers were charging for some of the basic IT building blocks—DNS changes, password resets and the like—would they be shamed into charging reasonable fees for such work? Or would the cost shift to other, less commoditised elements of their portfolio, less easily dissected through the Freedom of Information Act?
To start the ball rolling, who wants to ask the FOI question: Please tell the public how many DNS changes have been made in each Whitehall Department in the last twelve months, and how much was charged for each?
avast: loyalty in spite of problems
Last night, avast suffered a rather large issue. All of a sudden, it started blocking seemingly every http web page. I still had email access (over https), but even attempts to Google what the problem had the results blocked.
avast’s blog post of yesterday indicated that this was a result of a false positive issue with one of their virus definitions updates. By the time I’d read this, I’d already downloaded AVG’s free offering just to get me up and running again. avast’s mistake here was not to advertise the issue clearly on their website, particularly given its crippling impact. (I’ve just watched a Guy Kawasaki video in which one of his messages is: Deliver Bad News Early.)
As a paying avast customer, I will go back to them. Not *because* I’m a paying customer, but because the product is all kinds of awesome.
I’ve been burnt by horrendous anti-virus software in the past. Namely: Norton. Norton is a horrendous application, a virus in and of itself. It sucks the life out of users. It announces and advertises its presence at every opportunity. And it makes you want to throw your laptop through the next available window.
avast is the opposite of Norton. Its spinning disc sits innocently in the tray at the bottom of the screen, there purely to inspire confidence. On occasions, it tells me that the virus definitions have been updated. But beyond that, I know not of its existence.
I’ve been an avast customer since 31 May 2006. And I will continue to be their customer long after our fifth anniversary.
Backupify and Google Mail: a costing mindf*ck
I am confused.
I currently do not pay for email. I am on the free version of Google Apps. I use it primarily for email—in five years, I’ve used up 53% of my 7,548Mb allowance—and calendar. I have the odd Google document but haven’t delved any wider across the Google Apps business suite.
I’m reluctant to upgrade to the Premier version, however. The main reason: the charging is per user, and in addition to my own account, I have set up a couple of others—one for my daughter, one for a business associate. So instead of paying $50 per year, I’d end up paying $150 per year. I would much rather Google gave the option of upgrading on an account by account basis, as opposed to upgrading all accounts within the domain.
But with the recent stories about Gmail accounts being wiped clean and data being lost, I’ve become increasingly worried about the fact that my 4Gb plus of email is sitting in one and only one place: with Google.
So Greg Baker introduced me to Backupify. And Sean Garvin introduced me to its one-year free trial. So I’ve signed up.
It backs up my Facebook (which interests me little), Flickr (very important), LinkedIn (low importance) and Twitter (high interest, low importance) accounts, together with my Google Apps data (essential). Based on current pricing, an annual fee of $60 will kick in at the end of my one-year trial, and I’m not phased by this.
But I *am* phased by the fact that I consider my email sufficiently unimportant not to pay for, while I view its back-up as important enough to pay $60 per year for. This makes no sense in my own head, and is troubling me.
Maybe I should bite the bullet and start paying Google $150 per year—if only to restore the (relative) equilibrium in my head.
Half a million redundant clicks
I was working on a spreadsheet with someone the other day. I was on their PC, and at the end of the session I needed a copy of the spreadsheet we’d created.
So I asked whether I could email it to myself. With her consent, I attached it to an email, put a couple of words in the subject line, and hit Send.
Automatic spell-check was turned on. It found seven errors in total, all appearing within the lady’s email signature. Parts of her name, her company address and her email address all fell foul of the spell-check.
I asked her whether this happened every time she sent an email. It did. Every time, she hit Skip seven times, the email eventually zooming into the ether on the seventh click. I asked why she hadn’t instead hit Add to dictionary, but she was afraid that doing so would add it to a big, central dictionary.
So for the last 12 years she’s hit Skip seven times—every time she’s sent an email. At 30 emails per day, that’s over half a million Skip clicks. Or she could have hit Add to dictionary seven times on day one.
Fabulous.