Corporate Internet ouchage

I don’t know what kind of Inter­net access work are using (well, I know who they’re using: it’s not quite the same), but they should seri­ously think about chang­ing things around a bit. Aside from wierd peer­ing issues a few months back, now they’ve just dropped off the face of the planet for *counts* I think about three days now. Pre­dictably, some­one is point­ing the fin­ger at Telstra.

Every­one always points at Tel­stra. Cus­tomers don’t care whose fault it is — they’re pay­ing whomever to pro­vide a reli­able ser­vice, not Tel­stra. Upstream contracts/networks are some­one elses’ respon­si­bil­ity altogether!

It’s pretty abysmal that it takes three days to get Inter­net ser­vic­ing more than 100 peo­ple work­ing again… Sigh.

I’m here at home on per­fectly func­tional Inter­net, but the things I’ve needed to do the last few days have involved the project web­site which has been equally unavail­able. If I were a full time employee I’d have been paid for two days of doing noth­ing this week… why don’t peo­ple take redun­dancy a bit more seriously?!

It also may or may not be diplo­matic for me to whinge about the cor­po­rate VoIP ser­vice they’re using at this point… it’s still work­ing (pre­sum­ably a sep­a­rate link alto­gether), but it sounds like a really bad pre-DECT-era cord­less tele­phone ser­vice, and that’s when your ears aren’t being blasted by the sounds of a modem as you dial in.

Grum­ble grum­ble. I might delete this post later if I think bet­ter of it… for the minute, suf­fice to say Josh is in a pretty bad mood about qual­ity of ser­vice he’s meant to be depend­ing upon. I learnt last week that I don’t have the free­dom to nego­ti­ate ser­vice con­tracts (yes, even where none expressly pro­vid­ing that kind of ser­vice yet exist — think mobiles…) which made me a lit­tle upset (because I thought I’d done really well talk­ing with a cer­tain ven­dor who will remain name­less), but saw the point of it all. But when reli­a­bil­ity gets this bad, for an all-online ven­ture, I am afraid to entrust host­ing to that kind of envi­ron­ment. You can get really good host­ing in Oz for way under $300/month (and even less if you’re pre­pared to com­mit to con­tracts, because that’s the way most Aussie providers do things) — not nec­es­sar­ily myth-of-the-nines host­ing (Seg­Pub are one host­ing com­pany with a really good rep, but they only do a 99.5% SLA), but waaay bet­ter than three days of down­time in a month.

In case you were won­der­ing, that works out to about 90% avail­abil­ity per annum. And it’s not nec­es­sar­ily going to flake out at times no-one is using it, and, given the demo­graphic, it’s not an office-hours-only kind of ser­vice. And I wouldn’t be look­ing at alter­nate ser­vice providers because…?

(Yeah I’ll prob­a­bly pull this arti­cle soon… just wanted to whine.)

# by Josh on February 21st, 2007 Tags: , , , , , ,
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So I succumbed to the allure of normality

That is, an inter­est­ing way of say­ing “I have a new phone that doesn’t require a con­certed weights train­ing regime for sev­eral months before you can begin car­ry­ing it around with you”.

Sony Ericsson V630i next to an iPaq

Noth­ing amaz­ing, it’s a fairly aver­age look­ing Sony Eric­s­son V630i. My ratio­nale in buy­ing it was that it’s not as though it’s part of the same busi­ness units as the DRM morons, any­way, and actively sub­verts their cause by offer­ing MP3 & WMA sup­port, instead of retarded ATRAC spe­cial­ness. It does use an M2 card instead of microSD, though, which is a bit of a shame.

Sony Ericsson V630i

Its PC Sync­ing is ade­quate, though obvi­ously not up to the Win­dows Mobile per­fec­tion to which I am accus­tomed :P

Mostly I just wanted PC sync­ing to make con­tact trans­fer pain­less. The “PDA” func­tion­al­ity (if one even dare call it that) is very much a sec­ondary thing: I’m vaguely con­sid­er­ing buy­ing a Palm, but not until I’ve got my head around this com­pletely. It’s rather on the usable side, but the inter­face is obvi­ously more lim­ited than a touch screen would ever be.

Sony Ericsson V630i

It cost me… noth­ing, on a Voda­fone con­tract. I didn’t mind that because I’m not locked into the hand­set for the con­tract length — I can unlock it from the Voda­fone net­work today if I want, with­out any charge, and stick my (3G, but, alas, I’ve only got par­tial 3G cov­er­age at my house — with both 3 and Vodafone/Optus, haven’t tested Tel­stra — so there’s not a great deal of UTMS going down here at the minute — reg­u­lar triband GSM wins out) SIM into any other phone.

Yes, that’s right, petty 3 users. I can change phones with­out hav­ing to go grov­el­ling to my net­work provider. Howdya­likethathuh? *gloats* :)

Any­way. It’s still good fun. It also has an MP3 player, but the probably-prohibitive cost of M2 media for this thing, com­bined with the supremely uncom­fort­able bun­dled head­phones (they’re designed for like, ele­phants or some­thing) and lack of reg­u­lar 3.5mm jack (*tear*) mean it’s not likely to get used much. ‘cept to say it sup­ports WMA & MP3 ring­tones, which is about as much fun as I had with the iPaq, only Win­dows Media Player actu­ally sup­ports this as a media device.

Yes, friends, that too is irony.


# by Josh on January 3rd, 2007 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 7 Comments »

SingTel Annual Report 2006

It uses the term SMS exactly once. MMS doesn’t get a men­tion, and, just to make sure it’s not a parochial thing, I checked for PXT as well… also no men­tion. If any­one has any good stats on mes­sen­g­ing by Aus­tralian mobile SPs please leave a com­ment. Tel­stra are great, Optus/SGT are not so great. Clearly as an annual report it should be more than fluff fol­lowed by some finan­cial bor­ing­ness. Com­pet­i­tive analy­sis, etc., would surely be not a bad thing to have in there. Mind you, weigh­ing in at 192 pages, there’s a lot of fluff already.

*growls at cor­po­rate types*

# by Josh on October 6th, 2006 Tags: ,
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Back from OP2006

Got back from Ori­ent Point last night at about 10.30 or some equally respectable time (felt like a really short trip despite near-disasters with lack-of-petrol, etc., made much less stressful/long thanks to an iPod shuf­fle clearly pow­ered by the Energi[s/z]er bunny, good con­ver­sa­tion, and shared dri­ving load). Was awe­some, fea­tur­ing lots of con­sole action, a bit of mud, a lot of water ear­lier in the week, a lot of water in a boat after cer­tain peo­ple (see pho­tos referred to later in post) cap­sized a canoe, Kahlua (straight, with ice-cream, with vodka, milk, and I’m sure there were other vari­ants), mod­er­ate quan­ti­ties of Taboo, a few hours of DVDs, sun­set on the head­land look­ing over water (yes, even on Australia’s east coast. I love rivers.), alter­nately good and okay food (few dis­as­ters, I’m pleased to report!), and a not-quite com­plete absence of Inter­net (only by GPRS when we were try­ing to get some­thing work­ing ear­lier in the week).

Am now sick. (Not very sick, just annoying-cold-sick). Sick­ness was prob­a­bly brought on by late nights etc., but it’s not like sleep wasn’t had… plenty of sleep was had, just at slightly, errr… skewed hours. Plus other peo­ple made me sick but I timed it well so I wasn’t sick whilst away. *nods* Too many dis­eased clouds (aside: that so eas­ily becomes dis­eased clowns, which is all fun and games until you go a step fur­ther: deceased clouds (rain) or deceased clowns (black com­edy). Words are fun. (Apolo­gies if I used them to annoy any­one too much dur­ing the week (seri­ously (I like brackets))).

Last night was going to be early (after an expe­di­ent trip home) then became late as some wed­ding party rehearsal (the wed­ding was this morn­ing) locked them­selves out and I went to let them back in (should have been a quick trip but I stayed to setup var­i­ous stuff for a bit). Meh! Then I didn’t get to sleep for ages because of not-being-able-to-breathe bad­ness. I kept wak­ing up and finally gave up and ended up get­ting out of bed at about 6.30 this morn­ing… yeeeu­u­uc­c­chhh. Yeah, what­ever, I don’t care if you nor­mally wake up at that time. It’s that ver­sus 9.00-ish to 11.00-ish every morn­ing for the pre­ced­ing week, so twas e’er so slightly painful. And now I’m exhausted (pre­dictably), and plan on sleep­ing in until about 11am tomor­row morning.

Whilst that’s hap­pen­ing, hope­fully 750-odd MB will be trick­ling up onto Flickr. Since I started writ­ing this (prob­a­bly twenty min­utes to half an hour) I’ve done 8 pho­tos (~2.55MB each)… poor com­puter :( Gonna be a long night for it! Ah well… Tel­stra is being retarded this month (still capped speeds despite not offi­cially being capped accord­ing to its site, etc. Must call up and whine exten­sively.) so I’m gonna use it any­way, because uploads aren’t capped (speed-wise, even if they retardedly-count-towards-quota). I could alter­na­tively upload at work (== iiNet ADSL2+ == no upload quota == fast) on Mon­day but I’m afraid I’m too impa­tient for that. Plus I *heart* kflickr and abhor their (Flickr’s) Win­dows uploader tool (fuploader it should be called, which makes a sound sus­pi­ciously like a belly-flop does (“fup”/“thwup”/“thwack”/*blood splat­ter*). F stands for FAILURE.)

Speak­ing of quo­tas and the like, how much mucus (I could swear that is spelt incor­rectly) do you think it’s pos­si­ble for a per­son to pro­duce per day? I’m so sure I’m over quota right about now. Hope­fully this means I’ll run really quickly through this cold and be capped by tomor­row! Hehe­hehe. Insert elab­o­rate metaphor about run­ning noses and de… what’s the word? Some drug. Does stuff with colds. What­ever… point is I dis­like cold + flu drugs. They make me drowsy and I for­get to take them and you’re not meant to mix them with alco­hol… err hi. I mean… Oper­ate heavy machin­ery. Yes, that.

Good week. Pho­tos com­ing soon.

# by Josh on July 8th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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Telstra Bigpond support

I hadn’t called sup­port for at least six months. I did, yes­ter­day, because our router went on hol­i­days and I’d neglected to keep a local copy of Big­pond clients, etc., and knew they had a super-secret-accessible-without-authentication FTP site I could down­load one (for the record, it’s 61.9.192.138 under dist/ with anony­mous auth) from. Because I wasn’t going to pay a net cafe/couldn’t be both­ered walk­ing the 1km to the near­est one, and because I couldn’t find an open AP to steal wire­less from(!! and I drove nearly a kilo­me­ter try­ing to, even the usual places were out!).

That was yes­ter­day. Today, I called again because I couldn’t get it un-setup. And got the most com­pletely and utterly clue­less tech­ni­cal sup­port per­son I’ve ever encoun­tered. Not to sound misog­y­nis­tic or any­thing, but… well, no male tech has ever come close to this woman’s sheer level of clue­less­ness. She hadn’t heard about their MAC address lock­ing auth which has been going on since the begin­ning of time. Obvi­ously, this was an imped­i­ment to get­ting things work­ing when clearly it was a lock­ing prob­lem. She read me an SM server IP address off some sheet she had (which, so she claimed, was the way they did things now… yeah, righto. I’m now con­nected just fine with­out any such defined server, thanks) which I entered — of course — to no avail. Then I asked if she knew whether I should be using a SM or a DCE auth server, in light of the fact I’ve been con­nected for a cou­ple of months with­out any prob­lems (no joke… when Tel­stra works, it’s the most spec­tac­u­lar thing in the world. Get­ting it up and run­ning is often quite a dif­fer­ent story.) and she said:

“Uhhh I don’t know… SMTP server? Hmm…”

*josh bangs head against desk*

Some minute and a half later she realises, “Oh, that’s about email, right. Let me check that for you.”

Uhh, yeah, that’s what I wanted you to do three min­utes ago. *waits on hold*

“Well, I just spoke with my super­vi­sor and they don’t know either.”

Please, give more sup­port con­tracts to the Indi­ans. They know more than support-script-monkeys in Aus­tralian call centres.

So, next ques­tion — can you tell me when I’ve shown up as authenticating/connecting in the last 72 hours?

I know what the answer to this ques­tion should be, because they’ve been able to do it before. Hers was “Oh, hang on… oh dear, this is too tech­ni­cal for me.” *Raised eye­brow, before vio­lently rip­ping limbs from tech-support voodoo doll reserved for this pur­pose* Real­is­ing the irony of her state­ment, she laughed air­ily, “And I’m meant to be the sup­port per­son!” Oh, really? *Starts to warm sol­der­ing iron for use in doll’s eyes* Unsur­pris­ingly, she couldn’t fig­ure out what was going on enough to answer my question.

She pro­ceeded to launch into the stan­dard “Oh but you said you were using a router and actu­ally we don’t sup­port those so I’m sorry we’re not really trained in how to use them…” I was tempted to cut her off and start set­ting it up on another com­puter now to prove it still wasn’t work­ing, but thought the pain had gone on long enough. So she con­tin­ued with her “Bad user, you and your stu­pid non-desktop-solution that uses third-party routers.” Nev­er­mind that these routers fea­ture Telstra-licensed heart­beat soft­ware (at least, one would hope so, because bpalo­gin is GPL’d and router firmware cer­tainly isn’t!). I could see the “con­tact the man­u­fac­turer” rec­om­men­da­tion com­ing — it did — but then she threw out another gem that can’t pos­si­bly be ignored. She pro­ceeded to actively rec­om­mend a third-party sup­port com­pany to setup my Tel­stra Big­pond Inter­net con­nec­tion, as though they’d some­how be able to fix my (Telstra-induced) MAC lock­ing problems.

At this point I took the doll down­stairs, and left it sit­ting on the gas stove.

Adden­dum: I have encoun­tered good female techs plenty of times in the past… I’ve just never encoun­tered any male techs this bad. I think it’s prob­a­bly a result of moronic gen­der equity cor­po­rate poli­cies, whereby they employ use­less females to make up the num­bers — sim­ply because not many work in the indus­try, doubt­less at least in part because of the “clue­less female” flack that some appar­ently cop. Proud to be a part of the prob­lem. *rolls eyes* It was said in jest, live with it ;-)

# by Josh on June 23rd, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| 1 Comment »

Either I suddenly got a lot more patient…

… or Telstra’s cap­ping sys­tem just stopped work­ing. I like.

Update: We’re now at 11593.49 MB usage, but everything’s back to nor­mal speeds. The IP changed for some rea­son… so it seem as though it’s maybe an IP-based restric­tion val­i­dated every X hours — and we’re not yet at that reval­i­da­tion point, I sup­pose. Inter­est­ing­ness. Shrug, it’s nearly April!

# by Josh on March 30th, 2006 Tags:
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Capped =(

I think we lasted 14 months. Now it’s time to switch to ADSL 2+, def­i­nitely… unless Big­pond re-quota their plans in the near future. This is just one of those things that comes with chang­ing usage pat­terns. We’re still pretty aver­age users in terms of over­all band­width con­sump­tion (well, “pretty aver­age” based on Whinge­pool w0w-0mg-my-1$p-iz-so-st1ngy-w1t-bndwdth!!Lo!L!11! users being not nor­mal, and a pre­sump­tion of “nor­mal­ity” for broad­band being in line with Telstra’s prod­ucts in Aus­tralia), but things change. I’ll stream video on the web with­out think­ing twice now: that wouldn’t have hap­pened any­where near as much 18 months ago. I’m get­ting used to a crappy media expe­ri­ence in a 3″ box on my 17″ LCD, heh. Hav­ing said that, I’m about to go down­stairs and watch an ~8″ video I down­loaded, on a 42″ screen… and it’ll look fine! (Stu­pid widescreen lame-resolution/dual-link DVI-not-supported piece of junk that it is).

I’ve got a server run­ning per­ma­nently here now, and Big­pond uploads count. That wouldn’t have mat­tered in the past, but I’ve pushed between 1 and 2GB of traf­fic from it in the last month… so it’s a con­tribut­ing fac­tor to the prob­lem of being 800MB over quota at present.

Exe­tel are look­ing good to me at the minute (and their Vodafone-resold mobile plans look pretty awe­some, too… a part of that is that they’re pre­sented sen­si­bly in a table, rather than spread across mil­lions of pages with pro­mo­tional crap — as per every large tele­phony provider in Australia).

# by Josh on March 25th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , ,
| 3 Comments »
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