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.)

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.

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.

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.

*growls at corporate types*

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.

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 ;-)

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!

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).

Orange today informed us that they’ve become 3. High-powered marketing blitz to existing customers of Orange has begun, and is expected to continue in force. This line typifies the level of crap I’ve come to expect 3 (and most other 3G telephony — not data, that’s okay — networks) to spew:

So, on our 3G network, you can enjoy the same great value, plus international roaming, Bluetooth™, picture messaging and more.

Okay. Let’s analyse this a bit. My call rates are going up, even though the volume of users on Hutchinson’s 3G network “is now larger than our CDMA network” (cost/volume should go down, but hasn’t). I could get international roaming with Orange, albeit only in places with CDMA: no-one should ever choose CDMA without being aware at least to some degree how the technology works/is applied globally (if that’s something they care about — I don’t, global roaming is still way too expensive + I don’t go overseas often enough). Bluetooth is the pinnacle of crap in this line, having absolutely nothing to do with the network — unless it’s a provider-supplied phone with Bluetooth disabled because they’re scumbags. I don’t need to elaborate on this point, suffice to say I sincerely hope no-one with any technical knowledge copy-proofed this. Picture messaging is arguably the most useless thing that ever happened to telephony.

As for the other crap HT have spun, I especially love this line from their FAQ:

What happens to my Orange contract?

Your Orange contract will remain valid, however, as a special offer we are allowing a full waiver of all remaining handset instalments when you upgrade to 3G.

Marvellous. Not only am I being forced onto more expensive plans + call rates (call rates matter for where I’d like to take my mobile phone usage patterns — at present, I’m price-conscious to the point of making less calls than I otherwise would, and SMS usage is trivial at 11c to any mobile in Australia. With 3 I get some free SMS, but I’m not at all helped on the call rate front), there’s also absolutely no exit option.

Effectively, HT would love to change my contract so I’m on a volume-economics-powered 3G network on which they have higher margins and I see no real benefits. Get this:

Can I keep my current phone when I upgrade to 3G?

Yes. The phone is yours to keep, however we will not be connecting any new services to Orange and this phone will not work on any other network, including our 3G network. We have developed fantastic upgrade offers that include a free handset within the plan. We are in the process of setting up a recycling program to take all old mobiles.

The phone is mine to keep, but there aren’t any CDMA networks left in Australia (WCDMA is actually nothing to do with CDMA and has no interoperability with it). “Fantastic upgrade offers” refer to marginally reduced SMS costs (which, so far as I can gather, is the most profitable part of non-business-account telephony services in Australia: namely, Orange’s core market. They never made a big impact on the business telco scene, and their flagship product — before they ditched it — was a landline-replacement plan) and increased call costs if I were to choose a plan based on my current usage. “Include a free handset” refers to the ability to get a free phone if I agree to be shunted onto a new contract term. Not terribly likely. In fact, I’m going to see this contract term out, then switch to another telco.

Or maybe not, but I’d certainly like to. Anyone have recommendations for a $35–40 plan, preferably with cap? Yes, even Telstra is an option if the cap is good enough. It’d mean we could get rid of our landline, still have a discount on Internet (two or more Telstra services on one bill), and switch to VoIP. Sure, Telstra are still getting our money but they’re shooting themselves in the foot doing it! I just want the family to get past the “learning curve” of VoIP so they’re hooked on the idea and then we can find a more compelling ISP, pick the cheapest possible landline rate with a non-Telstra provider, and then they’re only getting ULL money from us.

Did I ever mention I hate telcos?

Dependencies, incidentally, were the main reason it didn’t get installed on a Debian system as originally planned. Pacific Internet’s apt repository seems to have been borked the last few days, so there were missing packages and packages in the database but unable to be installed and all other kinds of junk… When it got to the point I couldn’t even get something to install from CPAN because of lower-level dependencies in Perl itself, I kind of gave up and started downloading Asterisk@Home. That was yesterday. I cancelled the download because Pacific was being too slow for my liking (Telstra Cable has spoilt me with downstream), and this morning before heading in I downloaded the distribution from Sourceforge in about 10 minutes. Bad checksum. Downloaded again. Burnt to CD. Still faster than it would have been to download at work. Ah well.

I didn’t get in til 9.30 because I was burning CDs etc, and had a functional system calling between PCs and with voicemail, reception message, etc., by 11.11 (I noted the time, it being a seminal moment in my personal VoIP-using history, even if I did cheat and use a pre-packaged version!). Good stuff.

Also, if you’re going to use Asterisk@Home in Australia, install the OpenVoice IVR prompts and recordings. It’s much better than listening to that American voice which was driving us nuts even whilst testing :P Having said that, you may need to restart the server when changing voice files… ours was doing some weird thing where it seems to have cached the old files in voicemail IVR prompts. The voice would be chiefly Australian, but for a “one” sound. Might’ve been the inflexion (falling “one” or neutral “one” instead of rising “one”), but I didn’t think they had particularly concerned themselves with that when writing most PBX/voicemail systems… could be wrong. Anyway redialing the voicemail extension a few times seemed to help resolve things. Bizarre.

The Asterisk box, to borrow a term (Hi Steve :P), is running with 256MB of RAM — but is sitting perilously close to swap whilst running. It doesn’t help that it leaves two instances of mpg123 running in the background for hold music, as well as vsftpd (seriously, who’d use that on a telephony server? If you need to backup voicemail, write a cron job to copy the files to a remote server. Bingo, no FTP server required! Grr.) and a handful of other crap. Anyway, it’s probably going to get more memory before it moves into production use. There are two Fritz! ISDN cards in it, but they haven’t been set up yet. Anyone seen a site about installing Fritz! cards with Asterisk? All I’ve seen about them is that they need kernel recompilation for chan_capi stuff… and recompiling kernels has never struck me as particularly fun. (The few times I have tried, bootloaders have been unco-operative… i.e. I didn’t know what I was doing!)

Craig Middleton said this:

No I am not saying iPod users can download directly into iTunes. But they can download and burn CDs. With a CD there is no need to ‘engineer’ anything with iTunes — although it is illegal to rip from CD onto iPod. As the Sydney Morning Herald once pointed out there is no legal way to use an iPod — but that makes a lot of us criminals
:-)

Then Phil Tripp (albeit under a pseudonym) fired this back:

And I’m one of the biggest criminals around with a succession of three generations of pods with 11,000 songs on one now and a hard drive with 26,000 songs–but all legal from my own record collection.

SO what you suggest I do is use a PC to download songs legally from BP, then burn to CD and then I can transfer these over to an iPod. KEWL! You got me. Any chance that BP is going to do the 99 cent downloads again for November if iTunes launches?

Telstra pulled out the lawyers.

Phil suggested that Telstra encourages customers to circumvent its digital rights management protections. In fact, Telstra in no way advocates or condones this type of action by customers. Transferring BigPond Music downloads from a CD to an iPod or other device is an infringement of copyright. It is also a breach of the terms and conditions that customers agree to when they sign-up to use BigPond Music. Craig made this clear in his email to Phil by saying “it is illegal to rip from CD onto iPod.”

Telstra is extremely disappointed that Phil chose to misrepresent his exchange with Craig on the themusic.com.au website.

That is, of course, assuming smiley faces have absolutely nil semantic value. Bull crap. (I try to keep this site clean, and that’s probably one of the stronger expletives I’ve used here. This debacle irks me, lots.)

Telstra, just like the rest of us, fully recognises what consumers will do with DRM’d media. Namely, whatever the hell they can and want to. No-one reads “terms of service” for B2C services, unless they’re security paranoid (I’ve been known to, but only when I really don’t trust a source–certainly not because I’m afraid of prosecution!), and distributors know it.

Record companies are a bunch of ostriches, it’s true, so maybe they’re the only ones who haven’t cottoned on to this fact yet. This whole DRM thing is a massive façade to convince the record industry they do, in fact, have some control over the distribution of their music. Here’s some news: they don’t. You probably didn’t hear it here first.

http://lists.slug.org.au/archives/slug/2004/04/msg00133.html

Ironically, I was looking for that software so I could see what could be done away from a MS Windows live production environment (for an event mid-December this year). As it stands, I’m downloading Dyne:bolic from another source (GNU.org’s US FTP server, actually. One of Bigpond’s more often-saturated links), and will post here once I’ve figured out if it’s worth “the risk” of using. And again if/when it gets used.

My biggest concern is it’s not going to like various TV-out hardware on the two computers I want to use it on. Actually, it only needs to work on one — the other is up to Ubuntu, but the software will be much the same. And yes, I now trust Ubuntu enough… kind of. Breezy is ridiculously stable, though its multimedia performance can be a bit lacklustre. I’m blaming the TNT2, though, and figure it’ll pick up lots if I stick a GeForce 6600 in it. Failing that… I’ll probably use a laptop, or something else boring.

Basically, I want the Dyne:bolic box to be a playback machine, and the Ubuntu box is just gonna sit there and feed a nice static graphic (or maybe an animated logo, if I get bored). The Ubuntu box will be my desktop, because, whilst it’s fine for WWW stuff and the spot of word-processing… I have too much crap installed on it. Contrary to popular opinion, Windows is far easier to trim services/background apps on for extra speed than Linux on the desktop is. The amount of crap Gnome/Ximian/Nautilus leaves lying around is truly disgusting if you ever want to try and stop all the processes and just have something work on its own. I could launch into a failsafe X session and just run what I want from there, I guess… always a possibility. Can’t do that on Windows (if someone says “safe mode” I might stab them).

If anyone feels like lending me a vision mixer (or well-specc’d computer!) for a weekend in December… *looks strangely optimistic* Yeah, okay. Well, if anyone can get me a good deal on a vision mixer (MX-50 is my friend) for a weekend in December…

(Yeah, I’ve checked Digihire. They’re nice people, but cheaper would be better. Church/non-profit event.)

Nevertheless, impressive considering the limitations of the medium. I used it to download Breezy from iiNet’s FTP (because ISP.net.au still doesn’t have the ISOs), and averaged about 750KB/s — which is about a third again of what I was getting from ISP.net.au, so I think I’ll change the sources.list to that. It’s a shame Telstra’s files.bigpond.com is so useless/HTTP-only/slow to respond to new releases, because I’d love — and I’m sure they’d save some bandwidth/peering expenditure — to be able to get quota-free downloads of this stuff. I probably could have got Breezy from there, albeit via HTTP, albeit in a few days time whenever they get stuff up there (haven’t checked, might be there already, but generally they’re pretty sluggish), but it’s just so much easier this way.

Anyway, I’ve burnt it to CD now (no, Elinks doesn’t do that too) and will hopefully be up and running again soon.

Posted from Elinks

I’m using a Dynamic DNS service instead of just setting up an A record (much simpler, plus that would mean I could have a catchall on the domain… my current DNS host — also my registrar, Joker.com — doesn’t like wildcard CNAME records, though) because, theoretically, my plan only has a dynamic IP address prone to changing at any given moment. Dynamic DNS services really should only be used by people with dynamic IP addresses, for a number of reasons… the most obvious one being that they are designed to change, and expire if you don’t let them. (At least with DynDNS, which is pretty excellent for the price… free.)

With this in mind, I received this message today:

A hostname you have registered with Dynamic Network Services at DynDNS, sn0239410.dnsalias.net, with current IP address 60.225.85.25, will expire in the next 5 days. This expiration is due to an automatic timeout; your host has not been updated for 30 days, and hosts are removed after not being updated for 35 days. This is our policy to prevent a stagnant DNS system. Users with static IP addresses can use the Static DNS system, which does not have this timeout.

There’s more, I just can’t be bothered repeating it here.

That’s the fourth time I’ve read that paragraph in separate messages. That exact paragraph. Yeah, not even the IP changed.

To give that some time scale, see the quoted portion above: “hosts are removed after not being updated for 35 days”. I’ve manually touched my subdomain’s record once every 35 days or thereabouts for the last four months. Before that, the same situation existed, but then only for three months. Before that? Two. (And before that was iiNet, back in the day, and that doesn’t really bear commenting… every time your modem disconnected you’d get a new IP, and sometimes more often! Though it seems to have improved since…)

Seems to me as though Telstra is slowly and quietly making its dynamic IPs more and more static as broadband adoption picks up. So, Telstra, when are you giving us (mere plebs) IPv6?

Look carefully at the screenshot above. Something is incongruous.

Yes, that’s right, this “Static IP demonstration” is all about Telstra’s spam filter product (which, incidentally, they charge for — boy am I glad we aren’t using Telstra email as well as Cable in this house!). I clicked through to the demonstration because I was interested to know how exactly one explains the purpose of a static IP to Joe Smallbiz — and the idea that one could creatively demonstrate a number–and a static number no less–seemed too good to miss.

It seems, however, that BigPond’s answer to the great (or should I say bulk…y…) unsolicited email question that floats above the present Internet generation like a puddle doesn’t, is simply to assign everyone static IP addresses and be done with it. Wow. What forward thinking from one of the world’s most notoriously backwards ISPs!

Of course, the whole thing would require an adoption of IPv6 to function, which would defeat the purpose as there would be ample spare resources to acquire once any given IP/subnet got blacklisted, but you know… an interesting concept.

In fact, so prolific is this campaign that the two often collide in spectacular style, as I discovered on my (prolonged, courtesy of the Cross City Tunnel stupidity that gripped Sydney today) bus trip into the city this morning.

It wouldn’t have been so tragic if their campaigns weren’t so similar… but they are. The only difference, apparently, is the strength of execution: note the SMS components of each campaign vary slightly, with Sensis using a regular number (presumably to add unsuspecting commuters email addresses and phone numbers to a database for on-selling) whilst the Yellow Pages have at least gone to the trouble of acquiring a dedicated promotional number.

As a side note, their index is heavily commercially geared, and seems to leverage “Australian” results purely on the basis of domain namespace (that is, .au). As a developer, I’m not terribly impressed with it, but, unlike Ansearch, this is a force that may have to be taken seriously into consideration in the months and years to come.