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O2’s definition of ‘unlimited’

Monday, May 17th, 2010

On the 10th of May I received a very strange phone call from O2 regarding my broad band account. After finally establishing that the caller was legitimate, they informed me that I was over using their service and had to reduce my usage with in a month or I would be disconnected. Well that is the summary, their actual logic goes like this:

- My broadband account is “unlimited”.
- I used more than 40GB last month (51GB to be precise).
- If I use more than 40GB this month I will be disconnected.
- I very defiantly do NOT have a bandwidth limit of 40GB per month.
- My broadband usage is unlimited.
- O2’s terms and conditions clearly state that “There is no limit on the monthly network usage.” (http://www.o2.co.uk/termsandconditions/broadband).
- If I use more than 40GB this month I will be disconnected.

The call went round and round in circles for quite some time, with me becoming increasingly confused. The lady on the other end of the call was very adamant that I do not have a monthly usage limit. But I must use less than 40GB per month. I was assured that I would receive further details in writing. So before rushing to blog my distress, I decided to wait for the details so that I could get the facts right.

Today, May 17th, I received an email from O2. The body of which reads as follows:

We hope that you are enjoying your home broadband experience with us. Unfortunately, it looks like you’ve been using significant amounts of our network capacity and it’s affecting the service that our other customers get.

We need your help to make sure that all of our customers get the most from their broadband service. Here are some of the things you can do:
* Be Aware – Make sure you know what’s using up a lot of bandwidth.
* Peer-to-peer software – like Bittorrent. As these programs download and upload files, you might be using more than you realise.
* File sharing – some programs might run continually in the background. If you turn off the ‘auto start’ setting you can stop this.
* BBC iPlayer – If you’re using the old version, switch to the new version – it uses less capacity
* Ask around – Someone else in your house might be using it more than you realise. Ask everyone to use a bit less
* Lower your download speed – Most file sharing programs let you set a maximum download speed, please set yours to low.
* Download an application that will monitor usage – There are lots available to download for free and it might help you keep an eye on how much you are downloading

And the simplest solution is to download and upload less.

Taking some or all of these steps will make sure all our customers get the most from their broadband. We’d like to help you sort this out as things unfortunately can’t carry on like this. Sadly, unless you cut down by next month, we’ll have to cut you off. It’s not something we want to do, but it’s the only way to make sure all our customers get the same quality service.

And if you’ve got any questions or need some help to cut down, please call us.

Regards,

Felix Geyr

Head of O2 Home Broadband

Ignoring the fact that it took them SEVEN DAYS to deliver a generic email, I really have to wonder how this counts as “further details”. There is less detail in this email than the cryptic phone call a week previous. The threat is big – disconnection is a heavy-handed reaction. And they have not even provided estimates of my bandwidth usage. No numbers for me to work with. Just a looming threat designed to scare me into using my connection as little as possible.

Even more strangely, they email also fails to quote any O2 policy, or even link to it. Finding the actual wording of their fair usage policy on O2’s web site is not trivial. There any many passing references to it, but no hyper links. When I did finally find it, it is as expect, very vague and unhelpful.

So the only option left is to take Felix up on their generous offer and phone O2 back and try and get some more details from them. Or at least ask if I can borrow their dictionary.

To clarify: its not that I am having a go at O2 for imposing a bandwidth limit. Its they keep claiming that they do not, and then getting annoyed when I believe them. If I do not know what the limits are, how am I supposed to obey them?

Posted in Uncategorized, lj-xp | No Comments »

Pipe lamps: Work in progress…

Sunday, May 16th, 2010

Still need to work out where the transformers are going to go (the small boxes at the bottom). I have yet to work out how to conceal them amongst the structure. It has also been suggested I should try and make it look more ‘attached’ to the table.

I have also started to hook up CC tubes in various other interesting places. When I have finished the overall effect should be fairly good.

Posted in builds, lj-xp | No Comments »

American Sizes

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

Hopefully I should be flying back to the UK this afternoon. So as a leaving thought, I have a proposal for American restaurants.

Please place some form of indicator next to each item on the menu to give the reader an idea of exactly how much for they are ordering. I propose the following 1 to 5 scale:

1. You will still be hungry after eating this and wonder if this was just a starter.
2. A good meal, but you will still have space for desert.
3. You will finish this, but feel quite fat for doing so and feel guilty until you have had a good walk to exercise some of it of.
4. We did not put the phrase “for 2 to share” in the title because then you would order less food. The cooks will probably laugh at you if you order one each.
5. Seriously, this is just obscene. Not even a law court would believe this is just for one person.

Think it would catch on?

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Has the world forgotten how to make decent laptops?

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

I need a new laptop. While it is true that I am in possession of a number of laptops, they are all at least 4 years old and “a bit slow” does not really cover it any more. My main machine is a laptop with a 2GHz Pentium M and 2 GB RAM and is near-permanently-docked to a 24″ monitor. Eclipse is tolerable but not nice and HD video tends to just not play.

So I have been looking for something new. I am looking for something to last me the next few years and I am prepared to spend to get quality. Provisionally I have given myself a budget of about 1000 GBP, so I am expecting something really quite decent. And I am prepared to go higher if I think its worth it. However after a couple of months of looking I have failed to find anything all at that I want but can’t afford, let alone something I want to buy.

Summary of my requirements, in roughly descending priority order:

Must not come with a propitiatory OS. I plan to use Ubuntu and don’t want to pay tax to either MS or Apple.
Graphics card that plays nice with Ubuntu. (nvidia or Intel graphics preferred).
Decent battery life; at least 4 hours. There is no point carrying round a laptop with no power.
Decent CPU speed – at least an i5, though an i7 would be nice.
Should be reasonably small / light. I have done 17″ laptops, now I want something I am likely to want to carry.
Decent build quality. The machine should feel well made and build to last.
Keyboard should be nice to type on, have a decent layout and not be missing any import keys. Must have Home, End, PgUp and PgDn keys. Bottom-left key must be Ctrl (NOT Fn).
HDMI video output port. Its going to be docked a lot, so I want decent video quality on an external screen.
x86, 4+ GB RAM, 200+ GB HDD.
No CD drive. I never use it, so it would just wast space.

Now to me, these requirements are fairly modest and easily within the bounds of currently technology. Though as far as I can tell, this machine just does not exist.

OS tax
The first major problem I have hit is OS tax. So far as I can tell, it is near *impossible* to build a laptop without paying for a pre-installed OS. I can not see free OSs like Ubuntu *EVER* gaining any meaningful market share while this remains the case. Very very few users are ever going to use a free, unsupported OS when they have just paid for a supported one.
I am very surprised that the EU have not had a go at MS for being anti-competitive, though I suspect the blame would be tricky. I am sure MS would argue that they just make their OS available to manufactures and its the manufactures, who choose to only supply one OS and not supply hardware without an OS.
Or perhaps MS subsidise it so much that the hardware would be more expensive without an OS pre-installed?

Battery life
So few manufactures ever give enough priority to this, but what is the point of a laptop form factor if its not portable?

Build quality
People have been making laptops for quite a few years now any yet they are always bendy, feel cheaply made and creek a bit when poked. Apple are the only manufacturer I know of to actually put a laptop in a metal box. While I would never actually buy one, the metal bodied Apple laptops give a really nice sense of something that has been thought through and well made.

Keyboard
Apple is the prime offender here for stripping out a whole load of useful keys, removing the possibility of buying one and running Ubuntu on it. Which is a real shame, ‘cos the hardware is really quite nice otherwise.

All this leaves me with a feeling that the world has forgotten how to make decent laptops. I wonder if laptop manufacturers are scared they will end up like phone makers? Selling all their hardware through service providers who attach them as freebees in contracts. And with the market being largely determined by which models service providers decide to offer. Its possible. Already a number of netboooks are given away with 3G contracts.

This leaves me very sad and still lacking a decent laptop.

Posted in lj-xp | 1 Comment »

When life hands you lemons…

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

… make lemonade.

Along with many others, I am stranded until a certain antisocial geological event gets over its angst. But on the bright side, San Francisco is defiantly near the top of my list of places to get stranded in.

Though my brother wins the prize of most failed attempt to fly home. He was scheduled to fly home a few days before the rest of us (due to prior commitments) and was almost half way home when the first eruption occurred. His flight got turned round and resulted in an 8 hour flight to where he started.

Just over a day later he was on standby for a flight from SF to Glasgow, Scottish airspace having just cleared. He just managed to get a seat on the flight and we all thought he might actually make it this time. So we did some shopping and went out for dinner. Around dessert time a phone goes “beep-beep” – a text message: “Got turned around again. Meet you at the hotel?” Another (4 hour) flight to where he started, because the volcano erupted *again*.

So we are all still in sunny SF and likely to remain here for some time. But as I said before, could be worse.

Though now I need to email my managed and explain my situation. Ironically, I had chosen to travel with my work laptop to guard against getting stranded due to industrial action (if forced, I could try and work remotely).

So instead of flying home, tomorrow morning we are going to cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge and find brunch somewhere on the other side of the bay.

Funny old world really.

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Arduino serial pain

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

So I have been trying to make my newly acquired Arduino (mega) talk to this old 16×2 char, serial-interface LCD display I have.

This should have been fairly easy – you just feed the LCD ASCII over serial and it displays it. An Arduino can output ASCII over serial directly. Should be easy.

The short story is “its a bit messed up”. The slightly long story goes like this:

I started by trying to print the character ‘a’ to it. Logically I tried:
Serial1.print(‘a’);
The display showed “0″. I also tried:
Serial1.print(97, BYTE);
Serial1.write(97);
Same result.

After a lot of scrabbling in the dark, I finally tried:
Serial1.write(61);
And got an ‘a’ character to appear.

Seems something is getting confused between DEC and HEX. I tried driving the LCD from my PC’s serial port and it worked as expected. I tried reading the serial data from the Arduino back into a serial port on my PC and it looked ok. But for some reason when I send the display DEC from the Arduino it reads it as HEX. If I try using the hex literal in the Arduino code:
Serial1.write(0×61);
I get ‘0′ on the display again.

I have probably missed something obvious somewhere, but I have no idea what. I have a backup plan that involves using some form of nasty conversion, but I would prefer to avoid it.

Tags: Arduino, LCD, serial
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Morrigan alpha 3 somewhat delayed

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

My current dev build of Morrigan has a lot of new stuff compared to the a2 release. In theory it now matches all major functionality of terra and I have indeed now migrated to using Morrigan as my primary media player. And for the most part it is going well.

I would really like to now make another release, but I am hesitating for 2 reasons:
1. So far as I know, the only people who are going to test it use Linux, and the Linux build has a load of what I would class as really annoying defects, listed here.
2. I keep finding more bugs. Fixed 3 more tonight.

But it is working quite nicely on XP. So in light of point 2, I will keep using it myself and resist adding new features (I need a brake anyway) until I have gone a good length of time (5 days to a week) without finding any further serious defects. Then I will package up what ever I have and call it “alpha 3″, regardless of the known issues.

I guess this is how all software releases end up – its about know that none of your existing defects are blocking and that no new issues are arising.

…

Not that I really expect anyone else to really care about Morrigan, and I say this without sarcasm or remorse. This project was never intended to be any more that an opportunity for me to upgrade terra and get better at developing an actual product. Oh, and to prove to myself that I could do it. :D

Posted in lj-xp, morrigan | 2 Comments »

When to deviate from conventions

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

When following conventions of working within a framework, it is import to know when to follow and when to deviate. As was once famously said, “Rules are there to make you think before you break them.”.

Previously I mused on the possibility of creating a fixed control bar across the top of Morrigan’s main window. This is, surprisingly, a completely supported feature of RCP and some experimentation this afternoon yielded this:

It is not wired up yet, but that should not take too long. I will also remove the menu bar and re-home the few unique commands it contains. The toolbar buttons that controlled lists will be moved to the top the list editors themselves. The video can then be shown in either a view, an editor or full screen (or as a last resort, at the right-hand end of the control bar).

Also Morrigan now has global hotkey support on both Windows and Linux. Well, on windows at least. Linux global hotkey support still has a fatal bug I have yet to solve.

Posted in lj-xp, morrigan | No Comments »

GUI designs – frameworks and innovation without confusion?

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

Morrigan’s GUI as of today:

This weekend I have once again spent rather more time that planned working on Morrigan. Progress has mainly been in the area of playback and some GUI stuff. The big new feature is that video can now go full screen, and with terra you can chose which display this happens on.

The problem I am now up against is workout out where to put everything. In the world of RCP, the GUI is very definitively divided into discrete areas – Views and Editors. In Morrigan media lists (libraries and playlists) are editors and everything else are views. This all works quite nicely until we get to the player view.

A view has several key features:
- A main area.
- A caption bar across the top.
- A toolbar with icon buttons on it.
- A drop-down menu (click the little button circled in red below).

Some funky GUI logic allows the toolbar buttons to be moved into the tab area if there is space, otherwise they can end up sharing the same space as the caption bar. The drop-down menu is handy for hiding things… but that is just it. Its hidden. Placement of stuff is all rather flexible and with this power comes a world of GUI pain. While in theory views can be placed anywhere, some expectation of width is required as this dictates how many tool-bar icons you can get away with.

The layout shown in the screen shots here is my current best-attempt at coming up with a sane default layout. It works quite well… until you realise that I have dumped far too many options into the Player view drop-down menu.

Logic says I should pull some of them up onto the main tool-bar / menu-bar. This is indeed an option, but could cause confusion if I ever allow more than one Player view per window. This does not happen at the moment and I don’t see a huge demand for it, but so far I have been keeping this option open.

Another question is weather the video should be detached from the Player view into its own view / editor. (Import note here: Views and Editors can’t share the same “stack” of tabs – the Player view can’t be placed on top of playlists). The best way to arrange things will very much depend on the user’s screen size, so perhaps the best option is to allow all these and make it configurable? But I don’t want to cause too much confusion.

And I have not even begun to talk about the problem of placing the seek / progress bar. I could default the Player view to being long and thin along the top of the window, and arrange controls in it in a similar way to a more typical media player. RCP allows for views with no tab and which can’t be moved, so perhaps this would work here? But then were would the video go? In another view? Always in an editor? An editor that can’t be closed?

Here I have shown this along side the top of terra’s window.

One thing I always liked about terra’s interface was how I somehow managed to avoid too much GUI clutter. I am hoping that RCP will not force clutter upon Morrigan’s GUI.

I know text comments are no where near as powerful as standing round a black-board, but if reading this has given you some ideas, then any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Posted in lj-xp, morrigan | 1 Comment »

Morrigan Alpha 2

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

For anyone interested, I have another (probably) stable build for Morrigan. Main new feature: DirectShow or GStreamer support, including video.

Well, There would be a Windows/DirectShow build, if it were not for the issues outlined my last post. Though if anyone wants a windows build with DirectShow, then please ask and I will rig something up :D.

But anyway, for anyone on Linux, this build should be a goodun.

morrigan.a2.linux.gtk.x86.zip

Known Issues:
- The list of file extensions used for library searching / open dialogue is hardcoded to what I can pay on windows. What can actually be played depends on the GStreamer codecs you have installed.
- On Ubuntu 9.10 I am seeing an issue where the video disappears (leaving an empty box) when the video panel is resized smaller. The video re-appears when the panel is made larger again (so just resize it pixel larger and that *should* fix it).
- On Ubuntu 8.10 playing wmv files sometimes crashes the whole thing with a segmentation fault error. Though I suspect this is a GStremer error. :p