I’ve decided to change the name of my blog. The old name, “What did you learn at the office today?” always seemed a bit clunky and I was never very happy with it.
The new name, “Multithreaded” seems to describe my life these days much more accurately. I’ve got a number of different things going on at the moment and need somewhere to keep track of all the threads.
Joel Spolsky makes this insightful, erm, comment on allowing comments to blog posts or not. I have to say, I have a lot of sympathy for his view, where he is in agreement with Dave Winer, of not allowing comments to blog posts.
It is interesting for me that on this blog (not the most popular or active in the world, for sure) one of the most popular posts has been my rant against Orange for their disgusting broadband service. To date there have been 104 comments from similarly frustrated and dissatisfied Orange customers and it has become something of a forum for people to not just express their emotions on the issue, but to keep people informed of the progress they are making in the fight against a totally broken customer service situation, and, in some cases, to announce their final victory.
However, this kind of post may be unusual in its nature. Joel and Dave make the point that their blogs are where they can express their, possibly unpopular, ideas and if anyone wants to comment on them they should do so in their own public forum (i.e. blog) and not as a comment (possibly anonymous). Joel also makes the good point that comment threads often rapidly descend into bun fights, especially for just those controversial issues that he feels blogs are best suited to and the trackbacks should ensure that all the posts are linked together.
So, with that in mind, I have disallowed comments on this post. If anyone is actually reading it, and wants to comment, you know where and how to do it.
Hey, we got an entry on KillerStartups!
In my spare time I’m doing the video editing for Intruders.tv. Having great fun learning all about digital video formats and how to use Final Cut.
This is just awe-inspiring (for any self-respecting geek, that is)
That was an interesting move by Apple at the WWDC yesterday, making Safari available on Windows. There seem to me to be a couple of good reasons for this:
Firstly, on June 29th the iPhone will be released (in the US at least, we Apple fanboys in the rest of the world will have to wait a little longer to get our hands on one) and a million or so people, not just Mac users, will be buying them over the next few months. Of course, Safari is the browser on the iPhone. Not a cut-down, limited version of Safari, but the full Safari 3. All at once there is the possibility of running the exact same browser on your Mac, your PC and your phone. Bringing Safari to Windows gives all the non-Mac iPhone users an opportunity to have the same browsing experience on their desktop, laptop and mobile phone.
That’s the short-term reason I see. The second, longer-term, reason is that this is giving more ‘ice water to someone in hell’ as Steve Job’s commented when asked why iTunes was so popular on Windows. Making Safari available is another way of giving Windows users a little more taste of what the Mac experience is like. A lot of long-term Windows users have no idea how using a Mac is just different from using Windows. I certainly didn’t until I made the switch two-and-a-half years ago. I remember the excitement of realizing that this wasn’t simply the same ideas as Windows packaged differently, but that the whole approach was different. By making more of that available to the 93% or so of computer users who have never experienced a Mac, Apple will tempt a lot more of them to go for the full switch.
In the future I can see more and more of the core apps being ported over to Windows. Mail, Address Book and iCal would all sit very comfortably alongside iTunes and Safari. There’s no direct economic benefit, since they’ll all be free downloads, but the aim would seem to me to be to infiltrate the Windows territory, give a taste of what’s on offer and get people to switch. Apple currently has about 6% of the computer market. Currently they’re not aiming for 93%, they’re aiming for 10%. You can see that in the Mac/PC ads - they’re not designed to appeal to everyone, but they are designed to appeal to the next segment of users that Apple want to attract.
Apple clearly have a long-term strategy going here and seem to be very effective at executing it.
I’ve been reading “Dreaming in Code” recently. This is written by a journalist, Scott Rosenberg, who embedded himself in an open source start-up company a few years ago to follow the progress of the development project, in much the same spirit as “Soul of a New Machine”.
In an early chapter, Scott explores the traditional ideas about software development evolving towards a ‘lego’ model where software is created by snapping together pre-formed units to form an application, and then ponders the reasons why this has not happened. This has got me to thinking. Do we really want to aspire to a ‘lego’ model for software? Are we really suggesting that software should be compared to a child’s toy? After all, look at any lego structure and tell me you would want to use a software equivalent for anything. In fact, look at the world around you? Tell me, is any of your furniture made of lego? Your household appliances? Your house? Lego structures may look impressive, but only in a sort of dancing-dog kind of way. The key features of any lego house I’ve ever seen, for instance, are that all the top surfaces are covered in small, round, protuberances and everything is squared-off and all the corners are sharp. Oh yes, and it’s a toy. Even if you built a full-size house out of lego, I doubt anyone would want to live in it, except perhaps as a post-modernist art exhibit.
The usual comparison that is made at this point is with electronics. After all, aren’t there lots of standard electronic components that you can plug together to make, say, an amplifier? It doesn’t matter which electronics company you get them from, you just take standard transistors, op-amps, resistors, capacitors, stick them on a circuit board according to established patterns and, hey presto, an amplifier. What are you going to do with it then? Well, at that point you’d write ‘Matsushita’ on the outside of the case and put it on the shelf of Dixons for £49.95 to sell to people who don’t give a damn about audio quality. The fact is that anyone who wants to make an amplifier that doesn’t sound like a couple of tin cans tied together with string takes care to select high-quality components from specific manufacturers; builds their own power circuits; develops creative new patterns for circuitry that make the best of those components and minimises interference between them. They test them and then make changes and test them again. Then you can put Quad or Linn on the outside and sell them to people who care about sound. BTW, there is a “standard component” way of developing software. It’s called Visual Basic. You can very quickly knock up a useful, database-backed GUI in VB with all the usual bits and pieces such as text fields, combo boxes, radio buttons, etc. as well as much more complex things such as spreadsheet components in a very short time. But when you see one of these apps you’ll notice that the main defining characteristics are the software equivalent of there being small round protuberances on all the top surfaces, everything is squared-off and the corners are sharp. In a lot of cases, these apps are no more than toys (though, contrary to real lego, it is possible to build non-toys as well.)
Take another example: the car industry. This is a very mature engineering industry, but do they have a lego model? Look outside at all the different cars you see. Even the cheap ones. Can you take a door off a Nissan and stick it on a Ford? Even within the same brand, the main visible components are not interchangeable, they’ve been tailored to the design. There is an interesting parallel between car manufacturers and software development, however. That is the concept of the ‘Platform’. In the past couple of decades car manufacturers have realised that developing a new car from the ground up is just too expensive. Now, several different manufacturers will get together and design a chassis together and use that as the basis for a whole range of different cars of different makes. A lot of variation can be built on top of a good platform for a fraction of the cost of ground-up. But that is exactly what the software industry has been doing over much the same time period. In the early days if you wanted to make a computer you build the hardware and put your own bespoke software on top. This was the approach taken for mainframes and mini-computers and the early micro-computers. But then in the 80’s people customers demanding cross-compatibility and since then the industry has standardised on a few, common platforms. There are the Unix-based platforms (including Linux and OS-X), the Windows platform and a few mobile phone platforms. In addition, the hardware platforms have become more standardised, too, with the IBM PC architecture being the most common. IBM soon lost control of that and advances were driven by a wide consensus between manufacturers. No-one builds a new computer from the ground-up anymore. Even Apple have moved to much more standard Intel-based components. They just take more care in putting them together than most companies. The variety of systems you can build on these few platforms is immense.
But it is interesting to note that the computer industry reached this point only a few decades after it’s inception. The motor industry took close to a century to get there. Perhaps we’re not so far behind in our thinking and practices as some people would have us believe.
A month has passed since my last entry. Have I really learned nothing at the office in that time?
Actually, I have been very busy. Last year was a year of consolidation for my small company. We built a good foundation on top of the opportunities we had the previous year and have solidified our relationship with our main client. This year I hope to make one of expansion. Our aim is to really build on that relationship and expand the company from our current 3 people to, perhaps 7 or 8.
I’ve spent a lot of January working on planning out the year and we have a number of potential projects in the pipeline so things are looking good. This means, hopefully, that I can get my head back down into the technology again. We have an interesting project lined up to do with processing Schematron. That maybe doesn’t sound so interesting, but we’re taking a novel approach in order to re-use the platform we build last year and it should be quite fun.
BTW, we’re recruiting. We’re looking for a really good all-round Java developer and also a really top-notch JavaScript person. I know that’s not much of a job description but if you think you might be interested in working for a small, innovative and friendly company in West London then by all means send you CV to <jobs at gsl.com>.
Well, Orange have finally agreed to close down my broadband account, 3 and a half months after installing it. At no time was the service fit for purpose. At best, I would get several line drops an hour with an immediate reconnect, at worst no service at all. From the morning of December 23rd until now I have had no connection at all.
I finally managed to persuade technical support that raising another line test request was not going to be worth it. They tried to tell me that they couldn’t raise a cancellation authorization as no line test had been done in December. I politely pointed out that the reason no line test had been done in December was because it had taken their engineers four and a half weeks to respond to the fault which was raised at the end of November. Eventually, after consulting his supervisor, the support guy, who really was very helpful and stayed calm despite my ranting, told me that he would raise a cancellation authorization. However, his system was down which meant he couldn’t do it there and then but he promised that he would put in all the details and that I should give customer services a call an hour and a half later to complete the cancellation.
Actually, I waited until the next day as 40 minutes on the line with Orange was all I could stand that day. When I did call, much to my surprise, the cancellation authorization was there on my accounts records and a very chirpy young lady agreed to start processing it. Too good to be true, however. When she contacted Customer Care (the Orange department naming committee clearly have a strong sense of irony) they told her that they would not process the cancellation since “not enough diagnostics had been carried out and they needed to send me a new modem”. She argued my case, even consulting the official procedures manual and pointing out to them the bit which said that if tech support had raised the authorization then they had no choice. Customer Care responded that they could override the cancellation if not enough diagnostics had been done. She took the matter up with her supervisor who insisted that CC could not refuse to cancel and even spoke to them directly whilst I held to clear the matter up and finally came back to me to say that Customer Care had agreed to do the cancellation and that he would clear the outstanding balance on my account (I cancelled my direct debit last month) and that if I had any problem I could contact him personally.
So finally I seem to be free of the abomination that is Orange Broadband. There’s something I don’t understand, though. Why would a company treat its customers like this? What do they possibly hope to gain by subjecting them to atrocious levels of service, making them hold for 15 minutes or more in order to speak to people who have no control over the situation; holding customers to the letter of a contract when it is clear that the service is not working; continuing to take money from people when they are not providing a working service with the threat of legal action if they default.
Even had Orange sorted out the problems and got me a working service, I would have terminated it at the end of the contract anyway. I have been an Orange mobile phone customer for over a decade, which is why I signed up for their broadband in the first place, but now I want nothing to do with them. I am actively seeking another provider for my £250-£300 per month business mobile phone services. In other words, because of so doggedly trying to hold on to £20 per month of broadband income they have alienated a loyal customer so much that they are going to lose more than 10 times that revenue in another area of their business.
If Orange do not sort out this situation quickly I think they do not have a very bright future. Somehow, though, I don’t see them getting it sorted. The automated switchboard message had changed when I called yesterday. It said that it was taking 8 to 10 days longer than usual to send out new live boxes because of the extra large number of sign-ups they were dealing with. All I could think of was poor sods who are going to have to go through what I did.
Can anyone recommend a good mobile phone provider in the UK?
I’ve just watched a political speech by Nicolas Sarkozy at the Le Web 3 conference. I have very mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, this was clearly a political speech (Sarkozy is a strong possible presidential candidate) and was delivered in French with simultaneous translation. Sarkozy came on, gave the speech, and was out the door before Loic could even deliver his ‘thank you’ piece. It seemed to me that what he said was basically “these are my policies, presented in a format that has a bit of relevance to the subject of your conference”. I would have been much happier if he’d stuck around to answer questions or join a forum.
On the other hand, I believe it is useful to have input from people who’s focus is not necessarily the same as ours. It is easy to get wrapped up in the ideas and technology of the web and forget how to relate it to the rest of the world and to be reminded that a lot of what we are doing is changing the world and that those changes have effects on the lives of a lot of people.
Update Jan 4th: Finally managed to get my account cancelled after a two-day saga.
If you are considering having Orange Broadband installed then think again. I had my Broadband Max, or whatever it is called, installed in mid-September and am still trying to get a decent service from them.
For the first month the line would not connect at all. To be fair, this was a fault on the BT line which also meant that voice calls were very noisy. When we contacted BT about it they said they couldn’t find a fault and that they could send an engineer out to us but if it turned out the problem was with our equipment then they would charge us for the visit. Nice company that threatens their customers with financial penalties for reporting problems. Still, this rant post is about Orange, not BT. Orange technical support requested a line test which, indeed, came back saying there was a potential problem on the line and, lo and behold, an engineer cleaned some contacts at the exchange and the noise on the voice calls is now gone.
That, however, was the last favour that Orange did me. Since then I have had a broadband connection which drops regularly. I’ve never seen it stay up for more than two hours and it often drops within a few minutes to half an hour. Sometimes it reconnects within a few minutes, but often it will stay down for an hour or two, cycling around making a connection and then dropping again after a few seconds.
I have spent upwards of 10 hours on the phone to Orange technical support in the past two months going around the same loop. They put in a request for a line test and ask me to call back in a couple of days to get the result, since they cannot seem to progress a problem without prompting. The result is always the same - a possible fault on the line. Please call back in 72 hours to get an update. Engineers believe the fault is fixed but the line is still dropping in the same intermittent fashion. Request a line test… - I’m now on the fourth iteration of this loop.
On Monday I decided I had had enough and asked for my account to be cancelled and for a refund. After having technical support tell me that they couldn’t do anything and I should speak to customer services, and customer services tell me that they couldn’t do anything and I should speak to technical support, I finally got escalated to escalations who cannot do anything as I am in a twelve month contract and because the line is up sometimes they won’t let me cancel as there is hope the problem can be corrected.
Now here’s the real kicker. Because the engineers have not made an appointment to visit my house and look at the line at that end, Orange consider that not all the possible diagnostics have been done and until all possible diagnostics have been done I cannot cancel. However, it it up to the engineers to decide if they think they need to make and appointment to visit my house and they currently don’t believe it is necessary. That means that I am entirely at Orange’s mercy to be able to cancel this service which does not work.
In addition, the engineers are not under any obligation to respond in any definite time-scale to get a problem resolved which is why, although the last request for them to look at it was on September 27th, I am still waiting for any kind of update from them a week later. As usual, the best that customer support can do is to ask me to call back again, on their national-rate number, in 24 hours to check for an update as they are incapable of calling me back when anything changes.
Apparently the engineers are quite busy at the moment which is why it is taking so long for them to get around to my fault (again). My understanding is that they are so busy because thousands of Orange LLU customers are suffering similar or other problems.
The frustrating thing is that when the line is up it is actually very fast. In the meantime I am still using my Easynet business broadband line which, though very expensive and only 2Mbps (only? three years ago that was a miracle!), has been down for a total of about 1 hour in all the years I’ve had it.
The whole experience has been so frustrating that I am considering moving my business mobile phone account to another provider in protest - if only I could find one that was any good. It is interesting that competition in the telecoms markets has simply resulted in price wars with no-one competing on quality of service.
Just in case the message wasn’t clear, don’t get Orange broadband.
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