Earlier this week I went and photographed the first London gig of a friend’s band – Obvious Pseudonym (no covers, self-penned, funky disco, try it sometime…) – and took lots of photos.
I dutifully uploaded them to Flickr. Boom. Was a busy 24 hours. 🙂
Many of you will know that I’m involved in organising the UKNOF meetings.
Some of you will know that I don’t understand this obsession that many UKNOF attendees have with going en-masse for a curry (usually with someone’s employer picking up the tab) the evening beforehand.
What is the attraction, apart from maybe not having to pay for it yourself, of sitting at a big long table, when all it achieves is you having to yell at the person next to you in order to have a conversation while receiving iffy service of usually disappointing (sometimes downright poor) food?
It’s no good for mixing and networking, one of the attractions of going for dinner with industry colleagues, as you can only bellow your conversation at your immediate neighbours, either because everyone else is pissed and shouting, or just to make yourself heard over the loud sitar music.
Sitting in tables of 6-8 would help a lot with conversation, and probably improve service as well!
It’s also not a good dining experience. The most recent curry being a particular lowlight, when a) I hardly ate any of what I ordered because it was so unpleasant (and it wasn’t as though I’d ordered a phall!), and b) I was later unwell in the middle of the night. I should have seen the warning signs when they handed us each a sticky, laminated menu card, I guess.
While I don’t think of myself as entirely Grumpy Old Man as yet, I still don’t really see the attraction…
I also can’t talk about drunken behaviour in curry houses without a link to Rowan Atkinson’s Indian Restaurant sketch… It is a tricky bit of floor. Deceptively flat…
Anyone who pays more than a passing interest in the world of craft brewing will know that Scottish craft brewer BrewDog narrowly missed out on winning an industry award earlier this week, due to the interference of a representative the event’s sponsors, drinks behemoth Diageo.
As wounded as they may be by what’s happened, BrewDog’s glass is half-full, not half-empty.
Had BrewDog won the award, as originally intended by the judging panel, then it would have most likely made just the industry and local press. However, this story has now made mainstream news (such as the Daily Telegraph article, The Times, the Sun, and morning freebie Metro, as well as on BBC Scotland), because no journalist can resist covering a David vs. Goliath struggle such as this.
Tactics such as those alledged to have been used by Diageo have backfired spectacularly. Not only have they revealed that they do consider BrewDog as a serious threat to their beer portfolio, but it’s got BrewDog the sort of mainstream publicity that money can’t buy.
I’ll raise a (half-full) glass to that… Mine’s a 5AM Saint.
A few weeks ago, I attended the PacketPushers webinar on OpenFlow – a networking technology that, while not seeing widespread adoption as yet, is still creating a buzz on the networking scene.
It certainly busted a lot of myths and misconceptions folks in the audience may have had about OpenFlow, but the big questions it left me with are what OpenFlow stands to open up, and what effect it might have on many well established vendors who currently depend on selling “complete” pieces of networking hardware and software – the classic router, switch or firewall as we know it.
If I think back to my annoyances back in the early 2000’s it was of the amount of feature bloat creeping into network devices, while we still tended to have a lot of monolithic operating systems in use, so a bug in a feature that wasn’t even in use could crash the device, because the code would be running, even if it wasn’t in use. I was annoyed because there was nothing I could do other than apply kludgy workarounds, and nag the vendors to ship patched code. I couldn’t decide to rip that bit of code out and replace it with some fixed code myself. When the vendors finally shipped fixed code, it was a reboot to install it. I didn’t much like being so dependant on a vendor, as not working for an MCI or UUnet (remember, we’re talking early 1999-2001 here, they are the big guys), at times my voice in the “fix this bug” queue would be a little mouse squeak to their lion’s roar, in spite of heading up a high-profile Internet Exchange.
Eventually, we got proper multi-threaded and modular OS in networking hardware, but I remember asking for “fast, mostly stupid” network hardware a lot back then. No “boiling the sea”, an oft-heard cliché these days.
The other thing I often wished I could do was have hardware vendor A’s forwarding hardware because it rocked, but use vendor B’s routing engine, as vendor A’s was unstable or feature incomplete, or vendor B’s just had a better config language or features I wanted/needed.
So, in theory, OpenFlow could stand to enable network builders to do the sorts of things I describe above – allowing “mix-and-match” of “stuff that does what I want”.
This could stand to threaten the established “classic” vendors who have built their business around hardware/software pairings. So, how do they approach this? Fingers-in-ears “la, la, la, we can’t hear you”? Or embrace it?
You should, in theory, and with the right interface/shim/API/magic in your OpenFlow controller, be able to plug in whatever bits you like to run the control protocols and be the “brains” of your OpenFlow network.
So, using the “I like Vendor A’s hardware, but Vendor B’s foo implementation” example, a lot of people like the feature support and predictability of the routing code from folks such as Cisco and Juniper, but find they have different hardware needs (or a smaller budget), and choose a Brocade box.
Given that so much merchant silicon is going into network gear these days, the software is now the main ingredient in the “secret sauce”, the sort approach that folks such as Arista are taking.
In the case of a Cisco, their “secret sauce” is their industry standard routing engine. Are they enlightened enough to develop a version of their routing engine which can run in an OpenFlow controller environment? I’m not talking about opening the code up, but as a “black box” with appropriate magic wrapped around it to make it work with other folks’ controllers and silicon.
Could unpackaging these crown jewels be key to long term survival?
I noticed that my electricity account (paid by a monthly direct debit) was starting to accumulate credit over the course of the year, so I was rather happy when I got news that my monthly payment is to go down by just over £20 a month from April.
Of course, the monthly systems are prone to “swings and roundabouts”, where if your monthly payment is too high you end up with an account massively in credit and your electricity company sat on a load of your money, or the opposite, you’re paying too little each month and end up owing.
So, I did wonder if it had been reduced too much and I’d end up in arrears after a few months…
However, on closer investigation, my home is using less electricity each month compared to the same quarter last year, even accounting for our recent very cold winter. The bill has a graph comparing our average daily energy usage from the current statement against the same period the previous year.
It was around 10kWh a day less this year compared to last!
I wondered how we’d achieved this.
We hadn’t really changed any major appliances, we hadn’t cooked less, been away for weeks, or anything that would produce such a signficant change.
Then it dawned on me that our old immersion heater in the hot water tank (sadly, no gas at home, just electric) failed early last year, and was replaced with a new one. One of the reasons the old one failed was because it had become coated in limescale – London’s water is famously hard and nasty to anything with a heating element. Eventually, the build up causes the element to overheat, and eventually it can split (blowing the fuse, or popping the breaker).
The previously installed heater gave us very hot water. Steaming hot, and needing to be diluted with lots of cold water to be useable. You could hear the sound of boiling coming from the tank when the element was active, and the system was prone to airlocks – partly because of the water being overheated, and partly due to an error in the positioning of the expansion pipe when the property was built.
So, when the heater was replaced, I decided to turn down the thermostat from it’s default setting. Believe it or not, they are usuallyglued to around 65-75 C, with a little blob of silicon sealant. So, I popped the silicon blob off, and turned the stat down to about 55-60 C.
We still get hot enough water, and the only time it’s an issue is having a bath instead of a shower (the shower has it’s own water heater). A bath tends to run all the hot water off, or needs use of the “top-up” heater.
That’s all I can put such a significant and sustained change down to, but it’s looks to save about £20 a month. Talk about money down the drain!
Oh, and the system airlocks less frequently.
If you live in the UK, you’ll know the purple phenomena which is Premier Inn, advertised by that jolly Lenny Henry. (He’s a very tall chap. I wonder if they have a special bed for him when he stays?)
They actually do well at providing a reasonably good and consistent hotel product, something which the UK has long been lacking. Remember we’re talking about the country where you could end up in an antique hotel complete with rattly plumbing, school-canteen food, and that epitome of UK hotel kitsch, the Corby Trouser Press.
However, the warm, fuzzy, “I know what I’m getting”, brand consistency which comes with Premier Inn, also comes at a cost: There’s a marketing department back at Premier Inn Central in Dunstable, which feels the need to use lots of adjectives. Fairly standard marketing practice, but it’s almost like it’s there for the sake of it, and often downright odd.
My current cringe-worthy favourite is from their “grab and go” breakfast, or whatever it is they call it. It stood out as being odd when I first saw the flowery prose, talking about grabbing:
“A Costa Coffee and a baked croissant“…
The first thought that came into my mind was “Baked as opposed to what?”
Poached? Steamed? Deep-fat fried? The mind boggles.
Some copywriter in the marketing department just had to put in an adjective.
Yes, it made me pay attention to their “baked croissant”, so maybe it worked, but it’s just bloody weird when you read it.
A few weeks ago, I wondered why a number of posts on my blog which had been quiet for a while saw some renewed interest – the series on regional peering suddenly saw a significant growth in readership – when I received word that there was group forming in Manchester to discuss the subject, instigated by Manchester co-lo operator m247 and involving (my former employer) the largest UK IXP, LINX.
Now it started to make sense…
Continue reading “A new regional peering initiative for the UK?”
I attended by all accounts a very successful first open meeting for the IXLeeds exchange point yesterday – with around 120 attendees, including many faces that are not regulars on the peering circuit making for brilliant networking opportunities and great talks from the likes of the Government super-fast broadband initiative, BDUK, and energy efficient processor giants ARM (behind the technology at the heart of most of the World’s smartphones), as well as more familiar faces such as RIPE NCC and LINX, among others.
Definitely impressed with the frank discussion that followed the talk by the DCMS’ Robert Ling on BDUK funding and framework, but still sceptical that it’s going to be any easier for smaller businesses to successfully get access to the public purse.
Andy Davidson, IXLeeds Director, was able to proudly announce that IXLeeds now provides support for jumbo frames via a seperate vlan overlaid on their switch, which is probably the only IXP in the UK which officially offers and promotes this service – at least for the time being. Of course, they are supporting a 9k frame size…
Well done to my friends and colleagues of IXLeeds for making it to this major milestone, and doing it in great style. It seems a long, long way from a discussion over some pizza in 2008.
The only thing I didn’t manage to do while in Leeds is take a look at the progress on the next phase of aql’s Salem Church data centre, but I’m sure I’ll just have to ask nicely and drop by aql at some point in the future. 🙂
When I was travelling internationally very frequently, I was a big fan of the UK’s IRIS recognition deployed at some of the busier UK airports. I probably still am, actually.
The system used high defintion photography of your irises, as unique as a fingerprint, as a replacement for showing your passport to an Immigration Officer. It allowed you to cut out a lot of the queueing, and most users were frequent travellers, everyone tended to know what they were doing!
It also didn’t depend on presenting a passport. All it used was the iris photography.
However, it looks like the system’s days are numbered – the IRIS booths in Manchester and Birmingham have been switched off. The booths at London airports (Heathrow and Gatwick) will be operating until at least after the Summer Olympics.
The UK Border Control say they are “reviewing their biometric technology”, which means switching off this really useful system.
I guess I’ll be back to queueing for a booth, waiting for ages, looking at posters containing “tougher checks take more time” hectoring by the authorities.
Some of you may be aware of the Google Fibre project which is an experimental project to build a high-speed FTTH network to the communities in Kansas City. They chose Kansas City from a number of different communities who responded to Google’s “beauty contest” for this pilot, because they had to pick just one and felt that it would have the greatest effect and be the best community to work with.
Like many other Community Broadband projects, Google point out that what the large incumbent telcos sell as “high speed internet” is seldom “high speed” at all, and is commonly sub 4Mb/sec. Google estimate that during the pilot, the cost of works for lighting up each subscriber premises may be as much as $8000 – though this is cheaper than the £10000 that it’s rumoured to cost to deploy high speed broadband to a rural subscriber in the UK.
So, this got me thinking, what could Google potentially bring to the UK with a similar sort of project?
It strikes me that one of the ways that Google could help the most is by facilitating the existing community benefit-based FTTC/FTTH groups to build networks in their communities, which right now can be frustrated by lack of access to public money from the super-fast broadband deployment fund (aka BDUK).
A significant amount of BDUK money is going to BT as the incumbent, or needs complex joint-venture constructs (such as Digital Region – though that was not a BDUK-funded project), because these organisations firstly have whole departments dedicated to handling the paperwork required to bid for the public funding, and secondly because they have a sufficiently high turnover to bid for a sufficient amount of public money to deliver the project. These are hurdles to community led companies, who will most likely just drown in the paperwork to bid for the funding, may not have all the necessary expertise either on staff or under contract, and likely don’t have the necessary turnover to support the application for the funding.
Meanwhile, the House of Lords Communications Select Commitee have issued this request for evidence (.pdf) in respect of an inquiry into whether the Government’s Super-fast Broadband strategy (and the BDUK funding) is going to be able to repair “digital divides” (and prevent new ones), deliver enough bandwidth where it’s needed, provide enough of a competitive market place in broadband delivery (such as a competitive wholesale fibre market), and generally “do enough”.
Could this be where Google enters stage left? As opposed to running the project in it’s entirety, they partner up – managing things such as the funding bid process on behalf of the communities, possibly acting as some sort of guarantor in place of turnover, as well as providing technical knowhow and leveraging their buying power and contacts?
This would at least give an alternative route to super-fast broadband. Right now, BT are winning a lot of the County Council led regional/rural fast broadband deployment projects, sometimes because they are the only organisation able to submit a compliant bid.
It remains to be seen if the money will benefit the real not-spots, or just prop-up otherwise marginal BT FTTC roll outs. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve no axe to grind with BT, but is the current situation, with little or no competition, ultimately beneficial to the communities that the awarded funding is purporting to benefit?
This is certainly one of the questions the House of Lords enquiry is looking to answer.
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