PigBlog

Back in December last year, Simon Guilfoyle, police inspector and systems thinker, published this rather good blog article: Life in the Fast lane. He briefly explored what happens when the lane discipline goes wrong, and how capacity is reduced by that, but then moved on to use this as a parallel to managment and targets. He’s also done a similar thing with a visit to a pub.

Now, this stuff interests me, and I’d reccomend the blog to anyone, but I’d actually like to explore the motorway as a system, and what breaks it, and try to speculate why.
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They’re at it again then.

The politicians, despite being met with indifference over the wholesale filtering of domestic Internet connections, our right honourable overlords now wish to promote “good, clean, wi-fi” in public spaces.

Whatever the fuck that means. No porn, maybe? The conspiracy theory types will say this is just the thin end of the wedge for censorship. We could have all sorts of content considered ‘unclean’.

I’ve already discussed that providing wi-fi for public access can be hard, and this is a further obstacle. It’s unclear what the term “wi-fi provider” defines- it could be anything from the biggies like BT Openzone down to my local friendly garage or pub who have chucked a Netgear domestic router in for customers to use.

I’ve already said how hard it is to do filtering properly, and you don’t have to take my word for it.

It’s a bit easier to do on a larger scale, with some enterprise-grade hardware and a subscription, but this costs thousands of pounds a year, and still isn’t 100% accurate.

The domestic routers a lot of small potential wi-fi providers use are the same sort of stuff we all use at home. Here’s my router’s filtering setup page:

A typical domestic router’s filtering setup: dependent on manual entries. Click to embiggen.

It’s reliant on maintaining a list of dodgy sites and entering them. Other routers can block based on DNS hostnames, but this, once again, relies on manually keyed blacklists. This is not going to encourage the provision of free wif-fi if people have to stump up time and money, or face legal problems if they don’t.

Here’s a wild idea: if you’re a parent, talk to your kids about the content available on the Internet (the chances being, if they’re teenagers, they can probably teach you a thing or two). Don’t devolve parenting to tech, and if you really have to, do it on the device, where you have control.

I’ve had a discussion recently on Twatter with Stuart Berry. He seems like a nice chap, and we had a good discussion.

Stuart’s a GP in the NHS, and campaigns for free wifi in NHS buildings with the #nhswifinow hashtag. There’s some really good points: I spend a couple of days in hospital in 2009, and would have killed for decent connectivity, rather than the expensive, shit web access on the bedside TV I did have. If you were in for a long time, it could really help.

Now, don’t know much about healthcare, or the NHS, but I *do* know a bit about wifi, and providing wifi networks over a reasonably-sized site.

I don’t, in principle, disagree with the idea. I’d actually rather like to see universal Internet connectivity for all, everywhere. I’d use it.

However, this is one of those things that, just like the the campaign for wifi on NXWM buses, gets picked up and run with without asking the right questions or considering a few harsh technicalities.

Good wifi is expensive. Good connectivity is expensive, remote managment is expensive, and on-site support engineers are even more expensive. There’s a real danger of people taking the idea of their £15/month domestic broadband, and £35 domestic router, and imagining it will cope on a much larger scale. Trust me: it won’t: I have tried it. It’s unreliable, hard to support, and a wholesale pain in the arse. You can do this, and people do, but you have security and potential illegal usage to bear in mind, on top of all the “I can’t connect” queries, or the “think of the children” content filtering.

Stuart quoted £400 for an ambulance ride to hospital- that sounds reasonable. So, if we’re being a bit awkward, 1 ambulance ride is equal to a decent access point. Which would you rather have if you’re ill? I do think the wifi is a good thing, but can the NHS afford it (and, critically, if not, who does pay)?

An unmanaged, unsupported, poor-performing network is probably worse than nothing, as it delivers the promise, then fails to provide- I wish this idea well (especially as it has secured independent funding), and the proposed device looks very interesting, but providing public wi-fi over shared 3G? *boggle*. The fact that the link in the article goes via facebook speaks volumes.

Turning in particular to buses, the only current, economically viable way to get Internet connectivity to a moving bus (or train, come to that) is 3G (or 4G, I suppose). 3G data is great. It gives us connectivity in many places- but it has problems- dead spots, high latency, changing IPs- I’ve covered this before.

I’d also raise this: surely a good proportion of potential users have their own 3G these days? It seems the whole world had a smartphone before I did, and most of these can do the wifi hotspot trick for if you have a device without it’s own 3G radio. 3G data is no longer expensive, especially compared to the cost of the device you need to use it….

As is traditional, I went to Walsall Beer Festival. Unusually, I went in the day on Saturday, hoping to avoid some of the beers running out, and have it not so busy.

It worked, to some degree, but there were still a few notable beers that had run out: Backyard Brewhouse‘s Chinook IPA had gone, so we had to take a post-festival visit to The Fountain for that (well worth the trip). In all we found 5 or 6 beers no longer available: it seems everyone likes the same sort of beer (pale, hoppy ales and IPAs) as us.

Beyond that, it was great. There was still a good choice of great beer, decent food on offer from the town hall restaurant, and a friendly, relaxed atmosphere, so a big thanks and kudos to Walsall CAMRA for a great job. My one slight complaint? More seats required- us poor middle-aged types with kanckered legs and backs can’t stand for long. We did find seats, but they were in short supply.

Next year, I reckon, it’ll have to be a day off and visit on Thursday afternoon.

My bike has been stolen, from the Barns Lane area of Rushall this morning. My own stupid fault in one way- it was unlocked.

It’s a Forest Green GT Nomad Hybrid bike, similar to this one:

A bike similarish to my stolen GT Nomad. Click to enlarge.

with a 19″ frame, a black back wheel (the front is the original silver-coloured one). The bash ring on the chainwheel is missing, and the brake cable outers are silver rather than the original black, so it’s fairly distictive.

[edit]
Here’s a picture of an almost identicatal bike (front). Note mine has the bash ring on the chainwheel missing, silver brake cables, and a black back wheel, and this one (an unknown colleague’s) has had a replacement saddle, which mine needed…

An almost doppelganger.

I was back in Bournemouth Network Monkeying again recently- 4 years on, the town has declined a bit, but there’s still good restaurants and a couple of decent pubs. This time, the weather was mostly cold, but Easter Sunday was stunningly bright, and felt like we might see a spring, maybe: the only snow there was on the trucks colleagues took down, so returning to WS9 was a bit of a shock, with snow still on the ground.

Even with the decline, and the seafront drinkers at 8am, I like Bournemouth: it’s a proper town, but also has the seaside- a nice beach, a pier. Bugger me, the drink’s expensive though.

I’ve had Virgin Media broadband for a long time now- starting at the dizzy heights of 512K, but a recent upgrade had meant that I now no longer have a seperate cable modem, and instead have a Superhub. The Superhub is a integrated cable modem and router, supplied by Netgear, and with some VM branding.

I didn’t have high hopes: the device had a bad reputation from the start, though it’s subsequently had many firmware upgrades. Many people abandon the router and wireless functions, and use it as a modem alone, and this was my plan, once I’d got it activated. Activation was quick enough, and a quick test saw a very acceptable 65Mbit/sec, so a quick switch into modem mode, and another test- same sort of speed.

The disappointment came when I attached my router- not a domestic cheapy, but a low-end Cisco. I originally thought it had mis-negotiated the link speed, but it seems it was correct at 100/full, so it was unexpected to see only 38Mbit/sec. Remove the Cisco, back up into the 60s, so poor throughput from what is an enterprise device…

So then, can I make everything work with the Superhub? To be fair, for many people, it’s a perfectly useable device: minimal setup, one box. However, the Cisco has a full copy of IOS, and as such has a lot of facilities. A very different beast, it took a while to get round to doing, but it did mean I could use whatever network range I liked, mess with DNS to handle internal hosts, tweak DHCP accordingly, and update DDNS for accessing stuff here from the Internet.

Well, it turned out OK. A poke into the advanced settings shows that I can still do port forwarding. editing hosts files negates the some of the need for DNS trickery, changing the IP of one box fixes the network range to 192.168.0.x, and the noip2 client on that box means that the glaring omission of DDNS from the Superhub doesn’t matter.

So far, wired throughput is great, but one great truth of networking has shown itself- Wireless networks never perform at or even near the theoretical max: it’s currently set into a mode which should give up to 144Mbit- so faster than the Internet connection- but I’ve not seen better than 44Mbit, even with an 802.11n chipset. The next test might be to borrow a decent AP to see how much of this is down to the Superhub’s wireless electronics, but the fact is that wireless is a shared medium in a hostile environment, unlike good old Ethernet on UTP.

Time will tell, but so far, while it’s not Super, it seems an AdequateHub.

This is a bit painful: I’d usually steer a million miles from linking the Daily Fail, bu there’s local content.

If you drive along the Rugeley bypass (the A51/A513 multiplex), as I did last Sunday from the Stafford/Milford direction, you can’t really miss two things: Rugeley Power Station, and the huge Amazon “fulfilment centre” (i.e. a big shed).

This article I’m reluctantly linking is written in fairly typical Fail style:

Between a sooty power station and a brown canal on the edge of a small Midlands town, there is a long blue building that looks like a smear of summer sky on the damp industrial landscape.

*[retch]* Where do they get these journos from?

but still has a bit of interest, and makes an interesting read just to hear about some of the organisation. The way the staff are employed leaves something to be desired though: it being the all-too-common scene these days of temporary contracts and hire-and-fire.

This is letting light in on the magic a bit of course: to me it still is magic that I can sit at home (or at work, or, well, within reason anywhere), and order stuff, and a few days later the magic pixies deliver it to me. Of course, the pixies are HGVs or Transits, ships, containers, railways and all the other infrastructure we barely think about (like this huge warehouse in Rugeley), and all the people, too- people on minimum wage, on short term contracts, and at risk of losing their job for going off sick, if the story is to be believed.

There’s a couple of further, better written articles I’ve found on this, but they’re US-based: The Price of Amazon’s Free Shipping, and I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.

This is all a good indicator of the way things are these days of course. Lots of hidden layers we don’t see, outsourcing, but (on a more positive note) some great use of tech. Tech that’s useful, rather than flashy. I’m still loving the idea that, in effect, stock gets dumped anywhere that it will fit, rather than a designated place, and just gets scanned as being there.

Amazon, like any big, successful business, has some practices you’d rather they didn’t have, but by god, the system works…

It’s well about time I blogged about our new furry children. Our previous pets have all had finest shitty handcrafted HTML pages, but practically all my web output goes here now.

After the death of Meowth we were, frankly heartbroken. Our pussycat friend was our surrogate child, and our companion: in short, irreplaceable, but having said that we can’t not have a pet or pets.

To this end, we went off to Cats Protection, and found our new friends- a pair of black and white cats, sister and brother, who had to be homed together. They have since been renamed QT McWhiskers and Kitty Softpaws
or QT and Kitty for short.

It’s been a long and at times painful settling-in period: they have spend weeks under the bed, only coming out to make a ton of noise at 4am: we’re wondering what their previous home was like. Now, however, they are coming round. Kitty has taken to the catflap, and QT is starting to consider it. I have a lapcat again, even if she doesn’t spend hours there like Meowth did as she got older. QT is a big soft Mommy’s boy, Kitty is Daddy’s girl.

One hing I have decided is that there will be more photos: We didn’t have nearly enough of Meowth, or some have got lost or deleted.

Hopefully, no-one noticed, but www.piglet-net.net has moved from a virtual server I shared with a few people to a more usual hosting arrangement. Thanks to Lee H-W for giving me loads of time to move.

The move was straightforward: back up the MySQL DBs, copy the files over, import the DBs, change a couple of config files, bodge /etc/hosts to check it, and switch DNS while the 2 sites were a mirror of each other.