David's Blog

It’s really rather simple:

Act dumb.

Yes really. Allow me to explain.

I browse a lot of forums, and in many cases I’ll see a barrage of people complaining about various technical support departments at ISPs, service providers, and whoever else. They’ll be wailing that they didn’t get the help they wanted, and nothing worked, and how much the support sucks, and so on.

I’ve called support for Virgin Media, Be, Zen, Orange, and various others over the years. I work in IT, and I do a lot of troubleshooting myself. I often have an idea of what the problem is, and sometimes what might need to be done to fix the issue. I could easily phone up the support line, tell them what the issue is, and demand they do what I want to fix it. I might be right – but there’s an equal chance I’m NOT right, and could send them on a wild goose chase trying to deploy the wrong fix. I don’t know their systems or their networks, so who am I to tell them what to do?

And that’s the issue most people have. They may, or may not know what needs to be done, but the service provider know their stuff better than you do, so let THEM decide what to do. Hence why I say ‘act dumb’. I had an issue with my cable modem. I phoned up, and just told them what they asked for. I did exactly what the guy on the other end told me to do. An engineer was dispatched, and the problem was fixed. Simple. Other people with similar issues (it was an attenuation issue) go through countless engineer calls, and visits, and personally I think that’s because they pre-empt things, and try and tell the support person what to do. I never do.

Yes, I could phone up and say ‘I work in IT, therefore I know what the issue is’. They probably get loads of calls like that every day. As I say, some will know what the issue is, others will only think they do.

I had issues with my ADSL flaking out (back when I was on ADSL), and I jumped through all the hoops both Zen and Be had, which included moving the router to the master socket, and running through all the tests they wanted to do. As a consequence of doing that, all the BT engineer visits I had, which led to a No Fault Found, weren’t charged to me. If you read all the paperwork, in theory I should have been charged about £75 for those visits, but I wasn’t as they were raised as per the processes BT set up for the ADSL providers. We jumped through all the right hoops, so I wasn’t liable for the costs. If I’d phoned up, told them I wasn’t going to move the router and demanded an engineer, I would have been stung. I’ve seen people do that, and wonder why they get charged.

Don’t get me wrong – there ARE plenty of ‘bad’ support lines out there, and poorly trained people manning them. They may be working to a script, but think of it this way; if you were in a play, and one person is working from a script, and you turn up and decide you don’t want to use the script, you’re going to very quickly end up in a mess. Same goes for these support lines really. Let them follow their script, and don’t pre-empt them. Let them ask the questions they have to ask (have you turned it off and on again?). If they can’t handle it, they’ll escalate it anyway. I’ve gotten in and out of support lines in no time, and had all my issues solved pretty quickly, without any shouting, swearing, or demanding to speak to their supervisor.

So remember. Just act dumb!

I’ve been wrestling with the Cisco Telephony Service Provider (TSP) today. We’re doing an install of ARC console, and having set everything else up, it wouldn’t start. I traced back and found that the issue lay in the TSP module itself. ARC tell you to try a utility called TAPI Soft Phone. Every time I ran it I got a vague error about not being able to connect.

I found the TSP was actually dropping logs into C:\Temp. I found these lines:

CiscoTSP001.tsp|   CSelsiusTSPWaveList::GetAvailWave() *ERROR* No wave available|<LVL::Error><MASK::0001>
CiscoTSP001.tsp|   CSelsiusTSPDevice::OpenDevice() [ARC-SrvQueue3] *ERROR* GetAvailWave() returned WAVELIST_NOT_ASSIGNED|<LVL::Error><MASK::0001>

I was aware there was a Wave driver in there, but it supposedly gets installed when the TSP installed.

Right?

Well, it would seem not. Whether it’s meant to or not, I don’t know. I could find plenty of reference to reinstalling it, but not a lot of mention of how to install it in the first place (or reinstall it for that matter). A bit more digging, and I found this Cisco document which tells you how to install.

It mentions Windows 2000, but it’s roughly the same for 2003, which I’m using. I selected Add New Device, Game and Audio controllers, and just pointed it at the driver.

One thing that struck me is that Windows claims the driver is unsigned. I’m wondering if the TSP installer is trying to shoe-horn the unsigned driver in, failing, and just silently giving up. Like I say, that’s assuming it actually does it in the first place.

Anyway it now works. A simple thing, but it took me a while to find the root cause and fix it.

As you can see from the widget on the right, I’m using Twitter these days to spout all sorts of random nonsense. Twitter is a wonderful thing, and I’ve found it useful, and quite entertaining.

Thing is, I see something of a major flaw with it, and it extends outside of Twitter. Due to the fact ‘tweets’ have to be 140 characters long, if you want to post a URL (link) to something, people will often shorten them using one of the many services such as TinyUrl, Tr.im, Bit.ly, or Is.gd. The end result being that your original URL, turns from this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8026736.stm

to this:

http://bit.ly/8kx1o

We now have a considerably shorter URL to post, which saves a lot of space in the tweet.

My problem with it, is that the URL could link to anything! In this instance, it does link to the article above. But it could go anywhere! Any how else would I know until I click it.

TinyURL thought of that particular problem and introduced a preview feature, so the URL http://preview.tinyurl.com/cakpdn actually takes you to a TinyURL page which tells you where the link goes to. You can turn on a cookie to always make it go there, then you choose to click through if you trust the domain. But not all the providers do that. Bit.ly don’t seem to and besides, it relies on the person posting the link using the preview URL, or the person visiting the link having the cookie enabled, both of which rarely happen.

We also end up with URL blindness, and people will just click on them regardless, and end up at a plethora of sites. Most of the links I see go past in my Twitter feed are shortened somehow, and without the context of the tweet are mostly meaningless. How long before they are accepted entirely, and start appearing in Phishing emails and the like? We could end up with shortened URLs firing people off to all sorts of sites.

There have been suggestions by some for the domains hosting the content to provide their own URLs. Personally, I think this is by far the best method, as it means you can instantly see which domain the link goes to and know with a better level of certainty that you’re going to end up where you expect to. Trouble is, it relies on the domain owners implementing something themselves, which they might be reluctant to do, seeing services like twitter as a flash in the pan (I don’t think it is).

A short-term solution might be for the short-URL providers to send short URLs to a landing page, so you can see where the link goes, and if it is malicious or not what it said, flag it as such (although they could be open to abuse as well).

It’s a tricky subject really. Just click carefully!

I just realised something.

American Dad is now doing jokes and storylines similar to those The Simpsons was doing around Seasons 5-10 (or thereabouts). The Simpsons are now doing jokes and storylines more like those Family Guy was doing in the early seasons. And Family Guy – well, I’m not entirely sure what they’re doing, but it’s still funny.

For Me, American Dad has been getting funnier, and the storylines have always been very coherent. They have purposely avoided non sequiturs and cutaways (those were Family Guy’s domain anyway), so they had to make good storylines, and good jokes often arise from that.

The Simpsons is a mixed bag. Yes the animation on the first few seasons may have been awful, but the stories were good, so I’ve learned to see beyond that. I’ve found myself really enjoying mid-series seasons as, like American Dad, they had good storylines, and were interesting to watch. The latter seasons have just veered off into total randomness. Bart has gone from being a brat to being plain evil at times, Homer lurches between being dumb and being vaguely intelligent, and Lisa would in real-life probably be heading towards a nervous breakdown. Marge seems to have mellowed a lot though, whilst Maggie has suddenly gotten very intelligent (almost aping Stewie from Family Guy in some respects).

As for Family Guy, I think the last couple of seasons have consisted of mostly excellent episode, then some horribly structured, somewhat pointless episodes, with gags which felt more like filler than something dragged out for comedic value. The cutaways to Conway Twitty are pointless now. It was funny at first, now it just feels like a bit of an up-yours. Then again, the Star Wars special episode was spot-on, and the episode where Peter has a stroke was too funny.

But then again, comedy is very subjective. I don’t find Southpark funny, and others I know do, so maybe some of these things I don’t find funny have others rolling in laughter.

Who knows!

After many years, I’ve finally done it. I’ve gone to Cable internet. And it’s great! (so far).

I’ve had ADSL for quite a while. When I first joined, which I think was around 2000/2001, the only option was BTOpenworld (or Openwoe as they were more often known), as the market hadn’t yet been opened up to competitors. At that time, you had to have an engineer install it for you, and there were a multitude of tests including the ‘woosh’ test, and line length tests. The whole thing was actually quite an ordeal, and your line HAD to meet strict specifications. All this for a 512Kb connection! You also had a modem provided (no routers) which was owned by BT, and you technically weren’t allowed to use anything else. When BTO started out, hardly anybody was using it, so it was amazingly fast and reliable.

Over time, that changed. More people piled into the service, and it got slower and slower. BT started allowing other ISPs to re-sell the service, and in such a way that you used their network, instead of BT’s, so the performance was often better. BTO became BT Yahoo, and the service declined sharply, although I was paying a lower price for being a good customer. In mid-2004, I moved to Zen. They were always getting a good press for their excellent service. A few months after moving to them, the restrictions on line types changed, and I was able to upgrade to 1Mb. Later, the option of ADSL max became available, which meant a much faster service (potentially) albeit with a download cap. I was soon able to get 3.5Mb, and all was well.

Then the ‘issues’ began. The line would drop out now and then, and not come back for extended periods. I tried all sorts of things, and Zen’s support were excellent. My line speed fell bit-by-bit I bought a new router, ADSL splitters, and tested all sorts of things, but nothing worked. The line would be fine for a while, then every few months throw a wobbler and fall over. Not a lot of use if you’re trying to use VPNs and other stateful apps like I do. BT tested the line countless times, and found nothing.

Be* were suddenly the new kids on the block, but also using the newer ADSL2 standard. I moved to them in February of 2008, and then had a slightly faster connection, and no download cap. It all went well for a while, and then the connection issues came back. I tried yet more to resolve it, but still no improvement. I found myself getting a maximum of around 2.5Mbs, so was going backwards in terms of speed. Not good.

Others had been telling me for ages how great Cable was, but I always maintained that the support was great with Zen or Be*, and the performance was good, so I didn’t want cable. I’d scoff at the caps, and stay put. A few weeks ago, after the latest connectivity issues with ADSL, I decided enough was enough, and signed up to Virgin’s 10Mbs service. I had it installed today, and it’s been wonderful! It downloads at the advertised speed, as opposed to an ‘up to’ speed. OK, the caps are a little annoying, and very easy to blast through, but it’s certainly liveable. All in all, it’s much fairer. It remains to be seen how customer service is as NTL/Telewest were awful way back when. I hear it’s improved, so that’s something.

So time will tell how it goes, but so far it’s very promising.

Postman loses £130,000 savings to Nigerian internet scam after being duped by a friend he met on MySpace | Mail Online.

Leamington man loses $150,000 in Nigerian scam.

How are people STILL falling for these scams? There’s plenty of publicity about it, in print and on the TV, yet people still fall prey to them. I suppose it’s simple greed kicking in and overriding the truth. It’s like compulsive gambling – keep going, and eventually there’ll be a payout.

I suppose anybody reading this (all two of you) already know better than to go sending some random stranger all your money, all your friend’s money, and any other cash you can scrape together. It’s just amazing that to get so far in debt, these people actually end up doing ALL the things you shouldn’t do online.

Amazing, and quite sad for these people.

Oh, sorry about one of the links being the Daily Wail.

If you go buy a TV from Comet or Currys (or any out of town retailer), they’ll swear blind you need to pony up upwards of £50 for a Monster HDMI lead, which is 99% oxygen free, and was hewn from the very depths of the poles of one of Jupiter’s moons, and that with anything less, you’ll not be able to see every hair and blemish on Harrison Ford’s face when you watch Bladerunner on Bluray.

Cobblers.

With analogue connections (i.e. SCART), the signal made its way through as a set of subtle waves. The subtlety of those waves could be destroyed if the cable was of a poor quality. It could lead to flat colours, a ‘halo’ effect around people, or shadows in the picture. People would pay ridiculous amounts of cables which did make a difference, albeit subtle. To most folk, it was so subtle that it really didn’t matter. The hard-core home-cinema type would tell you until they were blue in the face that it made a difference, but it mattered not one jot to everyone else. There was such thing as ‘cheap’ or ‘bad’ cables. I’ve had a few, and they were poorly made, and poorly shielded, so they did produce a pretty dire picture.

Along comes HDMI, and it uses a digital connection. It’s all pulses. On-off-on-off-on-off. The digital simplicity of ones and zeros. With HDMI, if the signal gets through, it gets through. It either does, or it doesn’t. What that means, is that the cable either works, or it doesn’t. If the cable is ‘bad’ you’ll know it – big blocks on the screen, or odd sparkly colours, because chunks of the picture information is missing. It’s very similar to how Freeview breaks up when a lorry rumbles past your house.

Basically, you need a ‘decent’ cable. One that makes a good connection at both ends, won’t slip out or wobble, and shields itself from any interference from other cables, like power leads or speaker wires. These stupidly expensive cables are just that – stupidly expensive. I found the cable pictured at the right for £14.99 in Wilkinsons. It’s 1.5 metres, and has gold-plated ends (so they won’t tarnish). I’ve got three of them now, and they work like a charm!

Since buying an HD-ready TV about two years ago, I’ve slowly been replacing bits of my TV/Audio kit, as we gadgety-geeky types are often wont to do. In doing so, I’ve upgraded to Sky+ HD, and have upscaling DVD players and other fun things. As a consequence, all my kit is now connected via the HDMI. I used to have a spaghetti of SCART leads packed down the back of the TV. They were thick and bulky, and always drifting lose (a major issue with SCART).

Using HDMI cables has been good. I’ve actually got more HDMI devices than inputs on my TV, plus I need to send the signal in two directions to the TV and projector, so there’s a switch box in the mix too. All told, there’s about six HDMI leads in there now, including these Wilko cables. I’ve been using them quite happily for some time, and they give me perfectly good picture quality. The Sky+ HD box comes with an HDMI lead which is, to be honest, a bit cheap and nasty when you look at it, but even that works perfectly fine. As I say, a lead either works, or it doesn’t. My ‘best’ cable, is a Belkin lead I bought some time ago which was probably nearer £30, and that is no different to these newer, cheaper leads. Wilko actually sell cheaper leads still, and I think even they would work fine.

The Monster leads Comet and Currys push onto you are sold simply for the profit margins. The wholesale costs on them is closer to £10, but they sell them for about £50. They use it to recoup any losses they might have made price matching, and giving you a better deal.

That’s how they getcha!

Well, more spammed-by-proxy.

I had an email today which purported to come from a lady called ‘Nicole’ at a company called ‘M80‘. A quick looksee at their website shows that they are actually into ‘Social media marketing and online publicity’. In my case, their person sent me an email using my contact form, telling me all about an upcoming webinar Cisco are hosting this Thursday about Unified Communications, something I mentioned in some other posts.

The email then goes on to give me links to blip.tv to preview the webinar (apparently I have to keep that off the record), plus some excerpted clips from the webinar which are on YouTube. Finally, there’s a link to the actual webinar.

And, here’s the cheek of it:

I hope you'll consider posting the video and link to your site; there's some
great UC info here and it's rare that we have in-depth video on the subject!

Well, make your mind up, dear!

Thing is… this is an unsolicited email. I didn’t ask to be told about Unified Communications, or presence or WebEx. I already know what they do. The email address it goes to is registered with Cisco for some CCNA stuff I did some time ago, but this actually came via my contact form. So this company are obviously paying people to Google for terms, then email or post comments on people’s websites. Truth be told, ‘Nicole’ is probably somebody working in India or China for a pittance, just filling in contact forms all day.

I think the thing that galls me the most about this is that Cisco are doing it – a company who recently invested in Ironport, an ANTI-spam company! They’re also working for companies like Dr Pepper, Ford, and 20th Century Fox. All big, reasonably respectable companies, or at least, as respectable as mega-corporations like those can be.

So looks like we have a new kind of spam to concern ourselves with.

I just saw this on Graph Jam, and it made me think of the number of times I’ve seen people at work go into the toilets, relieve themselves, then just walk straight out without washing their hands at all.

It certainly makes you think twice if you have to touch their computers.

I’ve also seen people emerge from the cubicles – and based on the sounds and smells emanating from within said cubicles, it is pretty obvious what they were doing in there – then just walk straight out of the toilets without even going near the sinks.

Utterly, utterly disgusting.

Obviously, I can only base this on what males do. Maybe some are scared that washing their hands would somehow degrade their masculinity somehow? Who knows.

Oh Cisco, bless your cotton socks.

I added a load of phones to CallManager today, and used the Bulk Administration Tool (BAT) for the first time. The phones imported happily, but I realised I’d managed to miss out some fields, like the caller line text; the phones will display the caller’s number and their name, assuming I set it. The BAT hadn’t added those fields (or rather, I hadn’t), so they weren’t present.

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