It amuses me that we can deal with terrorists in London without so much as a pause. An RMT strike however brings the capital to its knees.
Can we call the RMT terrorists yet?
This blog has been far to quiet recently, but then I’ve not had time to do much of anything other than work and sleep.
We’re in the week leading up to our first live customers on the system so to say we’ve been busy would like be like calling the surface of the sun “warm”. I’ve been working hard trying to get our voice platform finished. Yesterday and today, I decided to take a little time off – it’s been too long since I had a day to myself. As luck would have it, my DIY plans went out the window when the pager went off yesterday afternoon. I rushed up to base and had myself a little blue-light drive up to Dolygaer Outdoor center in Alpha. There the ambulance service had asked us for some assistance to bring down a mountain biker who’d gone over the handlebars.
With that sorted I headed home with the intention of putting some shelves up. Sean and I sat down to some food and feeling that I still needed to catch up on sleep, I closed my eyes for an hour or so on the couch. Unfortunately, around 1900, I was rudely awoken by the pager and headed off again – this time to the Neath Valley waterfalls to find a missing diabetic woman – fortunately she was found on the side of the road and so we finished that one off pretty quickly. On the way home however, we were asked to respond to another incident – a missing woman somewhere around Pen Y Fan. We diverted from base and headed off. Brecon had already spotted what they thought was her but they were on the wrong side of the valley. Once we got to the Neuadd pumphouse, it was just a matter of heading up onto the ridge and walking the lady down. It was a long day though, ending as it did around midnight.
Today I headed off to WICC to represent the team in a climbing competition – far from being a serious competition, this was a bit of fun. Taking a Landrover and some buckets to collect money down, I met up with Lee and Mal and Louisa. Not being the strongest of climbers, we were somewhat relieved when the piercing sounds of the pagers going off meant that we had to bow out early. Racing away from the climbing center in a blaze of blue lights, we headed through Nelson over to Cwm Carn Forest Drive to pick up another fallen cyclist. A quick assist to the Fire Service and we headed down for a quick ice cream before heading home.
So tonight I will sleep well. Thank God, because I think I need it.
This week was a long one. Sean and I spent the week in London getting our servers, network kit and racks all sorted out in a new building site datacenter. Five days of some pretty physical work at times going from 10am through to around midnight on most nights and a few past that left Sean and I utterly exhausted. It’s not over yet though – there’s plenty still to do and it looks like we might have a visit back again next week to finish off. Some apologies to friends in London who we couldn’t spend much time with – it was about 9pm on Friday night before we managed to get to Docklands to say hi quickly. Hopefully I can find more time next time I’m down.
So the weekend has been spent doing pretty much nothing. A bit of food shopping and sorting out clothes happened yesterday – nothing exciting. Today however we’ve been hard at work. Remember how I posted about that lovely bright green I painted my bathroom? Well, those of you who know my house know just how bright that colour is. As a result, I’ve decided to finally get around to toning it down a bit so today Sean and I have been sanding the walls down ready for a repaint. It’ll need a few coats of white to bring it to a nice even colour and then I can try out some testers. Looking forward to this.
Next week is going to be fun and very busy. As we’re putting together various parts of the network I’ll post them up here. It really does surprise people sometimes about just how much thought we’re putting into making this platform resilient – especially the voice side of things.
It’s fantastic weather this week around here, Monday lunchtime, I was sat outside our kitchen, eating my lunch and chatting with a few of the lads from the office in the beautiful sunshine. I’ve even been in shorts all week. Tomorrow I’m (hopefully) off to London to start the build-out of our datacenter space and I’m expecting a beautiful sunny day, sunglasses on and sunroof open.
It occurred to me during that peaceful moment of enjoyment in the sun on Monday that school has broken up for the summer, and with that realisation came a sinking feeling. Kids on holiday, coupled with this great weather following a period of heavy rain will likely have left parts of the Beacons wet, muddy and slippery. Something told me this was callout weather.
So it was somewhat of a non-event when the pager went off on the way into work this morning telling me there was an area call to a casualty with an ankle injury at Bwlch Duwynt. Unfortunately, I have no time to respond to callouts during working hours at the moment, so I had to head to work and follow the incident via pager. At around 1130 the casualty was loaded into a helicopter and taken off to hospital.
So that’s it. I just hope that it’s going to be an injury-free summer. Good luck to those of you heading into the Beacons, hope you enjoy a safe day up there.
** UPDATE: We had another callout tonight – an area search for some missing mountain bikers. We were supposed to be helping the Brecon team, but we were fairly quickly stood down. I hope this isn’t a trend.
How Malcolm can stand being an architect I do not know. Today I have been mostly trying to arrange the installation of some satellite dishes for our datacenter. Apparently, we need planning permission from the local authority…and this is what I’ve been trying to do today. How Malcolm can deal with planning and building regs alone is beyond me, especially in a Conservation Area. To top it all off, we’ve been told that actually the landlord wants to apply for planning himself now instead. *sigh*
Besides that, things are coming together. We’ve had (almost) the last delivery now – our PDUs are here ready for installation next week. We’re still waiting for some Foundry load balancers to arrive from the USA but once they’re here that’s it. This evening I’ve been getting ready to install our billing application, the snappily-titled “Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management” platform (everyone still calls it “Portal” – which is what it’s name was before Oracle bought them). I’m working my way from the back forwards, so with Oracle working on the backend, I can get get Portal working and have something to test it against. Once that’s up and running, it’s mainly a case of getting our own software to talk everything then.
Exciting times. Busy, but exciting.
In response to the growing VoIP industry in the UK, Ofcom have released a new consultation. This investigates whether it should mandate certain types of VoIP provider to carry 999 calls. this could have far reaching impacts on a number of providers, but does it mean the end for Skype?
Some of you might be asking why I’m so busy recently, especially since I wasn’t entirely happy in my job. Well, if you missed it back here, I left Box UK to work somewhere else entirely. It’s really exciting and fun work – but what do we do?
The company I joined is called Inuk Networks (pronounce In-ook). They are what’s known as a triple-play provider – providing TV, Telephone and Broadband services through a brand called Freewire. So plenty of people do this already – Sky, NTL and Virgin to name three – what’s different about Inuk and Freewire? Well, the difference is in how we deliver our service. Our entire service is delivered over IP.
Sky have a satellite distribution system which means you need a dish on the side of your house and NTL and Virgin are cable-only services, meaning that they not only have to have cable in your area, but that they also need to dig up your street a bit to put a new service in. We’ve taken a different approach. With so many homes and premises these days getting broadband and the amount of bandwidth available to the home increasing, we’ve chosen broadband as a delivery mechanism. But isn’t this terribly inefficient and costly to stream all that video down an ADSL connection? Well, yes, but we’ve been clever about this.
Basically, we use multicast to send our TV streams to the end user. That’s basically a way of only sending out one stream from our end and having each router replicate the stream for each path it needs – this page on our website explains it clearly. That means that we can scale to millions of users and still only need to have the same amount of bandwidth going out of our network. It also means a scaleable and efficient delivery mechanism for HD – yup, we could potentially deliver HD streams to your home over your DSL connection. So, that’s great – anyone can get it right?
Well, no, and this is where it gets a little difficult. The way that BT has built their DSL product it pretends to be one piece of cable from your house all the way back to your ISP. The ISP then pays for the bandwidth they use. The problem with that is that multicast needs a common path between two households to make it work. For example you and your next door neighbour probably share the same exchange. Your telephone line ends up in the same building with the same equipment. Then there’s one pipe back from your exchange all the way into BT’s core network where it then goes to the ISP. Great! Well, no. The way ADSL works is that the connection is ‘tunneled’ and basically all you see is a cable between you and the ISP. This means that it doesn’t scale well. Which is bad news.
Of course with any bad news, there’s good news, and it’s called LLU or Local Loop Unbundling. This allows someone to take the telephone line to your house away from BT and build up your own delivery network. Effectively it’s like cable except you’re using BT’s existing network. The good news about this is that it’s already here – we’ve signed a deal with Cable and Wireless to provide an IPTV system over DSL connections. Even better is the assertion that if other people are doing it, BT isn’t going to be far behind.
So that’s what I’m up to. I’m going to be posting more stuff up here as time goes on, with a few posts appearing in fairly quick succession. Our rollout is happening at the moment and we’re expecting to go live very, very soon so watch this space. So yeah, it’s groundbreaking, it’s fun and I’m really enjoying myself. So you’ll excuse me if I’m a little bit scarce for a while.
This blog has been quiet recently. Very quiet. In my defence, I have been busy – extraordinarily busy. On thr bright side this does mean I have a few things to blog about. Two callouts to start off with, there’s a rant brewing about suppliers and in all that I’ve been told I can blog about what we’re doing at work, so there’s some quite interesting stuff going to be on here shortly I hope.
I keep saying that I’m not going to be responding to callouts at the moment, but I keep getting callouts which I can respond to, so that’s two this week. Sunday we had a search in Treherbert for a young lady. I was picking Sean up from his police training in Carmarthen at the time, so we quickly drove off down the M4 and TomTom brought us almost to control – but the batteries in my GPS mouse ran out about a mile away. I rapidly got deployed in an area with another party while Sean was deployed into the small kitchen area in our control vehicle to make coffee and tea. I headed off with Trig and the rest of the party to here where we were searching along the scree slope. A horrible area as you can see from those contours, we were fortunate since a message came over the radio – the casualty’d been found. A quick trek back to control and some chips courtesy of South Wales Police and we headed home. Job well done. I think Sean had fun as well, since he managed to be useful again, not only making coffee and endlessly filling Les’ cup, but also helping Pete with a trip down to the village as an extra pair of eyes.
Last night I’d just managed to get home when the pager went off again. Quick chat with Sean and I headed off up the valley. Pulling up at base I discovered that we had two dogs stuck in a crevice on top of Mynydd Cilfach-yr-encil. It’s not too far from base and we headed up there quickly in two Landrovers. Extremely glad to see us, the owners of the dogs reported they’d been playing in the heather and Winberries when they suddenly disappeared. A little-known feature of this area are the numerous crevices that seem to appear from between clumps of heather. After some coaxing we managed to retrieve both Beagles from the crevice (naturally the female was far more awkward to get out than the male and wouldn’t listen to a word we said…!) and to the echoes of a very grateful family we headed off.
All in all, it’s been a good few callouts.
It wasn’t so long ago that I said that I was going to be cutting down on my rescue work because of how busy we were going to be at work. Well, as it turns out, one of our deliveries has been delayed. Instead of arriving on Tuesday, it won’t be here until Monday now. This is both good and bad – it means we’ve had more time to prepare for the installation of this kit, but of course it means that we have one less week to build and test everything now. But hey, what’s life without its challenges?
So when the pager went off late Tuesday afternoon, Simon and I looked at each other. With the delays I decided to head off – this was likely to be the last rescue I could do for a while, or so I thought.
Up the A470, up the dual carriageway to base. Two other team members were there, and I got my kit out and jumped into the driver’s seat of the Landrover. We had a 25 year old woman with a broken ankle on Corn Du. With all of our lights on and sirens going, I headed out of the lane and onto the roundabout. Down the heads of the valleys road we went – a dangerous road this, it’s 3-lane all the way down and with patches of double white lines, it makes for a difficult drive on blues. Nevertheless, we got to the bottom safely and turned onto the A470 up towards the Beacons. It wasn’t long before we were turning into the lay-by at Pont ar Daf. We jumped out to find that the air ambulance was just landing alongside the casualty, so I parked the vehicle up and waited. The “no further personnel required” message came over the pagers and pretty soon it was all over. Back to base before heading home.
Wednesday night was a joint exercise with the Army medical corps up near Trefl quarry. We were just packing up when the Incident Controllers’ pagers went off – “Please contact Dyfed Powys control room”. We were asked to standby for a search for a 70-year old gent who was missing. Quickly packing up our kit, we rendezvous’d down at the nearby pub, where we got word to stand down from the police. After a debrief with the Army, we headed back to base to wash the vehicles and repack all the kit.
Thursday I spent in Portsmouth visiting a client. Not wanting to drive, I took the train, though that did mean that I didn’t get back to Cardiff until around 8pm. I headed home, needing food and rest more than training. I sat down with a cup of tea and sighed as the pager went off. ‘111’ I got changed quickly and headed out to the car. Driving up to base was uneventful and as I arrived, everyone was preparing to head out. We had 3 teenage Duke of Edinburgh’s award students who hadn’t arrived at their allocated checkpoint. We got the Landrovers ready as the IC’s planned our searches. Just as we were about to head off, the call came from inside – stand down. Apparently, one of their teachers had picked them up. Heading down to the pub, I had a pint or two of iced water before heading home to sleep.
So it’s been a busy week. We’re up to something like 40 callouts so far this year already, though it seems quieter than last year – it’s not, they’re just a bit more spread out this year. I’m not expecting to attend any more callouts now until September. We’ve not been placed on standby for the rain which is nice. Simon and I are heading to London on Wednesday to get some kit from Redbus, but that shouldn’t be a problem.
In other news, the company is setting up some blogs so that us techies can talk about some of the cool stuff we’re doing. Once we get them up, I’ll post a URL. For now, I’m just relaxing and watching “The Towering Inferno” – an old classic. A nice relaxing weekend for me for a change.
I am and have been a Sky subscriber for several years now. I actually subscribe to Sky+ which is Sky’s Personal Video Recorder. This allows me to record programmes for TV to watch later or even pause live TV while I’m watching it to go and make a cup of tea perhaps, or even attend a callout. Sky has a neat feature called “Series Link” which allows you to tell it to record all the episodes of a TV series.
This has revolutionised my TV viewing habbits. I no longer watch what’s known as “linear TV” – that is, switch on, pick a channel and watch. Instead, I come home, turn the TV on, bring up the PVR’s recorded programmes menu, pick something I want to watch and enjoy it. I can fast-forward through the commercials and enjoy what I want to enjoy when I want to enjoy it.
Add to this the fact that Sky have an online interface where I can browse the TV Guide online and remotely chose a programme to record, it’s really brought my TV viewing into my control. So when Sky recently announced Sky Anytime – their Video on Demand service, I was not only interested from a consumer point of view, but since I might have to implement this at some point, I’m interested from a professional perspective.
Technically, this is a slick product. Download the client, and although it opens in fullscreen, it’s obviously configured for a 4:3 ratio screen, not my widescreen laptop. No matter, I have a look anyway. Very slick, the whole thing looks very nice, it’s quite a simple interface and it gives some great information.
So why did I uninstall it tonight? I have a basic package – I don’t pay for Premium movies nor Sport packages on my Sky subscription. So seeing as their VoD service is aligned with their normal subscription, I didn’t expect to get the extra content for free. What I did expect was to be able to pay for a programme individually – I don’t want to upgrade to all the movie channels – but you can’t do that. Gah. Box Office content (their normal pay-per-view content) is still PPV.
Moving on, I start browsing the content that I do subscribe to – and to my surprise, it’s chargeable. What? I’ve already paid for this, why do I have to pay it again to download it to my PC?
Now to be fair, if I used the VoD interface through my set-top-box, I’d get content I subscribed to for free. But, and here’s the clincher, you don’t get the same content through the two interfaces – and you still have to ‘upgrade’ to a more expensive package to view movies instead of a PPV approach.
I’ve uninstalled the client now. The last straw was that the “feedback” link just directs to the anytime front page with no obvious way of giving feedback. If anyone from Sky reads this (unlikely) then here’s a few suggestions.
1. Make the content I’ve already subscribed to free – I’ve paid to watch it once, why should I want to pay £2.50 per programme to watch it through VoD?
2. If it’s content from a channel I don’t subscribe to – give me the option to upgrade or buy it on a PPV basis. I saw a film tonight I want to watch, but I don’t fancy paying for an upgrade – but I’d pay say £2 instead of renting it on DVD.
Let’s face it VoD is nice, but it’s basically competing with video rental shops – it’s just got more content.
So, thanks Sky, but not for me.