Archive | August, 2009

Tube Notify hits the iPhone App Store

By on August 17, 2009 in iPhone, Programming

After 11 days of waiting, my first ever App hits iTunes. Regular readers of my posts (there are some, really) will have noticed what it was all about after seeing my Push on the iPhone post which covered doing Apple Push Notifications using Django on the server side. I did get around to pushing up a nice page on github to cover it and you can find that over at the django-iphone-push page.

Available on the App StoreThe app is called “Tube Status Push Notifications” and it is… available in the App Store for the small price of 59p. It would have been free, but paying for the server infrastructure that runs it means that I have to recoup at least some of the costs. You can find out more about the app over on the Tube Notify page.

During the approval process I was a bit put off by the fact that Tube Deluxe managed to get push notifications out the door first. I wrote this app while push notifications were quite new. I also did it as a learning exercise writing an application I wanted. When Tube Deluxe 4.0 came out, I did give it a go. It has some things better, some things worse. Here, however, is the main thing – Tube Notify takes < 10 seconds to load up, even on GPRS (the little round dot at the top). I built the app for speed on loading, no one wants to wait to read information.

So, in short, a different application that serves a different purpose. I didn’t write it to make a lot of money, I wrote it to learn the iPhone SDK and for myself. I then gave it to others to test for a few weeks and then here we are! I hope others enjoy using it in the field as much as I do!

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AVG, Windows 7 and a Netbook

By on August 9, 2009 in Operating Systems, Random Rants, Windows 7

How do you take a fast operating system and make it impossibly slow to use? That’s easy, install AVG.

Last night, I installed AVG on my Samsung NC-10 thinking that would be good and useful to have some protection. How wrong could I be? Upon reboot the Resident Shield took 100% CPU on the Intel Atom 1.6GHz chip that the NC-10 has and consequently making the entire machine unusable.

Time to try another anti-virus I think. To think that Windows recommended AVG as well…

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Windows 7 and the Shake Gesture

By on August 8, 2009 in Operating Systems, Windows 7

Today I managed to get time to upgrade my MacBook Pro and Samsung NC10 netbook to Windows 7. Overall, everything went very smoothly however one feature that is on by default caused me much pain; I hate the fact that when I shake the mouse loosely all my windows minimise!

I spent some time hunting for the control panel item to turn it off. Typing in ‘Shake’ into the Control Panel search suggest the ‘Change how your mouse works’ in ‘Ease of Access’. However, there’s no option to turn off shake in there… or is there?

It turns out that ‘Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen’ means what it says AND disables the mouse shake gesture. Thanks Microsoft for making that intuitive – why do I have to turn both off. I like the arranging feature, I hate the shake feature.

mousefun

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Badly scripted customer service is bad

By on August 2, 2009 in Random Rants

I am a customer of Virgin Media and have been since January of this year. Let me be clear, they are generally very good. The fault number (151) is served by English people during the week if the call volume is low, and Indian people if the call volume is high or at the weekend. The English customer service is fantastic and cannot be faulted. The Indian… well…

Yesterday my cable broadband died. Being an IT guy I did some self-diagnosis before calling. I checked the light on the Cable TV box and made sure that was flashing and looked at the error there of No Return Path. OK, now I know that means the UBR (Universal Broadband Router) is having some trouble. The Virgin Media engineer I spoke to told me so. I logged into the modem itself on 192.168.100.1 and noticed that:

MAP w/initial maintenance region received
No Ranging Response received – T3 time-out
MAP w/initial maintenance region received
No Ranging Response received – T3 time-out

Again, that’s excellent. It just means the upstream is all dead but downstream is fine. This usually ends up being an area fault, and area faults are usually raised out of volume of calls. The more people that call in with the same fault in an area alerts the relevant area of engineers. So, I make the call:

Me: Hi, my broadband isn’t working

CS: OK, what is your name please?

Me: Packham

CS: OK Mr Packham that is a problem I can help you with.

(How does he know that, he has no idea he can help or not… so why say he can?)

CS: Could you tell me what lights are flashing on the modem Mr. Packham

(This drives me crazy, stop repeating my name on the end of every sentence… please!)

Me: The sync light is fully on and the ready light is flashing. The modem pages are telling me that it is failing to lock an upstream link and the TV box is also flashing indicating the same.

CS: I have no knowledge of TV problems Mr Packham. Let me take a look at the modem

CS: Are you running Windows Vista or Windows XP?

Me: What relevance has that got to diagnosing a cable modem fault? I’m running a Mac

… silence …

CS: Ok this is odd Mr. Packham. It looks like there’s no modem activated on your account. Let me send a reset code to your modem.

… pause …

CS: The modem should now reset

Me: It hasn’t

CS: Let’s wait a little amount of time

… pause …

CS: Now?

Me: No

(clearly a communication fault and this guy is following an awful script)

CS: Let me try again

… sigh …

CS: It should reset now

Me: No

CS: Ok remove all cables from the back of the modem, wait 30 seconds and plug them back in.

… I remove the power cable knowing full well that the other cables make no odds at all …

… pause …

Me: I’ll plug them all back in now

CS: Yes please Mr. Packham

Me: Ok it’s booting

Me: And the same problem

CS: Ok let’s book an engineer

Most of that could be skipped. Whenever I have called and had the English call center, we tend to get to the book an engineer point a lot quicker. Mainly because they understand me. I can reel off what I have checked. I usually do things like remove the splitter etc. and try different cables to make sure. I can tell them that, they’ll listen and they will get it sorted a lot quicker.

It just sums up why Indian Call Centers are bad. It’s not their English, nor their intelligence. The issue is they don’t live here. They’ll never have had Virgin Media cable either. They’ll of seen pictures of the equipment involved but no idea really how it all hangs together. They don’t know how to tell the difference between an IT professional calling vs. a mother with 4 screaming brats. They just follow a script. A poorly written one at that. I can imagine that if they deviate from the script they get scalded for it. It’s a crying shame.

At least I can understand why the Status page lacks updates. English engineers are, by their very nature, lazy. They get the job done, and are super efficient, but they never update tickets. The Twitter guys appears to be on the ball though. It pleases me that they are responding to my Tweets and are at least saying they’ll find out why things like the Status page isn’t getting updated.

Thankfully, my 3G dongle is plugged into my FreeBSD  server and providing me with some sort of Internet access.

The other thing worth adding about this is that at least it is getting looked at. BT are awful by comparison. Is Virgin Media therefore just the best of a bad bunch? I’ll let you know when the service comes back. I’m just looking forward to upgrading to 50Mbps at the new lower price next month.

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Tube Notify

By on August 1, 2009 in Portfolio

My first iPhone application as gone through a number of iterations. However in it’s current form, it support all lines apart from the Overground and provides push notifications that the user can subscribe to. It’s free on the App Store and is supported through the use of iAds. It makes use of fast scrolling techniques to stop the List juddering that you find in many apps.

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