Good Riddance Google+

When I was forced (through my YouTube account) to create an interlinked Google+ account I was not best pleased.  And I posted as such on the pages there, then never returned to them.  As a social media platform it was flawed and ran into the "Google being evil" motif far too strongly.

Anyway, I look through BBC News just now and find this....

The fact Google knew about the issue in March and didn't disclose it... Well it's pretty much just the dregs.

Virgin Media Cable to Wet String Maybe?

It has been just under a month since I started to measure my internet connection speed, I've been paying for 50Mbit, and receiving pittifully less at all times of the day, and huge dips during what is tabbed the "peak time".  We get massive slow-downs whilst streaming - constantly - opening say ITV player and then opening a web-site for wikipedia totally freezes the player until the whole wikipedia page has loaded - remember wikipedia is mainly text, there's very little media data being exchanged, but the player is just cut off; it's dreadful.

There's no reason for this, when I was paying for 200Mbit I was receiving around 33-36MBit at all times, so deciding to pay for only 50Mbit I was to save money and still get this speed I had had - since I never ever got more...

But it seems this is totally beyond Virgin Media, they're playing speed throttling shenanigans....

However, the clever chaps at Andrews and Arnold engineering might just have the solution for me... Wet string...

That's right, they're sending internet data, so that I presume is TCP/IP with the string acting as a conduit for the ADSL signal... Impressive, more impressive than my paid for cable service!

Virgin Media : Poor Internet Speed Misery

You know that moment in Misery where Annie (played by the excellent Kathy Bates) raises the lump hammer to Paul (James Caan's) ankles?  That hopeless moment, where you know what's coming, and she's determined this is the best, and he's helpless to change things....

Yeah, his feeling at that moment is the same feeling I get whenever I try to solve my service problems with Virgin Media.  I've tried in the phone centre, they either won't talk to me, or deny I'm an account holder - the account being in my wifes name, but I'm a registered up user of the account etc etc.... Or they simply deny there's an issue....

"I can ping you now sir"....

Really, a few ICMP packets get through and you think it's a-okay do you?

Or I get told, reboot your superhub...

Or variously asked "are you on wifi or wired"... It makes no difference when the speed recorded by either is less than 2mbits!!!

And I've just been told in a reply on twitter "If you have been told about an Area Issue were you given an estimate as to when the issue will be resolved"... I've not been told anything about any area issues, nothing, nada, zip.

Therefore I'm still not best pleased, remember I went down from paying through the nose for Vivid200, as I never ever got anywhere near 200mbits/sec ever.  I did record regular speeds of around 34 to 50 mbits, therefore the safer, more cost effective option was to pay for Vivid50.  Simple, see, simple logical option, if they can't meet the expectations of their own service, play the system at it's own game.

However, it seems that in reality, Vivid200 should be labelled Vivid50, and Vivid50 itself should be called Vivid1... Because breaking the 1mbit/sec barrier seems to be too much for it.

I have therefore decided to create something anyone can interpret, a chart... Managers love charts... People can interpret charts....

This chart is going to record the internet speed (recorded from my linux server, on my wired Cat5e directly to my 1gigabit router, which is directly wired to the Virgin Media Superhub 2 set into Modem Mode).  No wifi, no confusion, no bull, and my router has pfSense, so I can see there's no shenanigans, just the pure speed through put.

I'm going to record the speed with "speedtest-cli", which you can see yourself how to install here.

I will collect my results by running a python script, which runs the speed test and outputs the time, the upload and finally the download speed into a CSV file.

Find the source on my github... 

import subprocess

import time

from time import gmtime, strftime

# Open a simple text file for writing the result

resultFile = open("speedtest.txt", "a+")

while True:

# Header text & placeholders for our result

print ("Starting Test...")

timeStr = strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", gmtime())

downloadSpeed = ""

uploadSpeed = ""

# Action the process to test our speed

# capturing it's output

result = subprocess.run(['speedtest-cli'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)

# Process the output into text & split the text

# at each new line character

btext = result.stdout

text = btext.decode('ascii')

lines = text.split("\n")

# For each line, check whether it is upload

# or download

for line in lines:

# For Download, take a split against space

# and the middle value is the speed

if line.startswith('Download: '):

speedParts = line.split(" ")

if len(speedParts) == 3:

downloadSpeed = speedParts[1]

# Likewise for upload, the middle  value is

# the tested speed

elif line.startswith('Upload: '):

speedParts = line.split(" ")

if len(speedParts) == 3:

uploadSpeed = speedParts[1]

# Print our output result as a CSV

print (timeStr + "," + downloadSpeed + "," + uploadSpeed)

# Write the result to a file also

resultFile.write (timeStr + "," + downloadSpeed + "," + uploadSpeed + "\r\n")

resultFile.flush()

# Count down until the next test time

count = 10

while count > 0:

# The line is repeated, so we use the end=""

# and a return carriage to print over and over

print ("\rTime until next test " + str(count) + " seconds", end="")

time.sleep(1)

count = count - 1

# Print a new line to stop the next text appending

# on the time count down line

print()

I will then load this CSV file into a spread sheet and create a chart, here's one I created earlier with 5 test data points.

The blue-line is where I'm most concerned, that is my download speed, as you can see within three minutes I had quite a difference, ranging from a high of 2.24 mbit, to a low of 1.23 mbit.  Upload speed has been more consistent giving a measly 3.5 to 4.0 ish.

I already know where VirginMedia will take the conversation, they will talk about "based on average peak time download performance".  However, I want to immediately counter that their speed information states that speeds are based around "Movie based on 4.1GB file size a single user and wired connection", and this chart is provided.... 

Average download speed at peak time (8pm to 10pm) the time's I have mostly messaged to them on twitter are sub 1mbps... Right now at just before 11am they are still reporting as extremely low.  And yes, this server is the ONLY machine on in the house, the wifi is off, the other wire into this hub removed, there is one wire to one machine and one wire to their Superhub...

And yes, I can get 1gbit disk to disk over NFS on this hub, the wires to and from it to the machines are perfect, and I've also swapped the wire to the superhub.

I'm going to run this for a few days, and see what speeds we get in the dead of night, or early mornings, and see if there is a pattern.  I have known for years Virgin will throttle speeds, however, their table of speeds is labelled "Average", one can only believe we're on the lowest ebb of that bell curve, and I am not a happy customer.

Virgin Media : Poor Internet Speed

I'm continuing to have my issues with Virgin Media, let me explain.  Last month I came to them asking to remove the superfluous junk offering items, as I was simply paying more for items I didn't use, want nor need.

They could not help, in fact they flat refused to, so I cancelled 66% of my services off completely, TV, Phone all gone and never ever to return - well done them...

The next item was the 200mbit broadband I was paying for, below is a historic speed test I carried out a lot, as you can see I never, ever, got near 200Mbit, but I always got over 50Mbit...

Being quite a logical person therefore, and based on this evidence, this proof I had for myself, I downgraded the internet from the Vivid200 to Vivid50, i.e. 50mbit... Yeah, save money, it can do 50 mbit easy, right... Right... RIGHT?.....

WRONG.

This is tonight's speed test...

Last night it was slower than that, I had a download speed of 1.22mbit, and upload of 620K.

Yeah, rocking the 1990's internet speed.

And I'm utterly sick of it, I'm sick of paying for a service I never ever get.  It may have been optimistic, maybe even naive to think having seen 50mbit when paying for 200, I would get 50 when paying for 50, but clearly something has gone astray here.

Clearly, Virgin Media are up to some shenanigans, be that throttling, load balancing, whatever term they want to give it, or even what ever they want to say in denial, but I'm observing this poor speed, I'm enduring this poor service, and I'm utterly and totally frustrated with the script (I would say expert system, but it's clearly a script) the people in the call centers follow.

This is NOT my equipment, this is not my network, this is their external speed, this is from their superhub 2 and outwards, NOT the internal side of that connection.

That is a test through the newer version of Ookla (the site at the top) as you can see the speed is even worse twenty minutes on - BTW, note to Virgin Media, your own engineers use this site to do a test upon installation.

And here's the speed an hour after my original post... this is now 21:32 on a Sunday evening...

Virgin Media's: Terrible Security

So, in a prior post I made you aware of the situation with myself and Virgin for my services, well... Whilst talking to them they wanted me to give them the "First and Fifth" letter of my security password...

I apparently got this wrong....

"Give me the fourth and the eight"....

I apparently got this wrong....

"Just give me the password...."

No.

This is terrible security, and I said this to them, I asked if they can see my password "yes".  So their system stores my password, in plain text.

I said to the chap "This should be stored as the salted hash of the password, not the actual password, and you should not use it as part of my accessing the account over the phone".  This is the password to access your account, your VirginMedia e-mail, basically everything.

Now, I don't know if this guy was fishing for my whole password bit by bit, or whether he was genuinely looking at the whole thing and just asking for letters, of if he just had some mask of it being shown to him which he asked me the solution to...

But the underlying system clearly stores the plain password, and that's just such a massive security flaw.

Virgin Media's : I'm Sick and Tired of You

I've had my broadband with only two companies in twenty years, NTL and then Virgin whom bought NTL.  I've had them at three addresses and never had cause to really complain, sure for a while I had a junction box which would fill with water whenever it rained, so cutting me off, but they sorted that quickly enough.

However, for the last year I've paid for 200mbit speed, super speed, being who I am I immediately started to monitor the speed, and initially I did get around 198mbit download speeds with a constant 12mbit up.

Unfortunately over the last four months that speed has dropped off and off, so much so that my automated server started to report 4mbit.  I tweeted VM about this, of course I received the standard line that this was my equipment.  I called them about it and was told that "over wifi you get much less download speed than you pay for", except I'm using Cat 6 over a gigabit LAN... "Cat what?" the operator asked, as I was simply no longer on their lookup script of replies.

In the end things came to a head when I also noticed that the TV package I was paying for went from a stately total of £50 a month to just over £80.  That's quite a hike, and I looked realistically at what we watched and found it not to be worth it.

The absolute soul cracker was my week away disconnected in Wales, where we had a freeview connected TV, and there was so much choice, right there, free to air.

We were both also sick of the recycled land-line number constantly rining with whoever only knows looking for past holders of the line for debts or catalogues or PPI, so much so I took up a distinct accent whenever answering my own phone to put people off calling.

So, no TV needed, no Telephone we just need basic broadband.

And the persuit began, I knew the name of the exact product I needed, I needed to go from Vivid200 Broadband to Vivid50 - why pay for something you're not getting - and that was it basically, the rest could go, but I thought I'd challenge them...

Now have you ever watched Morgan Spurlocks "Supersize Me!" and it's effect on the fast-food industry?  Well, this same effect is underway within Virgin Media, they upsell, they upscale, they ask if you want to supersize, and they simply can not ever stop doing it, you say "no", you say "stop" you say "less"... And they do not understand.

You're stuck calling a gaggle of people who are not native English speakers, sometimes to lesser or greater effect, and they do not understand you want less.... Three point manefesto in this conversation was simply... "Drop the telephone line, reduce the broadband speed and I'll listen about the TV for ease".

The lines which came back to me beggared belief... "We can not give you a lower rate on your TV without your having the weekend calls"... "Having the calls makes the package cheaper".

The saving through the package £6, the additional cost in the package of a phone line £10.99... So how was I saving anything?  That's right I wasn't, but on their screen the two HAD to go hand in hand, they could not, were unable to, untrained and not savvie enough to realise I had no need for and some concerns with the recycled number of the line we had, but they just could not figure this out.  Extremely poor customer service ensued.

"Your bill is so high because you had the McGregor fight" yes we did have that ordered, yes... "This proves my point, I'm paying for this TV package and still having to pay more to watch the items I want to watch, so where is the incentive for me to pay for the package?"

Silence.

There was simply no answer to this, the chap then passed me without asking, to a "supervisor", with whom I had to go through this whole rigmorale again.

I'd had 15 minutes of this online, 20 minutes with the first chap, and over a year of issues with the broadband speed and phone line, so I simply snapped... "Cancel it"

"Cancel the TV, Cancel the Telephone, and drop the broadband to VIVID 50 whilst I look for an alternative supplier"

The guy didn't even argue, he just did this, they are so blasé about their customers, we are such sheep, decades of supply are but nothing, they're not interested in you.

Ten minutes later I had started to investigate freeview or freesat to my fancy Sony TV... It has both.

Half an hour later I have over 600 channels on Freesat, with one wire now at the back of my TV, and no additional power usage from their slow TiVo.

The only thing the wife and I are missing is pausing live TV, however, I think the TV will do this with the addition of a USB Harddrive... And I know I have several of them lying around!

In conclusion, fuck you Virgin Media, sick and tired of you.

People : Co-Workers We Remember

Today everyone has some form of social media, at least in this business, LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter or this blog!  They're all examples of being able to keep in contact with people out there, either bi-directionally in the case of LinkedIn & Facebook, or uni-directional in the case of Twitter and this blog.

I like the latter, I like people to be able to find me; if they know me, or just discover me.  I recently had a message from a chap involved in my first Rack Mount Mistakes posts.  His name is Stuart, and he was a very nice chap, he helped with the clean up and was my second when we had to confront and appoint the blame for the debacle on the chap responsible.

He contacted me to say "hey, I remember this"... Which is exactly what this blog is about, but I had to tell him I didn't clearly remember him...

After a little discussion we came to a conclusion, he found me to be a pain in the bum, fun and good at my job, but I was young, much younger than him, but in charge; which he didn't like.  I was early twenties, he was early thirties.  Now he's entered his fifties he looks back on those days with fondness and even said "I thought back then I had the nous to do your job, that you were pushy, but I know now I could never had been like that with people, never told them what to do and get those jobs done when I was that age".

Two things struck me about this, firstly that he was complimentary, but also I realised why I didn't remember him clearly.  He was one of those rank and file kind of guys he did his job, he fitted in, and he got the task done.

Because he never rose above the surface level he was never a nail head needing me to drop on him like a hammer...

To my fault this made me place him in my "of least concern" perimeter, so as time has gone on I've forgotten that he was diligent, forgotten that he was a good developer, forgotten even his surname.  This is good and bad.

However, taking this tail of thinking further, I realised I remembered lots of the bad ones... The bad egg, the nail which poked up and needed hammering into place, the ones who didn't get on with their jobs, the ones who disappeared from their desks for hours on end, or who missed deadlines, even some whom even today I chase around bad code they've left in their wake.

I don't contact either group of ex-co-workers, very few of them can directly contact me, perhaps this is good for the bad ones, but it's certainly not ideal for all those good ones I've met and worked with over the years....

Andy S

Max B

Paul D

Leon B

Dave P

Ravi S

Steve W

Tony

Andy K

Richard (Dad!)

And the valiant few I still work with and like to work with where I sit today, I salute you all.... Anyone not on the list... I either forgot about you or I don't like you; you decide which!

People: I am Xelous (Someone else has an Identity Crisis)

I bring this to the public attention of these pages as I had what could only be described as an ill conceived lecture last night about my name, now let us be clear we all know "Xelous" is not my actual name, it is however a name I have use and evolved online since 1996.

If you google "xelous" you will find me.. I admit also a young lady on Picorama... but you find me....

If you google my actual name you will find the Gillingham Goal Keeper, and a well known film franchise, you will not find me.

You will like-wise NOT find me vaunting myself on LinkedIn, again I have been challenged about this.  My first reason for not really embracing Social Media in this manner is that I get a lot of spam, an awful lot of spam, the second is that it's simply not mature enough for me yet, Facebook is too much a dictatorship and not professional and LnkedIn is not mature and insecure.

I noted how that LinkedIn hack disappeared from the radar pretty quickly in the Summer... I however remembered it.

I've had the comment that "Xelous" is a silly name, it's a name... It is actually a name, I thank "Nacel Xelous Elal Ybab" of the Philippines for letting me make this point.

I have worked professionally in the Entertainment Software industry under the pseudonym "Lord Xelous" as well, and it is the name on my YouTube channel.

So to that nay-sayer, you were wrong, and sounded silly.  Indeed I looked you up online, with your buttoned down collar supposedly "correct" name, you were WWAAAAY down the google search listings and even came second on the LinkedIn listing and your surname is quite unique in of itself!  FAIL!

Virgin Media - Getting The Service You Require

I've had a bit of a battle with Virgin Media over the last month, I noted I was suddenly, and for no reason, on a very slow connection (at least slow to my liking) it was showing up in tests as between 46 and 52 mbit... STRANGE!  Since I thought I was on 100Mbit and was trying at the time to get onto the new Vivid200 mbit.

Anyway, after doing some calling around, and basically being given the run around by sales, I got through to a chap in the right department, who was able to sell me things AND look at my account; they seem very able to sell stuff to you, and take your money, but you ask for something and you get stone walled.

So, this chap checked my account, 50M sir, you're on our 50M service?... I thought I was on the Big Bundle thing, on the tele?.. 100Mbit etc... Oh You were sir, but your contract ended in 2016...

So, did they continue charging me?.. Oh yes.. Full whack, but they slowly eroded both the channels on the TV package and the speed of the internet, I guess hoping they could provide less and charge the same, or even more!

I set about trying to rectify this, and got exactly nowhere, online chat, telephone calls, even twitter didn't budge them into action, they didn't give a hoot!

Therefore, I set about getting what I wanted the underhanded way... 

What I wanted was to jump from 50mbit to 200mbit, leaving the TV and landline telephone as was, the problem?... No human operator on any channel, in any department, nowhere could give me this, I was even told you could not order this combination!  That my kit didn't support it!  That the wires were wrong!!?!?!

When I pointed out that the wires and kit are theirs, sort it, they basically hung up on me.

Online in my account however, I could see an upgrade offer... For a free I could upgrade to some new cables.. DOCSIS or some such thing... So, I ordered that...

A week later, I checked again, the new offer was for a free upgrade from 50mbit to 70mbit.  Are you still with me here?... So I chose that.

A week yet further on and I had 70mbit, and the option to pay £1.50 more per month to upgrade to 100mbit!  So I ordered that.

And yet another week on, I finally have the option to order 200mbit for an additional £5.50 a month, with 6 months at £2.50...

I have this arriving, through the ether as we read this...

So why the delay?  Why did the humans say they could not leave my TV and landline alone to just uprade the speed?... Well, seems they could, they could all along, they were lying, or their training didn't expose them to the workings of their own systems.  Whichever it was, I was very very frustrated by the whole affair, and I've made it known.

https://twitter.com/OriginalXelous/status/725670550601867264