neuro.me.uk

I got a letter addressed to “The Occupier” from Virgin Media this morning. It’s the latest in many advertising missives that I’m convinced I’m only sent because someone has surveyed the street and spied my Sky minidish attached to my back wall.

So this one I got this morning has listed ten reasons to switch from Sky to Virgin Media. Each one of them pissed me off at their tactics, so I thought I’d go through them, like the pedantic, easily-pissed-off bastard that I am.

1. We’ve got all your favourite Sky channels including Sky1, Sky News and Sky Sports News. Yes, and Sky Sports and Sky Movies too.*

But I have those channels already (excepting the Sports and Movies packs, because I cancelled those along with Setanta after I lost my job to save me money). Sky also have Sky1, Sky Movies and more in HD. You don’t. You also charge more for Sky Movies (Sky charge a fixed £16/mo for all the channels, regardless of what other tiers you’ve signed up to; Virgin charge between £19.50/mo and £30/mo dependent on which TV tier you’re on).

2. Only V+HD can let you record two channels while watching a third (Sky+HD can’t).

But various Freeview+ and Freesat+ PVRs can.

3. Only Virgin TV gives you access to a huge, ever-changing library of over 500 movies and thousands of great TV shows, documentaries and music videos stored to watch whenever you want (Sky’s equivalent doesn’t even come close).

Yes, Sky don’t have a “pull VOD” system, where you can watch video on demand by having it streamed to your set top box whenever you like. They have a “push VOD” system, where they send select movies and shows to your PVR’s hard drive, but you have no real choice in what you get. However, Sky does have a VOD website (currently called Sky Player), where you can stream or download hundreds of movies on a pay-per-view/own basis, or for free when you subscribe to Sky Movies. It’s not equivalent to Virgin’s Replay, but it’s a stopgap until Sky complete developing their broadband-based VOD next year.

4. Only Virgin TV lets you watch BBC iPlayer, ITV Net Player and 4oD right there on your telly.

No, I’ve been doing this without Virgin for quite some time. Again with the “only” thing. Yes, Sky don’t have VOD yet, but my laptop has it. As does the Mac mini plugged into my TV. However, the actual necessity of watching anything on ITV Player is very much debatable.

5. And only our TV comes down a state-of-the-art fibre optic cable, not through a dish or aerial. So when the weather’s bad, your picture won’t be.

6. The same fibre optic cable brings you fast, future proof Virgin Broadband at up to 50Mb, that’s the UK’s fastest. (Broadband from BT, Sky or one of the others comes down copper telephone wire, which means your speed gets slower the further you live from the phone exchange).

Two ‘reasons’ talking about fibre optic cable. Bloody hell. Are Virgin still droning on about fibre optic cable? Let’s clear something up. Virgin insinuate they deliver all their services to your home via fibre optic cable. They don’t. Well, not really. Virgin deliver services over a hybrid fibre-coaxial network, using a national fibre network to “headends” in each regional area, just as BT use a national fibre network to interconnect telephone exchanges. “Headends” are akin to exchanges: they slurp in content, phone calls and Internet access using satellite feeds, fibre optic links and network connections, then spit all that out along fibre trunks to cabinets in each Virgin-covered street. From there, coaxial cable (aka copper wire) transfers the signals back and forth from each house to the cabinet.

ADSL, on the other hand, which is the primary thing Virgin are attacking with this component of their campaign, is delivered over fibre optic links — just like Virgin — to BT’s telephone exchanges, and from there to your home using pairs of copper wire. This will slowly be replaced by BT with fibre optic cabling to cabinets in the streets, and on occasion, to your home.

So yes, Virgin use fibre optic cable further up the chain than anyone else at this consumer level of Internet service provision does. But it doesn’t really make it all that “better”. It’s as prone to congestion (aka contention) as ADSL is. They really need to find another way to market this, because leaning on the fibre optic angle just ain’t the truth.

However, at least their “UK’s fastest” line is mainly true: only BT’s “Fibre to the Cabinet” trials could be faster; no UK DSL provider offers more than 24Mbps on a single line at the moment. But is 50Mbps really that important?

7. Servicing and repairs are free all the time you’re a customer.† (Sky charges you £65 for a call-out the minute you’re out of warranty.)

Yeah, but Virgin subscribers don’t own their receiving equipment, they merely lease it from Virgin. Once you’re no longer a customer, none of that equipment will work, and they’ll want it back. Meanwhile, Sky customers own their receivers from the get-go, and once out of their subscriptions, they can still receive all Free-to-Air and most Free-to-View channels, including at least one in HD.

8. Delivering TV, broadband and phone down the same fibre optic cable is better value and keeps everything in one simple bill. Our prices for TV, broadband and calls start at just £14 a month when you switch to a Virgin phone line for £11 a month.

Sky’s package of TV, broadband and phone starts at £17/mo (+ phone line for £11/mo). Virgin undercut this by offering an entry level, no-cost TV package (called ‘M’ as in Medium) which mirrors a list of channels freely available on Sky, Freesat and Freeview. If you want channels like Sky1, G.O.L.D., Hallmark, etc, on Virgin, you need to shell out at least £5.50/mo for the M+ package, bumping the comparable package price to £19.50. Oops.

9. We’re so confident you’ll love it, we’ll give you your money back if you don’t. Everything is covered by our 28 day guarantee.

Or I could just not change anything at all and keep my money in my pocket.

10. Your street’s already connected to our fibre optic network so it’s easy to get switched on.

Well, woop de doo … but I’ve had a Sky dish attached to my house for over 8 years. What’s your point?

Job done? Great, just call …

Pass.

For the last couple of years, I’ve fallen more and more back in love with Macs. One of their foibles is that Apple have decided the standard British English, or UK, keyboard layout should not match that of every other computer manufacturer on the planet. Various characters are just in the wrong place, such as quotation marks, backslash, hash mark (or pound, for my American friends), tilde, and so on. In Tiger and Leopard, I used Phil Gyford’s awesome instructions and the associated .rsrc file as to how to sort this defect out, at least in software.

So now Snow Leopard is out, and it’s fab and lovely and nippy and dices and slices and so on. An immediate downside (apart from having to manually upgrade Xcode to 3.2, and reinstall MacPorts from .dmg to make that bit work again) is that the trusty icle .rsrc doesn’t work any more. Well, it works, but it doesn’t stick; OS X keeps switching back to standard British English, which means when I try to type out quotes, it comes out with at signs. This is ungood.

However, the Internet to the rescue! Some kind soul has posted new keyboard layouts for OS X to correctly map the British English key layout. Just download and extract the zip file linked to from that page, copy the files from inside the zip to either /Library/Keyboard Layouts off the root of your hard disk, or ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts in your home directory, then log out and log back in again. Go to System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources, then tick British (PC105). If things don’t seem consistently correct, try British (PC105 alt).

Bosh, sorted, and I can touch type again!

Update 2010-02-13: apparently this works on Dell Mini netbooks too, so Hackintosh people can get the benefit as well. Bonus!

Dear oh dear. The well-loved and well-respected actress Mollie Sugden has died, aged 86. In tribute to Ms. Sugden’s most famous character, Mrs. Slocombe, and to the constant running jokes about her pet pussy cat Tiddles, Jonathan Ross sent out a tweet encouraging one and all to use the Twitter hashtag #MrsSlocombesPussy in their tweets. Unbelievably rude, but also staggeringly apt! However, Twitter has decided (perhaps algorithimically) not to display search results for that hashtag: that, in and of itself, is somewhat disappointing. The hashtag became so immediately popular it appeared in Twitter’s list of trending topics, dominated in recent days by topics like Michael Jackson, and Glastonbury.

What’s more disappointing, however, is how US technology gossip blogs TechCrunch and Mashable dealt with this information. They considered it an attempt to poison the trending topics list with spam, neither bothering for an instant before publication to check and see if perhaps it was legitimate in some way.

Both sites have since been put right by blog commenters, and they’ve updated their posts to reflect that, but their knee jerk reaction was to condemn the tag as spam. $deity forbid that a territory outwith the US with a better sense of humour, and with less instinct to consider mild double entendres as nasty in some way, would gather up the power to invade the hallowed Temple of Twitter’s Trending Topics.

The blogs’ concerns were that the system could be gamed, but are we saying that those clicking through the trending topics list are stupid, and can’t tell the difference between targeted spam, and legitimate trends?

Is it just me, or has this furore over Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross prank calling Andrew Sachs’ answerphone on a radio show been blown out of all proportion? Both men involved have apologised to Sachs, and that should be the end of it. Instead, they are now suspended from their BBC broadcasts, and Sachs’ granddaughter wants them fired (yet she waited until today to express that to The Sun, after all this publicity has kicked off).

However, this situation is entirely the making of the press — most notably the Daily Mail. Look at the figures. The original broadcast was on Russell Brand’s late night Saturday show on BBC Radio 2, on the 18th of October. Brand apologised on his show the following Saturday, the 25th. On Sunday the 26th, the BBC said it had received 67 complaints. After the press coverage on Monday morning, that number reached 1,500. By Tuesday, it was 18,000.

How many of these 18,000 people heard the original broadcast in its original context, over a week ago? How many heard it first on YouTube (in two parts)? How many didn’t actually hear it at all, but consider Brand and Ross to be the worst of the ‘elite’ and ‘overpaid’ celebs at the BBC? Only 67 actually considered it worthy of complaint at the time, and I’m not the only one to have noticed this.

And what of the granddaughter, Georgina Baillie? The Daily Mail has been horrified by all this, horrified enough to publish large photos of Baillie in burlesque outfits (plus a photo of her at 10 months old, to redress the balance, or something) which can’t be doing her career as a self-labelled “satanic slut” any harm. And just a click away, Piers Morgan calls Brand “sex-obsessed”. In the Daily Mail. Take a look their website’s front page. Look at the right-hand column, and scroll down. It reads like a cross between Heat and tmz.com, it’s the worst kind of paparazzi-driven celeb trash.

Still, I guess with the US presidential election looming, and a massive global financial crisis still ongoing, we need something else to fill our headlines. How stupid, as a society, do we have to get before we unnaturally evolve into idiocracy?

UPDATE 2008-10-29 18:25 UTC: Brand has resigned from his BBC show, Gia Milinovich is asking for your comments of support to pass back to Jonathan Ross. Hello, CNN.com readers.

UPDATE 2008-10-30 09:19 UTC: BBC now reporting 27,000 complaints. How is it possible to accept complaints about something that has (a) received such a high level of media attention, thus skewing public opinion, and (b) happened nearly two weeks ago?

I was flicking through the iTunes Store this morning and noticed something odd … some words in reviews and track titles had asterisks in them as though they were swear words (e.g. ‘b*ll*cks’). But they didn’t appear to be swear words. iTunes uses allmusic for the bulk of their album and single reviews, so luckily it’s possible to go back and ‘decode’ some of these words. They include: “porno”, “teen”, “cream”, “sexy”, “hot”. Strangely, variants like “sex”, “creamy”, “teenage” aren’t being censored. This seems to be a blanket effect on iTunes — Katy Perry’s current single “Hot ‘n’ Cold” is listed on the UK iTunes Store main page under ‘Top Songs’ as “H*t ‘n’ Cold’.

This seems to me to be really odd behaviour. They’ve done the same thing to some common swear words, but to censor “cream”? And it’s inconsistent to boot. Look at the review for Tenacious D’s eponymous album. The tracks “Fuck Her Gently” and “Cock Pushups” are censored with asterisks, but the title “Sex Supreme” in the review is not. The Roots’ track “Pussy Galore” has its title censored, but not the name of the band Pussy Galore.

And it’s not even like people at Apple don’t swear.

Jono’s post about taxi cabs and close calls with death reminded me of how little hassle I’ve usually had with cab drivers.

I usually chat away to cabbies, and tip pretty generously on most occasions, but one guy in San Francisco took the biscuit, and didn’t get tipped. Or chatted to, as I was giving him directions.

I had to go 8 blocks from Clay to Green carrying a load of crap in plastic bags, so thought “fuck it, cab”. There was one across from the hotel. “Battery and Green”, I’d asked. “Do you know how to get there?” he replied? I thought he was implying it wasn’t that far, or did I know where I was going? Nah, he was asking because he didn’t bloody know where it was. Then, when I gently discussed how cabbies in the UK have to do The Knowledge before they’re let loose on the streets, he told me that that was “not true, they can just go out and drive like here”. Hey, don’t mind me, I only bloody live there. I ended up having to guide this guy to the destination as, by his own admission, he’d only been working for two days, including that one.

Then there was the private cab driver who, on taking me from Chelmsford town centre to Stansted Airport on a Friday afternoon, seemed to be dominating the conversation. He was basically chatting me up. He even broke my cardinal rule, which is when taking a cab for work travel, expense the bare fare, but pay with a tip. That way, the tip comes out of my own pocket. But nooooo, this guy threw an extra fiver on the receipt. “There you go, mate, something back for yourself”. Brrrrrr. I took a meal off my expenses that week to counter it.

So two things i’ve been looking forward to for a long time are going to see The Dark Knight and finally getting to see a movie at the IMAX cinema out at the Glasgow Science Centre. It’s a crying shame that the actual experience of going to watch the movie didn’t match up to the movie itself at any level.

So the movie itself is just frickin’ awesome. All kinds of awesome. Every performance is note perfect, and makes me itch for more. I don’t want to go too much into the movie, as I tried to stay clear of any pre-release hype to keep the movie fresh for me when I saw it, and I don’t want to spoil the experience for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. However, if you’ve seen it, you hopefully know what I’m talking about.

No, the reason I’m blogging about going to see the Dark Knight in IMAX is sadly rationale for yet another “neuro is ranting” post.

The actual experience of the IMAX segments of The Dark Knight were truly stunning, expanding the more traditional widescreen segments vertically up- and downwards to absolutely fill the field of vision. However, the non-IMAX segments of the movie had terrible black level definition, as though someone had turned the brightness way up on your television. That’s my only real complaint about the movie presentation itself, as the IMAX segments were amazing (I’ll keep reiterating that to make the point that there’s nothing wrong with the IMAX process itself), and the sound system was leg-shakingly loud.

Well, except when the ushers used it as a PA system. Just before the start of the movie, after seeing some postage-stamp sized ads, and a 5 minute fluff piece on Christopher Nolan and crew espousing how awesome IMAX is to shoot with, one of the ushers gave us the lowdown on where the exits where (I’ve just gotten back from a couple of weeks travelling; the last thing I want to hear is someone on a PA telling me where the exits are … are there lifejackets in this cinema too?) and to “keep your feet on the ground, get ready for The Dark Knight: the IMAX Experience”. Just get on with it!

I should point out that my agitation at this point was that it was around 11pm by now. We’d gotten to the Glasgow Science Centre at about 9pm to get our tickets and avoid a massive queue — indeed, we were amongst the first into the cinema itself — but then we were made to queue until around 10:45pm for a 10:15pm showing. It was nearly half one in the morning by the time we got outside.

So the movie starts. I’m sat in my rather uncomfortable seat, drinking my bottle of Coke which had gotten lukewarm between my buying it and actually getting sat down. Our little movie going group had already eaten most of our movie munchies. And we still had two and a half hours to go. This was not going well.

And so the movie finished. Not five seconds after the end credits have appeared, the lights went up (well I say “lights”, it was a massive spot up in the rafters somewhere) and another usher grabbed the mike to tell us to take our rubbish with us, and to use the exits at the back of the theatre. Meanwhile, the credits have gotten to Michael Caine’s name. I don’t mind the lights coming up after say 10-15 seconds of end credits; most movie-goers are on their feet by that point anyway, but to actually interrupt the movie by blabbering on a PA is massively disrespectful to not only the feature, but the process too.

I now have an indelible impression that going to see a movie or feature in IMAX will be marred by dreadful pre-entry procedures, awful seating, poor herding of patrons, and shoddy treatment by the staff to whatever’s being shown; sadly I shall never return to the Glasgow IMAX cinema. For every moment I was enjoying the movie, there was another wishing I was back at home, in my comfy chair watching something in HD on Sky or on my Mac mini, and that surely is a damning indictment of any “experience”.

As someone said on IRC this morning: “the FSF appear to have come up with the perfect plan for how to look like a bunch of annoying, smart-arse tossers“. Has the Free Software Foundation gone nuts?

Update 13:30: I don’t seem to be alone on this: popey, mgdm, ZDNet, Slashdot.

I’ve been saying for a while that the more zealous methods used by proponents of Free software have been somewhat over-the-top, and do more to detract from the FOSS public image than to build upon it in a constructive way. Now they’ve taken a sip from the poisoned Kool-Aid. The FSF, via it’s Defective by Design campaign, is advocating that people block-book sessions at an Apple Store’s Genius Bar, a sort of drop-in and bookable repair and support centre. “Having lots of slots booked will get Apple’s attention and ensure that the Geniuses have done their homework”, says the ‘Apple Challenge’ page, posted by FSF employee Matt Lee. The rationale apparently is that Apple is now the enemy, since Vista is doing more damage to itself than anyone else can from outside Microsoft, and the first target are the Apple Store’s Genius Bars.

Update 13:35: Just noticed this on IRC …
[13:33]<mgdm> popey: you mean mattl actually uses a Mac?
[13:33] <popey> he does
[13:33] <mgdm> IRONY OVERLOAD *head asplodes*

My employer purchased both AppleCare and ProCare for my MBP, which has come in extremely handy when the ‘O’ key snapped off (keyboard replaced overnight), my battery failed to hold a charge (replaced immediately upon attending pre-booked Genius Bar session) and my motherboard GPU failed (motherboard replaced in 90 minutes). Now imagine any of the following scenarios: you’re unsure how to use your newly purchased Macbook; you’re trying to connect a camera to your Mac to transfer photos to iPhoto and print them to send to relatives in a frame; your machine has failed in some way and urgently needs repaired, as you use it for your business. You try to book a session at the Genius Bar to resolve any of these issues, and … it’s fully booked. For days. Wow, they must be busy.

Well, no, it’s actually a bunch of uber-asshole Free software zealots thinking they’re “special”, attempting to monopolise a consumer resource in an attempt to “educate” or “catch out” Apple Store employees, some of whom may have used Macs for years, others may have had a crash course in Apple products so that they know as much as they can about the stuff they sell, but little else. Why harass these people? It’s like having a constant stream of people going up to the counter at McDonald’s and espousing the benefits of a low-carb, high-fibre diet to the person who can do the least about it. Genius Bar employees may know all about FOSS, but critically it’s not their job to promote it. It’s not a “product” to be “sold”, but a philosophy to be shared.

A plea to the FSF: stop harassing Apple staff, and stop alienating the very people you’re trying to “save”. There are better, more ethical, more agreeable methods to promote FOSS. What you’re doing is none of those things. In the meantime, you’ve virtually guaranteed I will never promote, condone, contribute or donate to any FSF body, project or campaign. I’ve had a “Warning, DRM” defectivebydesign.org sticker on my Macbook Pro for a while now, mainly for comedic value. It’s gone now. I no longer want to be seen to be promoting these idiots in any way. As much as I love the thought of Free and Open Source Software being used everywhere and anywhere, this is just not the way to be going about it.

I dropped my dinky Dell Latitude X300 a couple of weeks ago. The whole thing just locked up hard, and wouldn’t recover from a reboot. I ended up claiming for it on my home insurance. The insurance folks got back to me and said it was unrepairable, and they’ve offered me £400 in vouchers for Currys or PC World to spend to get a replacement. Urgh.

I mean, this is the laptop that has survived bus trips, car trips, flights to England, Wales, France, the US. It even survived having a full pint of beer poured over it. Gah.

So long, little buddy. Schniff.

YouTube is currently off the air. Several people are citing a blog post describing the issue as youtube.com being the victim of DNS poisoning. However, this simply ain’t the case.

YouTube hasn’t had their DNS hijacked; Yelvington describes a wildcard match in the whois tool which let’s you see not only youtube.com but other records where youtube.com forms part of the overall domain name, but doesn’t actually affect the lookup of *.youtube.com at all, e.g. YOUTUBE.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.WWW.GULLI.COM. Check out something similar which happens when you lookup microsoft.com.

The simple fact is that YouTube is inaccessible due to the leak of network route announcements from outside a Pakistani ISP’s network border to implement a government-sanctioned block of certain YouTube ISPs. In other words, someone messed up. YouTube can easily re-appear on the net once either the Pakistani ISP resolves their route announcement snafu, or Google shift the servers onto alternate IPs not part of the /24 block being announced. Simple.