fscked.co.uk

Some children’s author I’ve never heard of (he wrote the Artemis Fowl books apparently) will be writing a sixth HGttG book the BBC reports. After being asked to do it by Douglas Adams’s widow, he said:

My first reaction was semi-outrage that anyone should be allowed to tamper with this incredible series.

Hmm. At least we agree on that bit then. Seriously though. DNA had a remarkable writing style. Can this really end in anything but tears?

Personal Rants

Matt sent me a link to this Digg thread which quotes:

Gov. Rick Perry said that he supported the policy of the Harrold school district to allow teachers and staff members to carry guns at school as long as they are adequately trained in gun safety.

The comments there are… well, they’ve made me whither and die a little inside just by reading them. I would urge you to read them in moderation and do not drive or operate heavy machinery for sometime afterward in case of dizzy spells. I mean, come on. Let’s arm all the teachers in a school? What could be wrong with having a hundred handguns floating around a school, eh? After all, no-one who carries a gun has ever had it taken from them, or lost their temper and used it inappropriately. The stupid, it burns.

(Headline stolen from Misinformant in the comments on Digg)

Personal Rants

I used to have a Vauxhall Calibra. One day I replaced it with a Vauxhall Omega (I’m not married to Vauxhall or anything, it just made sense for various long-winded reasons). On that day, I parked the Calibra at a little parking spot near my house, wrote to the DVLA, and declared it SORN. In other words I told the DVLA it was off-road and would not be paying road tax on it.

To make sure this was above board, before I did all this, I telephoned my local council’s Highways department and asked about what, exactly, this parking space was. After all it wasn’t my property, but I had seen other untaxed cars stored in it, sometimes for a long time. They told me it was “unclaimed land” i.e. essentially just a piece of concrete someone laid once which they have nothing to do with. This certainly explains why it is pitted and overgrown with weeds. As such, it isn’t on the public highway, and a car declared as SORN is legally allowed to be there. They were very specific about that.

So imagine my surprised when, sometime during the morning one cold October day, it acquired some big red warning stickers from the DVLA, threatening me with fire and brimstone for not taxing my vehicle. Imagine my further surprise when the car was towed that lunchtime, less than two hours later. There then commenced a very fun four hours for me on the phone.

It went down a little something like this.

I rang the local DVLA office. There was only one guy in that day. I asked why they towed my car after less than a couple of hour’s warning; “it was illegally parked sir”. I asked why they bother with the warning stickers at all but simply kept getting same responses, at rapidly escalating levels of rudeness. I changed tact and challenged why the car was illegally parked; he insisted it was, I said it wasn’t. This went back and forth for 10 minutes until he hung up on me.

Furious, I rang the council, and spoke to an incredibly helpful lady. First interesting thing she said was, yes, my car was legally parked in that parking bay. Second thing was that standard procedure was for the DVLA office to fax to the council a special annotated map showing where each taxless car is parked, so the council can tell the DVLA whether the car is legal or not. She confirmed they had received no faxes about my car.

Incandescent, I went back to the DVLA with this. He refused to believe he’d done anything wrong and continued to babble that I would be taken to court for the heinous crime of car tax avoidance. It took — no word of exaggeration — it took over twenty minutes to encourage him to understand that according to the local council, he hadn’t checked with them, and if he had, they would have told him I’d done nothing wrong. Now, I’m not someone to get rude with people on the phone unnecessarily. I’m well aware that 90% of the time, these people are just doing their job, and getting shirty with the person on the other end doesn’t help.

This was the other 10% of the time. I was exceedingly blunt towards the end. Eventually, by sheer bloody brute force, I managed to cram into this fellow’s exceedingly small brain that All Was Not Well here. Eventually he agreed that the council could ring him tomorrow. I yelped, and asked him to please explain to me, in extreme detail, exactly why both I and the council should be running around sorting out his mistake, and why, for that matter, he thought this was a suitable use of tax payer’s money?

Finally, he suddenly remembered the faxed forms, and sent them to the Council. Less than ten minutes later they faxed back the “this guy has done nothing wrong” form. And then I finally got him into the position I had been working towards for hours of back-and-forth, my boot metaphorically on his throat.

“OK sir, you can come and collect your car now. We’re open until 5:30pm”
“Well, that’s all well and good, but I don’t finish work until then. And in any event, the car is untaxed. I cannot drive it back to my house on public roads.”
“Oh, that’s OK sir, we can give you special dispensation. You will be allowed to drive it without tax–”
“But I still will have no MOT or insurance. I cannot legally drive that vehicle back to where you illegally took it from today.”
(beat)
“But sir–”
“Here’s what we are going to do. You are going to call your supervisor and you are going to call your tow truck driver and he is going to deliver the car back to exactly where he took it from. And I’m not going to call the police.”
(beat)
“OK sir.”

And so he did.

The punchline? I had a chat to the truck driver when he was dropping the car off. He told me that when he collected the car, he had called into the DVLA first, and told them he was sure this was a private parking area and the car was legally parked here. The bloke — the same bloke — told him to “no, bring it in”. Apparently they have quotas. Imagine a local government organisation employing someone, then letting the power going to their head, eh? Unheard of!

I wrote a very stiff letter of complaint to the DVLA management afterwards but never heard back. I should have followed it up with my MP, in hindsight. God, I can feel the anger boiling over right now.

Personal Funny, Rants

To Paul Hale, Editor

Regarding: Escaped spammer kills himself

I’ve been reading the Inq since before there was an Inq — in fact, I was a fan of Mageek’s writing before there was even a Reg. I followed Mike from the Reg to the Inq and have read both sites ever since. I am not opposed to your tongue-in-cheek commentary, and I am a fan of your sometimes gutterpress attitude to rumours. The world has enough boring tech sites.

This article however is appalling. I hate spam as much as the next guy but that report is disgustingly insensitive. To make light of the murder of a three year old girl is simply staggering in its stupidity.

Let’s reflect on that opening sentence:
“NOT ALL STORIES have a happy ending, but the tale of escaped spam king Edward “Eddie” Davidson sure does. After walking away from prison, he got a gun, killed his family, then killed himself.”

Do the decent thing, Paul. Retract this and issue an apology immediately.

(If the Inq pull the piece, The Register has linked to a backup copy incase you want to see what the fuss is about)

Personal Rants

Email to DHL:

Hi there. I have been tracking my parcel today (JD00 022 125 8082 6813, not that it matters for this inquiry) and I’d like some clarification on what my tracking information means. At 06:02 my parcel was “Released to other delivery agent” — does this mean it’s been passed to a subcontractor? At 07:30, my parcel was then “Out for delivery” — sounds simple enough. But the next entry in the log, which appeared at about 3pm or so but doesn’t have a time, I have “HSD Out for Delivery awaiting IOD”. What does that one mean?

Reply:

Thank you for your email.

It stands for “Home Shopping Delivery awaiting Information On Delivery”.

Thank you for contacting DHL and assuring you of our close co-operation at all times.

Oh, well that cleared that up then. Oh, no, the other thing: I’m none the wiser. Idiots. I asked what it meant not what it stands for.

Personal Rants

I received a reply from O2 to my recent complaint:

Hello Richard,

Thanks for your email about your upgrade order.

We didn’t receive your upgrade order. Your order wasn’t accepted, this is the reason you didn’t receive an email confirming the status of your order.

I’m sorry to hear you’re disappointed with the level of service you’ve received. We value our customers and we ve (sic) tried our best to provide you with the best possible service.

We’re working as fast as we can to deal with the high volumes of upgrade requests we received, but we cannot confirm for you at the moment whether your upgrade was successful. We recognise that this has not been a brilliant experience and apologise for the obvious frustration, but we are doing everything we can to resolve the situation as soon as possible.

Demand for iPhone 3G is staggering. We invested heavily in our website capacity which was tested carefully in advance, but we were experiencing 13,000 orders per second being placed, far beyond our expectations and our  worst case  scenario.

This may be of little comfort to you, but we were as prepared as we could possibly be but the sheer volume of demand is completely unprecedented.

We made a limited allocation of iPhone 3G stock available for pre-order online, primarily for those customers that pre-registered their interest. Demand has been very high and we have now sold out of this allocation.

To upgrade to the new iPhone 3G, please visit your nearest O2 store. Please be reassured that for new and eligible to upgrade O2 customers including iPhone existing customers, there will be iPhones available in store from 8:02am on the 11 July, although we again expect demand to be very high, so urge you to get down there early.  All iPhone stock is being sold on a first come, first served basis.

You can also upgrade to the iPhone from Carphone Warehouse stores from 8:02am on 11 July 2008. Please note that you won’t be able to upgrade from an Apple store.

Now to be fair this is suitably apologetic but I take umbrage at two points.

Firstly, what this letter boils down to is “we messed up our website and that wasted a day of your life, so here’s an idea: go queue up outside one of our stores instead. Oh, they won’t have many though, so you’d better get there at ungodly o’clock. We’re really sorry. Please buy one.” Is it just me or is that quite insulting?

Secondly, that 13,000 transactions per second figure. Now, my posturing in my complaint letter wasn’t unfounded; I really have done scalability testing and analysis for some of the biggest travel ecommerce solutions in the UK. I will happily admit that 13,000 per second is a hell of a lot of traffic. Wow! 13,000 per second! I cannot imagine enough servers to cope with that; well, that gets O2 off the hook then. Quite understandable.

But wait a goddamned stinking minute. This doesn’t add up. In his letter to various customers, O2’s CEO Matthew Key said that

To put it in context we had over 200,000 people expressing interest and only a very small proportion of that number of devices available. Faced with this dilemma, we made it clear in the communications that to be fair to all customers the orders would be managed on a first come first served basis, as stock was limited. The response was so great that the online store completely sold out of iPhones within just a few hours.

Now, I’m nowt special, but I’m pretty sure 200,000/13,000 = 15.6. In other words, if the O2 website was processing 13,000 orders per second at its peak we would expect all 200,000 customers who asked for O2 to contact them about pre-orders to have ordered in a single 15 second period. Let’s be generous though; it was 13k peak and not 13k sustained, and it was “over 200k”. That still clearly implies that every single one of those pre-registered customers would have had to gone onto the site within something around a two minute window though. Furthermore, as there were only a “very small proportion” of those that could order before stock ran out, the stock should have been exhausted in, say, less than a couple of seconds. O2 have confirmed verbally to me and in emails to a few bloggers that stock lasted through until 11AM or so. So that doesn’t make any sense.

It also would require O2 to have simultaneously delivered the “hey, come buy me!” teasing SMS to all 200,000 people and for all of those people to be sat right at a computer and immediately gone “woo, here I come!”. In fact, I can confirm anecdotally from a small sample of friends and bloggers that those SMSs were received anything between half six and about half eight Monday morning. This 13,000 per second figure has been widely cited, by places such as Reuters and Daring Fireball, but seems to me to be scarcely credible.

Y’know what I think? I think its a cascaded failure of the system, a failure mode I violently feared when I was scalability analysing. Basically, it goes like this. In the first ten minutes a couple of hundred people try to order. In the second ten minutes a few more hundred new people arrive, plus half the first group whose first attempted order failed. Thirty minutes in and you have a thousand people banging on the system and now it’s really in trouble. Draw that curve out and you end up at 13,000 hits per second — entirely consisting of people on their tenth, twentieth, thirtieth attempt at ordering.

See, that’s a much less sexy headline. Suddenly we’re not “O2 took 13,000 orders per second and the servers melted to slag, but hey, no mortal could cope with that and Mighty Thor was on his day off”. Now we are “O2 took a hundred orders in the first five minutes and the system crapped out for most of them, then those people tried again and more people came and oh my it’s dying”. Now perhaps that doesn’t sound any different but the point is that this second scenario, which I contend is much more likely to be what happened, was both predictable and preventable. O2 knew how many SMSs and emails they were sending. They could easily figure the maximum possible rate customers could arrive at the site, and should have specced hardware to cope with this load, plus a bit of headroom. They didn’t do this, because if they did, there is no way on God’s green Earth they would have reached a load of 13,000 transactions per second.

I would dearly love for O2 to open its kimono and show some log analysis from the Apache servers. I’m willing to give them a fair crack of the whip, I’ve been around the block with this stuff and I know how subtle and tricky it can be. I’d subject it to rigorous analysis, not some made up superficial blogging crap. Bet they won’t do that though. Time and time again in my last job I dealt with clients with no idea about scalability analysis, who wanted to stick a finger in the air and leave a one hour meeting with all the figures somehow conjured up. They were always disappointed when I took weeks of running simulations and load tests before I would commit to any numbers — but none of the sites I looked after ever went down like this one did. I’m willing to bet O2 tried to wing it, jimmied some random number of servers into the cluster, and are now trying to wriggle out of the PR with some old-fashioned “look how big the numbers are!” pseudoscience and “hey, Apple didn’t give us enough!” blame-oh-rama.

Well, I call shenaigans on this. I’ll go further in fact. I bet sometime over the last few weeks, somewhere in O2, some bigwigs met some techies and some Bob Techie said “Here is the little microsite we made to take iPhone preorders.” Jim Sarky Technical Architect said “You fool! If that site crashes, what will happen to www.o2.co.uk?” That made Fred Bigwig nervous and he said, “Shit dude, yeah. Put the microsite on its own server cluster.” But of course there wasn’t a server cluster around for this, and Fred Bigwig wouldn’t sign one off, because who buys a cluster for just one day of taking orders? So, Bob Techie did what techies do, and he improvised with some spare servers, and maybe reallocated them from QA, and reused some old ones, and generally lashed a cluster together. And minutes after those SMSs went out the bailing twine and spit that was holding it together fell apart and now here we are, either writing (me) or reading (you) a whiny blog post about it made out of overlong sentences.

Oh, and finally, none of these shenanigans around scalability explain why the system was taking orders after stock ran out or why the frontline support staff had no visibility into the order system. I still think both of these things stink. From where I’m sitting it still looks like a world class balls up.

Personal Gadgets, iPhone, Rants

I despair at Windows Mobile, I really do. Here’s just the latest in a two year series of issues, hiccups, problems, and bloopers.

I was planning on buying an iPhone on Friday (I say was…) and so I turned my attention to getting my contact and calendar data off my current HTC TyTN (running Windows Mobile 6.0) and into Outlook. From there, I can sync them through iTunes directly onto the new iPhone, saving me retyping all those hundreds of phone numbers, addresses, etc. Good times.

Now, this phone has been around a bit so it already has two sync partnerships on it; one with my workstation in my last job and one on an older personal laptop I don’t use any more. I want to sync it now with my new work laptop, which is also my primary personal machine. Naively, I plug it in, and to be fair it quite happily connects, runs off to Windows Update, refreshes the HTC_USB driver, installs Windows Sync Centre Doodad, and offers to create a partnership. So far so good — this is somewhat slicker on this Vista machine than it was on the previous XP machines. And then It Happened.

It was a really innocuous dialog that I really wish I’d taken a screenshot of that looked not entirely like this:

Sadly, I didn’t screenshot the actual screen I saw. It was quite similar to this one but instead of showing me the partnership from my laptop to the TyTN — the one I made earlier — it was showing me the two partnerships my TyTN was already engaged in when I started today — one with my old workstation and one with my old laptop. Clearly my phone is a sync slut.

Now, it turns out Activesync only supports two partnerships in total so the dialog I saw earlier didn’t quite look like that one above. It said “I only support two partnerships at once. Please delete one of these two” and then it listed “timora” and “Windows PC 2″ (I love that second name). Knowing full well I don’t have access to either of these machines again, I just clicked on one, then the other, selecting a nicely drawn Vista-ised bubble button down at the bottom that said simply “Remove Partnership”.

One of these — I forget which — took a long time to respond. That should have set alarm bells off but I was multitasking too much and didn’t see what was going on. Perhaps you, dear reader, are more alert than I and have guessed where this story is leading.

Anyway, on with it. I created my new partnership, synced across, and opened Outlook to find… no contacts. Eh? Closed and opened it again, no contacts. Disconnected and reconnected advice, watched Sync Centre go from “Disconnected” to “Syncing” to “Done”, no contacts. Rebooted laptop, reconnected device again, confirmed the sync partnership definitely covered contacts, opened Outlook, no contacts.

Opened Pocket Outlook on the device. No contacts.

Gngh.

It seems that when a Windows Mobile device acquires a contact record over a sync, the record is tagged where it came from. And when you delete the sync partnership? Boom, record gone. With no warning that this seemingly disconnected event at the other end of the GUI will be deleting the most valuable data your device has.

Stupid old me only had a six-month-old backup too (after all, Activesyncing is supposed to be your backup isn’t it…). On the good news side, my contacts data is pretty static so I won’t have lost much. On the bad news side, I’m sure I’ve lost at least one or two new phone numbers or birthdays that’ll cause me annoyance down the road.

More seriously, the backup was taken after the last time Activesync freaked out and duplicated all my contacts but before I went through and deleted the three hundred of so duplicate entries. So I have to do that again. I suspect some sort of VBA into Outlook is the answer here. (Aside: I had Palm PDAs for three years, and moved around between three models, and it never ever mismanaged a sync).

My central point remains, however, that a user interface capable of deleting your most central and valuable data whilst doing something that, on the face of it, is entirely unrelated to that data and doesn’t see fit to even warn you is just plain dumb. Go away please Windows Mobile.

Personal Gadgets, Rants

Dear Sir or Madam,

As your own advertising has been only too keen to point out, the iPhone 3G is one of the most significant new devices O2 has launched in years. After slow initial sales of the original iPhone, the price cut and sales boost have built huge pent-up demand for the 3G model. You were clearly aware of the scale of this demand, as you put in place a pre-registration process for potential customers to be alerted by SMS when preorders became available. Indeed, that SMS said “Demand will be very high, so it’s first come first served”.

It is therefore with astonishment and disappointment that I am forced to contact you to register my disgust at how incredibly badly O2, as an organization, has bungled your customer services during this highest of high profile launches.

I switched to O2’s SIM-only contract nearly six months ago with the intention of upgrading to the iPhone 3G when it was released. I registered my interest on the O2 website within hours of the product announcement. I was on the website and attempting to preorder my handset within an hour of receiving the SMS advertising that sales had begun. Unfortunately, as my purchase was an upgrade of an existing account, I was forced to use the upgrade website and not the one for new customers. I have read that the website for new customers remained operational, as did Carphone Warehouse’s website. Sadly the upgrade website did not fare so well.

From 9am to 4pm I made dozens of repeated attempts to fill in my details on the site. I was repeatedly presented with errors as your servers were clearly incapable of dealing with the load they were placed under. This was O2’s first failing: you clearly had an idea of user numbers, as you sent each potential user of the site an SMS, and yet you still failed to ensure there was enough capacity in the servers. In the past I have performed scalability analysis for such high profile ecommerce websites as ThomasCook.com; I know full well that designed scalable websites is not a black art. If a website I had specified had performed as badly on launch day as yours did, I would have resigned immediately.

Eventually, at around 3pm, I managed to make the website direct me to https://upgrades.o2.co.uk/failover/ok.html, a page which told me that my order had been received and that if there were any problems with my details I would be contacted. Shortly afterwards the website changed to a “no stock” notification. However, I had no confirmation number of any kind, no delivery date, and even after several hours I had not received an email from the site. Suspicious, I contacted your customer service department on 0870 600 3009.

After requesting my call be escalated to a manager, as first line support seemed to have no information at all, I was informed that you had actually sold out of all the iPhone 3G stock at around 11am so there was no way that I could have a valid order. It seems that the website continued to give out seemingly valid orders for many hours after stock had actually run out; it also seems you have only secured a laughably small stock allocation. This problem was very widespread; the manager I spoke to in your call centre said she had dealt with 41 phone calls in the last hour from people in the same position as I am. As far as I can see, your failover cluster did not have any sort of online stock level fulfillment against the main live server, and hence had no ability to know it was double selling stock. Meanwhile anyone who wasn’t an existing O2 customer was able to buy up that small amount of stock from the “new customers” website without any technical problems. Essentially I was at a disadvantage because of my customer loyalty; surely this is not good business?

The final customer service blunder came when I asked the manager in the call centre to try and confirm my order details, just in case my order had slipped through. She informed me that your call centre staff could not see details of the iPhone orders placed on your web site, and that the only way for me to check was to see if the money had been taken from my bank. How were these staff supposed to do their jobs and support online sales without any access to the information coming from the website? It frankly baffles me how poorly thought out this entire process seems to be.

The iPhone 3G launch should have been a high point in O2’s financial year, and it was certainly a device I was greatly looking forward to owning. Instead I have wasted hours of my life today battling your poorly designed systems in a futile attempt to persuade you to take sell me an expensive 3G device — on top of a report in this month’s PC Pro magazine that, in addition to having the worst 3G coverage of any UK network, O2 also has the worst 3G network speeds.

Sadly, I now feel like a complete idiot. I would invite O2 to please give me some explanations for what went wrong today and a reason why I should not simply request my PAC at once and migrate to T-Mobile, whose mobile data service and customer services departments are more than an afterthought.

Yours faithfully,

Richard Gaywood

Edit update 2008-07-08: I have now had a reply from O2.

Personal Gadgets, iPhone, Rants

Gah!

Say I am writing a unit test for a class that converts metres to feet. This, naturally, involves floats. Ideally my code looks like

float expected=32.91; // in feet
Distance dist = new Distance (10,”m”);
Assert.AlmostEquals(dist.convertToUnit(”ft”),expected);

where the “AlmostEquals” method does something smart like compares the first decimal place or so. I think JUnit/NUnit/etc actually allow you to spec a precision.

Microsoft haven’t managed this, so I have to write stuff like

float expected=32.91; // in feet
Distance dist = new Distance (10,”m”);
float difference = Math.abs(expected - dist.convertToUnit(ft)); // java ism, not sure of the .net Abs method offhand
Assert.IsTrue(difference<0.01);

Unit tests need to be as crystal clear in their intent and as quick to write as possible. Every little tiny rough edge will catch your project thousands of times over. So a big “bah” to Microsoft for this one.

Personal .Net, Agile, Coding, Rants, VisualStudio

Top posting annoys me, and here’s why. This was originally written for Usenet but applies equally to email and indeed the hip new forums all the kids are talking about these days.
=================== begin generic top-posting cuss ==================
Regarding top-posting:

1) Some quoting is necessary. This has to be done in order to give  context to your reply. Remember that it might have been several days since the viewer has read the original article you are replying to, and  due to the vagaries of NNTP propagation, he (or she, naturally) might not have read it at all. Some quoting is therefore necessary. This also ensures each article is readable as it stands, without reference to previous articles the poster might (or might not) have read. Depending on the nature of the article being replied to, some or most of it might be quoted. Signatures should always be removed, and you can choose to indicate the removal of other text by inserting the word {snip}.

2) Having decided to quote, it dramatically improves the readability and flow of your document to intersperse quote and reply in the manner usually adopted on most newsgroups. Top-posting means that anyone trying to read your article as a free-standing document must scroll up and down, trying to figure out who said what and to whom. It implicitly carries the message that “my time as an author is worth more than yours as a reader” and so offends people. It takes seconds to compose a properly trimmed and quoted reply. Please do so.

Remember that Usenet is very, very old indeed in computer terms. These  rules of netiquette have evolved over that time, and although they may look odd, there are very good reasons behind them.

Finally, it is true that many newsgroups accept top-posting. When I am in one of those newsgroups, I respect that convention, and I do not cuss people for top-posting. This newsgroup is one of the ones that does *not* tolerate it, and I would ask you to extend us the common courtesy of respecting our conventions when in our newsgroup.

For further discussion on this matter, please see
http://www.geocities.com/nnqweb/nquote.html and
http://www.malibutelecom.com/yucca/usenet/brox.html
which have some other arguments. If you wish to read more,
http://www.google.com/search?q=usenet+netiquette+top-posting
has plenty of suggestions.

In short, please don’t top-post.
=================== end generic top-posting cuss ==================

Personal Rants