Archive for October 20, 2009

troy | October 20, 2009
No comments

Us Now

Us Now By Ivo Gormley

Us Now By Ivo Gormley

I have had the pleasure of watching a documentary called “Us Now” by Ivo Gormley. Whilst I don’t think it presents a balanced and equal perspective of the topic as I think a documentary should, the content of this film is definitely well thought out and is a good conversation starter.  If you have an hour or so, I can only urge you to watch the film, or download the torrent (completely legal) to watch later.

From their site:

Can we all govern? Us Now looks at how ‘user’ participation could transform the way that countries are governed. It tells the stories of the online networks whose radical self-organising structures threaten to change the fabric of government forever. Us Now follows the fate of Ebbsfleet United, a football club owned and run by its fans; Zopa, a bank in which everyone is the manager; and Couch Surfing, a vast online network whose members share their homes with strangers.

Category: entertainment |
troy | October 20, 2009
No comments

Facebook Outages

Many users are currently unable to access their Facebook accounts

Many users are currently unable to access their Facebook accounts

I, along with many, many other people started my “hard core” social networking on MySpace. And I, along with many others stopped using MySpace in favour of Facebook. One of the drivers for my move was because people could not mess with the page so much so that you couldn’t find things, but the primary reason was because MySpace was getting very flakey.

You would be unable to log in to your account, or images wouldn’t load, or pages would load without CSS so you couldn’t work out what was up or down. It was a very good reason to leave, the site already absorbed a lot of my time – I was not going to sit through hundreds of constant issues.

This is now becoming the case with Facebook. The exact symptoms I described above are becoming commonplace now for Facebook users, and people are increasingly getting fed up with it. To make matters worse, Facebook “Technical Support” is non-existent. Reading articles about the recent mass account lockouts that Facebook as been undergoing shows that messages sent to the Facebook support desk are simply ignored, or replied to with a “We are aware and are working on it” type response.

What’s the next step – is somebody poised as Facebook was to take over? Or, unlike MySpace, will Facebook realise the risk of running a poor service is loosing your user base.

I would assume that finally the reality of “Internet Worth” and “Real Worth” are crashing in on Facebook. In early 2008 Facebook was being valued at around $3 Billion. For something to be worth that much, I would suggest that it needs to show that sort of revenue potential. And whilst advertising is what drives the internet, I don’t think a single point for advertising such as Facebook could ever hope to generate that kind of money. With earnings in 2007 of around $150 million, and no clear idea of what their operating expenses were at that time, it’s hard to see how much of it was profit.

I like the concept behind Facebook, it’s nice to be able to look at friends pictures and see what they are doing / thinking via status updates. But I am not in any way “loyal” to Facebook. I have no reason to hang in with them as they go through technical difficulties with the promise of it getting better. If somebody came along and offered me something that worked, and my friends were moving across too – I would discard Facebook in the same manner I discarded MySpace.

Category: rants | Tags: , , ,
troy | October 19, 2009
No comments

Home Automation

I will admit that sometimes I can be wrong. How wrong, is yet to be proven.

A little while ago I wrote about our home automation experiences at Belcastro. The experience that I was relaying was one of frustration with a less then operational lighting solution, that can not be reliably controlled.

Dynalite has now stepped up, and are attending site tomorrow to start what I hope will be the process of recovering the installation, and making good with their product. Given the recent email exchange, I am assuming things will be a little uncomfortable, and I hope that our aligned goal – to leave this site with a working lighting system – will smooth things over.

Category: rants, work | Tags: , , ,
troy | October 14, 2009
No comments

Google Mail Offline… again

Google has had a tough few months when it comes to outages and today’s Postini outage is just adding to their woes.

Many users of Postini (a wholly owned subsidiary of Google) have been experiencing severe delays of mail, with most reporting delays of around 4 hours.

Postini is not taking calls, as their call centre operates during normal USA office hours only, and to access their support site, you need to request permission which takes up to two business days to process.

The only other option is a call to Google, which has a recording saying they are aware of the problem, and do not know when it will be resolved.

I can see that this is going to become an argument as the “do no evil” company is refusing to admit this is an outage. Google spokesman Jay Nancarrow has been quoted as saying

We’re aware of an issue that’s causing a delay in mail delivery for some Postini customers in the U.S., and are working to fix it as quickly as possible. Outbound mail is fully functional, but inbound mail has been flowing at a reduced rate for affected users. We know how important mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and apologize for the inconvenience.

Given the size and veracity of complaints in forums all over the world, it seems like Google is trying very hard to play down a major fault. It is not specific to the USA, nor is it just a reduced rate. Mail is taking upwards of 12 hours to arrive (for us at least) and it seems that it is also affecting outbound – contrary to the statement above.

Category: rants, work | Tags: , , , ,
troy | October 13, 2009
No comments

Foxtel Downloads powered by Microsoft

In my previous post about Foxtel’s new “Downloads” service, I mentioned that it was platform specific to Windows 32 bit operating systems.

Foxtel have since responded to my concerns with the following:

Unfortunately, at this stage, the Mac operating system doesn’t support Digital Rights Management (DRM), which is what we use to secure content. If DRM is supported for Windows Media Player on the Mac Operating System in the future, then we can begin to plan to offer the service to Mac users. Please revisit the FOXTEL website periodically to see if the system capabilities have changed.

Support for all users including Mac O/S users is included in the FOXTEL Download roadmap. At this stage we do not have a fixed timeframe or date when the service will be available for the Mac operating system.

If your Apple Mac can run a full Windows emulator that meets our system requirements then you will be able to access FOXTEL Download when in Windows mode. If your Mac can run a supported version of Windows simply go to the Download section of the FOXTEL website while in Windows mode and install the Player and register the computer as you would for a normal PC. You will then be able to download and play FOXTEL Download content on the Mac whenever you are in Windows mode.

Whilst most of this is typical marketing – I am concerned with the statement “Mac operating system doesn’t support Digital Rights Management”. This is an out and out falsehood. What needs to be said is “The Apple OSX operating system does not support Microsoft’s Silverlight Implementation of DRM“.

Foxtel is a private company, and as such – they are more then welcome to make business decisions. They even may have made a business decision that might well be misguided. It wouldn’t be the first time – and not the last. My concern comes from their customer / public facing staff being given inaccurate information.

To hear Foxtel tell the story, they would love to have allowed Mac (and other) users access to their “Download” service, but it’s Mac’s fault that they can’t. They need to stand behind their decision. They have chosen a platform dependent, non-standardised way of delivering their content – as is their right to do. But they should “own” that decision, not try and place blame elsewhere.

Category: rants | Tags: , , , , ,
troy | October 7, 2009
No comments

Talking to a Ness / Elk M1 Panel via PHP

This is an example of one way to communicate with an Elk / Ness panel via PHP.

If you are looking for a much better way to go about it however – have a look at Remote Panel Access.

<?php
$ness = “192.168.100.1″;        # IP address or FQDN of your panel
$nessport = “2601″;             # Port you wish to connect to (generally 2601)
$usesecure = true;              # Connect with SSL (non zero) or Plain Text

$function = “ua004608″;         # Example “ct” to toggle a zone
$zone = “”;                     # Zone number / input number / output number

if ( $zone <> ” ) {            # Add leading zeros to the zone number if it is specified
$zone = sprintf(“%03d”,$zone);
}

$command = $function.$zone.’00′;        # Add the “future” 00 string
$commandlen = 2 + strlen($command);     # Calculate the length of the command
$commandlen = strtoupper(dechex($commandlen));
if ( strlen($commandlen) == 1) {
$commandlen = ’0′.$commandlen;  # Add a leading zero if required
}
$command = $commandlen.$command;        # Compile the whole command

$chksumasc = 0;

# Add all the Ascii values together
$array = str_split($command);
foreach($array as $char) {
$chksumasc = $chksumasc + ord($char);
}

# Calculate the Mod-256 of the total values
$chksum = bcmod($chksumasc,256);

# Subtract that from 256 to generate the checksum
$chksum = strtoupper(dechex(256-$chksum));

if ($usesecure) {               # If we are securly connecting to the panel prepend the address
$ness = “ssl://$ness”;
}

echo “Connecting to $ness:$nessportnSending: $command$chksumn”;

$fp = fsockopen($ness, $nessport, $errno, $errstr, 30); # Open the TCP connection to the panel
if (!$fp) {
echo “$errstr ($errno)<br />n”;
} else {
$out = $command.$chksum.”rn”;
fwrite($fp, $out);
if (!feof($fp)) {
echo fgets($fp, 128);
}
fclose($fp);
}

?>

Category: work | Tags: , , ,
troy | October 7, 2009
One comment

Foxtel Downloads

Want to watch what you want, when you want it? Check out Foxtel download. If you’re a Foxtel subscriber you can access a selection of the content available to you in your current package, online. It’s the free and legal way to download Foxtel programming straight to your personal computer. Simply log on to … and get that little bit more out of your Foxtel.

It would seem that Foxtel’s new offering (which you pay at least an additional $4 per month for) is only available to Microsoft Windows users. And even then, it’s a slim subset of those users who will be able to install it.  With their choice of .NET and Microsoft Silverlight as the back end, and written to only work within a 32 bit environment I am not sure why Foxtel would bother advertising this service so aggressivly.

What I find particularly annoying is the automatic increase to my account, yet – I can not (and possibly will never be able to) access the service. I am not alone here, the mac install base is estimated at somewhere between 8 and 25 percent of home users. Even without adding Mac to the mix, a major portion of people who would actually be interested in this service will have 64bit machines.

Given a sample of Foxtel’s recent advertising for their new platform, 50% of their advertising is showcasing the Foxtel Download service. With that in mind, I will be expecting 50% of the increase credited back to me each month until such time as I can access the service, I would suggest if you are in the same boat – you should contact Foxtel and ask them for the same offer.

Sadly, companies like Foxtel assume that if people don’t complain, then everything is fine. So unless you let Foxtel know they are missing the mark with their new offering, they won’t do anything to improve it.

Category: rants | Tags: , ,
troy | October 5, 2009
One comment

Belcastro

Belcastro is the name of my parents house. (It’s also a city in Southern Italy – but I am writing about my parents house here..)

We have spent many years trying to perfect the automation system in the house. I am very confident in saying that it is probably one of the most integrated and automated houses in Australia. Almost all the services that can be automated in some way, are.

For a bit of information about what we have done, have a look at a brief description of the automation sytems at Belcastro.

After several years of trying to get Dynalite to work, if there is one standout lesson here – it would be that it just doesn’t – and it should never be used in a residential install. I am partially to blame for Dynalite being selected, because I backed it when it was recommended by the lighting designer. My experience with Dynalite in theater had been great – in a commercial setting – it is robust and reliable. Our experience in a residential setting is that it is wholly unreliable, and when you turn to Dynalite (now Phillips) for support – they ignore you.

Category: information technology, rants, work |
 

Switch to our mobile site