jcm's blog

What’s more screwed up? jailing a newspaper editor for claiming someone is gay or actually having “forced anal examinations” in a country so conservative that gay rights are completely ignored?

I think the latter. It’s nobody’s business what sexual orientation somebody is or is not and it’s certainly not an issue for the State to enforce some misguided quasi-religious/conservative inspired pseudo-beliefset upon the whole populous. But then this is Africa and there are more than a few dozen other major issues affecting African nations that dominate the headlines so stories such as this one are relegated to the sidelines. It’s bad enough that there are fucked up whackjob “ministers” of religion dancing about on sea planes proclaiming AIDS as a curse from God (it isn’t, AIDS is an unfortunate disease which affects all people equally) but it’s 10 times worse when the government of a country gets in on the act.

Jon.

So I’m confirmed over in the US for Boston LinuxWorld. I’ll be hanging out for the whole week of 1 April – 9 April and might also get time to swing by Portland for a day on the weekend. I’m a little nuts as this will be two firsts for me: my first weekend trip to Canada followed by the first time I’ve done two transatlantic crossings within a week of oneanother. Someday, I’d like to just travel for a living I think or if I win a lottery – going from place to place is fun. It’s my main environmental indiscretion but I don’t do it deliberately to hurt the environment.

One of the guys on IRC was talking about LCD monitors just now. I gave some advice, and decided that I really do want one for this machine now – this monitor is just horrible and using it every day for work is going to be very painful indeed. I should probably also get my glasses sorted sometime. I also want to throw out some of these many SPARCs (or probably put them into parental storage instead) and consolidate a lot of kit before I can relocate. I’m thinking that a Mac Mini is on the list now, it’s just a pity they’re all McMinis.

Jon.

Sleep is an evil, evil thing. It deprives me of the ability to work around the clock and forces me to consider that I can’t do everything I want to in the space of a day (especially with the amount of time I otherwise seem to end up wasting on crap). I need to find some of that medication they’ve been trying on Air Force pilots to enable them to run sleep-free for extended periods without any apparent (yet) side effects.

So I got one column in (quite late, annoying) and am finishing another on kernel performance tuning at the moment. I decided to write about things like OProfile and how I’ve used this to benchmark things like RT performance or just for general system profiling. I’ll probably end up with a brief look at lock-free algorithms, since that came up at FOSDEM on the weekend too. Luckily, I’ve reduced my writing commitments from next month down from around 12-14 pages plus book chapters, to a more manageable 6-8 pages of articles in a month.

I bought jonmasters.net last night and jonmasters.co.uk and jonmasters.me.uk this morning. Maybe I’ll try one of those “here’s the main site, he’s the play site” approaches and stick up stuff that I’d otherwise just not care about on one of those. I dunno. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately for my attempt at global namespace pollution, someone else has myname.com (seems like a nice enough guy too) so I’m not likely to grab that one – but I did wait 2 or 3 years for the .co.uk variant to expire, so you never know.

Jon.

Photo: A typical New England covered bridge (from my weekend in New Hampshire).

Looks like I’m definately swinging by LWE Boston 2006, which is now next month. I’m planning to sync up the trip with a one night visit to Portland (Oregon) on the weekend in order to catch up with Deepak and hang out for a while with some coffee. I could be persuaded to go via SFO if enough people are interested in also having coffee.

I’ll be scoping out the Boston area while I’m over too, figuring out where all the cool cats hang out and what kind of rates are charged for living in town (and also over in Cambridge too). There are some driver folks at the expo this year, so I’ll probably have a chat about that stuff too.

Jon.

“Our plan has never changed and we are still committed to offering businesses all the benefits that a converged network has to offer. That, for us at 186k, means making further strategic acquisitions”
– Dominic Marrocco, new owner of Mailbox Internet Ltd.

So I got a bunch of mails back from 186K that basically merged all my existing correspondance into a single ticket, which was then closed. As others have stated on the various ADSLGuide fora, one could be forgiven in wondering whether these guys are now getting paid by the resolved ticket (look at the number of increments per week too). I whinged about this and got a call from another disgruntled customer who told me he’s had to send engineers out on site to deal with the “migration” efforts. He’s also requested around 5 MACs so far this week (the week is still young) to get his customers away from Mailbox. Interesting.

I’m going to get another line moved here ready for a new ADSL account, but in the mean time responded to their ignoring me with an offer to swing by in person for an appointment next week – if they can’t be bothered to call me or answer my questions then I’m quite happy to take my questions up to them.

Jon.

I just booked my flights over for ajh’s bash next month so I’ll be in Ottawa for my first weekend trip on March 25/26. Basically more time in the air than on the ground! Yay! Yes, I am quite, quite crazy but hey! If you’re around and want coffee, mail me!

Jon.

“As a smaller ISP we like to present ourselves as being humans, not a faceless corporation that sticks rigidly to policy.”
— Mailbox Internet.

Tried calling Mailbox support lately? Or sales? Not had any luck? Me either. And they don’t bother to call you back. I’ve suggested it might be easier if I pop up to Leeds and have a coffee with them if talking to a customer on the phone is going to cause them too much inconvenience. I’m quite happy to actually do that too – that’s not a threat as I’m only interested in talking to them about the service since 186K took over and I’m happy to make an appointment. But it might be that it’s the only way to have that conversation.

Incidentally, Mailbox switched to TISCALI as a backend provider today (if my ADSL connection logs are to be believed) and are now nothing more than another virtual ISP in the 186K pile. Oh well. Well and truly dead. They didn’t send me any email I recall reading with the words “we’re going to fuck up your connection and screw up routing on existing sessions on Monday 27 Feb” but instead just silently broke it for a while. Lovely. That’s real nice. Thanks folks!

I’m very likely to switch to the folks at Blackcat (BCN) but only if they give me a t-shirt and that’ll take some time as I can’t just literally switch (I’m not wires only). It’ll be too much hassle to not just have two services for some level of continued service but that’ll also mean I need a line moving to another location first. Anyone else interested in writing a formal letter of complaint to Mailbox about their service these days? If you’d like to get involved in asking them what the heck went wrong, drop me a line. I’m quite happy to follow this for a while in the name of the greater good of getting better service.

Here’s my most recent mail to Mailbox/186K:

Hi folks,

I’m a customer of Mailbox Internet. I have been for quite some time.

Service has not been so good lately and again was unavailable earlier today. I tried calling and was assured of a call back as soon as someone was available, but had no call. I’d really like it if you could go ahead and get them to call me as promised (+447776131337) because it’d be great to find out when the service is going to be back to the old Mailbox standard.

Anyway. If that’s going to cause you too much inconvenience (I appreciate that making phone calls can be quite a demanding experience) then I’m happy to come meet with your representatives in person instead, if that’s easier for you. Just let me know – I’m down in Reading, but it’s really no hassle to sort out an appointment if that suits you. It’s a little harder than it was talking to or visiting Mailbox, but those are the breaks in life.

Jon.