Walk Alone

I got a Nokia 2600, thanks to my father. Classic Nokia design and a great phone for a first time user. What it lacks (seriously lacks) is connectivity. No WAP. No GPRS. No IrDA, USB or Bluetooth. This is one phone thats in a world of its own. But look at the bright side of things. I won’t spend my time changing wallpapers, logos and tunes. This phone is meant for talking and thats what I’m going to use it for… a pity really. I’m now tracking all the connectivity-enabled phones in the market. I wonder whether I can swap it for a 3100 or 3120 anytime soon? Maybe. Maybe not. You never know.

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The OOAD project is giving me a lot of trouble. I’m seeing the worst of human nature here. Oh well, its not like I’m some perfect individual. Far from it. But the actions of certain individuals defy comprehension. Everytime I say, “No, he won’t do that“, that is exactly what happens. Each time, its like some acid chipping away at a rock. I’m respecting the guy less and less.

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Last Friday’s post has come in for a lot of derision and scorn. Now what can I say? Hold it against me that I’ve not travelled around in the city as much as you guys. That some (or maybe, a lot of) places in the city are still unknown to me. That I’m naive or rustic when it comes to knowing this city’s landmarks and locations and routes.

So what? Kill me?

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Is it just me or is Blogger not accepting images today?

update: Uploaded the picture, standard mug shot.

Had a peaceful weekend, leaving aside the brief exchange on the previous post. I’ve written about the washing machine syndrome sometime ago. Yesterday, I witnessed another use (or diabolic misuse, from my point of view) for the machine.

My sister got herself a Nokia 7610 (no, not an envy-rant). It plays songs and can be connected to the PC via USB. So far, so good. So she hooks up the cell to the PC. And does she back up her phone’s contents? Transfer images shot with the camera? Synchronize schedules and to-do lists? No way! She logs in to coolgoose.com and apniisp.com and downloads songs in bulk. Using the Nokia PC Suite, these find their way onto her phone.

Piracy apart, I hate seeing my machine reduced to a glorified pipeline. The phone’s loaded. It has GPRS connectivity. So why not use it? Why waste nearly four hours of machine time every week to transfer songs? I say if you download music like a vaccum cleaner (like a lot of my friends), do it only if you are going to listen to it from your PC. Why the double standard, you ask? Because I spend more than four hours every week doing ad-ware and AV scans, updates and defrag runs to make sure Windows doesn’t hang up on the user. After all this, using the machine as a transporter (highly efficient but replaceable and redundant nonetheless) is simply not fair. I wouldn’t mind if she buys CDs from the market, rips them and transfers the files to her phone - thats where a PC would be essential but as a pipeline? No way!

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My plans to persuade my parents to switch ISPs has run into a wall - tariff. With effect from November, MTNL has doubled its rates for the “Telephone for Internet” scheme. Don’t know why. Maybe they are trying to push customers to TriBand. But TriBand has serious billing issues. People using its Night Usage plan, where traffic between 12 AM to 8 AM was supposed to be unmetered, have received bills amounting to thousands of rupees. And MTNL’s policy is “Pay up first to continue on to redressal of your complaint”. Also it has serious authentication issues. It seems the username and password are stored in the DSL modem. So you can effectively use it as “roaming DSL” wherever you have a DSL-subscribed telephone line, since such lines would have the necessary splitter that seperates telephony and data signals. Convenience? Or a potential for misuse?

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I talked with Amey through Skype for fifteen minutes yesterday. He came away impressed with its quality. I wasn’t in a position to judge becuase I don’t voice-chat that often. But the few times I’ve done… Skype is better.

Went to the IIT campus today. The third time in my life. Yes, I’m one of those people who worship temples of technology. To visit our guide, we have to walk past their Machines lab. Each time I see it (well, I’ve seen it just twice by now), I mentally shake my head and say, “Wonder how Mumbai University allowed SPCE to run a course in Electrical Engineering”. Guess it has something to do with the Rs. 1.5 lakh backlog that students have to pay, according to a recommendation by some arbitration committee for fixing the fees. Thats in murky waters that I’m not venturing into.

Each of the times that I’ve been to IIT, I went by a different route.

• 396 - Andheri, Sakinaka, Powai
• 460 - Malad, Aarey, Powai
• 496 - Andheri, Jogeshwari-Vikhroli Lin Road, Marol, Powai
• 398 - Powai, Sakinaka, Marol, Aarey, Kandivali

Seen a lot of corporate offices and factories (factories? inside a megalopolis like Mumbai?). Different arms of L&T, SEEPZ (not exactly a company), Reliance Energy Management Institute and a host of other companies. For all intents and purposes, I became a tourist in a city I lived in since birth.

The same is repeated inside the IIT campus. Here, it is sort of deserved though. We wander around wide-eyed till its time to meet the guide.

All this commuting is getting me down, no thanks becuase of our roads. Why can’t we tele-conference? Its IIT, for Budhha’s sake!

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Our BE project is finally crystallizing. Though I haven’t grasped enough of it as is necessary, we are going to develop a library of numerical techniques to analyse the stability of power systems, sort of stuff to analyse the major blackout that occured yesterday.

The professor was using Red Hat with Opera. Cool. Also saw a Mandrake Linux install. The lab was networked; with a networked printer. They had an entire lab for CAPS! We use the common lab. Of course, the scale of operations is different, so I’m not really complaining. But our computer networks could learn a lot from the IIT systems.

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GMail is quite finicky about attachments. It rejected a zip file containing GIF images, flashing a warning about an execuatable in the zip file! Easily accepted the plain GIF files. The recipients would be mighty inconvenienced. I’ve yet to figure out GMail’s attachments filtering rule. So if you send me a mail with some attachments and it bounces, remail it to rvbhute[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]in.

I’m at home with nothing to do. I’m not complaining. Amey gave me a heads-up for the rain just as I was leaving the house. I did an about-turn and walked right back in. Pacenet, down since 8:30 yesterday night, finally started working at 1:30 in the afternoon. I think Pacenet needs to be put under the scope.

Right off the mark, I would say this - When it works, Pacenet is the ISP to beat. When it doesn’t… thats another story. The problem is - its not working; rather frequently at that. If you want the background on the tiff between Pacenet and me, search this blog.

First off, lets see their hardware. Pacenet has built an incredible WAN that stretches across Mumbai. Of course, the LANs that make it up are rarely bridged. Why? Because the LANs are the responsibility of the LCO - Local Cable Operator. The mess that is found in the cable television sector is perfectly mirrored in Pacenet’s LANs. Officially -

We do not support usage of Pacenet’s networks for purposes other than connecting to the Internet.

Translation -

If you can, use the LAN. If it messes up your system, don’t come to us.

And thats that.

The software is brilliant. Pacenet has mostly speed and time based packs. It utilizes RASPPPOE for authentication, billing and control. The mess begins here. The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) was developed in the Unix era - primarily to exploit copper telephone wires to transfer data between two Unix terminals. This was when microcomputers and workstations were reaching a sustainable density. Today, all OSes have PPP implementations, be it win32 or Linux or OS X. This includes the traditional PPP used for dialup and PPPOE - PPP Over Ethernet - used for running PPP services on LANs/WANs. But Pacenet skips over them and installs a third party implementation of the PPP protocol, RASPPPOE. Is it necessary? Over and above this, the Pacenet Dialer installer has an option for installing yet another PPPOE implementation. Now, is it necessary?

So, where do the problems begin?

With the service structure offered at the customer premises. The LCO is your intermediary, whether you want him or not. The problem starts with selecting the pack. Each LCO has his individual arrangements with Pacenet. And each offers only select packs in his area. So if a scheme is available in your friend’s area, it may not be on offer for you. The billing is unsynchronized. Its the LCO’s job and you are out of luck if he slacks off.

For hardware problems you are supposed to call the LCO. In turn, he forwards it to a technician on his contract. When the tech arrives, is another story. However, this is a clearly delimited area. No complaints here.

The problem is in the software. Errors bearing tags numbered 25xxx. Random things like POP services timing out or websites not loading. Unreliable PPP services and PPP services not offered. The first part of solving the problem involves fixing the blame on someone - Pacenet or your LCO? And it is the most vexing part. For the buck-passing that occurs is astounding.

Conclusion? Pacenet is only as good as your LCO.

So I think I’ve done a rant. Is there a solution?

1. They should clearly delimit their AOs - Areas of Operation. Call us for this. Call your LCO for this. It is already existent, but it should be further refined.
2. Throw open their LANs. Bridge the LANs. LANs are a technical asset, not a liability. Pacenet should allow the customers to work the system. People using a LAN actively will be motivated to look after it and report problems. It will also add more value to Pacenet’s services.
3. Reduce their dependence on a specific implementation of PPPOE. And make their PPPOE services more reliable. Having a daily average downtime of more than an hour is simply not done.
4. Increase the TQ - Technical Quotient - of the LCOs. They may know a lot about running Cable TV systems, but LANs and Internet Services are on a different level altogether.

Did I miss anything?

I helped start a group blog - spcetrical2002. Predictably, it has lost steam after the initial posts. That came as no surprise. None of the members were prolific bloggers. So here’s what I thought up. It may be an entirely new software or it may already exist somewhere. It simply aggregates posts from multiple blogs into one blog.

All the blogs from Blogger have Atom feeds. This blog’s feed is here. You can also get it by clicking the Atom XML Feed button. In IE, the output is plain text and images. In FF, you also have clickable links. The most important point is that the XML output is constantly rendered across the two browsers. (Opera results, Thite?) Now lets say we successfully write a script that collects N such feeds. Let it be PHP or Perl, because it will be a script run on some server. This script will first store the N feeds in whatever format is convenient. Then it will parse the feeds and harvest the ten (or fifty, as the need is) latest posts. This is possible because the time-stamps are in a fixed format and we should be able to parse them easily. The posts will then be rendered on the web-page. This checking for new posts can be done periodically depending on server load.

So, is it a new script or something available on the net already? Any PHP/Perl programmer out there reading this?