Walk Alone

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?

Lots of things to do and hardly any time to do them… well lots of time actually, but hardly any inclination to do the needful.

Having five days to while away, saw me do just that. While away the time. I finalised the template. Hope to hold it for a few months now. As far as I can tell, it loads in 6 steps.

1. The title block, the long post entries block and the profile block at the top of the sidebar. This loads from Blogger. And it has the operational stuff - the post entries - which is what a reader wants anyway.
2. Next is My Blogroll, it loads from rpc.blogrolling.com. If the server is slow or dead, it will affect the loading of this block. Needless to say, the rest of the page will be held back till this is resolved. Also involved is the Blogroll me link, which loads from vs.blogrolling.com.
3. Next is the Recent Posts and Archives block which again comes from Blogger.
4. Technorati - loads from embed.technorati.com. The same rules as for blogrolling.com apply here.
5. Buttons - from img.photobucket.com. Not much of a trouble since all have ALT texts in case of time-outs.
6. Footer from Blogger.

As for my site template, I’m planning to use the skeleton of this blog template. Details like DIV tags and so on. The point is to make it look like a stripped down version of this template - similar in layout but without all the colour and graphics.

****

If you want to dredge anything from here, I recommend the Technorati Search box on the sidebar. Its better than the one provided on the Navbar above. I signed up with Technorati as a part of whiling away the five days. Also indexed my blog with Blogdex and Google. Just for the heck of it. But I still recommend Technorati. Because it has a better feel for my blog than Google.

****

Beta times ahead! Both Firefox (current stable - 1.0.6) and Thunderbird (current stable - 1.0) have their 1.5 betas out. While I’m not going to try them (courtesy of my washing-machine syndrome afflicted sister) , I’m waiting for the RC - Release Candidate - versions. And of course, the official 1.5 stable releases. OpenOffice.org (current stable - 1.1.4) has also put out their 2.0 beta. OOo finally has a database component - Base. Can’t wait to try its RC and stable release versions.

****

Pacenet is acting up again. Frighteningly frequent “unexpected disconnection” events. Erratic speeds, mostly on the slower side, make that very, very slow. So I’m having trouble downloading my mail, loading sites and in general, carrying out my planned net activities. This post is taking well over thirty minutes. And a disconnection… Damn good Pacenet, setting the Pace for the Internet Race. No wonder, people here still swear by dialup.

Well, it turns out to be delayed by 24 hours!

When I started blogging got a Blogger id in October 2004, I was a n00b as far as blogging was concerned. What brought me here was the promise of a website that was easy to update. Though I still keep a webpage, its this page which gets updated more frequently. Since then, I’ve tried setting up group blogs, forums and community sites. All to get the people I meet daily to express themselves on the web. Some didn’t think it worth their time, others were just not interested.

And now, if you look at the sidebar, you would find a lot of blogs I track. Thats good. As I read the situation, blogs (except for those with non-personal themes, like Bhise’s blog - in fact, even Bhise puts personal events on record) give me a window into that person’s life. Even if we meet in college daily, blogs are an important channel too. For it contains stuff that we don’t express in the rush of face-to-face communication. It is stuff that we put down after due deliberation and thought (atleast some of us blog that way). And it is stuff that will remain for all to read long after we leave college and stop meeting each other.

So what is it that I don’t like? Its stuffing your posts with irrelevant pictures. And passing it off as attracting eyeballs. Now a sworn Aishwarya Rai fan filling his posts with pics - I can understand, within limits of course. But a guy using pictures without relevance? From post number one? Sorry dude. You are not only penalising your blog by increasing its loading time (ask a first-time visitor about your blog’s loading time when it holds 10-15 entries per page - its a good thing that blogs are cached by most browsers) but also diluting and trivialising your content, which I’m sure it doesn’t deserve. You ‘d be better off using something like Flickr on your current blog or a photoblog somewhere else. Or maybe put in an url for the “Picture of the Post”. While I don’t mind seeing those ladies on the blogs, I don’t want the images to slow my surfing either.

Another thing is the rank commercialisation of Blogger blogs. Let me explain. Back in Oct-Nov 2004, hitting the Next Blog button (see the upper right corner) usually was a good way to reach another good personal blog. Or even a focussed community blog. Now? You reach blogs selling Cuban cigars and salvation and everything else in between. Guess thats the price for a good medium like Blogger. You won’t find it happening on LJ, but then, you can’t move around reading random blogs either.

While I spent the whole day yesterday making my PC and blog current, today was wasted in implementing an e-mail client in rigging up AVG to scan the mails. Thunderbird is fast, as predicted. But allowing AVG, good it may be, to take over the pipeline resulted in disaster. Reliability of outgoing mails dropped with 95% of them hugely delayed and the rest couldn’t be delivered - reasons unknown. Incoming mails were no better with the connection itself failing for various cryptic reasons. “avg+gmail+thunderbird” on google revealed the scope of the problem. While individually or in tandem, all are outstanding products, in a troika, they bite the dust. Got referred to ‘Avast!’. Hugely complex UI. And there was nothing to show me that it was touching the mails - and I didn’t have any infected mails around to check the product. So it was back to AVG. And I’ve maintained the pairing of GMail and Thunderbird. It rocks!

And something on Rediff. This hugely popular portal, for some reason, refuses to stop being biased against Firefox. Their website renders differently and their mail service offers different layouts to IE and Firefox browsers. And now, their IM application, rediff Bol is supposedly incompatible with Firefox, Netscape and Opera !? For one, I’ve had no trouble from their popups and ads - because I use Firefox. So I guess its a small price that the “click to add to ‘To:’ field” feature goes missing in Firefox. And, so far, everything related to Bol has worked in Firefox, so that is also put to rest. But then, rediff shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it, hm?

“These servers’ clocks appear to be inaccurate. This can cause difficulties in caching their content. Please ask the administrator to synchronise their clocks (this may also be caused by a proxy between you and the Web server).

• www.blogger.com - 55 min 40 sec ahead
• creativecommons.org - 58 min 51 sec ahead
• rvbhute.blogspot.com - 55 min 39 sec ahead
• www.spreadfirefox.com - 59 min 48 sec ahead
• img.photobucket.com - 55 min 41 sec ahead
• buttons.blogger.com - 55 min 41 sec ahead”

I was playing around at www.web-caching.com and got this. This page loads from 6 servers - SIX different servers.

update:

• www.blogger.com - 55 min 35 sec ahead
• rvbhute.blogspot.com - 55 min 35 sec ahead
• creativecommons.org - 58 min 50 sec ahead
• www.statcounter.com - 55 min 34 sec ahead
• www.spreadfirefox.com - 59 min 56 sec ahead
• img.photobucket.com - 55 min 35 sec ahead
• c4.statcounter.com - 53 min 59 sec ahead
• buttons.blogger.com - 55 min 35 sec ahead