The Open Sourcerer

Broadband Magic with the I-Plate

Well today I was amazed.

I bought, on the suggestion of my colleague Alan Bell, the I-Plate for BT’s master socket. It costs about a tenner including postage and there are lots of happy people who saw their broadband speeds increase when they used it.

Well, it arrived at lunchtime today and after puzzling a bit because of some strange extension wiring, we managed to work out how to plug it in.

Here’s what my cheap and old ADSL router said before I plugged in the I-Plate:

And here is what it said in the time it took us to walk back downstairs to my office:

Note the Downstream speed!

I’d say that was a tenner well spent. Of course YMMV but it seems worth a try.

Did Microsoft make Firefox?

This post by Matt Assay discussing how we got to a competitive browser market got me thinking. (Dangerous I know, but bear with me.)

… I suppose the truly intriguing thing is not that we have a competitive market for Web browsers again, but how it happened. Baker told me recently that Firefox is “an anomaly” because it managed to beat back overwhelming Microsoft market share. Can we do it again?

What was the tipping point when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team finally had to start paying attention to Mozilla’s Firefox browser? And when did Google decide that it couldn’t subsist on Firefox’s roadmap and instead had to forge its own browser, Chrome?

My own take on this is it was all Microsoft’s own doing. Think about it. Their browser, Internet Explorer [and more specifically IE6], was locked into the operating system that ran an almost every PC sold. So for Mozilla’s Firefox browser to take more than a 20% market share is pretty staggering. If you use Windows (as certainly a few years ago almost everyone did) you already have a browser on that Windows PC so why go and download another one? It isn’t quite the same for OpenOffice.org or Gimp for example. You are having to make a decision about acquiring an Office Application Suite or an Image Editor; whether you pay for commercial code or use FOSS is your choice. But with the browser, you already have one.

My conclusion to Matt’s question is that it comes down to just how bad IE6 really was. If it had been a half decent browser with acceptable support for the standards it was supposed to support then I don’t think Firefox, and possibly the entire FOSS ecosystem, would be as strong as it is today.

Presumably Microsoft could have patched and updated IE6 during the course of it’s life but they chose not to, and instead stuck to delivering a half-baked, non-compliant browser full of leaks and security holes and proprietary features that lead many unfortunate souls to build sites that only worked with Microsoft’s browser.

I think that it was the web development community that started this movement. Being professionally involved in helping Graphic Designers make websites work across browsers, I know just how BAD IE6 really is when it comes to supporting standards. If it hadn’t been so terrible, or even got fixed, I don’t think the web developer community would have started using Firefox in the numbers that they did and then espousing it’s virtues with quite the same level of gusto.

Of course, as well as being a decent browser, there were many new and innovative ideas and features in Firefox, a huge extension and plug-in library and cross platform support too. But as “most” users of a browser are simply surfing, then if IE wasn’t such a pile of steaming poo in the first place I don’t think many consumers would have been inclined to change at all.

What do you think?

When you book an airline ticket, you use FOSS

This article on ReadWriteWeb really caught my eye today.

From my previous life in data and telecoms I know a little of the scale of the Sabre network. It’s BIG. By the sounds of things most of it runs on Open Source software too. They have announced a partnership with a commercial Open Source vendor Progress to use a number of their FUSE Open Source products.

By default, Sabre only chooses off-the-shelf software as its last option if when no open-source solution is available. If there is neither an open-source nor an off-the-shelf solution, Sabre’s own technology team will provide an in-house solution.

Sabre, as Progress’s Debbie Moynihan proudly pointed out to us, can’t afford any downtime – and FUSE’s Supplier-Side Gateway, which currently handles about 1.5 million transaction a day, has now run on Sabre’s system for 14 months without any error.

Besides FUSE’s offerings, which are based on Apache products, Sabre also extensively uses Apache’s web server, MySQL, Hibernate, Terracotta and a number of other open source products. Also, two-thirds of Sabre’s 5000 servers currently run Linux and the company expects to expand this number over time.

Nice figures. Good story.

It’s when I hear about these really massive and important networks that can’t really go down using FOSS because it works and works well that I really wonder why uptake across the whole enterprise space is so shockingly small in comparison. And then I remember why I think it is so.

The Huge Marketing Budgets of one or two proprietary vendors. But, you know what. I think the times they are a changing….

Another letter to Jeremy Hunt MP, but this time a response too

Not on the subject of the British Standards Organisation and the Freedom of Information Act, but clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill. Here is what I wrote:

Dear Jeremy Hunt,

I am concerned about the Coroners and Justice bill currently being
debated. I am an IT professional and have studied the Data Protection
Act as part of my education and professional development. Not being a
Coroner or a Judge I had little interest in this new bill. I was very
surprised to learn that clause 152 of this bill will rip apart and
remake the Data Protection Act. This seems to me to be a very
underhanded way of making law. If there is a need to change the DPA then
the government should attempt to do so in a separate act with a relevant
title.
Please vote to have clause 152 completely removed from the bill leaving
intact the data protection act. I will leave it to the coroners and
judges to comment on the usefulness of the remainder of the bill.

Yours sincerely,

Alan Bell

and he got back to me 3 hours later with this:

Dear Mr Bell,

Thank you very much for getting in touch about the proposals for new
data-sharing powers in the Coroners and Justice Bill.

I completely share your objections to this section of the Bill. These
proposals would have a truly dramatic impact, allowing Ministers to make
an ‘information sharing order’, meaning that a whole range of public
servants could access the public’s personal data. Data could be shared
between officials across Whitehall, with local authorities and even with
companies in the private sector, simply in order to meet a Government
policy objective.

This threatens to open the floodgates to a continuous, uncontrolled and
unchecked flow of personal data, and as is often the case with the
Government, any safeguards will only be put in place after the Bill has
already passed into law. This means that Parliament will be asked to
vote on proposals which contain no safeguards and no serious sanctions
for abuse of the new powers. This is simply unacceptable.

The Government has displayed its incompetence and complacency in
relation to data time and time again – it is no wonder public trust in
the ability of the Government to keep our personal details safe is at an
all-time low. Last year, HMRC lost the personal data of almost half the
population, leaving over 7 million families worried about the security
of their bank accounts. More recently, the details of thousands of
criminals, held on a memory stick, were lost by a government contractor.
Countless other cases of lost data have occurred, including the details
of thousands of driving test candidates, prospective military recruits
and over 5,000 prison service staff. Now, even the Prime Minister has
admitted that he “can’t promise that every single item of information
will always be safe.”

In this context, I find it extraordinary that the Government has slipped
these clauses into the Bill without any consultation or prior warning,
and certainly without the case for them being made. I assure you that my
Conservative colleagues and I will vigorously oppose this latest step
towards creating a database state by stealth.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to write to me. As always,
please do not hesitate to contact me again if I can be of any further
assistance.

Best wishes,

Jeremy

Jeremy Hunt
Member of Parliament
South West Surrey

so a pretty good response and a vote in the right direction. Now who wants to help get the scope of the Freedom of Information Act fixed, your MP is only a click away.

HMRC is getting the message

From the back of the HMRC Employer CD ROM

I guess pretty much all businesses in the UK got this today, the HMRC Employer pack. It contains a CD ROM, the CDROM supports Linux.