Image credit: mirror.co.uk

You probably saw the news today, fuel tanker drivers are going on strike again! Yay! Not… You see the problem with this is it disrupts the entire country when it happens. So you might be thinking why they’re striking anyway? To get back at the government for the stupid fuel prices? Oh no it’s because they want more money for themselves! They already earn an average of £45,000 a year, what bloody more do they want?! I know lots of people who would happily do their job for half that wage and not complain. If they don’t want their job they should give it to someone else, plain and simple, otherwise shut up and get on with it!

If this strike was over the newly proposed and accepted 3p increase in fuel cost coming in August this year, I’d be all for it. The government simply won’t learn. The UK fuel cost is over 150% tax on the price of the fuel itself. That’s how greedy our government is. They just tax things they know the UK economy just can’t be without. No fuel, nobody drives to work, so people MUST buy it no matter the price. Panic buyers have been out everywhere today filling their tanks. I was no different, I need my car for work too so I filled it up to the top at a ridiculous cost of £88, and it wasn’t even empty!

That £88 should last me about 600 miles at worst. I do 150mi/week to/from work plus a bit of leisure so we’re looking at 3 weeks tops I can last from that tank. Not a lot really but hopefully after 3 weeks the strike should be over and everything back to normal. The army is apparently going to step in and take over these lazy arse selfish self centred drivers jobs at a fraction of the pay so the disruption should be minimal.

Anyway, what can we do? Besides threatening to bomb the petrol stations or something stupid to get their attention, they’ll never listen. Tens of thousands of people take to the petitions etc. every time this happens and they get nowhere when they get to the people that can make a difference. They just slap another few pence on instead!!!

So yeah, we’re going to have to learn to live with it unfortunately. Our government are a bunch of idiots (and that’s the polite name for them). The sooner we get rid of them the better. We need Clarkson on our side, he’ll sort the bunch of idiots out!!!

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Right, my 2nd rant is about road works and how much they annoy the f**k out of me! I’m not talking about all road works, some I agree are required to keep the maintenance of the road, but the ones that annoy me the most are the ones where nobody appears to be working on it… EVER!

Take this example. Yesterday evening around the junction I come off at for work on the motorway, they’d laid cones out for some work they would be starting that day. Fair enough, but why was there ZERO notice that any work would be carried out? It didn’t affect traffic much that day thankfully but the issue still stood.

The next day (this morning) we were met by a 2 1/2 mile tail back from that junction because of these road works. All it was is a closed off lane, but nobody was doing anything on it! The actual work in fact was on an adjacent junction and they just wanted to “clear the traffic” for work they were doing. I’m sorry but the work that was being done was 400 yards further down that adjacent junction and it was on the pavement!!! What sort of crazy people think it’s acceptable to block off a full lane of a motorway slip road for that work?! They did the same on the roundabout by the way, one of the three lanes was blocked off.

This caused huge disruptions for a lot of people. No thought went into it at all. With any luck tomorrow will be different and they will have realised the disruption caused today, but I’m not holding my breath…

Rant over. I needed to get those ones off my chest as I can’t stand either of them!

OK so I didn’t have the best of luck with my new car and just 5 days after getting it I broke down (this was last Thursday by the way, it’s Tuesday now). In some ways it was good that it broke now and not further in the future. Let me describe what happened.

I was travelling to work as I do every weekday morning and everything was as normal. But as I was a mile or so from my junction off the motorway the car suddenly lost all power, it made a bong sound from it’s instrument panel and “engine fault” appeared on the display. That was it, car dead. I had just a few seconds to move from the outside lane to the hard shoulder before I lost too much speed (I was going up a slight incline too).

After pulling over I shut everything off and after a minute or so I tried to start it again hoping it would have reset the ECU. It didn’t, and it just cranked and cranked until I pulled the key. Great! First time in 4 1/2 years of driving that I’ve broken down. Thankfully I had AA cover, so a quick call and 25 minutes later they were there to rescue me. I got them to take me to the garage I bought the car from (phoning ahead so they knew) and get them to sort it under the warranty.

This got me thinking it might be the fuel injectors as it was on recall and was one of the things that can cause the engine to point blank refuse to start. I got the garage to diagnose it and they said it was an injector. They recommended I get in touch with VW, which I did, as the injectors would all be done under their recall warranty scheme. £3000 of work for free! I’m certainly not complaining. However the only down side was it would be 4 days before they could fit me in.

I hate being without a car, it’s like a lifeline to me. It gets me everywhere from work and home, to friends houses, etc. 4 days would be a long time! Anyway it passed and today I got the car back with brand new injectors and she runs really smoothly again.

Now the rant. Why can the car not run without a single injector having failed? Well I know it’s a safety feature to protect the engine and/or catalytic converter from damage from excess fuel being shoved into it etc, but at the end of the day I’m the driver! I should be the one to make that decision! The worst part is that it fails in the blink of an eye, no warning. You could be anywhere, I just happened to be moving at a speed that allowed me time to pull over safely.

So yeah, safety systems might be saving the engine but they could put you in one hell of a situation if it fails in the middle of a street! End of rant on that one anyway… Lets see if my luck changes and I don’t have any serious problems from now on!

I started having signal issues a few weeks ago where my Optimus 2X would randomly lose signal in a seemingly good signal area. It wouldn’t get it back until I either rebooted the phone or I set airplane mode on and then off again. Obviously this is a real pain and shouldn’t need to be done.

After a little bit of investigation work I determined it wasn’t likely to be the phone itself. It’s either a SIM card issue or a software issue (more likely since I run a custom ROM on it). The easiest thing would be to order a new SIM card to I went ahead and did this through O2′s live chat. That went smooth as you could ever imagine so no complaints there. And kudos to O2 for offering such a service, it saves time and money.

Anyway the rep I spoke to assured me everything was automatic for the switch over, which I was happy about. I was told it would arrive in a few days.

On Sunday I got a message saying I’d get it on Monday. Great! Fast service! Come Sunday evening I was browsing Facebook just before I went to bed and suddenly I noticed the phone had no signal again. Great, so I rebooted but the signal didn’t come back. I tried a second time with the same result. Thinking nothing of it I put it into my old Sony Ericsson which reported “SIM INACTIVE”. What the hell?

So here I am wondering why this has happened, it turns out that O2 have turned off my current SIM in anticipation of the new arrival the next day. Well done O2, you’ve now cut me off for the next 18 hours. How? Let me explain. I work a 9-5 job like most others, and as everyone knows post doesn’t magically arrive at 7am in the morning so there was no chance I was going to have my new SIM until the evening of the next day. This makes no sense because it means I’m without a phone for 18 hours.

Now what they should have done is activated the new SIM the next evening and told me to put it in on Tuesday morning. That would have made more sense and would have prevented daytime disconnection. I have sent O2 an e-mail regarding their replacement SIM activation process but I’ve not heard back from them yet (not surprising, they’ll probably take a few days). I’ve suggested the above to them for their activation process for replacement SIM’s, so I hope they take it.

Had I been a business customer I could have potentially lost a full days business. Even being a regular consumer I could have missed important phone calls. What if I needed to get in contact with someone or them contact me? I was completely out of reach for the whole time. Had O2 told me this would be the case I would have been OK with it, but the fact I was not told and it happened out of the blue is what annoyed me most.

Anyway what’s done is done, and I’ve made the complaint to O2. Lets hope they follow it. And let this be a lesson to anyone who is thinking of a replacement SIM following similar issues, make sure you confirm with them what the procedure it. It will probably vary between providers.

OK so you’ve probably heard of MB and GB (MegaBytes and GigaBytes), they’re used on all sorts of devices from phones to computers. But what are they? Better still, what are MiB and GiB (MibiBytes and GibiBytes)? Well both are units for measuring memory size but they have differences. The difference is that one is calculated using base 2 and one is calculated using base 10.

For these examples we’ll stick to GigaBytes and GibiBytes for our sizes.

A GigaByte that we’re all so used to is base 10 (1,000,000,000 bytes to 1 Gigabyte).
A GibiByte that you may have heard of is in base 2 (1,073,741,824 bytes to 1 GibiByte).

Table taken from http://www.pcguide.com/intro/fun/bindec.htm

So why does it cause confusion? Several reasons. Most sizes are referred to in Mega or Giga bytes so many people have been accustomed to this. For example in magazines or advertisements selling electronic equipment (tablet’s, digital cameras, etc.) and computers running Windows they’re referred to as this, but that’s where the confusion comes in, and a bit of a rant because of it.

The difference between 1GiB and 1GB is marginal, but when you increase this to several tens or thousands, it throws the scale way off. Not only that, Windows runs in base 2, but actually displays it using the prefix for base 10. So when you think it’s 1 GigaByte it’s actually showing 1 GibiByte instead but with the wrong unit! I have no idea why Microsoft decided to do this but it’s confusing as hell when you’re trying to work out the differences in file size on a program that really does show it properly. Gah!

The problem I had recently was on one of my sites, BetaArchive. I was trying to find discrepancies in the total archive size counter. It wasn’t showing the right size but we were adamant we had it right. In the end it turned out to be in the units.

Now I believe Mac and Linux use GigaBytes correctly and are also switchable from what I have read, you just have to find the option for it so Windows should have no excuse getting it right. Many people have complained to Microsoft but they’ve never done anything about it for some reason, so this problem continues to plague developers and people like myself trying to work out these discrepancies.

Suffice to say I wasted 2 hours trying to figure out where the missing data was. As a result of this cock-up I’ve even had to put a message next on the display on BetaArchive so people know it’s actually showing the right unit on the site but Windows shows the wrong unit!

I don’t doubt this will plague people for years to come as I doubt it will be fixed in Windows 8 either. I just find it hard to believe Microsoft have got away with it for this long.

What is “unlimited” when it comes to broadband?

This is a rant that has been going on for some time now and not just by me. You can see it all over broadband support forums, both static and mobile.

Before we begin, lets just outline the definition of “unlimited”:

Now that we know what it really means, lets outline what ISP’s think it means.

You will have found it hard to escape the small print and the all common use of “up to” in broadband advertisements. ISP’s think they can get away with selling a product as “unlimited” when really it’s just such a high limit that 99% of it’s users will probably never hit it. However as broadband becomes a more widely and higher used commodity those limits are being reached by more and more people.

Mobile Broadband

A common example would be from a mobile phone provider who offers a tariff with “unlimited data”. If you look at the small print there will commonly be something to the tune of “Fair usage policy applies” or “Fair usage of 3GB”. So on one hand they offer it as “unlimited” and the other it’s really 3GB. Now to me that’s fraudulent advertisement as they’re saying two completely different things. However it doesn’t matter as it’s “in the small print” and as long as it exists there Ofcom will do nothing about it. That’s the part of this that really annoys me. To top it off, if you go over that allowance they have the cheek to charge you £3/MB for the data when in reality the cost for that 1MB of data is not even 1 pence. It’s just a money making scam and it has to be stopped.

Regular Broadband

Another example comes from your regular broadband at home. They again sell it as “unlimited downloads” but then in the small print it says “fair usage applies” or, and this is where it’s a bit different, “we may manage your line if your download usage adversely affects others”. The difference here is that there is no given limit on how much you can use, but rather they tell you “if we feel you’re using too much we’ll slow you down”. Again that annoys me and I don’t think it should be allowed.

Traffic Management

Traffic management is the most common way of ISP’s to get out of the unlimited data problem as they are still technically offering unlimited data, albeit at a slower speed than before which artificially reduces the amount you can download in a given time. Virgin Media have been doing this for years (and so do others but I’ll pick on VM because I’m more aware of their practices).

Virgin Media employ what is called “STM” or “Subscriber Traffic Management”. This only operates between peak hours of the day (which surprisingly is 10am-9pm every day). It’s split into two so you have two limits per day. Depending on your speed you get a different allowance between these times. If you hit your STM limit, you will be traffic managed and suffer a 75% drop in download and upload speed. So instead (for example) having a 10Mbps unlimited connection, you now have a 2.5Mbps unlimited connection, which really IS unlimited now since they won’t slow you down any more.

Although Virgin Media openly give these limits out to their customers, I still feel it’s not something that should be allowed. You’re paying for a 10Mbps unlimited connection, which means you should be getting 10Mbps when you want to use it. In this day and age to watch any form of video online in HD you need more than 2.5Mbps to do it, and more when you have multiple users on the same connection (which is increasingly more common too).

The one thing I did notice with Virgin Media was with the higher speeds being introduced, more and more traffic management was being introduced – a sign that their network was simply not ready for it.

BeThere – The UK’s only truly unlimited ISP?

BeThere may well be the only
truly unlimited ISP in the UK.

Now personally I am with BeThere broadband and I have been 100% satisfied by this ISP purely for the reason that they really are unlimited. I have downloaded at 8Mbps solid for 2 weeks and not had any slow down or had a letter from them complaining about my usage. That is how an unlimited ISP should be. However with only 600,000 or so customers and little coverage compared to BT/Virgin Media, not everyone will have the privilege of going with such a great ISP.

The question is though, why do these other ISP’s limit the data allowance at all? I’ll tell you why. To save costs. Plain and simple. The only other reason to do it is if they don’t have enough bandwidth to go around and that’s what Virgin Media has been doing. They can offer 100Mbps speeds sure, but they don’t have the bandwidth to offer it to everyone ALL of the time, so they have to restrict it. It’s all about penis size with ISP’s and who has the fastest speeds. They may have the speed but they can’t deliver the actual data allowance. So there’s me with my lousy 8Mbps BeThere connection and someone else with their 10Mbps Virgin Media connection. They might have 2 more Megabits of bandwidth that me, but I can easily download more than they can because of traffic management.

Complaints to Ofcom

There have been tens of thousands of complaints to Ofcom over the years regarding this issue but all they can do is turn around with “guidelines” that the ISP’s are not even obliged to follow. It is my opinion that the word “unlimited” should not be allowed to be used in any advertising sense unless it can be proven it is unlimited.

If the ISP can’t provide the bandwidth they state on their advertisements 24/7 then they should not be allowed to sell that package as unlimited, and a GB cap should be introduced in it’s place (providing that cap can actually be reached so they don’t oversell that as well). 10Mbps is capable of 3300GB in a single month if used at full speed for 30 days so they couldn’t give a cap of 5TB if you can’t reach it. 2TB would be suitable as that would require just 6.4Mbps of bandwidth 24/7.

But anyway I think you can gather the point I’m trying to make. Hardly any ISP’s exist that are truly unlimited, and BeThere is the only one I know that stick to that policy because it’s what they’re best known for. Unlimited is a word that should be banned in the selling of broadband and phone tariffs, etc, because unlimited in these cases nearly always have a limit. The technology is becoming more popular and used more widely that these caps just don’t work any more. Jump back 5 years ago and unlimited was almost completely unheard of. Go back another 5 and nobody knew what a cap was because nobody used that much data.

Times change, and the language and meanings that come with it also needs to change to meet new expectations.

My next little rant is about traffic jams and how they’re so easy to control and even prevent if you know how.

Just this morning I was on the motorway for work, and there are ongoing roadworks which have been there for close to a month now if not a little longer. Many mornings there are traffic jams where the number of lanes changes from 3 to 2 as the contraflow begins. If drivers know how to manage such a change on the road there would not be traffic jams! There is still plenty of road for all of the drivers, but it’s knowing how to use it that is important.

Picture this: You’re in the middle lane and you get signs to say the 3rd lane is closing in 800 yards and the speed limit is now 50mph. What do you do? Most drivers will take no notice until it’s too late, where they’ll employ heavy braking and try to force their way into another lane that is not closed. Not only can this be dangerous but it also causes traffic jams. The drivers behind you in both lanes have to put their brakes on too. This causes drivers behind them to panic and put their brakes on even harder, and the effect cascades all the way back through the traffic. Eventually you’re all going so slow because of forcing your way into a free lane that traffic almost grinds to a halt. Congratulations, you’ve all caused a traffic jam.

So how can you prevent it?

Picture this instead: You’re in the 3rd lane of the motorway and you see the 800 yards and 50mph sign. Pull in and slow your speed down gently to the 50mph without brakes, just use engine braking. Everyone else around you also does the same thing in plenty of time so that you’re all pulled in and doing the correct speed limit in time. No fuss! Everyone is doing the right speed. there was no panicking. That wasn’t so hard was it?

OK, so things don’t always go to plan, we all know that.

If you’re in a traffic jam, what can you do to avoid it?

It’s actually easier than you think. It all comes down to two basic rules.

1. Keep your distance – By keeping your distance, if the traffic in front has to slow down, the gap you leave makes up for this until the traffic in front picks up again which often happens quite quickly. Leave about 10 car lengths and you should always have plenty of space.

2. Let people in! – If someone wants to pull in because of a closed lane, or they simply want to change lanes, then let them! Don’t force them to slow down to make the move, help them out. That way you reduce the amount traffic behind you has to slow down and you prevent the jam becoming worse. You may not be feeling nice during a traffic jam, especially if you’re late, but it pays to help other people. And remember, being nice puts everyone in a good mood!

Why does it work?

It’s all due to the stop-start cascade effect. If one car stops, the car behind has to stop. By the time the first car is moving again, the second car can move a few seconds later. But it’s already too late, the cascade has started. If you employ point 1 (keep your distance) you can avoid starting a cascade effect but you can also stop one too. Easy! This also applies to point 2 as well but in a lesser way.

So there you go, a comprehensive guide to controlling a traffic jam. What’s better, is it only takes 1 or 2 people doing this for it to start working. If everyone did it, there would be a hell of a lot less traffic jams on the roads today. I firmly believe it should be taught and tested (somehow) as part of the driving test/exam, especially now that we are seeing more and more vehicles on the road each year.

Something must be wrong with me as I haven’t had a bit of a rant recently, so here’s one I’m sure we can all relate to.

There is an increasing amount of cars on the road nowadays that are using HID (High Intensity Discharge) lights. To me, they are the most dangerous form of vehicle lighting you can get. While they are superior in the light they give out compared to standard bulbs, they cause a ridiculous amount of glare and dazzling effects which is very disorientating and dangerous as another driver.

Here is an example of what I mean. The HID lights are on the left, with standard halogen on the right.

You can very clearly see the amount of excessive glare these HID lights give off compared to halogens. Now picture yourself on a pitch black motorway (something I frequent this time of year travelling home from work on an evening). Although you’re on the other side of the motorway the glare from the cars going the other way can be extremely overwhelming if the vehicle has HID lights. You can very easily tell the difference if you were to look.

There is no need for HID lights on any vehicle except for specialised vehicles that require brighter lights (police, coast guard, etc). Standard halogens will light the road up perfectly well for normal road driving at no more than 80mph. If you need to see further ahead of you, you’re going too fast for the type of road, it’s that simple.

I wish HID lights were made illegal except on specialised vehicles because they’re so dangerous it’s stupid. The number of times I’ve been going down the road only to be blinded by HID lights and being unable to see on my own side of the road I can’t even begin to count. They’re also very sensitive to differences in road surface because they’re highly focused so one little bump in the road and they double if not triple in brightness in your view.

There have been numerous petitions to Downing Street over the last few years but they’re always dismissed or never make it far enough. We need to get HID lights banned. There have no doubt been accidents caused by HID lights but you just don’t seem hear about them. Why, I don’t know. I have plenty of friends who share the same opinions as I do and who have had close calls because of HID lights themselves so I know I’m not alone.

Image Source: keyboardmilitia.com

OK here’s the story… My website, BetaArchive, has recently had a Wikipedia page set up for it by some members. I thought this was a great idea at first since lots of other sites out there have their own Wikipedia page (not quite sure why I bothered linking it…). With that I set about adding some nice useful content to it. After a couple of hours work I was happy with the result. I sent the link to the page to a few friends who found what I had wrote there some-what interesting, since it’s not the sort of information that was readily available elsewhere.

A few days went by and then suddenly I got a message saying that my username had been suspended because it represents a company rather than an individual. What?! Since when could you not represent a company? Well under Wikipedia rules, forever it seems. I never bother reading rules as common sense is usually enough. It seems stupid that I cannot represent my own company (or website in this case). I had to register under a real name or an alias. But what if I wanted to remain anonymous but have an account to make my changes on? It seems you can’t. Relentlessly, I accepted this fact and simply started editing without an account.

A few more days later and I get another notification that some things have been changed on the page. “Oooh!”, I thought, “someone has added more information”. I log onto the page and see that information has not been added, but it has in fact been removed. My first call of action was the history tab to see what has been changed. Various bits of information had been removed. The confusing part was that it was removed by a Wikipedia moderator. What gives them the right to change an article on a site they know nothing about? They had removed various pieces of information that without it, make the article read as unreliable and factually incorrect. This is against mine and others free speech.

Suffice to say I was quite annoyed at finding this out, so I reverted the page back to it’s previous state. 2 minutes later, the page had been reverted again to exclude the information I just put  back. Outraged, I removed all of the content and replaced it with a message stating I did not want this article on Wikipedia any more. Given that I own the site the article is about, I should have every possible right to remove it, yes? No. At least that’s how the moderators saw it, so a few minutes later the article was again reverted back to the original article, minus the important parts the moderator removed.

Seriously pissed off now I simply kept reverting it back to my message. I did this 6 times in the space of about 10 minutes, and each time it was reverted by a moderator. Eventually, my IP was banned and I was no longer able to edit the page. To me this screams “NO FREE SPEECH HERE”. I own the website this article is about, I should be able to control whether or not the facts or opinions shown on this page stay or go, and I should also be able to to choose to remove the page should I choose. However it seems this is completely against Wikipedia’s methods and ethics. You can request a removal but there is no guarantee at all that it will ever be removed, as it has to go through a “public vote”. What’s more now I am banned I can’t actually edit the article to include such a removal request.

My ban expires in a few days. Perhaps then I will go on and request the removal in the method they explain you should use. I am by no means happy about having to do it this way. I find it unrealistic that they have this much control over a page about someone else’s website/company, etc. Wikipedia was supposed to be unbiased and allow free speech. However it seems in the politic controlled society we live in now (and the dicks at the other end of a computer with the super powers we call “moderation”) it seems this is no longer true.

Please leave your thoughts and opinions on this one.