Whatever happened to the railway?

Have you noticed how no-one talks about the railway any more? From BBC downwards, the place where you catch a train is now a train station, not a railway station. In other words, we talk about the vehicles, not the system. And the problem with that is that we’re getting a worse service and it’s costing us a lot more.

The reason why we’ve lost the concept of a railway system is clear: there is no system any more. Since the rushed, ideological privatisation of British Rail in the dying days of the last Tory administration, the railway has been run by train operators, such as Southern or First Great Western, and an infrastructure operator, Network Rail. Within each of these two broad groups — train and infrastructure operators — there are further schisms, such as train leasing companies, train refurbishment companies, track maintenance companies, signalling and telecommunications etc etc. The list goes on.

Railways are inherently complex organisations: they’re subject to disruption by all sorts of events, most of them not entirely or at all under the railway’s control. People fling themselves off platforms in front of trains, hardware wears out or fails before its time, external electricity supplies go down, weather results in key personnel — think train drivers and signalmen — being unable to get to work, and so on. You can imagine.

At the best of times, for a system such as a railway to work effectively it needs communication between the various elements. In the days of a single railway organisation, it wasn’t perfect but at least everyone was working for the same employer and could be orchestrated as such.

Today, that is no longer the case. Each organisation has a profit motive first which means there has to be a cash incentive to make something happen that’s out of the ordinary. Usually, that works to the disbenefit of the rest of us. For example, you want to make a train connection but your incoming train is 10 minutes late. In BR days, the connecting train might well have been held for the benefit of the arriving passengers. No longer. There’s a financial penalty for train operators if they are late so today you can happily watch your connecting train drive away as you arrive at the station.

Another classic example is a small incident that happened in July 2011 at the entrance to Edinburgh Waverley station. A train derailed but it was a slow-speed incident, the train stayed upright, and no-one was hurt. In BR days, a crew would have been out to to jack it up and get on its way, and make overnight repairs to the track. In this incident, before the train could be moved, there had to be a full investigation to find out what had failed in order to establish who would pay for the damage. This meant that, instead of there being a delay of perhaps an hour or three, it took a day and a half before Edinburgh was fully open for trains again.

Given that, you can imagine what happens when one railway company needs to contact another in an emergency. Something has gone wrong and it needs to be sorted out, as passengers are stranded in the middle of nowhere. Since the profit motive comes first, the various parties have to talk about who will pay, who is at fault and therefore potentially liable, and whether it’s worth fixing now or later. That’s before they get around to talking about how to solve the problem. Meanwhile, passengers sit in trains for hours.

This is not a hypothetical problem: it’s happened plenty of times. Yes, we’ve had some nice new trains following privatisation. We’ve also had beyond-inflation price increases every year to pay for them — and for the huge profit margins the trains companies demand before they will get involved, even though their profits are underwritten by the government — that’s you and me.

Privatisation of the railways has been a disaster overall. We’ve lost the concept of a railway system, and replaced it with a patchwork of train operators’ turfs, each of which doesn’t connect, and results in a blizzard of confusing ticket prices as they attempt to segment the market and screw more cash out of the customers (we’re no longer passengers). Woe betide you if you miss a train, even if it’s not your fault, as the mega-prices are backed up by penalties if you don’t get exactly the right ticket.

As my good friend John May sings: it’s time for a change.

Filed under: Current affairs, mergers & acquisitions, Railways , british rail, communication, delays, derailment, first great western, nationalisation, network rail, privatisation, railways, rosco, southern, tory, train leasing, trains

Lessons from Murdoch’s News Corp

There’s a number of depressing conclusions to be drawn, even at this early stage of affairs from the revelations about News Corp’s activities.

The first is that people — from individuals rightly sickened at the thought of News of the World journalists poring over Milly Dowler’s voicemails to politicians who should have known better — only seem to have voiced concerns when it involved a little girl. ‘It could have been us’, runs the thought.

And yet, the hacking — if it deserves that description as it only seems to have involved dialling into publicly available numbers and trying passwords until they found one that worked — had not only been going on for years but was known about for years. Few seem to have cared much about it when it involved people seen as disposable — actors, sportspeople, Z-list celebrities and the like.

It’s much the same when you discuss the issue of whether the UK should retain the monarchy. The two most common responses I’ve encountered concern the individuals — the Queen’s doing a good job and I wouldn’t want Blair — or the tourist money they supposedly bring in. Whether or not a country that describes itself as a modern democracy can continue to do so while it has an unelected head of state seems to be irrelevant: it’s simply not part of the discussion.

In both cases — Murdoch or royalty — the principal of whether it;s correct per se to hack into phones or to maintain an unelected head of state is not an argument it’s possible to have, or that people raise with themselves. Issues seem only to matter if they has a directly personal relevance. How we are governed seems not to fall into that category.

The second issue is that the ones truly responsible for this dismal state of affairs — the politicians who have been kowtowing to News Corp all these years — seem likely to be the ones who will be let off lightly. Cameron will be dented and might, in the most optimistic of scenarios, resign. But the rest of them will get away with it.

This is a direct consequence of the feeble level of political debate in this country, as I’ve already noted. It seems we get the politicians we deserve. If we continue to buy the News of the World — or Sun on Sunday as it will morph — then nothing will have fundamentally changed.

Yet the third issue is one that can be easily fixed: the low level of priority assigned by mobile operators to security compared to convenience. Voicemails seem to have been ridiculously easy to break into because passwords weren’t changed from their defaults; subscribers are unlikely even to have known their voicemails had a password let alone that they needed to change them because the operators didn’t tell them about it.

Britain prides itself on being a stable democracy with traditions many of which have changed little over the last 500 years. Consequently, people are not encouraged to think about issues of governance or principal involving public life. Maybe it’s time we did.

Filed under: Current affairs , democracy, news corp, news of the world, politics, principals, rupert murdoch

Review of new WD 3TB WD30EZRX disk drive

Quiet and huge describes this new 3TB Western Digital disk drive pretty well. It contains enough data that, if printed out on paper would probably cover the whole of Wales or several elephants, but who’s counting? You could certainly fit well over 500 standard DVDs onto it.

The WD30EZRZ updates the previous model, the WD30EZRSDTL, by upgrading to the latest 6Gbps SATA interface, which won’t make much difference to most people as it will take several drives to fill that data pipe. In other words, the update is largely academic for most users, and the drive is mechanically identical to its 3Gbps predecessor.

What this drive promises is an ability to fit into a range of environments without disruption. If you sit next to your PC all day, you’ll know that the disk drive is one of its noisiest components. And if you have a PC in the living room, you’ll know that when it wakes up and does its stuff, you can hear the drive start rotating and then make a rattling sound when it’s working.

All drive makers have gone some way to making disk drives much quieter than before, with WD’s range of domestically-oriented devices dubbed ‘cool, quiet, eco-friendly’ by the manufacturer. #

So in addition to being quieter, this drive is claimed also to use less power. Fortunately for disk drive makers, the main users of power and generators of noise are the same: the motor that spins the disk and the actuator that moves the drive head — that’s the component that ‘rattles’. So by reducing the power to both of these they can achieve their objectives at the cost of performance. WD doesn’t reveal the speeds its ‘green’ disks spin but one enterprising reviewer calculated it from the sound of the disk at between 5400 and 7200 rpm.

The drive is quiet when idle — within a metre of it, it’s barely audible even while out of the PC case — and you can barely hear the drive rattle when seeking. A sound meter sited the standard distance of a metre away didn’t register the sound in a normal office environment.

But what does that quietness cost in speed? I tested the WD30EZRX using an Intel motherboard housing Intel’s four-core i7-2600K CPU clocked at 3.40GHz and with 8GB RAM. Running the SiSoft Sandra disk benchmark against the drive revealed a data transfer rate, at 100MBps, unchanged from its predecessor’s results. This isn’t the fastest transfer rate there, nor is the drive’s access time of nine milliseconds the lowest, but for most purposes the trade-off is probably good enough.

So if you need a drive to store your DVDs or CDs on, this is close to ideal. But watch out: 512GB solid state disks (SSDs), which are silent and hugely faster than mechanical devices, are commonplace if expensive. And while SSDs will always cost more than rotating media, they’re now approaching the point when you might consider abandoning spinning drives altogether.

In the meantime, the WD is at least as good as its rivals in the places where it matters.

Filed under: Review , 3tb, disk drive, eco-friendly, low power, quiet, western digital

NAS upgrade on the way

It’s time to rebuild my server. Currently supporting two smartphones, a pair of high-powered desktops, two laptops and a variety of other devices scattered around the house, the lifespan of the Ubuntu server-powered machine in the basement has just about run out.

Not only is it running out of disk space, the space it does have badly needs re-organising. Now I know that it’s quite easy to upgrade the five-spindle EXT4-formatted RAID5 disk system in the self-built server but to be honest it’s more time and trouble than I have available to give. Also, the Ubuntu update system seems to have broken. Maybe they’ve moved where they put all the updates since I installed Ubuntu 8.10 but it no longer works and I can’t be bothered spending ages figuring out how to fix it.

Guess I’m not a pure hobbyist any more if I value my time so much that I don’t want to spend it in a dark basement tending an Ubuntu server as it rebuilds its RAID stripes.

When I first set up the server, it was designed to provide more than just storage. It would be the digital hub, functioning as as server for DHCP (IP address serving) NTP (time), VPN termination (using OpenVPN so I could log in from anywhere), and a half-dozen other things that I thought we’d need. Actually we don’t need most of that stuff. Turns out we really just need some central storage, properly managed.

Trouble is it’s not very well managed, in that it consists of five 500GB drives in one case providing about 2TB and an Iomega RAID (kindly donated) box with 1.4TB. They’re connected over the network using NFS to tie the Iomega into the main server’s directory hierarchy. All that’s shared using CIFS for the Windows boxes and AFP for the Apple machines.

The folder structure’s a mess though and the disks need upgrading both because they’ve been sitting there spinning away for over two years in an increasingly dense cloud of cobwebs — can’t keep the bugs out of the server as it’s the warmest thing down there in the winter — and because the volumes of data that video can gobble never ceases to amaze.

So it’s time to upgrade and rebuild it using bigger disks (4 x 2TB I think) and an off-the-shelf storage appliance such as FreeNAS. That way I don’t have too much support to do, costs are contained, and the functions it doesn’t have I don’t really need. I’m also going to build it on top of VMware’s ESX hypervisor (I’ll use my old PC’s motherboard and Intel Core Due CPU as the hardware for this) so if it needs more functionality (which I doubt) then I can just create and fire up a virtual machine.

So far, I’ve acquired an ESX-compliant network card (Intel PRO/1000 CT) and a low-end graphics card (with VGA out for my Adderlink IP remote KVM device that allows me to log in directly to the server from the office), and a 2TB drive that will act as a sink for the data before I move it all over to FreeNAS.

Watch this space for more – and maybe even a review or two.

Filed under: How-To, operating systems, Servers

Don’t say plain vanilla, say yum!

It’s an exotic orchid that grew originally in Mexico but now grows in all sorts of places, thanks to a slave — yes, a slave — who discovered that it could be hand pollinated. This freed it from having to be pollinated by natural means, using bees found only in its native habitat. That’s how come today most of it comes from Madagascar.

It’s one of the world’s most wonderful and rich scents and tastes — the two are highly intermingled in our senses. We put the dried form of its beans or seedpods in cakes, ice creams, custard and all sorts of other places. Can you tell what it is yet?

Vanilla. It’s just delicious.

So why, increasingly, am I hearing people referring to “plain vanilla”, when what they mean is the default option or, more usually, something that’s just plain?

Is it because they’ve never tasted vanilla? Is it because they are hard of thinking, and just like to repeat the latest management jargon, on the assumption that it sounds cool? Or is it because they can’t taste it? Once tasted, you’d never call it plain.

Wouldn’t you agree that it’s time to reclaim vanilla as a positive attribute, not as something that sounds about as interesting as a used tissue?

Plain vanilla: don’t just say no — make your views known!

Filed under: Food , colloquialism, dictionary, food, jargon, lexicon, linguistics, plain vanilla, vanilla

Upselling – the curse of capitalism?

I bought loads of stuff yesterday while out and about — but unusually, only one operation overtly tried to sell me objects I didn’t want, hadn’t asked for and wouldn’t have taken even if they were free — which one of them was.

So many organisations seem to have read the Dummies Guide to Selling and decided that what they must do is sell you stuff the whole time you’re within range. It’s enough to drive you bonkers.

On its own, upselling wouldn’t be that annoying. But combined with everything else, I feel upselling — or selling in general — is now a couple of notches higher on the list of life’s annoyances up with which one must put in a capitalist economy.

I bought a railway ticket. No-one tried to ask if I wanted two, or had I considered this nice ticket to somewhere I wasn’t going. I bought a cup of tea. “Would sir like a currant bun with that? Or a sandwich?”. Didn’t get asked that either.

Then I bought a magazine in WH Smith’s. I try to avoid the place as, in my town, there are other, locally owned and run outlets, and I’d rather support them so the place doesn’t end up looking like Basingstoke or Bracknell.

But in a railway station, your options are limited. Would you like a free newspaper? The Evening Standard? I don’t think so — there are so many things ahead of it in my priority list that I’d have to live to be 1,000 before it even reached the bottom of the list before working its way up.

What about a lump of stuff that this country calls chocolate but the rest of the civilised world wouldn’t, because it’s got precious little cocoa in it and tastes, well, pretty horrible? Nope. See Evening Standard, above. Why can’t they offer me something I might like?

See, this upselling business is OK for the sellers but they’re not taking it far enough. If they watched my buying patterns — I often use a credit card so they can — WH Smith would know that I have never accepted one of its free offers, though of course they’re not free as we pay for them eventually. They might want to offer me a magazine similar to the one I’ve bought, or something complementary.

Instead, it’s all about what they want to sell, not what I might want to buy.

Then I went to the supermarket. No verbal upsell there but a constant barrage of visual stimuli at eye level designed to open your wallet.

I’m always glad to leave. Much like any shopping experience really, I’m only happy when it stops.

What this means is that, if only these people would only stop throwing unwanted things at me, I might be a happier individual and, since I don’t believe I’m all that unusual, it would apply I’m sure to lots of other people too.

So here’s a plea: stop selling me stuff. I’m much more likely to buy something when you don’t sell it to me, but discover it for myself.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Vodafone doesn’t want new customers

Vodafone – how hard can it be to become a customer of yours? So hard I almost gave up, that’s how hard.

It all started about a month ago — a month away from the end of my contract with O2, who didn’t have the phone I wanted. Vodafone does, so I planned to switch — in spite of the company’s current poor reputation for avoiding paying £6bn in corporation tax in the cash-strapped UK.

Around that time, I got a call from Vodafone’s ‘Win Back’ sales team — as a previous customer I’m cheaper to acquire than a brand new one, so they wanted to know if I would come back to Voda. I agreed to a deal, and expected to get a call nearer the time confirming this. Score one point for Vodafone.

But a week before the contract expired, I’d heard nothing so I called the sales number. They’d no record of the phone call or of the good deal (£10 a month cheaper than any advertised price plan) that I’d agreed to. Strike one point for Vodafone – score now zero.

So I tried to cut a deal there but I was told my name would be passed to the Win Back sales team’s list. Four days later I got a call — this from a company that’s reportedly keen to expand its customer base after a long period of decline. Strike one more point for lack of urgency – tally is minus one.

In the end, I got a deal slightly better than the one I’d agreed a month before (one up for Voda, score now zero). I carefully spelt out my address, bank account details and the porting code (PAC) that O2 had given me, to allow my old number to be carried over. The PAC would be activated two days later, I was told.

Next day I got a text confirming that a phone would be sent out the day after — though the abysmal spelling of my address suggested a high degree of illiteracy or lack of attention to detail, or both, and gave me cause to wonder if the phone would actually turn up at the right address. Hmm, nul points each way, I think, score still zero.

The phone turned up on the appointed day — so a grudging point there, score one — but two days later there was no sign of the PAC being activated, so I emailed Vodafone. They’d no record of a PAC. Minus one. They suggested I send it and other details to a specific Vodafone email address, which I did in a hurry, since at this point I’m paying for two parallel phone contracts, and the PAC has a 30-day expiry limit that’s approaching fast.

I got a email back instructing me to enter the same details into a web page — this would be the third time of providing the code. Subtract one point, score minus two so far. An email arrived within a few hours complaining that the details I’d provided didn’t match what they held — I suspect that’s because the address I’d originally given them had been transcribed so poorly. Score: minus three.

So I provided the details for the fourth time and now, at last, have confirmation, and a date and time that the PAC will be activated — one day before it expires. Add one point, and the total so far is minus two.

If the PAC works as Voda claims, no change in score as that’s expected behaviour. If it doesn’t, you’ll hear about it.

If Vodafone wants to gain customer loyalty, it really needs to sharpen up its act. As it is, if another company offers a reasonable deal at the end of this 18-month contract, I’m off.

Filed under: mobile , customer, mobile phone, pac, poor service, porting authorisation code, vodafone

Why is finding the right keyboard impossible?

In a world where every product you could possibly think of wanting is made, and a huge number of orders of magnitude more products exist that shouldn’t be made at all, why is it impossible for me to find the keyboard I want?

When I started using PCs, the IBM PC and AT keyboards had function keys on the left-hand side, the keyswitches were loud and mechanical, and took a fair amount of force to depress. We cared a lot about keyboards in the days before graphical user interfaces were invented because they were the user interface.

I liked those keyboards. In the intervening 25 years have come a whole variety of input devices but I’ve remained wedded to the Northgate Omnikey keyboard I bought back in 1988. I must have written millions of words on that 23-year-old keyboard and nothing has ever gone wrong. I can disassemble it to clean it every now and again, but it’s had no other maintenance. It’s a marvellous piece of kit.

Incidentally, Northgate as a company is now, sadly, long gone, but you can still buy very similar keyboards from Creative Vision Technologies.

But I’m ready to move on. I’m ready to give up the loud forceful and clicky keyboard for a quieter device with keys that are easier to press and which, after a heavy day’s typing, don’t make my hands feel like they been through an assault course. But I’m not ready to give up the F keys down the left-hand side of the keyboard.

I use the keyboard a lot, even though I could use a mouse. It takes me a few milliseconds hit Ctrl-S or Alt-F4 to save a file or close a program, compared to the seconds it takes to move my hand over to the mouse, schlepp the cursor to the right icon and click it. It’s what my hands are used to doing.

And you need only one hand to do it when the the F keys are in the right place: on the left. Try Alt-F4 with the F keys on the top of the main keyboard layout and it feels really clunky and awkward — the result being that very few people ever use those keys.

So why can’t I find a quiet, easy-action keyboard with F keys on the left? Advice gratefully received….

Filed under: desktops, keyboard , alt-f4, AT, creative vision technologies, function keys, ibm, keyboard, northgate, omnikey, pc

Guy Kewney RIP

I want simply to express how what a huge loss to the world the death early this morning (Thursday 8 April 2010) of Guy Kewney is. He died aged just 63.

He was the first technology journalist. He started in the mid-1970s as a result of which he got to know all the big names when they were still speaking to journalists. Alan Sugar. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. And Douglas Adams for good measure.

Guy’s approach never wavered, and was born out of his fierce intelligence, a small smattering of humility, intense curiosity and deep loyalty to his readers. He’d ask the right question in a terribly polite way – and it got results. The IT exec would quaver and then blurt out what they didn’t want to say – or they’d give the game away by clamming up.

I worked with him for almost 15 years on PCW and PC Magazine and he was always the same. My job was, more often than not, to extract and edit his copy. His copy was incisive, insightful and idiosyncratic – and invariably, horribly late. But what you got was Guy’s voice, every time, no kow-towing to corporate or magazine style. It was sometimes infuriating – but he was right to do that, and readers loved him for it.

More entertaining was the Kewney Chaos Field (it acquired several names over the years) which resulted in perfectly good pieces of technology, often new, pre-released hardware or software, turning into door-stops as soon as they got within 10 feet of the man. How come? No-one ever figured out how he managed to break stuff that no-one ever did.

As for his expenses: managing them drove one individual to leave the country….but more importantly, he was an inspiration to two generations of journalists and PR flacks over the decades of his working life.

I didn’t speak to him as much over the last years of his life as I did when I sat across from him in the PC Magazine office for almost ten years. But I’m glad I went to see him just a week before his death. He was weak physically but his brain was undimmed, and he was perfectly relaxed and accepting of what was about to happen. He knew he was soon to die of the cancer that started in his bowels then ate away the rest of him. But the rational man that he was took it in his stride.

I only hope I can leave this world as gracefully. Guy: you are missed.

His final blog is here and there’s a nice obit from Iain Thomson here.

Filed under: Obituary , Guy Kewney

The worst press release of 2010 – by a country mile

It’s an old story but it keeps on running. Companies employ PR companies to put themselves before the media. The main way they do that is through press releases.

So would you be happy if your PR company put out a release announcing an initiative but which omitted not one but three key facts?

1. Who was launching it
2. Why they were launching it
3. Why anyone else would care

How could they get it so wrong?

Here it is, in all its glory, with only the PR company’s name stripped out to protect its blushes. Though, under enough pressure, I might publish that too….

The Common Assurance Metric (CAM) launched today is a global initiative that aims to produce objective quantifiable metrics, to assure Information Security maturity in cloud, third party service providers, as well as internally hosted systems. This collaborative initiative has received strong support from Public and Private sectors, industry associations, and global key industry stakeholders.

There is currently an urgent need for customers of cloud computing and third party IT services to be able to make an objective comparison between providers on the basis of their security features. As ENISA’s work on cloud computing, has shown, security is the number one concern for many businesses and governments. Existing mechanisms to measure security are often subjective and in many cases are bespoke solutions. This makes quantifiable measurement of security profiles difficult, and imposes the need to apply a bespoke approach, impacting in time, and of course cost. The CAM aims to bridge the divide between what is available, and what is required. By using existing standards that are often industry specific, the CAM will provide a singular approach of benefit to all organisations regardless of geography or industry.

[Quotes about how wonderful it is removed from here]

The project team anticipate delivery of the framework in late 2010 followed by a process towards global adoption for organisations wishing to obtain an objective measurement of security provided by cloud providers, as well as the level of security for systems hosted internally.

You’ll notice other issues (polite word) in there too. Who is ENISA, mentioned in the second para but never explained? Why is the first sentence only barely comprehensible — or even grammatical — on the first read-through? The second sentence in the second para doesn’t belong there, it should be at the top of that para. Since when does the phrase “impacting in time” qualify as English? And as for the last sentence/para, how many times did you have to read it to extract what the hapless writer was driving at?

Finally, why do people still feel the need to double-space between sentences? I gave up typewriters and starting using a word processor almost 30 years ago, and haven’t felt the need to do that since then…

It makes you wonder.

Filed under: Product launch , 2010, press release, worst