Archive for December, 2009

Virgin Media respond to Twitter!

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Update: Virgin were crap, nothing ever got fixed, and they sent a 17 year old “engineer” who didn’t know what a Traceroute was. We’re now happily on an ADSL line, soon-to-be with the nice folk at Bethere.co.uk.

This is my latest post on the Virgin Media support newsgroup (virginmedia.support.broadband.cable on news.virginmedia.com):

I just had a very interesting 20 minute phone conversation with Jason Golik (see http://www.linkedin.com/in/bungieboy) a senior Network Operation Centre shift manager at Virgin Media.

He got in touch with me via Twitter after I started tweeting loudly about how poor the quality of service and support at Virgin was.

Now, the bad news is that Virgin aren’t going to fix this particular problem with upstream capacity in Bristol until January 4th at the earliest since they have a freeze on engineering work over the holidays!

The really bad news is that the customer support staff on the phones and on the newsgroup would never have told us this! They’d just keep us hanging on with more of this “we have no update on this yet” or “it will be fixed on December 9th” or “Kam will not contact you today” bullshit.

The good news is that there’s someone with an ounce of clue and (potentially) enough power to get problems sorted, and that he’s happy to phone you personally if you make enough noise about the problem on Twitter (because it’s bad PR obviously). So, power to the consumer through social networking!

Unfortunately that’s not enough to keep me with Virgin Media — unless, and here’s a challenge for you Jason — you can get the problem sorted before the morning of December 17th — this Thursday — because that’s the last date I can cancel the installation of the BT line before I’m tied into an 18 month contract with BT.

And I don’t mean just get the problem sorted for ME — I mean for everyone experiencing serious packet loss in Bristol.

Anyone who wants to have a similar conversation can contact Jason by tweeting with the text “@bungieboy” in your tweet. Adding the hashtag “#virginmedia” may also help get you heard.

In a way it’s completely ridiculous that it took 3 weeks to get nothing from VM via the “regular” support channels (even though the NNTP server is hardly your average user’s cup of tea), but that simply by broadcasting my discontent on Twitter, I got an instant and satisfactory response.

Well, satisfactory in that it was at least honest about the timescales. Jason wasn’t able to confirm whether I’d get compensation or free contract termination as a result of these problems, but he did suggest that having documented communications with support over the last 2-3 weeks would help my case.

Let me know your experiences, this will be an interesting one.

Cheers,

Luke

Posted in Virgin Media | 10 Comments »

CRU hack — taking a step back

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

The CRU hack really made me stop and think about my views on global warming, in particular this article at The Register was interesting to me as a programmer because it points to some analysis of the data which is a pretty damning read. Specifically this analysis of the “Harry Readme file” is very fierce in its criticism — and rightly so, it looks like the source code and comments that we got to see were pretty awful.

But I think it helps to take a step back: We have no idea who the hackers were, but consider the possible range of their political motives. If they were lefties, it’s fair to say they wouldn’t have done it. It’s possible that they had no political motive but just wanted to get “the truth” out there. But it seems much more likely to me — especially given the timing just before Copenhagen and the impact they must have known it would have, that the hackers were climate-change deniers intent on causing as much disruption to the public impression of scientific consensus as possible. And it worked — it made me question what I had hitherto considered to be scientific fact.

Indeed their political motives seem to be reflected in the code and text the hackers chose to expose. Since they hacked the CRU’s fileserver, they would have had access to enormous amounts of data and code. And they managed to find some pretty nasty stuff in there. The problem is, any large project has a fair amount of bad code and confusing documentation, often not currently used but stored away in case bits of it might be useful later. So we almost certainly didn’t get a balanced view of the work that the CRU do, we just saw the darkest corners of their fileservers. If it is the current status quo, then the CRU has a big apology to make, and some serious data management and software engineering to learn, fast. But one must be very careful in making assumptions based on incomplete information.

So here’s an idea: why don’t the CRU balance out the bad code by releasing all their code, warts and all, under an open-source license? Then we’d know whether the source code that we got to see was indicative of a real problem — also we’d get to see whether the bad code released is still being used for modern climate modeling, or whether it’s been superseded by something of higher quality.

It helps to balance the arguments from the likes of The Register with this editorial from Nature. Coming from an academic background at Oxford University, it’s fair to say that in my experience academics are truth-seekers, and peer-reviewed journals are still the best way we’ve got to be rigorous about our science.

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Posted in Climate change | 12 Comments »