The road to 200Mb/s

Posted on by
Speed test

The road to 200Mb/s

When we moved to our present house six years ago, the only thing that I missed about our last one was the internet connection. That house had been one of the first to get BT Infinity and I’d quickly got used to 50Mb/s speeds. We only moved 1.7 miles, but suddenly we were cast back into the dark ages with a connection speed of 0.8Mb/s.

This clearly wasn’t going to work, so I signed up for an expensive satellite connection. In theory this offered 20Mb/s speeds, but in practice it was about half that and came with 800ms latency (no good for gaming) and nasty data caps (no good for Netflix).

Things improved three years ago when BT upgraded the cabling, but the distance from the exchange still limited the fastest speed we could get to about 12Mb/s. Upload speed was particularly constraining at 1Mb/s, which is a big problem with a house full of people uploading their photos and backing up their phones to the cloud.

Back in February 2015, I went to Israel to look at the tech/startup community and we were accompanied by friends from the BT Innovation group. Inevitably, the BT folks grouched about their airline problems and we complained about our broadband issues. This set in motion what proved to be a two and a half year joint quest to sort out my internet.

Many possible solutions were explored with BT over the ensuing couple of years, but it was frustratingly difficult to get real options. I think one of the problems was the regulatory restrictions that BT is forced to operate under. The people who could do the actual work (BT Openreach) weren’t allowed to talk to end customers. The people who were couldn’t fix my problem. Somehow we went round and round in circles for months, which stretched into years.

Finally, I got some real options on the table and decided to get a dedicated leased line from BT Local Business. A full fibre to the premises service, which understandably came with an associated high price tag and required me to register as a business. Rather than go for the “Managed Service” option, I decided to go for the slightly less expensive “wires only” option. “How hard can it be?”, I thought.

Well actually quite hard! BT’s “user guides” seem to assume that you are a qualified telecommunications engineer. Unusually, the internet wasn’t much help. So I thought I’d make a few notes on how to get things working for anyone who is mad enough to attempt the same thing.

I’d opted for a 200Mbps speed, delivered over a 1000Mbs fibre bearer. The following section in the BTNet “No Router Option (NRO) User Guide” describes how to connect things at the customer end:

4.1.4. 1000Mbps

1000Mbps services are presented to the customer as 1000Mbits/s Gigabit Ethernet conforming to IEE802.3z[25]. The customer connection is via a port on the WES1000 NTE.

The EAD1000 NTE customer interface is 1000Base-SX optical presentation via a Multimode dual LC optical connector as specified in the Gigabit Ethernet IEEE802.3z[25] specifications.

The customer must provide the necessary fibres to connect their equipment to the BT NTE.

The optical fibre patch cords to be used must be 850nm wavelength, 62.5/125 or 50/125 micron multimode fibre with LC connectors. The maximum fibre length is 550 metres for 50/125 micron or 220 metres for 62.5/125 micron.

It took me quite a while to decipher this and figure out what I needed to do.

Step 1: Which port do I need to plug into?

“WES1000” stands for “Wholesale Extension Service 1000”, with the 1000 referring to the 1,000Mb/sec speed of the line.

“NTE” stands for “Network Terminating Equipment”, which at least in my case was a box made by ADVA with a model number of FSP150CP FSP-ORNT-11-B. Here is a picture of one, which I have annotated to show the “Multimode dual LC optical” port referred to above.

What they mean by a WES1000 NTE

Step 2: What cable do I need?

You need a fibre cable like this one, shown below.

Duplex multimode fibre cable with LC connectors

Step 3: How do I turn this into something I can connect to my router?

You need a media convertor, which will connect optical fibre to regular copper 1000Base-T. I used a TP-LINK MC200CM Gigabit Multi-Mode Media Convertor.

Media convertor

You will also need a 1000Base-SX module like this one to provide the right socket for the fibre cable to plug into.

1000Base SX Module

Step 4: Connect your router

All that remains is to link the media convertor to the WAN port on your router with a standard ethernet cable and configure your router to use the static IP addresses that BT provides you with for your router, the gateway and BT’s DNS servers.

And that is all there is to it. 200Mb/s up and down and a happy household.

Travel Statistics

Posted on by
My wanderings…

Travel Statistics

Travel stats. We all love them. But where’s the best place to go to find out where you’ve been?

IAG, my employer and owner of Aer Lingus, British Airways, Iberia, Vueling and the newly launched LEVEL has been running a corporate accelerator programme for startups, called “Hangar 51“. I’ve been sponsoring the “Data Driven Decisions” category, and one of the startups I’ve been working with is esplorio, an automated travel journal service.

One of the things IAG and esplorio have been working on together is to offer our customers the opportunity to link their esplorio and BA Executive Club accounts, to give them a combined view of their data. Whilst we are sorting out the technical details, I thought I’d do a one person “proof of concept” by manually consolidating my own data.

Esplorio is a relatively young service, but it enables you to link to your Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare accounts. This means that I have data in Esplorio going back to 2011, which was when I joined Foursquare.

My BA data starts in 2004. This is when BA thinks I joined the Executive Club. I’m pretty sure that I joined before this, but maybe BA knows me better than I do.

According to esplorio, I’ve been to 30 countries and have travelled 454,648 miles. BA thinks I’ve been to 24 countries and have flown 351,818 miles. Whilst the two data sources agree on 21 countries, BA missed 9 that esplorio had and esplorio missed 3 so the true total is 33. Which I think demonstrates the power of combining data and also makes me think I’ve spent too much time on a plane.

Frustrated

Posted on by
Where is the missing external keyboard incorporating the new Touch Bar
Where is the external Touch Bar keyboard?

Frustrated

OK, I’ll admit I’m what some would call an “Apple fanboy” and I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to some of their more controversial decisions. I’m certainly prepared to accept higher prices and being required to regularly upgrade peripherals to the latest standards if that gets me a better product. For example, dropping Firewire for Thunderbolt or 30 pin for Lightning connectors.

But I have to say that recently Apple has been annoying the hell out of me. Not yet enough to get me to switch away to another operating system, but certainly enough to make me doubt the competence of the company’s management.

Back in 2010, Apple released the 27 inch Thunderbolt display. I bought one in 2012 for £750 and loved it. If they had upgraded it every 2-3 years, I would have happily given them another £1,500+ by now. They didn’t and have now killed it, instead promoting LG and Dell displays. If they believe that these displays are good enough, why the hell wouldn’t they rebadge one of them and earn a markup and keep that Apple logo front and centre for their customers? If they don’t think the quality is good enough to put their brand on, why are they willing to promote them as the preferred solution?

They neglected the Mac Pro for years and then Phil Schiller finally introduced a new one in 2013 with the line “can’t innovate anymore, my ass”. They have completely failed to update it ever since. Phil’s ass has a lot to answer for at this point.

The Touch Bar introduced yesterday on the new Macbook Pros is a decent new innovation. So why didn’t they launch a new desktop keyboard incorporating it? It would have been straightforward from a technical point of view and would have instantly added value to their existing lineup of desktop machines. A missed opportunity that suggests a culture of neglect for the Mac.

I’m also getting fed up with the dropping of ports. I’m OK with dropping old ports for which there is a better, more modern equivalent. I’m also somewhat sympathetic to the pruning of ports where weight and space are at a premium. But the new Macbook Pros couldn’t squeeze in an SD slot? Or an HDMI port? Neither of these has a more modern equivalent. And whilst USB-C is the successor to standard USB, how problematic would it have been to include at least one for a generation of Macbook Pros whilst in transition? It’s not even as if Apple has come up with any great external options. A drawer full of dongles is a really bad and inelegant solution.

Overall, I can only conclude that the current Apple management is either out of touch or getting the short term / financial considerations out of balance with the long term / customer value ones. Phil Shiller’s ass deserves a kicking and Tim Cook needs to listen to the views of his increasingly disillusioned loyal users.

Inspired by the Romans

Posted on by
Roman inspirations
Rome

Inspired by the Romans

After two and a half weeks in Italy visiting the sites in Rome as well as Pompeii and Herculaneum, I have been reminded how impressive the Romans were. I still can’t really understand how the whole thing collapsed given how advanced they were.

With Trump in anti Muslim mode, perhaps we need to make contingency plans for getting rid of our politically incorrect Arabic numerals. Despite the impracticality of Roman numerals, the recent Brexit vote tells us that politics can easily override rational thinking. So in preparation (and perhaps in the spirit of the summer silly season), here’s a bit of Swift code for doing the necessary translations:

let charValues = ["I": 1,"V": 5, "X": 10, "L": 50, "C": 100, "D": 500, "M": 1000]

let numerals = [(1000, "M"), (900, "CM"), (500, "D"), (400, "CD"), (50, "L"),
                (40, "XL"), (10, "X"), (9, "IX"), (5, "V"), (4, "IV"), (1, "I")]

func fromRoman(roman: String) -> Int? {
    var result = 0
    var maxSoFar = 0
    for char in roman.characters.reversed() {
        guard let value = charValues[String(char)] else { return nil }
        if value >= maxSoFar {
            result += value
            maxSoFar = value
        } else {
            result -= value
        }
    }
    return result
}

func toRoman(int: Int, numerals: [(Int, String)] = numerals, cumulative: String = "") -> String {
    guard let (intValue, stringValue) = numerals.first else { return cumulative }
    let newNumerals = Array(numerals.dropFirst())
    if int >= intValue {
        let quotient = int / intValue
        let remainder = int % intValue
        let stringToAdd = String(repeating: stringValue, count: quotient)
        return toRoman(int: remainder, numerals: newNumerals, cumulative: cumulative + stringToAdd)
    } else {
        return toRoman(int: int, numerals: newNumerals, cumulative: cumulative)
    }
}

Meanwhile, I hope everyone is enjoying the MMXVI Olympics. Currently, the UK is number II in the medal table, which is amazing!

Brexit Aftermath

Posted on by
Some things are clear, but much is still murky
Some things are clear, but much is still murky


Brexit Aftermath

It is just over a week since the Brexit referendum. The leader of the Leave campaign, Boris Johnson, has fled the field. I’d like to think his decision not to stand for the Tory leadership was driven by shame for what he has done, but it was more likely a simple act of political realism and self interest. In the post vote, post Boris, world, some things are now becoming clear but much remains hard to predict.

It seems the Conservative MPs are going to close ranks, elect a ‘safe’ leader in Theresa May, accept ‘the will of the people’ as far as leaving the EU is concerned and avoid an early General Election which would put their own jobs at risk. Worryingly, the irreconcilable objectives of the Brexiteers (control immigration, avoid paying into the EU whilst staying in the single market) look like being resolved by abandoning the single market, hoping that increased trade with the rest of the world can compensate for lost trade with Europe. The EU’s refusal to have any dialogue with the UK about the terms for exit before the UK commits itself irrevocably to leaving by triggering Article 50 seems to have made it very likely that the UK will be irreversibly on course for exit before the 48% of people who didn’t want to leave (and perhaps a few more who now regret their Leave vote) will get an opportunity to try to change the policy in a General Election.

What is less clear is what the opposition is going to do, with Jeremy Corbyn still apparently determined to try to hang on. Many of us are still hoping that there is a chance to avoid an exit. I loved this letter to the FT, speaking out on behalf of “the 48%”. I agree that we need an effective opposition arguing the case for the half of the country that views the exit vote as a national disaster of historic proportions. The Conservatives seem to have decided that the survival of their party and their own political careers require them to implement an exit, whatever the cost for the country. Perhaps Corbyn will go quietly and a new Labour leader will rally the MPs in the House to speak out for “the 48%”, for Leave voters who now realise they were lied to, and for common sense. I only wish I could be more hopeful that this will happen.

Meanwhile, don’t give up. Let the MPs who want to fight know they have mass public support. Let the rest of the EU know how many people in the UK feel European and want to stay that way. And let the non British born people living in and contributing to our country feel welcome and valued, not rejected, hated or unwanted.

Brexit Madness

Posted on by
Sick of being attached to a tree, a man decides to take back control of his branch.
Sick of being attached to a tree, a man decides to take back control of his branch.

Brexit Madness

Sad, angry and fearful for the future of the UK and for Europe. That is how I felt when I woke up on Friday morning to the news that the Leave campaign had won the Brexit referendum. The sadness and the fear remain but, somewhat to my surprise, my feeling of anger has only grown over the last 24 hours. I’ve never posted anything political here before, but I am so angry that I feel I need to speak out.

How did we get here? The root of the problem is the deep divisions about Europe in the Conservative Party. The party has been held together by a series of leaders who managed to paper over the cracks. The rise of UKIP made this more and more difficult. Prior to the last election, David Cameron made a disasterous short term political decision to offer a referendum to the Eurosceptics in his party. He had tried the same trick over Scotland and that almost ended in disaster (indeed it still may). Whether he thought he would be saved by the Liberals, or was confident he would win the referendum is hard to say. Whatever the case, it was a stunning case of gambling the future of the country for short term political expediency. Well, the gamble has failed. He has ended his own career and possibly also destroyed his party. In fact, I have come to the conclusion that the destruction of the Conservative Party as we know it is what needs to happen next if we are to avoid Cameron’s reckless gamble destroying the country too.

I know people will say that the people of the UK have spoken and we must respect their decision and leave the EU. But this was never an issue that should have been decided by a referendum with a simple yes/no answer. Everybody had a good idea about what voting Remain would mean. Nobody knew what a vote for Leave would actually mean. For some, it would be more money for the NHS. For others, it would be reductions in immigration. For many, it was a desire for the UK to “take back control” – people were fed up with being “told what do by faceless, unelected eurocrats”. OK, these are all valid and legitimate goals. But the simple truth is that there isn’t any chance these are all going to happen. Unlike after a General Election, there isn’t a leader or party that can be held to account to deliver on the promises made during the campaign. There has never been an overall plan of action set out by the Leave campaign. It has no overall leader with a complete vision of where to take the country. Instead we have single issue politicians like Farage and political opportunists like Boris who will say whatever he thinks will get himself into number 10. Whether you agree with Farage on his single issue or not, anyone who would trust the future of the country to him needs their head examining.

So what should happen now? Whatever happens, we should have a General Election before anything is done to enact leaving the EU. Let us see who would be Prime Minister and have a chance to vote for them. Let us hear the whole plan of the party or parties that want to go ahead and leave the EU. The implications of leaving are so significant and intertwined with other issues that it can’t be just “grafted on” as an optional extra. You can’t just choose your party of government and then add or subtract EU membership to taste.

The second thing that needs to happen is the breakup of the Conservative Party. I have voted for them in every election, so I say this with great sadness. But the truth is that what we now need is a proper centrist party to vote for, free of both left and right wing extremists. In 1981, the ‘Gang of Four’ broke away from the Labour Party to form a new centrist political party, the SDP. Sadly, this came to nothing in the end. But 35 years later, it is time to try again, this time starting with a break away group of pro EU Conservative MPs. Perhaps the current political crisis and the disarray in the Labour Party under Corbyn even makes it possible for them to be joined by a break away group of moderate Labour MPs. Now that would be a party I would vote for and I think would give the country an option which might beat “none of the above” as the party of choice.

A Swift update

Posted on by
A Swift update
A Swift update

A Swift update

Once again, I failed to live up to my good intentions to update this blog more in 2015. So as a new year starts, I thought I would do a few “catch up” posts covering events from last year.

The first one of these is a catch up on the coding front. I’d been playing with Swift right from the beginning, but early attempts at rewriting some parts of my Mac Finances application in Swift rapidly convinced me that Swift just wasn’t ready and I reverted to Objective C. However, I continued to play with Swift on the side as I do really like the language.

The advent of Swift 2.0 prompted me to ‘take the plunge’. I decided to completely rewrite the application in Swift – not because this is a good idea, but because I felt this would be the best way to really learn the language. I took me about 5 weeks to rewrite 12,700 lines of Objective C, working in my not very large amount of spare time, which is either a long time or surprisingly quick, depending on your perspective. It probably took me another couple of weeks to squash the final bugs that I had inadvertently introduced during the process. Overall, I’d say the experience was quite positive.

One of the things that I was intrigued to discover was whether Swift would produce more compact code, so I keep track of things as I converted things over. The outcome was a 13.6% reduction with a resulting Swift code base of 11,000 lines. I did make a few functional changes and refactored some of my earliest code along the way, so I can’t guarantee that this was all due to the language, but I kept track of the reduction as I went and it did seem pretty consistent. The reduction was only a little larger than number of lines of code in the objective C header files, so I think that elimination of these is probably the main saving. But what struck me the most was that the final Swift code was much cleaner and more elegant than the Objective C version and the “proof of the pudding” is that I would be really unhappy to have to switch back now.

0-100% Irish

Posted on by
Shamrock


0-100% Irish

As a result of my employer IAG’s “proposal to launch an offer” to acquire Irish airline Aer Lingus, I’ve been meeting quite a few new Irish people recently. Many make a comment something along the lines of: “Boyle, that’s a good Irish name. How Irish are you?”. So I’ve been giving some thought to what the answer to that question is.

Firstly, the facts. My great great grandfather Patrick Boyle was born in Ireland in 1842 of Irish parents and married a good Irish girl, Mary, of equally solid Irish parentage. So 100% Irish that far back and since I am in the direct male line of descent, perhaps I could claim to be 100% Irish today. Certainly the family name is.

Some time before the birth of my great grandfather James Boyle in 1870, the dilution of my Irish ancestry commenced with Patrick and Mary moving to Liverpool. According to the Irish rules of citizenship, as a child of Irish parents born in Ireland, James was automatically an Irish citizen. His son Austin, my grandfather, born in 1899 was not automatically an Irish citizen, but was entitled to become one due to having at least one grandparent born in Ireland. I, being a member of the fourth generation of Boyles born outside Ireland, have no rights to Irish citizenship through descent. So “zero” is also a reasonable answer to the question of how Irish I am.

But wait a minute. My great grandfather James had “pure” Irish blood as both his parents were properly Irish. And he married another Mary who, whilst born in Liverpool, also had parents who were both born in Ireland. So their son, my grandfather, was also of pure Irish blood. Only after that did the rot set in and the purity of the Boyle line begin to be diluted with non Irish blood. By that count, I’m 25% Irish.

So that clears that up then.

Tech hunting in Israel

Posted on by
The Old City, Jerusalem

Tech hunting in Israel

After three weeks catching up with ‘the day job’, I’m finally getting round to writing about a recent tech scouting trip to Israel. Four days of meeting with entrepreneurs, investors, startup companies and other participants in the Israeli technology and innovation ecosystem.

I had high expectations for the trip. Israel has acquired a reputation as the second most important centre for technology and innovation (the undisputed global capital of course remains “The Valley”). My already high expectations were exceeded and I came away deeply impressed by what has been achieved there. But overall, the thing that impressed me most was the sheer entrepreneurialism and energy of the people that I met. The willingness to take risks in pursuit of big rewards, and to treat “failure” as a opportunity to do better next time, drawing on the lessons learnt.

The UK has much to learn I think from Israel about how to foster and support innovation and create the jobs and companies of the future. There are lessons for governments, for companies and for individuals and I’d definitely recommend a trip.

Oh… and Jerusalem is pretty amazing too!

Confessions of a closet coder

Posted on by
My first computer
My first computer

Confessions of a closet coder

I promised myself to post more regularly on this blog in 2014 and after a good start, I’ve let things slide a bit recently. Laziness apart, one of the main reasons is that I’ve been busy on other projects, most notably learning to write Mac and iOS applications. “Why on earth have you been doing that?”, I hear you ask. Well if you want to know the answer, read on. However, I should warn that things are going to get a little geeky, so look away now if you are not into that kind of thing. You have been warned!

I’ve always loved programming. My first experiences, as for many others of my generation was with BASIC. In my case, it involved typing programmes into a teletype machine at school, dialling into the local council mainframe. Back in those days, “saving” your programme meant punching holes in a roll of paper tape.

Ease of use regressed further when I got my first personal computer, a Sinclair MK14. Not only did I have to assemble the machine myself, it had to be programmed in machine code, and I don’t mean assembler. I mean inputting the hexadecimal numbers that represent each instruction. Initially, there was no way to save your programmes at all – you had to type them in again after each reboot, no small task using a 20 key membrane keyboard. The only plus point was that with only 256 bytes of RAM to play with, that’s a maximum of 516 hexadecimal digits to type in.

Over the years, I’ve always tried to keep my hand in and I’ve used PASCAL, Visual Basic, Javascript, PHP, Applescript, BASH and Python. I dabbled at times with C, the low level nature of the language appealing to the machine code hacker in me. But until recently, I’ve never attempted to produce any real world programmes using the language as it was all just a bit too much hard work.

About 6 months ago, I decided to learn Objective C – an object oriented version of C that is used by Apple to develop Mac and iOS applications. I was driven by a mixture of intellectual curiosity and a desire to be able to write real Mac and iOS applications for my own use. Specifically, to replace the 45 sheet Excel spreadsheet that I use to manage my personal finances with something easier to use and maintain (I’ve tried but never liked any of the personal finance apps available in the market).

Objective C and Apple’s Cocoa frameworks have a steep learning curve, even for someone with experience of other languages. The learning resources that I found invaluable were the books from Big Nerd Ranch, video tutorials by Simon Allardice on Lynda.com and the Q&As on Stack Overflow. However, despite this learning curve, after six months my personal finances spreadsheet has been retired. The new Mac app has advanced to the point where it does the job much better. I’m not saying that you’ll be able to buy it on the app store any time soon, since it’s definitely an app targetted at a one person niche market segment. But overall I find it quite amazing that the development tools have now advanced to a point where a hobbyist like me, coding in my spare time, can learn how to build a functional Mac application in such a relatively short space of time.

The world of technology being what it is, just as soon as I’d “finished” learning Objective C (in as much as you can ever finish learning anything), Apple duly announced at this month’s WWDC developer conference that they were replacing Objective C with a new language, Swift. Having spent a couple of weeks playing with it, including experimenting with rewriting some parts of my finances application in Swift, I can say that there is much to like about the new language. To me, it brings many of the ease of use attractions of the Python language, whilst retaining the speed advantages of a low level language built on C. It solves many of the “WTF” moments I had when learning Objective C. To give one example, to add two decimal numbers A & B together in Objective C you have to use the syntax [A decimalNumberByAdding: B]. Swift has operator overloading so even for non primitive data types like NSDecimalNumber, you can use the syntax A+B. They’ve also brought across one of the great things about Python – an interactive mode where you can type commands and get an immediate response without needing to compile and run your code first, a real benefit when learning a language.

So all in all I think Swift will make it even easier to get into Mac and iOS application development. However, just at the moment it presents some additional challenges. Swift is still in beta and you still need to learn Objective C if you want to write apps today. It will take some time for the books, training videos and online Q&As that I found so useful to catch up. It has also given me a new language to learn. It’s a good job I like learning new things!