Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 28 November 1998, 9:32 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
What can I say about DSL? I've now been on BT's ADSL trial for a couple of weeks now, and it is fabulous. In some ways, it really shows up the raw spots on the Internet: when you get some things coming in at the speed of light, the slow bits and the broken links become really annoying. But having it there all the time, with the entirety of the Internet just an Alt-Tab away, changes the computing experience entirely.
And is it fast? Yes, it's fast. I've taken to sitting at work, tut-tutting at my Web browser and saying `Of course, it's much faster at home'. I normally then say `Ouch', as an irate co-worker decides to do an impromptu drop-kick test on whatever heavy PDA is currently in the office, with my head as the impact zone. You don't think they're jealous, do you? Hee-hee!
However: DSL can be damaging to your health. A friend of mine, also on the trial, was noticably shaken when I met them one evening. Apparently, they were looking at some high-speed streaming video from Germany (there's not very much about, so you takes what you finds), when the connection got slow The face of the Teuton being transmitted broke up into large colourful blocks, and wobbled around no end - thus triggering, my friend related, an immediate flashback to an experience they had some twenty years ago with some illicit chemicals where an entire room of people's faces did exactly the same.
Later that evening, I'm asked what I think of the AOL/Netscape/Sun menage-a-trois. How odd, I think. Perhaps AOL wants a good presence on the Web, and NetCentral is certainly that - but $4 billion good? Perhaps AOL wants control over its own browser software. Perhaps it's getting substantial dosh from Sun for the Netscape server stuff. And that $4 billion isn't really there at all. But nothing quite makes sense. Definitely one news story that's very deserving of being left alone until something actually happens that actually affects someone.
Tuesday
Off to Dublin, where the girls are (by repute) so pretty and the buildings are covered in big black irregular splodges. At least, my destination -- Gateway's factory on the outskirts of the fair city -- has said décor. Cold? It was Friesian!
Gateway has gathered us (around 15 journalists) to let us know of its cunning plan. While the world and its Compaq is going direct, sell-on-the-Web and cut out the middleman - Gateway's going indirect. For its upmarket servers, the product of its merger with ALR, it is appointing a load of dealers and providing them with all manner of juicy benefits. I suppose it doesn't fancy coping with support, and I suppose people buying servers would really rather have a human involved in any transaction that involves their company's electronic lifeblood. But still, it seems an odd thing to do. We shall see.
We sit through the PowerPoint briefings (have I ever said how much I hate PowerPoint? Nothing in particular about it warrants my intense dislike, but it's a crystallisation of the least attractive bits of corporate culture. A bit like The Suit -- which, I read, more than 50% of American business people fully expect to have disappeared, along with the tie, as part of the ordinary business scene within the next ten years. Fight on, my open-necked brothers and T-shirted sisters, fight on. We are so nearly there...). We do the factory tour -- the comparison with the Dell factory in Austin, Texas where I was a couple of years ago is most instructive. Stasis at Dell was as common as motion at Gateway. We eat a substantial Irish lunch of roast beef and four vegetables - two of which are potatoes, none of which is green - and we do a little more PowerPointing.
Then came the evening. I know what you're expecting here - sordid details of Guinness and diddly-dee music, Garda and late-night chases through the countryside, illicit liaisons and Joycean excess. Well, I'm not saying. Put it this way: we showed those tiresome stag parties in Temple Bar how one really does have a good time without damaging one's dignity. Although the incident with the giant elk was probably pushing it a bit...
Wednesday
Calamity! I am undone! The flight back leaves Dublin Airport at eleven. I awake, slowly, at ten to eleven, in an abandoned hotel. How could they DO this to me? There were a handy five other Ziffies on the trip: would they all have left me here to unknown terrors behind enemy lines?
Now, before you wag your fingers at me for perhaps overdoing it the night before and being in some way an architect of my own downfall -- a factor, I admit, but not normally an overriding one -- I wish the court to consider the following factors. Uniquely, in my experience, the hotel room had no alarm clock. Also, the phone didn't work - no, not even a little bit. So, when (as it transpires) the hotel front desk tried to phone me the next morning, it's hardly surprising that they got no answer -- although since I'd asked for the phone to be fixed the night before, it's a little strange that they tried at all.
As for the strange case of the missing Ziffies: my natural good humour and respect for my co-workers means I shall have to be as mysteriously obtuse here as I was about the night before.
And so on, and so forth. I finally crawl into the office at 6pm, which is unfortunate as I have to give a -- spit, boil, hawk, ptui -- PowerPoint presentation at 9am the next morning and I have an 8pm appointment this evening. Which leaves me the midnight hours to put the darn thing together.
Thursday
Am I tired? Am I more cream-crackered than Mr Jacob's factory? Yes. I give my talk (about The Future Of Technology to a gazillion BT management types in an airless basement in Tottenham Court Road: for some reason, this scene had never suggested itself to me whenever I'd mused on my future). I get back to work in time to see UUNet, which is doing quite nice things with global roaming for its dial-up corporate customers. I realise after the event that I should've asked things about stuff like DNS latency, but my own internal name lookup server is showing severe signs of lag.
Friday
Y'know, I'm really, really confused about this DSL business. Today, BT tells me that its going to be launching BT Interactive on December 9th. Now, BT Interactive is the content that all us triallists get connected to by default - it's going to be a collation of video-on-demand, news, weather, education, and other online services that all demand high-bandwidth connection. It needs, in fact, DSL. So is this the launch of the service. "No", said the PR. But DSL will be necessary for BT Interactive? "Yesss...", said the PR.
So that's clear, then.
Other oddities: BT has spent thousands per triallist providing routers, modems, PC World engineers and other bits -- but do we have anywhere to report technical problems, suggestions or give feedback? Not really: there's a helpline number, but that's really there to get people going. They gave me a general purpose email address, which hasn't replied in over a week to a request I sent about proxy configuration.
Odd way to run a trial. One might even suspect that they were just doing it to generate some traffic to fine-tune their connectivity before launching DSL to everyone, very soon, and us triallists are just necessary bits of the machine.
But it is wonderful. You'll love it. When you get it. Hey, don't point that PDA at me.... OUCH!
Saturday 21 November 1998, 6:25 AM
Rupert Goodwin's diary
This is going to be a hard week. Since so many people are over at Comdex, I've agreed to help put together the Client Section of IT Week. This involves organisation, timeliness and an amount of eyes-on-the-balliness that I'm not normally a natural for, so I'm worried. Copy doesn't come in, other stuff doesn't quite fit, and along the way I have to write stuff myself. Everyone else manages it, I tell myself, so I try and manage it too. Not too bad, Monday. But then there's three more days before everything's gone so I must be ultra-sensible and well-behaved. Nothing too extreme...
Tuesday
It's the start of the party season and following a hard day pushing news stories around, checking URLs, much chewing of lips (my own, alas) over what goes where and how much space to give it, I and many of my fellows depart to a club in Covent Garden to take part in Banner PR's Quiz Night.
The place is large and packed to the pavement with teams of IT journalists. I never realised there were quite so many of us -- and, terrifyingly, half of them appear to be up past their bedtime. Banner has arranged the quiz itself into five parts, each sponsored by a different client: I suspect this is the only way the gargantuan bar tab can be covered. For not only is this the first bash of Christmas '98, it seems as if everyone involved has been on a rigorous drying-out regime since January and is determined to make up for lost time.
Of the quiz itself, little need be said. It was a pub quiz rendered slightly swisher through PowerPoint and a projector, with video clips and the like. It started off sensibly, but by the end various forms of chaos had broken out and I can't say with any degree of accuracy who won. And would you have known the number on the side of Herbie in The Love Bug?
The highlight, of course, was the gossip. I've been out of the loop too long on this, but soon acquire a sufficiently large collection of snippets to trade. The evening ends well into the small hours of the next morning...
Wednesday
....and I wake up on a sofa somewhere near Marylebone High Street.
Tomorrow night, I promise myself as I weave a very fuzzy path down Oxford Street towards the tube, tomorrow night I will get to bed early and get a good eight hours kip. Nor is the damage limited to myself: it's probably most polite to describe the team spirit as 'subdued'.
Fortunately, today's tasks require little in the way of mentally-incisive reportage and technical awareness and much by way of editing, cutting, URL checking and the general machinery of putting the section together. But there's lots to do, and I end up wending an exceptionally weary way home at ten.
At half-past ten, the mobile rings. It's the Beeb, which has dragged my name up from its database of meeja-friendly techohacks. What do I think about this report of Intel's CEO saying that Dixons is poisoning the UK market through setting margins too high? I tell them what I think, and then I tell them what I think is broadcastable. Fine, they say. Can you make it in for Business Breakfast at 6:30 tomorrow morning?
Which means a 5am start. I briefly consider doing the sensible thing and telling them I'm half-dead through self-inflicted suffering, but my Media Tart persona kicks in and I find myself agreeing.
Home to bed and I set up three alarm calls. Star 55 star oh five oh oh hash... star 55 star oh five oh five hash... star 55...
Thursday
... oh five one oh. Ugh. Not only is it five in the morning, not only have I got to get up, but I have to look at least reasonably smart. Radio is so much more civilised. The rest is a blur, until I find myself sitting next to an impossibly-awake presenter at 06:40, busy trying not to make too much by way of an idiot of myself. At least I can stumble back home and get a couple more hours zizz before work. Oh no I can't. They want to run another interview at 07:40. That one goes even worse... but perhaps an hour's kip? Nope, I'm then dragged upstairs to record the same thing again for some lunchtime program on BBC 2. By now, it's about half past eight and I can just about get into the office before everyone else (which is a good thing as I don't normally manage it and it's nice to see the looks of surprise on people's faces).
Since they then use the same interview on the six o'clock news on BBC1, this makes a grand total of four outings for Rupe TV -- my all-time record. Needless to say, by the end of the day I am worn out like a cloth. On no account should I go to the Harvard PR party with live musicians, magicians and a goodly gaggle of people....
Friday.
...boy, that was silly of me!
But the work of the week is mostly done
At last! The man from Mastercare turns up, carrying network card, disk and cable. He's here to fix up a PC so it will work with DSL! Hurrah! I'll write up how that went next week, but it's been a remarkable experience with BT not telling any triallists what's actually going on and the triallists clubbing together to find out anyway. We're just about there now. As Michael Palin says, it's all jolly exciting.
Saturday 14 November 1998, 6:03 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Come back to some strange tales. The Internet went down, say friends, on Sunday. I wander onto the Net and search for cries of pain. I find them. To cut a long story short, it turns out that a bug in router firmware responded badly to a stream of bad packets that hit UUNET, and that the UUNET backbone turned into a monster. Other networks hurriedly disconnected, and it took around five hours to repair the damage.
If you look at UUNET's pages, you find lots and lots of confident copy saying how bomb-proof its network is. Well, it isn't. And this sort of problem could hit anyone - and next time, it could last longer.
We assume the Internet is safe and reliable, if not as good as it will be. It's important to remember it's not intrinsically reliable at all, and one day it might go away for quite a long time.
But what can we use as a backup?
Tuesday
Shooting the breeze with Peter Judge, Morris-dancing, hirsute and terribly good-eggish editor of the Network section of IT Week, we come up with a glorious plan. Pinging for people. I'll design and build a set of tiny radio-frequency tags that come with unique IDs, together with a cheap scanner that picks them up and routes the info to the Net. With these everywhere, you'll be able to find where your car keys are -- from anywhere in the world! Check up on your girlfriend or boyfriend! Never lose your dog again! Never lose anything again!
We develop the idea. Slap one on a book and leave it in a second-hand shop, and you can tell when its been bought and, once its been taken home, who's bought it. Pick the implications out of that one for privacy and marketing potential. Weave them into banknotes. Have manufacturer-specific ones, so you can tell how many Ford Kas or pink wooly jumpers are in a particular area. It would be a world in which nothing could be stolen, or kept secret. And it's not a difficult technology.
Should we build a prototype? Or should I just write a SF novel about it?
Wednesday
IBM unveils ‘the biggest disk in the world' (which I misread. I stop laughing about a minute later), 25 gigabytes of storage, mate. I do some calculations, and realise that this is Enough. I can do my video editing. I can store vast chunks of data dragged from the Net. I can build huge models of weather systems. I can record Radios 1,3 and 4 all day and work out what I want to listen to when I get home. This sort of technology can - and will - change the way we think about our everyday information. It's very exciting, and I want one.
But what can we use as a backup?
Thursday
What a bizarre day. I head off into town to see SilkRoad, an optical data communications company that is making some extraordinary claims for its technologies. Most very high speed optical systems use banks of lasers tuned to different frequencies shining down a fibre; this way, you can stack up tens of gigabit links to make a terabit (a million megabits) connection. This is remarkable, but very expensive and rather cumbersome. SilkRoad (infelicitously spelled SilkToad in one press report, which has stuck inside IT Week as the preferred name for the company) says it can do all this and more with one single laser on one single frequency. If right, it's a major story.
The trouble is, I can't make head nor tail of the reports I read. So I'm very much looking forward to meeting the people themselves and digging down into the photonic nitty-gritty. I'm no fibre expert, but most of the interesting stuff tends to be not too different to radio at heart and I'll soak that up until it Hertz.
An hour and a half later, and I stagger bleary-eyed out onto the pavement having tried very hard not to drown under a torrent of concepts. But then, what can a man do when the opening shot from the company's representative is a rattling exposition of non-zero tau solutions to Maxwell's equations? If you've never done a physics or electronics degree, you probably won't have heard of these - they're the fundamental building block of electromagnetism but having them thrown at me here is like having a hard disk manufacturer starting his spiel with a discussion of quantum chromodynamics and its relation to magnetic moments. Not useful. The rest isn't much better - block diagrams that almost, but not quite, make sense; tales of non-synchronised clocks and single sidebands; non-spreading pulses; beamsplitters from Radio Shack. It just doesn't gel. I know this stuff. Why isn't it making sense?
I go and talk to some independent optical datacomms specialists, who come back with the same story. "I've been covering the field for twenty years", said one, "and I can't understand a word of it. Nobody I've talked to claims to understand it either". But our man from SilkRoad had told me that the Wall Street analysts were bowled over by the technology, that telcos were clamouring to invest, that competitors were aghast. I suppose it's all under NDA, but the optical datacomms community is small and chattery and doesn't go much on secrets. As I said, bizarre.
And there the story must wait for me to get my paws on some promised technical documentation. It's either a mammoth breakthrough or... I don't know how to finish that sentence. When I do, I'll get back to you.
Friday
It's DSL day. Hold on, let me say that again. IT'S DSL DAY! The day when BT comes in to install my very own, very personal 2 megabit/s Internet connection. Whap! Here's a courier at the door, clutching a large box. I sign for it, but before I can drag it upstairs, whap! Here's a nice engineer clutching a test meter! Blimey.
I sit and natter while he bolts boxes to the wall. One splitter, check. One ADSL modem, check. One ATM router, cunningly badged as a BT product but with no other identification, check. An hour later, it's all up and running. The exchange can ping the router, the router and the modem are cheerfully sprinkled with green flashing lights (which go orange if I pull leads out, so that's all right), and I'm ready to go. Whoo-woooooh!
Only I'm not. As part of the rather convoluted trial scheme, I now have to get an Ethernet card and some ‘security software' fitted to my PC by - gulp - PC World. Or, in other words, Mastercare. And that can't happen for another three days... so I'm going to be stuck staring longingly at a 10-baseT socket all weekend, just imagining the packets patiently queuing there.
So, I get bored. So, I pull apart the router. So, I discover it's a Flowpoint 2025 with oodles of fun options. So I suddenly think that if I actually play with any of them, BT will be mad at me and I really want to keep this trial. So I put it back together again and pretend I didn't do it.
I shall also resist the temptation to just plug in an Ethernet card myself and see what happens, this weekend. Honest.
But it's hard to wait...
Saturday 7 November 1998, 7:39 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Come back to a delightful sight -- a 20-page internal memo from Microsoft adorning the Web. It's all about what the company thinks of open source software; the sort of thing where people write code, then give it away with a licence for others to do with it what they will -- provided only that they then give away the results. Or sell them, if they wish, but there has to be a give-away option.
To Microsoft, this is anathema. Unfortunately, it also works rather well, with Linux, Apache and many other delights doing things that Microsoft does only better. This is causing no small commotion in the hallowed halls of Bill. The memo seems the genuine article, and details such options as taking over various standards and making them much more complex, or identifying key open source developers and hiring them. Of course, this memo is a delightful vindication of the power of open source and Microsoft's much-derided reflexes: it may also herald the beginning of open source thinking catching hold everywhere.
Watch this space. The revolution may be about to go live.
Tuesday
Ionica gurgles away. This wireless telephone system has little left but a small gaggle of consumers and an out-of-date technology: so why, by all accounts, is Alan Sugar sniffing around the still-warm corpse?
The most valuable part of the company may well be the licence to operate a full telephone system. Re-engineered with more cost-effective, higher capacity radio links, Ionica still has the capability to be an exciting part of the UK telephone scene. And Alan Sugar must realise that once the smoke clears from the forest fire of change crackling away in telecommunications, there'll be more people communicating for longer than ever before -- and there will be some golden markets. The man is rich and bored, and the UK telco market is badly in need of some aggressive, no-nonsense cut-to-the-chase marketing. Alan's yer man...
Of course, it's not the first time Sugar's taken an interest in a Telco.
Wednesday
YES! This shout rends the air in the IT Week offices as I joyously throw the phone down. What has made me so happy? Why, those lovely people at BT, of course, of whom I will not hear a bad word said. They've only gone and given me a date for my xDSL connection! Friday the, um, 13th... oh, well.
I begin to sketch out my installation for the testing thereof. Let's see -- router, couple of servers, a decent gaming machine -- after all, have to test Wireplay for PC Gaming World -- and a firewall. Ah.
One of the downsides to being permanently connected to the Internet is that nasty people can find your computer and surreptitiously beat it up when you're not around. What the world needs, and badly, is a single-client Windows 95/98 firewall. No such beast exists. Without it, there will be a significant backlash against xDSL and cable modems -- wait for the first scare story in the media -- and that'll slow the market down. And, I think, it should be open source -- like Linux.
Why open source? Because that's by far the best way to ensure reliability, safety, quick release and sensible updates. It could be got going fairly quickly and released to the world -- any protection is better than none -- and it may well turn out to be the first widespread open-source Windows program.
Any volunteers? It needs to happen, and soon...
Thursday
Off to a small winebar in Soho, where I sit beneath a heart-warming picture of the widow Clicquot and discuss a wide variety of matters with Bill Pechey, his astounding wife Doreen (oops, Eur Ing Doreen Pechey BSc CMath MIMA CEng MIEE, and that's not the half of it) and mutual friend Sue Starie. Bill and Sue both used to work for Hayes -- Sue as PR, and Bill as Technical Guru. He's the sort of person who chairs ITU (International Telecommunications Union) committees on standards -- if you've got a modem, there's something of Bill beneath the covers. He's not the sort of person Hayes should've made redundant last Friday. But they did, and he's currently "investigating options" as they say. Tonight's option appears to be Cabernet Sauvignon, and it's v. yummy.
The wine flows and conversation becomes more animated. Of course, I can't reveal more than a tenth of what was said -- like what Bill and Doreen were doing in the bushes around Chequers with two-way radios one night during the Gulf War, or what Dennis Hayes is spending his money on these days -- but there appears to be no shortage of people keen to get Bill on board. If you need a technical director of the very highest calibre for your company, you could do worse than drop him a note on bpechey@cix.co.uk. But do it quickly.
It'd be especially nice if he got a job that keeps him on the various ITU committees to which he contributes. That way, the flow of stories about what actually happens in various Geneva restaurants can continue unabated -- and did you know that if you chair an ITU committee you get diplomatic status? That means you can get into the Special Section of the duty-free shops, "where vodka costs three pounds a litre", sighed Bill, "the same as the orange juice to put it in". Why the governments of the world consider it essential that their diplomats can get parsimoniously steaming, I do not know.
Explains a lot about international affairs, mind.
Friday
"Look at this!" The note from PC Magazine points me at a news story in the US Electronic Times (Here -- but come back afterwards!). This talks about Silk Road, a new optical networking technology that does... it's not exactly clear. 93 gigabits a second sounds astonishingly healthy, though, especially since it uses a single laser on a single frequency. Every other multi-gigabit optical network uses loads of both. Unfortunately, the technical explanation seems obscure to the point of whiffiness. I'm sure more clarity will be forthcoming.
Hearteningly, the article manages to call the technology Silk Toad halfway through. I shall from henceforth think of smooth yet warty amphibians whenever the discussion turns to optical fibres.
Ribbit!
