JazzTel – Theft, Deception or just technical blunders

We’ve been with Jazztel for a couple of years and generally they’ve been pretty decent but 6 months ago or so we noticed that the download speed wasn’t quite what it should be.

Our home setup is a little odd – the office is at the back of the building – almost as far away from the incoming ADSL connection as you can get. We have a Wireless N bridge between the 2 rooms – it’s a little temperamental but generally works. We have a plethora of wifi networks around us and it’s sometimes hard to find a clear channel without too much interference – so I’d assumed that the connection speed I was getting in the office was related.

More recently I’ve been able to do some proper testing of our setup and to my surprise I found that the local network was running fine. Not great but easily getting transfers of 5-10MB.

So I picked up the phone and called the usually helpful tech support of Jazztel to get some help with getting the issue fixed.

ADSL depends a lot on the distance you are from the exchange – so reaching the 20MB service we were paying for was unlikely but we were getting an avg transfer speed of 110 KBps – easily under 1MB so something was up.

Jazztel tech support has changed a lot – often the case as a company grows – and it’s not changed for the better. The first person we managed to reach was polite, helpful and quickly found that our line speed has been capped at 1MB even though their system reports that we should be getting the 20MB service. Ok – cool – so now we know it’s not an ADSL technical issue – it’s config related. Unfortunately he didn’t know how to get the cap removed – no worries he says – he’s passed it up the management food chain and we’ll get a call back the next day.

Days come & go without a call – so we call back. The experience this time however is worse – we reach an aggressive tech that tells us there is no problem and what we have is the best we’ll get. When I explain that we’ve been told otherwise and he needs to look more closely – he hangs up the phone and we end up talking to Customer Service and end-up with the usual tech support/customer-service ping-pong.

Yes there’s an issue but we don’t know how to fix it – if you’d like it fixed then you need to call tech support. Tech Support tell put you through to Customer Service – Huh!?!?

Some of the tech support can see the issue, others can’t be bothered enough to look past the automated tele-script their call center has to help.

The fact that there’s a cap on the line can be seen – and the cap is 5% of the service that’s being paid for. The actual bandwidth we’re getting is 10% less – so even though they’re happy to take your cash for a 20MB service, they’re delivering 0.5% of it.

Now it might just be a technical blunder – some config was written badly and it’s choked the line but the concern is that they don’t know how to fix it. Their system apparently doesn’t let them change the cap that’s been applied. This is worrying – as it means that management has prevented their techs from making the required change.

And if it’s a restriction put in by management – then in my mind it’s a management decision then it’s policy – which means deception & theft.

It’s a shame – they’re a young company that showed really great potential for delivering not only a decent service – but had a great ethic towards their approach to working with customers. Originally they provided a decent service for a good price without shafting customer-care, tech support or all of the other customer-oriented frills that makes a good service.

ISP’s often hide behind the ADSL “distance from exchange” statement to explain the connection speed – but this is the first time I’ve encountered masked management driven caps on the service beyond the usual Acceptable Usage Policies.

Titanium Android Modules

We’ve been beavering away working on our mobile client and where possible we’ve wrapped up parcels of code into module for Titanium.

We’ve a few out and available now – most are ready for use – a few are still in beta.

The modules available for Android are:

Paypal (Mobile payments) – http://github.com/dasher/titanium_mobile/tree/integration-paypal

UrbanAirship (Push notifications) – http://github.com/dasher/titanium_mobile/tree/integration-airship

AdMob & Smaata (Mobile ads) – http://github.com/dasher/titanium_mobile/tree/integration-ads

Google Maps (overlays & Polygons) – http://github.com/dasher/titanium_mobile/tree/master-integration

A pull request has been done to Appcelerator for integration with Titanium – so with luck they’ll appear in mainline sometime soon 🙂

Crucial Divide appoints Marina Zaliznyak

Crucial Divide appoints Marina Zaliznyak

Technology Clinic in Barcelona

Need some direction about how to use technology to bring an idea to market?

Cognitive Context

Eliza brings a couple of things to the table that other systems don’t – mostly as it allows a way to quickly load some structure into systems – which then allow the running of test data against those structures.  It’s often a way to short-circuit starting from 0 knowledge (new born infant) and to boot-strap yourself a 3 year old.  A simple example is extracting sentences from a paragraph.  It can be used as a pre-parser or a post parser or as a way of rephrasing data.  Rephrasing is a handy tool for testing validity.

It provides a vehicle for asking questions but also provides an approach to determining the relevance of information within the available context.  The term available context was used as it’s often interesting to limit the available information to cognitive processes.

You often ask questions about statements you encounter: Who, What, Where, When, Why

You’ll also have an operational mode that you’ll switch between: operational modes help to define how a cognitive process should approach the problem.

In the human model – think along the lines of how your state of mind changes based on the situational aspects of the encounter.  The context of the situation can be external, reflective or constructed.

External contexts are where we are expected to respond – maybe not to all input – but to some.  Often these situations are where an action or consensus is required.
Reflective contexts are where information is absorbed and processed – generally to bring out understanding or knowledge but also when a pattern is reverse fit – not proving a fact but re-assimilating input so that it correlates.
Constructed contexts are the what if situations & problem solving. Similar to the reflective context but more about adjusting previous input to test fitness to something new while attempting to maintain it’s validity to other knowledge.

You’ll often start in a reflective context as you assimilate information and then move into a constructed context to maximise knowledge domains.  Then you’ll often edge into the external context – while running reflective contexts in the background.  Periodically you’ll create constructed contexts to boot-strap knowledge domains and to learn from how knowledge domains are created (which in turn will tune how the reflective domains obtain information).

Essentially this is a lot of talk for saying that you don’t always need to provide an output.  🙂

Now I mentioned at the beginning that it’s often interesting to limit the information available to an available context – often it’s not only interesting but also important.  The available context is the set of prior knowledge (and the rules (or the approach) of applying the relationships to the information the it’s surrounding knowledge).

If all knowledge is available to an available context and the same approach is used for processing that information – then it’s hard for a system to determine relevance or importance of which facts to extract from data.  In essence the system can’t see the wood from the trees.

Think about how you tackle a problem you encounter – you start with one approach based on your experience (so you’re selecting and limiting the tools you’re going to apply to deal with the situation) and based on how the interaction with the situation goes – you’ll adjust.  Sometimes you’ll find that you adjust to something very basic (keep it simple stupid or one step at a time) – at others you’ll employ more complex toolsets.

The Eliza approach can be used not just as a processing engine – but also as a way of allowing cognitive systems to switch or activate the contexts I mentioned earlier.  It’s also a handy pre-parser for input into SOAR.

One of the reasons for these recent posts is after visiting zbr’s site and reading his interest in NLP and cognition.  I stumbled over his site when looking to understand more about POHMELFS, Elliptics and your DST implementation.  I’ve been looking for a paralleled distributed storage mechanism that is fast and supports a decent approach to versioning for a while for a NLP & MT approach.  Distribution and parallelism are required as I implement a virtualised agent approach which allow me to run modified instances of knowledge domains and/or rules to create dynamic contexts.  Versioning is important as it allows working with information from earlier time periods, replaying the formation of rules and assumptions and greatly helps to roll-back processing should the current decision tree appear fruitless.  In human cognitive terms these act as sub-concious processing domains.