Life as I find it

MTNL Triband is cheap, easy to set up, and reasonably reliable when all you do is surf. When you end up downloading a lot of data, you find that there is much to discover on the front of getting what you pay for. I just tested the regular speed I get on my modem, and it turned out to be 100kbps. No wonder my MTNL connection always seemed slow. And no, it wasn’t any slower than usual when I tested. Was running normally for it.

Now, the thing is, I have never paid for a slow connection as such. One of the main reasons for signing up for Triband was MTNL’s clear statement that cable internet providers provide speeds less than 256kbps, and speeds under 256kbps don’t qualify as broadband.

SO I signed up for 512kbps, and when it still seemed slow, upgraded to 1mbps Still, no change in performance. At which point, I tested the speeds I was actually getting. My modem shows 256kbps, while any online test shows around 100 +/- 5. So where is all this money I’ve paid MTNL for 4 years gone?

Apparently, I’m not the only one. Almost every person, regardless of what plan they choose seems to begin from slow speeds and it takes complaints about slow speeds to get them to raise your limits to what you paid for. Out of 17 people I spoke with, only 3 began their internet connections with the speeds they paid for. 4 of them complained about slow speeds a couple of times, and it was increased. 1 has a recurring problem with speed on a connection that should give him 512kbps. He complains, it goes up, and is slow again after some days. 6 others with the 512kbps night unlimited plan had never checked the speeds they got since they mostly used them for surfing and downloading when they were sleeping, but on my insistence checked and were angry to discover that they were not even getting half the speed the plan charges them for. The others were miscellaneous cases with complicated stories of plan changes/problems and not much relevant to speed.

My husband thinks I should go to the consumer courts. However, the problem with this is that consumer courts would like you to first approach MTNL, at which point they readily increase your speed – so then you don’t really have a complaint left for the court.

What I am looking at is this default “setting” that cheats people on a regular basis till they complain. If their billing system can refer to their records of my plan and bill according to that, why can’t their speed system refer to the same plan and provide according to that?

In MTNL’s own words, they are not providing a broadband service, since their speeds are not exceeding 256kbps.

Oh, they have the capacity – I’ve seen lightening fast MTNL connections. Incredible speeds, and real value for money. The thing is, you have to not just pay for it, but make sure that you test the speed you get and insist that they give you what you paid for.

What would be the electricity bill for the additional usage of the computer when my downloads took over 5 times the time they should for over 3 years? Who compensates me for this? Maybe we need a PIL.

I don’t deny that there was great bravery shown on all fronts against the terrorists. Yet, as we move on from the tragedy, the urgency is blurring. At this time, I want to take a moment to look at things that could have been better.

Equipment and training: I put these together, since it would be even more embarrassing to have an armed hawaldar disarmed by a criminal and his weapon used to create further harm. I think it is not enough to just arm our cops, but to instill in them certain standards of professionalism and pride in their roles. This needs to be backed up with adequate training. Not a small task, but necessary. Cops waving lathis chasing terrorists armed with AK47s is an image that doesn’t instill respect, no matter how brave they are. And it isn’t only about terrorism. In a world where every self respecting criminal has fancy arms, its about the cops feeling empowered enough to be a difference.

Emergency responses: Our emergency response needs designing. Note that I’m not speaking of updating or overhauling. If it takes over half an hour for the local cops to respond, its not a design worth keeping. Scrap it, work from scratch, and come up with something that allows the police response to be as near to the travelling time from the nearest presence as possible. This basically means that cops being trained to respond ASAP and their routines planned to accommodate at least one quick response team at any given time from any station.

Media: This has two sides. One is the media – there needs to be a plan about covering emergencies like this. This plan needs to include boundaries of what is not to be broadcast to the public. It wouldn’t even harm to continue with regular programmes with regular updates instead of creating a live test match out of a sensitive situation and compounding it with unconfirmed, contradictory information, rumours and speculation, which perhaps was a blessing if the terrorists were indeed following it. The other side of this is PR people for the cops/armed forces if their representatives can’t resist giving out information. Obviously the people of the country want information, but how much information is necessary to give immediately and what can wait till the end of the operation? What kind of information will help the country more in the situation? I imagine that I’d have preferred a blank screen rather than live telecast of commandoes rappelling to the top of the Nariman house for example. A simple statement like the army has been involved would be far better than details of which commandos, how many, and shots where their equipment is clearly seen. Go ahead, shoot it, and edit it into a breathtaking special after its all over, but not at a time when the criminals can get tactical information directly. There was a hue and cry over twitter which is full of rumours and tough to decipher with over 80 messages a second, yet clear shots of the commandos and their weapons continued, including direct statements like “bodies being carried out of the back entrance of the Taj”. No one is going to blame an official for refusing to share potentially sensitive information in the middle of a situation and no one is going to blame the media person who refuses to air it till safe.

Intelligence: We need to figure out a system for wading through all the information we get and working with it. Too much information was wasted that turns up now likehints of this plot coming up from terrorist captures in Lucknow, Kashmir, fishermen….. Nothing seems to have been done out of it. Ignoring intelligence defeats the entire purpose of gathering it in the first place.

Citizens: We have a concerned community alive to the dangers of terrorism. Is there a way that we can harness the helpless frustration of those camping out on twitter (for example). Can we engage volunteers to find out information, report things, sift through reports to remove the random chatter from the potential information, spread awareness, work on social integration objectives……?

Politics: Is there a way that we can bring parties together quickly in an emergency and work in collaboration to reassure, organize and manage the country by working with their audiences that support them?

There is so much potential for efficiency without even creating new structures. Can we try and ensure that things work as they should?

Thought I’d write something different this time. As more and more users access the net from their phones, it could be a good thing to design a version of the website that is suitable for mobile browsing.

Information abounds about how to adapt an existing site to mobiles like Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly in Two Minutes. This information is easy to find, and is a good step I guess.

On my to-do list currently, is a way of identifying visitors using mobile phones and redirecting them to the mobile version. Failing that, I can always put up a link to the mobile version.

Another thing I would like to do is rewrite my content so that it is brief – in the sense that it mentions the salient points of the subject and the length of the pages is short, links are better manages, etc.

Some tips I have made out for myself to design the site:

• Planning a simple site with no columns, css, javascript, images and other stuff that could delay loading or clutter the tiny screens.
• Creating an edited version of the content to convey salient points – more information than entertainment.
• Changing the link structure to remove alt tags and using immediately relevant links with some logical deeper links, rather than the bulk of deep links available on the original site.
• I don’t use pop-ups at all, but going through the code in any case to look at links that open in new windows and stuff. I doubt if anyone is going to appreciate losing the page they were on.
• Figuring out links to switch between the mobile and normal version.

I got myself a new Lenovo laptop with a Vista pre installed. I thought this would be the ultimate in freedom, etc. Unfortunately, it is not so. My laptop runs like a bullock cart even with 1GB of RAM. Sad.

I am used to super speeds with 1GB on my desktop. So what do I do. I thought of trashing the Vista and installing a Linux OS instead, like on my desktop. But then, there is a new problem. My Ubuntu Fiesty Live CD doesn’t recognise the touchpad and keyboard on my laptop at all What do I do now?

One way is drowning myself into Linux and making it work somehow. But I don’t trust my own abilities that heavily yet. I need to figure out a way of making the thing work, or my laptop is going to remain an expensive and oversize papaer weight.

I am currently trying some “hacks” for speeding up Vista. Recording everything I’m doing, and seeing how it works as well.

Hack no 1: Enhancing the performance of my SATA disk:

Do I have one? Er…. yes I’m a total newbie about some things.

I’m supposed to “expand disk drives” in my device manager according to this article. Ok, doing it…….. Ugh. Its so slow! I took some 3 minutes getting into the device manager…. and the SH** of it is that I get “not responding” no matter what I do for most stuff.

Back! I went to Device manager> Disk Drives> Right clicked my hard drive and checked enable advanced performance

There is a warning next ot it that it isn’t a good idea for computers without a back up power source, but since mine is a laptop, that’s not a problem. Unfortunately, the machine still isn’t as fast as I like and am used to getting with this configuration.

Let’s see what else I can do.

Hack No 2: Using my pen drive as an extended RAM with the ready boost feature

This seems fairly simple. I plugin my pen drive and wait for the auto play menu to ask me what to do. Then, I pick the option to speed up my system, and that allows it to use space in that drive for disk caching, and make the whole mess a little faster.

Doing it…….. Vista is still trying to read that empty drive and come up witht he box trying to ask me what to do. Done it, but oops. This device is not suitable. According to this article, the specs are at least 64MB USB2 device abole to read at 3.5MB and write at 2.5MB. Mine is a 1GB pendrive, so I guess it fails on the other requirements. I guess Microsucks wants me to buy a new pen drive too – as though the laptop wasn’t investment enough.

Hack No 3: Disabling network printer search

Unchecking Automatically search for network printers in Explorer>Tools>Folder Options>View tab

Strange – I don’t have this option at all – either checked or unchecked. I must have lost patience and disabled printers or something before doing this. So this is also not going to gain me speed.

Now what?

Hack No 4: Disabling the welcome center

I did click something or the other that makes it stop showing on start up, but this article wants me to go into the registry and do it. I guess to kill it from the root without even bothering for it to go around figuring out if it should load or not. I normally am leery about getting into the registry, but I guess I’m not going to miss the welcome center in any big way….

So fine. Start regegit>HKEY_CURRENT_USER, Software, Microsoft, Windows, CurrentVersion, Run> Delete WindowsWelcomeCenter Key. Ok, so this is the long route method. I already don’t have that key. Clicking the box that tells it not to load on start up seems to have done the same trick.

Hack No 5: Cleaning up the Start up applications

I’ve done it already

So far, so slow. Will hunt around for more options, or for my keyboard and touch pad drivers for the Ubuntu. Let’s see what happens first.