Read all about it in the Daily Tweet! Turn your Twitter stream into a newspaper

If you find keeping up with your Twitter stream hard going, as the updates whizz by and you waste time frantically scrolling up and down trying to find the connected tweets, don't despair: there is a more leisurely way to enjoy them.

It's still in alpha, but paper.li have put together a pretty impressive service, although they do warn that "newspapers" may be deleted at any time while they readjust the old load balancers and walk that dangerous tightrope walk that new services do. That's OK though, because creating a replacement newspaper is so easy, it's too trivial to be worth explaining (even for this trivial blog).
So why not give it a try? Long time Twitterers will enjoy seeing tweets in a new format and perhaps long time sceptics will be converted by something that actually looks useful and readable.
Only time will tell.

Further Reading

• Paper.li - Reading Twitter As If It Were A Newspaper (killerstartups.com)
• TweetyMail.com - Mixing Email With Twitter (killerstartups.com)
• tDash.org - A New Twitter Client (killerstartups.com)
• ManageFlitter.com - Tidy Up Your Twitter Account (killerstartups.com)
• Twitter and theregister. Why it doesn't work (go.theregister.com)

Fun and Games with Error 1316 - yet another reason why we don't want or need the Windows Installer

This morning I was trying to upgrade my Sametime 7.5.1 to Sametime 8.0.2 to see if I could fix (once and for all) some long running issues with external group loading and Voice Suite.
After downloading the ST 8.0.2 binaries, I closed my ST 7.5.1 and double-clicked on the sametime802.msi to start the install. Assuming it would auto-detect the existing, older version of Sametime on my system, and let me choose an upgrade option, I was a bit surprised it just exited, telling me to uninstall the old version first.

So, like an obedient little end-user, off I went to Start > Run > control > Add/Remove Programs (it's an XP Pro system) and found the IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 entry. I clicked remove and after about 2 seconds, I got this message:

Error 1316. A network error occurred while attempting to read from the file

C:\Windows\Installer\sametime802.msi

Now, you could get this error with almost any program that you were trying to install over the top of itself, upgrade or uninstall - it basically seems to occur when the msi entry is missing from the registry (I think, at least, it was that in my case) - it's not a Sametime specific issue.

Image via Wikipedia

You're obviously not going to get this if the program doesn't use or need msi, and I think software companies really shouldn't ever use the Windows Installer (msi). I'm not sure why any of them do, because it's terrible and a common source of problems. I remember myself and a work colleague having a nightmare with upgrading Symantec from version 9 to 10 a few years back on about 50 machines. I almost always failed with a cryptic error code, and in the end we had to run NONAV to completely remove every trace of Symantec 9 before we could get the version 10 installer to complete.


Anyway, I digress. If you're still reading, you obviously want to know how to get your program installed/upgraded/uninstalled, so I'll stop drivelling on... Here's how:

1. Go and grab yourself a copy of the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility from Microsoft  (note: you can read all about it here)
2. Double-click on the executable file you just downloaded - it should be called msicuu2.exe
3. You'll get the usual startup (unless you're a Windows 7 and possibly Vista user, where you'll just get a VBScript error instead ;-) and then you'll get presented with a list of all the programs you have installed that use msi, which looks like this:

4. Select the program you wish to remove, and click "Remove"
5. You'll see a typical Microsoft "Are you sure?" screen, but it explains that you are not actually uninstalling the program, but are in fact just removing the entry from the msi (Windows Installer) database:

6. Click OK, and you're done. You can now proceed to do whatever it was you were trying to do before, and it should work - no more Error 1316!

Further Reading

• How to resolve Common "Windows Installer" Problems (microsoft.com)
• Microsoft releases slew of stability-oriented Windows fixes (arstechnica.com)
• IBM adds meeting functionality to Sametime (v3.co.uk)
• Error 1316. A network error occurred (jakeludington.com)
• Windows Installer 4.5 - Download Free (techblissonline.com)
• RADVISION Enhances IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5 with High Definition Multiparty Conferencing and Telepresence Connectivity (eon.businesswire.com)
• Optimizing your Windows Registry (mt-soft.com.ar)
• Software FYI: Windows Error Code Lookup Tool (winextra.com)
• How Do You Get Users To Read Error Messages? (ask.slashdot.org)

Some Top Tools for Sysadmins

Image via Wikipedia

 jEdit
The world's most powerful editor and a pretty good IDE for too many languages to mention. Once you try the regular expression hypersearch function you won't ever look back.

Notepad2
For a super-lightweight, blindingly quick and simple replacement for Window's default editor, you can't go wrong with this baby. It's a genuine, simple replacement for notepad, unlike Notepad++, which (IMO) does too much to be really quick and simple, and too little to compete with jEdit or UltraEdit32. 

Beyond Compare
While jEdit has a comparison plugin - jDiff, it doesn't begin to compare (sorry) with Scootersoftware's minor masterpiece. This will compare directories, files of all types and all kinds of archives (even war, bin, cat and jar files, to name but a few). Old versions are available for free.

Fiddler2
While some might argue this isn't really in the domain of a typical sysadmin, I think understanding exactly why a page is throwing an HTTP error 500 code, or why a certain component renders slowly or never loads at all is pretty useful, especially since the post-financial crisis sysadmin typically has to take on many jobs that would normally fall to developers, webmasters and software engineers.

Radmin
While there's are a lot of remote control software out there, I've never tried one that is quite as good for remote administration of multiple Windows clients. Free is great, but sometimes, you only get what you pay for.

ZipGenius
While the version for 64-bit Windows 7 leaves a lot to be desired (they are still working on shell integration), ZipGenius rules on 32-bit Windows systems. Incorporating 7-zip binaries, as well as many others, such as C.A.K.E, UnRar and UnAce,there is little or nothing that ZipGenius can't open. It's missing the ability to simply GZIP files (it TARs and GZIPs them instead).

PuTTY
A free Telnet and SSH client that still can't be beat for its simplicity and power. Put it on a stick and shake it at every problem you've got.

Filezilla
The ubiquitous FTP client that's so obvious that we forget it's even there. There's a lot of competition in this area, but its still a winner for me. It's my FTP server of choice too.

phpMyAdmin
OK, so not all sysadmins use MySQL - but they should. There's every reason to have at least one instance of MySQL running, most sysadmins these days are at least part time solution developers. If there's a reason to have MySQL, there's a reason to have phpMyAdmin.

SQuirrel SQL Client
For every other DB, there's SQuirrel SQL. Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, Derby, posegreSQL - you name it, they have a driver for it.

Eclipse
There are so many plugins for Eclipse, and so many tools that can run on its framework, that there is no way a serious sysadmin should be without this. Want to put together a website with some PHP? Try the PHP perspective. Need to glue some disparate applications together, use the perl perspective. Got JVMs heapdumping? Use the memory profiler, load up some verbose gc logs and away you go. I could go on, but you probably get the picture. You can say it does a bit of everything, and none of it very well. But it is flexible, and its free.

Clonezilla
Backup and clone a system to many computers thanks to Clonezilla's use of multicasting. No need for the slavish one-at-a-time approach that can make a sysadmin suicidal, and that can only be a good thing.

LogMeIn
This has to be the biggy. You're offsite. You're online. You need to assist your client right now. They could be 40km away, or they could be 4,000km away. This one is priceless. Maybe you have to get to your work desktop while working from home without access to a VPN. If you're company allows it, use it. If it doesn't, invest in one of the many expensive alternatives - WebEx, Sametime Unyte, AOS.

Yes, I know, I'm missing something. Please tell me what it is and where to get it.

Further reading

• "Radmin Wanted" Campaign Completed with Striking Results (prweb.com)
• Everything - A Super Fast Portable File Search (techie-buzz.com)
• File Server OneHTTPD (ghacks.net)
• The 40 Most Popular Tools For Your System Admin Bag (sunbeltsoftware.com)
• tlbox - System Administration Tools (tlbox.com)

There's a new kid on the corporate email block

Image via Wikipedia

Cisco are most famous for their networking offerings, but they've been about much more than that for a long time now. With WebEx, they took more that their fair share of the corporate screen-sharing, web conference and IM. They have VoIP, they have video conferencing. In short, they have networking, in all its forms.

One of the few things they're missing is mail, right? Wrong. Cisco WebEx also provides mail services, but SaaS-based (in the cloud), rather than traditional, hosted services. They serve the mail service from the cloud, and support customers who choose to use Outlook as their mail client.

What next? Well, they replace the client-based Outlook experience with a fully online client offering, called Ciso Inbox, which will allow a user to do all the things they'd normally do in Outlook, but without ever having to leave the comfort of their browser.

This is starting to sound like gmail, right? Well, not really, because Cisco Inbox users can sort mails by "Topics", where they can classify mails by topic. This is not at all like gmail labels. No, honestly.

Still not convinced? Well, here's another way it's different to everything that's gone before, especially gmail:

You can link your inbox to social networking sites. One site, anyway: LinkedIn. That's right, the shit one that nobody in their right mind would ever be interested in.

What? It's like Buzz?! What do you mean? It's nothing like Buzz! You can't link Buzz to your social networking sites, now can you?

OK. So you can link Buzz to your social networking sites, but you can't post to them from Buzz, only the other way 'round.

Woohoo! Cisco Inbox scores.

Wait, no it doesn't. gmail can post status updates to Facebook.

So now I'm sure you can see all the reasons why Cisco Inbox is going to rule the world of corporate mail. Watch out IBM. Watch out Microsoft. Watch out Googl... Actually, google, you're safe.

Related articles

• Cisco CCNA Training Courses - Update (wealthyways4you.com)
• The Cloud's Important Role for WebEx on the iPad (readwriteweb.com)
• Cisco unveils WebEx app for Apple iPad (newstatesman.com)
• Cisco WebEx brings mobile meetings to BlackBerry (v3.co.uk)
• LinkedIn for Lawyers: LexBlog Network Webinar recording (kevin.lexblog.com)

Posting to your blog from Google Docs

Create striking data visualizations with Axiis

Image via Wikipedia

How do you present data or statistics in a way that makes an impact on the audience?
They've all seen histograms, bar charts, pie charts and 2d axial graphs so many times before, all you're going to do is provoke a yawn - at best.















Take browser market share statistics.
Add Degrafa and Adobe Flex 3.
What do you get?

Welcome to my Airport

jQuery is rather useful and fun, even if it has been around for quite a while now. You can find a lot of examples of things you might find a use for on your site, or a customer's site, and some bloggers have taken the time to compile "Top nn jQuery Tips and Tricks" lists, like this one, or this one, for example.

One such nice little script I came across earlier today is Airport, which imitates the effect of an airport information board, and would look a bit like this (please visit the blog post if you want to see it in action):

I like

Related articles

• Coin Slider: Free jQuery Image Slider Plugin (crenk.com)
• jQuery HTML Table Toolbox (noupe.com)
• New jQuery Podcasts (ajaxian.com)

10 Google Search Tips

Image by Somewhat Frank via Flickr

We all use Google search, and many of us will assume we would know the ins and outs pretty well, but you might find something here that you didn't know before, or forgot all about.

Further Reading

• 14% Say The Canonical Tag Doesn't Work on Google, Really? (seroundtable.com)
• Small Google Navigation Bug (seroundtable.com)

Google and McAfee uncover possible Vietnamese government plot to expose dissidents

Google, who pulled out of the Chinese mainland just last week, uncovered a plot to use malware infected computers to expose visitors to http://www.bauxitevietnam.info, a dissident website criticising Vietnamese mining project involving a Chinese state run company.

The malware made its way on to the unsuspecting users' target computers when they downloaded plug-ins to suppose Vietnamese characters from another site, that had itself been hacked unbeknownst to its owners. McAffee analysed the malware, which they said was a quite standard trojan for tracking user activity, creating access logs and sending them back to the perpetrators servers, currently believed to be elements of the Vietnamese government's security services.

Am I the only one who finds it hard to believe that China isn't involved here somewhere too?


Watch and read the full BBC World report.

Related articles

• Vietnam Dissidents Hit By Online Attack (huffingtonpost.com)
• Google: Online attacks aimed at Vietnam critics (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Google: Critics of Vietnam mine face online attack (ctv.ca)
• Google says online attacks used in Vietnam (cbc.ca)
• Google Hints At More Attacks From China (GOOG) (businessinsider.com)

Who would've thunk it? MySQL owns MS virtual territory

Image by betsyweber via Flickr

With Microsoft's heavy involvement in SecondLife, you'd think that its back-end DB would be SQL Server, wouldn't you? Well, you'd be half right - it's got SQL in there somewhere.

Portlet Update Issue

Last month I got a call about a WebSphere Portal issue where an administrator ran into trouble while updating a portlet. For no known reason, the update stopped. Retrying the operation didn't help.

Without going into too much detail about what the portlet did, suffice to say it was a fairly standard customer ordering portlet, processing new order information, passing this to inventory/order processing for... processing ;) updating the customer order status portlet, and repeating all the steps above as necessary.
In short, it was a cooperative portlet - which means that two or more portlets providing related business functionality were connected, or "wired" together (using, you guessed it, portlet wiring).

So, why would the update of such a portlet stop? I thought that perhaps it was too complex, that maybe too many portlets were wired together, and perhaps the update process was hitting some limitation with the "depth" of wiring. But, after reading up in the Portal Infocenter, I figured that there wasn't any way that this was happening. So I searched further - keywords "update cooperative portlet wired order broker" - and then... bingo! I found this:

Runtime behavior

The processing cycle of a portal request is divided into an action/event phase which processes user input and a render phase which generates markup output. The activity of the event broker subsystem occurs during the action/event phase. Event processing is usually initiated by a portlet action that is encoded in the current request URL. For example, this can be a portlet action URL, or a URL generated by a click-to-action menu. For requests that do not require portlet activity, but just produce output, the action/event phase can be skipped entirely.

If the request specifies a portlet action, that action will be executed and may itself publish output, either as a JSR 286 event or as a cooperative portlet property. If that output is wired to the input of one or more other portlets, a call to the processing methods of these portlets is put into the event queue. When the first portlet action is completed, the next event is taken from the queue and the target portlet is invoked. In the course of the event processing, the target portlet can trigger further communication calls which are then also queued. This process repeats until the queue is empty.

This allows the synchronization of multiple portlets within a single request-response cycle. For example, in a context of a customer order for some goods, all of the following can happen:

1. Transfer of the order ID to the Order Details portlet.
2. This first step also triggers the transfer of the tracking ID for the order to the Tracking Details portlet
3. The Tracking details portlet in turn triggers the transfer of the customer name associated with the order to the Customer Details portlet.
4. Consequently, all three portlets display information that pertain to the same customer order.

To avoid infinite loops, event distribution will also stop when a maximum limit of portlet calls is reached; this is considered an error situation and should be avoided.

Note: Event processing is completely sequential and never nested within one client request; each target event or action is fully processed before the next one is invoked. The portal guarantees that the order in which events are delivered to a single target preserves the order in which the events were published. However, for performance reasons, events for different targets may be re-ordered to minimize context switches.

 Note the highlighted sentence. I figured that this had to be what was happening, and gave the administrator the bad news that it was time to get the developer involved. The following week the new version of the portlet was released, and updates since then went without a hitch.

Never run out of disk space again

There, that got your attention ;)

Sometimes I think I have enough storage. Then I wake up and realise I was just dreaming. So if you've got designs on serious disk space, you might be interested to know how to get Petabytes of storage.

How long will it be before the average personal computer's storage is measured in petabytes? 2, 3 or 5 years? Or will there be no breakthrough to miniaturise enough in that time? Will it simply be a question of affordability, or will it be a combination of these two factors as it is now? Who knows the answers to all these questions? Who cares?
Not me. I can't even be bothered to knock together a proper post.

Further reading

• CompactFlash 5.0 offers 144-petabyte capacity (ubergizmo.com)
• Scalable Informatics introduces new storage cluster (insidehpc.com)
• IBM simplifying its storage range (go.theregister.com)
• Scale Computing Awarded Best New Product from PC Mall (eon.businesswire.com)
• A Hybrid Approach For SSD Speed From Your 2TB HDD (hardware.slashdot.org)

Whelmed by the iPad, bored by Apple

Apple excels at taking existing concepts – computers, MP3 players, conceit – and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration. It took the laptop and the coffee table book and created the MacBook. Now it's taken the MacBook and the iPhone and distilled them into a single device that answers a rhetorical question you weren't really asking.

Read the full article

iPad - iNotImpressed

After hearing loads of reports coming back about the iPad being a big disappointment, I thought I'd better catch up and see what it's all about. So I watched this:



And after watching it, I was like, meh...

Steve Ballmer, on the other hand, was like:



OK, that was from about 3 years ago, but it's still great.

Here's the product I'm really waiting for:



Ballmer will be sooo pissed.

Free copy of "HPC for Dummies"

Image via Wikipedia

Want to learn more about HPC? For a gentle introduction, get your free copy of
"High Performance Computing for Dummies" (Sun and AMD special edition).

Send Your Details to Support

The clever guys and girls over at Imulus have put together a handy page at http://supportdetails.com/
which displays the visitor's environment details right there on the page, such as:

• Operating System
• Screen Resolution
• Web Browser
• Browser Size
• IP Address
• Color Depth
• Javascript (enabled/disabled)
• Flash Version
• Cookies (enabled/disabled)

You can copy individual details, export them as .csv or .pdf, or even mail them to a support tech or engineer for review.

One neat feature you can try is to build a url to send to users to click on when they want to request support:

http://supportdetails.com/?sender_name=Jessica&sender=email@sender.com&recipient=email@recipient.com

The details aren't really the point - it's more about the interface and the way the information is presented. It's not hard to see this being applied to present much more detailed and useful system information.
Having worked with automated data collecting tools before, I have to say that this kind of interface would be a quantum leap over what I've seen being used in the support divisions in many of the largest IT companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun, and I for one would welcome the chance to use it. Imulus would, however, almost certainly have to stray from their world of ASP.NET to provide such tools.

Related articles

• Oracle will boost MySQL, release Cloud Office suite (computerworld.com)
• Stay away from OpenOffice.org until Oracle shows commitment, (infoworld.com)
• What Will IBM Do? (billburnham.blogs.com)
• IBM boasts hundreds of Sun migrations (v3.co.uk)
• Create Computer Profiles With Quick Config (ghacks.net)

Google Chrome on the march - overtakes Safari

Image via Wikipedia

It's official - Chrome is now #3 in the browser charts by number of users, nudging its way past Safari, Apple's browser offering.

In a little over a year Google Chrome has risen to 4.63% market share and has overtaken Safari, at 4.46%. One possible factor in the swing of about 1% that took place in December 2009 is that Google released Chrome for OS X giving Mac users another, possibly better, lightweight and fast browser to choose from. However, since the total market share of OS X really isn't that high, it was more likely the result of steady growth in Chrome uptake, while Safari stood still.
Mashable covered this in an article yesterday, and the graph they provided shows clearly how Chrome has been steadily growing in popularity. After all, Chrome is technically faster than Safari, and was since the early days, as this chart shows, so it was only a matter of time before it overtook it in terms of its user base.


Of course, Internet Explorer is still king. Then again, my recent acquisition of a new laptop running Windows 7 came with IE8 pre-installed, just as it would have done in Windows 3.x, 95, 98, NT, ME, 2000, XP, 2003 or Vista. The anti-trust, anti-anti-competition brigade didn't manage to change anything in that respect. Until they do, it's not a level playing field, and IE will continue to dominate. Firefox weighs in with 24.61% of the popular vote, and this is what Google are really chasing, so much so, that I think they're starting to really worry Mozilla's CEO John Lilly, and the gloves are coming off - in a way that can only hurt the interests of both companies.

Further reading

• BROWSER WARS: Google Chrome Overtakes Apple's Safari (mashable.com)
• Chrome Overtakes Safari in Browser Wars (appscout.com)
• Apple up, down in end-of-year report (tuaw.com)
• Open source browsers gaining market share (robbiz1978.blogspot.com)
• Chrome grabs market share from IE and Firefox, passes Safari (arstechnica.com)

Merry Christmas!

metaplace - Now That Didn't Last Long

Well, anyone who signed up for metaplace and wondered what exactly it had to offer anyone that made it worth the effort will not be surprised to hear that:

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

metaplace.com is closing on january 1, 2010

---

Today we have unfortunate news to share with the Metaplace community.  We will be closing down our service on January 1, 2010 at 11:59pm Pacific.  The official announcement is here and copied below, and you can read a FAQ guide here.  We will be having a goodbye celebration party on January 1st at 12:00noon Pacific Time.

Over the last several years, we here at Metaplace Inc. have been working very hard to create an open platform allowing anyone to come to a website and create a virtual world of their own.

Unfortunately, over the last few months it has become apparent that Metaplace as a consumer UGC service is not gaining enough traction to be a viable product, requiring a strategic shift for our company.

We’re sorry to announce today that Metaplace.com will be closing to the public at 11:59pm on January 1st, 2010.

This is a bittersweet moment for us. Metaplace Inc the company will be continuing on – in fact, we have big plans – but what you the users have known as Metaplace will be going away. We are also losing some friends and colleagues here as part of this strategic shift.

We’d rather dwell on the good than the sad. You, the users, have done amazing work here, and we want to celebrate it. We may not have managed to reach our goals with Metaplace.com and Metaplace Central, but we still had a lot of fun, watched creativity flower, visited amazing places, and made a lot of friends. We’ve had amazing guest speakers, more parties than we can count, live concerts, movie premieres and art shows; we’ve seen you make adventures and schools and churches and games and countless other sorts of worlds that would otherwise never have been created.

In that spirit, we want to treat these next two weeks more as a celebration of the good times. We invite you all to come back to see all of the amazing worlds that you have made. Registration will remain open, so you can show off to your friends. Remote embeds will remain active until the last day as well.

We’ll be turning off billing immediately, and refunding everyone for all purchases in the month of December as well as subscription payments that apply to December and future months. This month is on us. We are suspending regular customer service, but the support site will remain open for now in case there are any critical billing issues.

We know many of you have done work here that you would like to preserve. Please do use this time to capture screenshots, data, scripts, movies, and assets. We have a FAQ that explains how to retrieve assets from the service.

When other worlds have reached a sunset point, people have lost touch with each other. We’ve made a lot of friends here and we’re sure that you have too, so we don’t want that to happen. We have created a forum site athttp://www.metaplaceveterans.com that will be operational soon, so that you can all keep in touch with one another.

Finally: we want to treat the 1st of January as a celebration, rather than a sad moment. Please join us on that day for a party, starting at noon Pacific time. If Metaplace.com has to go, we want to go out with style, with joy, and with the same sense of fun that we have always had. Let’s celebrate the journey, not the ending. There will be meeps – count on it.

We’re sure you have many questions about all of this – and there’s a detailed FAQ that we hope answers them. Click here to read it.

In the meantime, we want to thank you all for your support, your effort, your creativity, and your loyalty. We know that many of you will be disappointed by this outcome. We are too. We are embarking on a new and exciting direction, and it feels strange not to have you all along for the ride.

It has been a privilege to have had you here with us on this great adventure, and we hope that this community – this wonderful, engaged, passionate, friendly community – lives on and on.

We’ll miss you -- and we hope to see you again.

Metaplace Team

Proof that virtual worlds, just like the real one, will, sooner or later, come to an end. It's just that in the case of Metaplace it was very much sooner.


For the few that did think it was a good idea, commiserations. With Forterra on its way out too, you'll just have to move back to that other complete waste of time, Second LIfe. Which assumes you had a life of your own in the first place ;)


 

Further reading

• Are Forterra and Metaplace Just the First Two Dominos to Fall? (botgirl.blogspot.com)
  
• Cat, Twitter, and the alternate ME (museditions.wordpress.com)
• The New SecondLife.com (blogs.secondlife.com)
• Next Island to launch sci-fi adventure virtual world - with time travel (venturebeat.com)
• Sloodle (bededtech.sjwc.hct.ac.ae)

Message to UPC: You Suck!

Never in the whole of human history has a cable television / phone / broadband provider sucked quite as much as UPC do at the moment.

I would have thought they'd have been content with getting our bills wrong, cutting us off by mistake, disrupting our service, fobbing off and downright ignoring our legitimate complaints, boring the crap out of us while rolling out a firmware upgrade, providing us with less than 10% of advertised broadband speeds during peak periods and even leaving us without the broadband we paid for for up to three days at a time.

Obviously, I was wrong.

Not remotely interested in providing a better quality service, and this counts for both technical and customer service, UPC has instead spent all their money on protecting their "service" by switching to Nagra 3 encryption.

So now anyone with an box of dreams, or viewer of stars, or whatever, can no longer even watch the channels they've rightly paid for on anything except that god-awful excuse for a box by Pace. The interface. The size. The responsiveness. The remote (see right) It all sucks.

Related articles

• UPC sucks - Erwyn van der Meer (bloggingabout.net)
• UPC sucks (2) - Erwyn van der Meer (bloggingabout.net)
• UPC Broadband, wonderful service unless you want to work at the weekends. (patphelan.net)
• Irish ISP To Block Access To Pirate Bay (yro.slashdot.org)
• INSIGHT: "Because it sucks" is not a reason to redesign (37signals.com)