h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Question is - will our suggested improvements cause any further problems, or just keeop the current ones going a little longer?
(See a few LED's back for the suggestions)

http://www.chaossoftware.com

Atomic Clock Sync - just getting ready for next time.

My online TV guide does that for me...

Your TV guide is set to synchronise your PC clock to the Atomic Clock, US National Institute of Standards and Technology, and even 'knows' your not on US time. Wow! That's one smart TV guide ...my digital TV guide is 2 seconds behind traditional Ceefax.

It's called "Digiguide"; it costs me about £7 a year, and like most of these things it only makes "fine adjustments" to the clock; it assumes you have the hour broadly right, so doesn't really need to know your time zone, but will happily adjust to allow for slippages up to the magnitude of +/- a minute or two a day.

(And if I remember right, it even pings the atomic clock a few times and adds the average of half of all the "round trips"... I read the tech stuff when I signed up a year or two back. )

Neat, handy for all that PVR stuff. In the old days of BBC Micros, the time could be polled from a teletext adaptor. PC users could do it wit TV cards. Don't know if the current crop of digital (Freeview) TV cards for PC offer software for RTC updates. It's a feature that fails mention in reviews, and website data sheets.

"Why do we spend so much time wearing digital watches?"

So we can tell what time it is?

Anyway, Jim, what's happening about our latest suggestion?

Haven't had any PC-problems here in January.

Hope they don't come in february

The last few days have been bad - Service not Available and SSO errors. Jim had a reason for the SSO problems (due to some new service on it eating up all the bandwidth) but I'm not sure that covered all the problems.

We've put in some triggers now which restart the service if certain monitors start heading into danger zones. We had that before, but the thresholds were too high to make any difference. Now, there should be more automatic restarts, which will generally mean the servers are healthy more of the time. We certainly won't have a repeat of the time last month where one or two of the servers were down for a whole day without being attended to.

The SSO problems of this week have been outside our control, but I hope it won't be affecting us again. That's what I'm promised, anyway.

Dear Jim,

I wonder if you could explain to techno-latestarters like me what is going on with Digi-boxes and TelWest.?

It seems that some of the disabled members who do not have a computer or who cannot manage to "sit" at a computer have been using their digiboxes. How this is done is quite beyond me.

Were they doing any harm? If not, surely the ethos of our founder DNA would have permitted them to use an alternative way of gaining both companionship and mental stimulation through through this magnificent site.

Is there room on this site for people who are so traumatised by their lives that they seek only to disable even more those who are disabled.? I realise that I am probably laying myself open by asking these questions, but I am deeply saddened to see so much unkindness and lack of compassion on a site which has always been to me so supportive, kind and understanding. I have never encountered it before and hope that those who have managed to upset a great many people who already have a difficult enough life to contend with will look into their souls and place themselves in the position of those who have offended them.
thanking you for any advice you can give me.

Also Ran1

Hi AR... long time no see

Unfortunately (and I hope I'm not putting words into Jim's mouth here) it's all a bit out of his control...

As I see what happened -

Telewest offer an e-mail service. (Note - not full internet access)...
Through various means, users of this service discovered a back-door into h2g2 through an e-mail).

Several h2g2 researchers, for differing reasons depending on who you listen to, decided to inform Telewest of this back-door.

Telewest have now made it impossible to use.

Now, from Telewest's point of view you could say that people using a system that was designed for the transmission of simple e-mails to access a site as potentially complicated as h2g2 could be putting a great deal of strain on the company's resources (plus of course Telewest offer _payable_ full internet access). So from their point of view it makes sense to close down this loophole.

I honestly think that if Telewest had closed this loophole down on their own then no-one would be complaining too much, however, the fact that a couple of h2g2 researchers sent an e-mail to telewest informing them of the back-door just prior to it being shut down has led to a great deal of bad feeling. (which again, is totably understandable if you're one of the ones who was using it).

So the whole thing seems to be out of the hands of the BBC - There doesn't seem to be an awful lot Jim can do about it.

(Again, sorry Jim if I'm putting words into your mouth!)

My feeling is that Telewest would be very unlikely to re-open this method of connecting to the site for purely financial reasons... After all, commercially for Telewest it would make far more sense to persuade those people who've lost their 'unofficial/free' access to h2g2 pay for a full internet access service.


To quote a character from the 'real' hitchhikers guide to the galaxy...
"Life... Don't talk to me about life!"

Someone reported TeleWest as saying that if enough digibox users contacted them to request dna access back as part of the service they would allow it or consider it or something. Unfortunately I haven't seen the original message from the company if there was one so I can't vouch for the accuracy of this. <./>/dna/ican/G409</.> is where some digibox users are running a campaign. If they have any sense they will put any such relevant information and address updates there too.

I suppose that might work... "either we get access or you can take your digibox back" sort of thing - but I can only imagine it being effective if Telewest thought they'd loose more customers than they might gain bandwidth/new broadband customers... I wouldn't hold my breath for that! (But like you, I'm not in possession of all the facts here)

Also Ran,

Whisky has summed up the situation reasonably well. I'm still not sure whether or not the use of h2g2 by digibox users was actually against Telewest's rules - and I'm also not sure if they cut off access because of that, or because they (wrongly) believed that the BBC wanted the access cut off. It's not in the BBC's interest to block access - we want as many people as possible using our services.

So in other words, it sounds like "Big Brother" strikes again!

*put the kettle on*

Some time ago, I accessed a Telewest interactive site, from time to time it would close for maintenance. When the site was available again, it was obvious people had access to it despite it being closed. So I ask, and then was told a full website was available.

So off I go down to the library to access the web. Find the site. Then back on the digibox make an e-mail anchor to it, and it worked. Then I found the URL for the Telewest version. Tried that on a PC to see if the access speed was a telewest connection or site problem. Well the TV version zipped along on a PC, so I'd say Telewest have a speed issue.

I asked about this "backdoor" and a few people sent me an e-mail link. One was even to a WebTV version of the site. Which I liked, it was the best of both worlds. So it would appear a few people knew about such links.

I set about learning HTML, sent an e-mail to Telewest, asking them about approved HTML in e-mail, what fonts, colour, command are supported.

This is my answer:-

"


















"

Yes, another fine example of customer service from Telewst there then, not even a "don't do it."

Not long after that various links came my way. It was like Star Trek, once you have shown warp drive capability, ie understood e-mail anchors, everybody wanted to tell you stuff.

The next thing I wanted to do was access the real BBC news, not the pathetic digibox version. Finding links to the digibox version on the way.

From time to time Telewest would leave its 'walled garden' wall down. So from a digibox we had access to google.com infact anywhere.

The times it would go back-up was when a lot of people where posting on the site mentioned above.

As for a pay-for internet service via a digibox, Telewest put the project on hold. They do have dial-up both pay-as-you-go and unmetered. But that needs a PC/Mac.

I have been told that there are some at Telewest that would like a digibox internet service. I managed to find an URL to it, and filled in the form, about the service, how good I thought it was, how much I'd pay etc. I left acustomer number. Though not part of the official trail, I did get a phone call from Telewest the next day. Did the panic - no. Was it the end of the world - no. They just stated that it was trial only, and not available. Though I'v seen the development of it's style carry on from versin 1.2 of the software. Not much has happend of late. The menus match the current set available to all, but links do less than before. I've seen the on-screen keyboad change shape/size/color.

What I have not seen is any speed / usability improvement. Not even with all the so-called bandwith no longer being used to access h2g2. If anything, things are worse now. If the e-mail menu loads or not is 50-50. Other menu options just stall. So digibox use is no better for preventing access to this BBCi site.

Blueyonder broadbans is no faster than it was last week, still as prone to hackers as ever. Microsoft Exchange is still what its always been. So no wonder Telewest "TVEmail" is what it's always been. Not proper e-mail as claimed by Telewest. Limit of 50000 characters, no way to collect, have collected mail, no attachments, not even any address book, poor, V. Poor. Least when the wall is down, we can get to yahoo (hotmail did work before M$ broke it.) etc.

Until the end of Febuary, Telewest are offering free inatall of Blueyonder braodband. Save £50!
Do you see a mad rush for people to get it, buy a PC, just to access this site? Here is a distraction, fun, human contact, not the end of the universe... If it was we know which two would be running the cafe,

As for stoping digibox users from getting on-line... Guess again! Only this time I don't plan on passing the link on. There is one other I know worked out how to do it, since they e-mailed me, and we compared notes.

Over the weekend I shall be setting-up a PC to XP pro, and Works Suit. Being a digibox userd does not mean I'm a dreg, or know nothing about computers. I've managed to do without one in the house (bar a 286 for a Psion backup system) for years. Being a digibox user meant I was avoiding the hassel of spending £1000's just to chase rainbows for the latest/fastest PC part. Yes you can buy cheap, a £14 motherboard, a £12 case and so on, but it's junk your getting, so why bother, when from the comfort an arm chair, an hour or five could be spent in mixed comapany, from a wide range of people, from the idiots to the funny, from the smart to the brilliant.

Am I going to continue with Telewest, I doubt it. If I do bother to get a PC, then I'd set it up to work with BT yahoo broadband. This is for watching for the last couple of years people struggle with Telewest broadband, even the 1 meg service. It;s not the igibox users that make telewst what it is, it's the idiot transiant staff and blinkered top level managment, that don't allow the managers with skills, years of industry experience to do their job.

A wise man once said... "You can't polish a turd." I don't expect a menu option on interactive for h2g2. They are blinkered into a thing called yoome2, a chat site. Not everybody with a digibox want's to. "ASL, wan 2 meet sexy" as a way of communicating with others. I did start to see this website as a hand store for info one may put in a diary, setting for various bits of hardware. But even that seems wrong now.

Sharing information on this site seems to be about calling others for poor language, then posting spam in the form of and gibberish in Journal. This from the very people that site others for poor English, how very magnanimous_E

Sharing information on this site seems to be about calling others for poor language, then posting spam in the form of


For some may be but ,a lot of information can be obtained,and shared quikly the "telewest" issue has backed that up if nothing else.

Monoplies commission are reluctent to tackle several issues raised by the fuhora or hoo ha ha that has been brought about over events of the past month.

The area i live in i cannot get digital telivision ,or cable tv if i want to enjoy that mode of entertanment i need a dish and that will not only have to come from sky i have to agree to haveing it for a whole year.

Ok im lucky i can get broadband but had several of the companies in this area not been here i doubt if i would have got that so "speed" of communication is not as fast.

Hi whisky,

Thank you for the explanation. It is vaguely clearer now, but I thought that a digibos was in order to get onto SKY. and of course now I remember they always say that one can send an email in order to emter a competition or something like that. But as I never use my hand control to do any of that It would never occur to me to send an email through that. Nor would I be able to enter any other site!!

Are you still in France?
Lucky you if you are.

Kind regards.

Also Ran1

Hi Jim,

thank you for the reply. It seems that there is a case to be made for those who are genuinely disabled and are unable to access h2g2 with a conventional computer. Perhaps that is something that the big wigs could think about. I wonder who TeleWest are?

Kind regards

Also Ran1