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I was 8 when I first learnt how to program. In those days (oh so long ago) you didn’t have that many choices, it was either BASIC, Assembler, COBOL, Fortran or other arcane languages. My language of choice at the tender age of 8 was BASIC. Let’s be honest here, I was far from a child prodigy, so that added to the beauty of BASIC: it was, errrm, basic and therefore rather simple to learn and use - I was very proud of my first “hello world” program:

10 PRINT “Hello, world.”

At the age of 13, and after my school ditched its BBC Micros in favour of x86 machines, I decided it was time to move up the programming language property ladder, and so chose Assembler. It certainly turned out to be a giant leap; it was more difficult to learn, more complex to write and had about a 5:1 line of code ratio with my equivilent programs in BASIC, for example:


MOV AH, 9
MOV DX, OFFSET HELLO_MSG
INT 21
INT 20
HELLO_MSG: DB ‘Hello, world.$’

However, the overhead was worth it in my eyes because using Assembler let me interact with any peripheral in any way it supported, call any BIOS function, hack and crash my school’s network, and generally behave like I owned the place.

But Assembler was never going to win in the private sector. Yes, it has its niche, now largely confined to embedded applications, but businesses want quick results, so C became popular, then C++, then Java, and now Ruby on Rails and our beloved PHP.

To be honest, I got bored with programming and lost the buzz about 7 years ago. Still, that’s almost 20 years of dedication before I “retired”. Languages were springing out of the woodwork and un-primed managers were jumping on buzzwords like there’s no tomorrow - “we should use Visual Basic,” said one person, whom then continued to exclaim, “because we can do everything in VB that we can do in C++, only much faster!”

This isn’t a rant about VB so I won’t explain too much as to why that frustrated me. Let’s face it, VB was useful in some areas and arcane in others, but it was never a direct replacement for something like C++. In fact, a common implementation (once people realised that VB wasn’t the answer to all of their prayers) was that VB got used for prototyping and building the user interface, and C++ was used for business logic and low level communication and interactions. VB would then call C or C++ functions that were compiled into a DLL/OCX etc. You know, we’ve been separating the user interfaces from business logic for longer than you may think.

So times they are a changing. They always seem to be changing, and after 20 years of anticipating that my programming language cheese was going to be moved annually, I started to get bored rather than excited.

(Oh, I suggest you read Who Moved My Cheese - it’ll only take an hour and you’ll get what I mean - I became a Hen rather than a Sniff or Scurry.)

Anyway, back to the story: new languages all had the same constructs, they all shared the same metaphors, they just had more quirky or more all-encompassing functions. Geez, in any speaking language you just add words to your already known language. We didn’t have to invent an entirely new language when we added Google as a verb to our dictionary, we continued speaking English.

In my years as an active developer I comprehensively learnt at least 10 languages, and also picked up a sprinkling of at least another 6. I loved learning those languages at the time (well, maybe with the exception of Miranda), but I’d had my fill and decided it was the right time to further my career. However, it must be said I do believe that as a senior technical manager it’s absolutely essential to keep abreast of what’s going on in the industry. Otherwise I’ll become one of them - you know - one of those managers that used to be technical but still lives in the ’80s and has ’80s principles, and generally just becomes a hindrance more than a help.

So the big buzzword of the year so far is Mash-up. No, it’s not about getting a Web Service to make you a cup of tea, and it’s certainly not defined as Encarta would have you believe here. I also don’t think that Wikipedia’s description does it justice by describing it as “a web application that combines data from more than one source” - see here. Yes, Mash-ups are the combining of data but the very power that gives you in conjunction with other Web Services is awesome. Nearly every Google Maps Mash-up also presents you with the map interface - that’s not just sharing data, that’s providing you with a very powerful means of presenting that data too.

These Web Services are very simple to use. In fact, I reckon you could set up a business within a day and start seeing revenue almost immediately.

Generally, Mash-ups use Web Services, and these Web Services perform some action and return objects either as raw data or as an object you can display. As an example for the reducing league of Windows developers, think of Web Services as a Web version of a Windows COM object. With that in mind, a Mash-up isn’t really a new concept, we’ve just got a name for them when interacting with Web Services. So is it just another buzzword for something we’ve been doing for years? Yes and no. Yes in that we’ve been doing it for years, and no because the power of them just isn’t comparable. A Web Service can be made available world-wide as soon as it’s commissioned; they can be hosted anywhere on the internet and used by anyone on the internet.

So, true to form, about once a year something crops up that gives me withdrawal symptoms from coding, my willpower reduces to nothing and my fingers just start typing without my say so. And probably the most surprising of recent offerings that reduced my will power to nill came whooshing from BT. Yes, I said BT.

Yeah, they’re the telecoms company that let you make calls and connect to the internet, right? Correct. But they are also very big on software development, and they have just released an API for a bunch of Web Services that are just crying out to be used. You can get complete details of the Web Services at sdk.bt.com but the ones that I really like allow you to very easily send a text message, track a phone’s whereabouts, and initiate a phone conversation between two phones.

Ok, there are websites that offer these services to the general public now but think of the things you can very quickly and easily do on your own website. You can allow parents to track their children’s whereabouts, as an employer you can track your employees (very useful for logistics and cab firms, for example), or you can almost pin-point the whereabouts of your stolen mobile phone. Combined with, say, Google Maps you can get a visual representation as well. That’s a very powerful Mash-up.

Their API could also enable a dating agency to very easily allow two clients registered on their website to call each other’s phone without disclosing their details.

So, after downloading their SDK for PHP I looked at their example for sending an SMS. When you boil it down you’ve only really got 5 lines of code you need to worry about:

1. require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/../../web21c.php’);
2. require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/../common.php’);
3. $web21c = new Web21c($applicationName, $environment);
4. $sms = $web21c->MessagingOneWay();
5. $r = $sms->sendMessage($recipientUris, $from, $messageText);

There, I can send an SMS in 5 lines within my own website. Ok, you need to ensure the parameter values are set appropriately but it really is centred around those 5 lines. I think that’s impressive.

But it’s not just BT’s SDK that’s feeding this Web Services/Mash-up move, just sniff around and you’ll soon come across 100s of them, there are even catalogues of them. For instance, go to IBM’s QEDWiki, or even go to http://www.strikeiron.com/. Furthermore, PlusNet’s User Group (PUG) are getting in on it and plan to add a page specifically for Web Services like these (keep an eye on http://usertools.plus.net/). But there are many more that you can choose from!

Earlier I wrote about how new languages crop up here, there and everywhere instead of us enhancing existing ones; I also touched on the fact that new languages by and large only have the benefit of new all-encompassing features, resulting in you having to write less code. Writing less code is a good thing, but that can be achieved by extending existing languages, writing your own libraries, or making use of libraries written by other people. I think Web Services and so called Mash-ups are a big part of the solution. You can call a Web Service from most modern languages and you can write one using most modern languages too.

So, do we need a new language or can we make use of Web Services and language extensions to provide us with the increased richness, flexibility and speed to market? Will PHP, .NET and Java be the next COBOL in 5 years time or will we stay with them, be patient with them and build on them as and when we need to?

My own thoughts are that Web Services and Mash-ups will be in the mix whatever languages are around. They make it incredibly easy to expose extremely powerful functionality (tried and tested) within seconds. Your libraries will no longer just be a bunch of APIs as part of an SDK you store on your own site - much of the code you use might actually be distributed amongst many third party’s servers.

PlusNet have already started to benefit from some of these Web Services. For example, we’re trialling the use of Google Maps to help us better understand our customers’ demographics, and we’re also using SMS services to provide our customers with critical information.

We believe that leveraging third party Web Services can provide us with significant development savings. Not only is the code already written, most of the time the code is already tried and tested as well. This saves us a considerable amount of time, which in turn means we can spend more effort doing things that we wouldn’t otherwise have had the time to do. Web Services could be the biggest time saver for software development in this generation so far.

I always wonder what development marvel will hit us next. Whatever happens, software development is getting easier and that can only be a good thing, right?

( Upon reflection, though, I’m not sure BASIC would have coped all that well today anyway )

Dan Kirkland

Head of Platform, PlusNet

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Well, it’s the August Bank Holiday weekend - that’s come around quickly.  The next EOD will be Tuesday - can you wait?  Of course, whilst some of us here are taking an extra day well earned, you can be sure that Comms and CSC will be here, in the discussion forums, and of course taking your help calls and tickets.

The incident report about yesterday’s email issue is being written, we expect to be able to publish this next week - in the meantime, the discussion forum will give you the background.
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Words hardly do justice to how disappointed I am that, in the week that we commit to posting a regular EOD again, I should have to talk about the problem with email delivery yesterday. It almost goes without saying how much importance we all place on email, and it’s very disheartening when things go wrong.

There’s not so much I can add pending a full incident report, but the Service Status update and forum discussion provide some detail to this unfortunate situation.

Service Status confirms now that all new email is currently being sent, received and delivered in a timely fashion and customers should not be seeing problems with the receipt of messages to their mailboxes.
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Another hectic day in the office.. I’ve been busy with my Scrum project today. The improvements we want to make to Manage My Mail are looking good and perhaps more crucially (for me at least!) coming in on schedule. More about this in a future blogging.

So.. the EOD and my eyes and ears have reported back with some of the happenings from their departments. Here we go then..

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Here at PlusNet we have various procedures in place for resolving system problems, be they internal or external issues.

Anyone at PlusNet can raise a problem using our internal Problem Tool, and the problem is then passed to our QA department to be verified before being assigned to the relevant department for resolution.

Problems when raised are assigned a priority of 1-3. The descriptions for each priority level are below:

A Priority 1 problem is defined by ANY of the following:

- A customer facing service is not working for customers using it (urgency to be judged by Comms/HoD’s)
- Any problem affecting sign up or billing
- An issue flagged as critical in Nagios (if affecting customer facing services)
- A problem which causes considerable disruption to the workflow of any department (for the CSC this is defined as a problem which is estimated to cause 100 contacts)

A Priority 2 problem is defined by ANY of the following:

- A service wide issue which does not directly impact the customer or for which there is a readily available workaround
- A problem affecting a departments efficiency, at any level

A Priority 3 problem is defined by ANY of the following:

- A single user issue (internal or external)
- An issue which requires no immediate action or presents no significant risk to the business or customers

Once QA have replicated/validated a problem, it is passed to the relevant department (Networks, Development, Content, Finance, Products) for resolution.

Priority 1 problems are published to the portal, and can be tracked by customers until resolution. You can also add your username to any P1 problem if you are affected, without having to go through the CSC department.

Here in Comms, we took ownership of the problem raising and management process from a CSC perspective a few months ago, and have been involved in many behind the scenes changes to improve the process, and turn problems around quicker (along with our Network and Development colleagues of course).

One of these is something we call the Problem Hopper, which means we can escalate the status of a problem which is categorised as a P2 or P3 but is causing customer pain, or is an issue which CSC receive many contacts about. When in the Hopper, a problem sits somewhere between a P1 and a P2, and is worked on urgently by our problem team until resolved. You may have seen posts in the forums from Comms Team members advising they have prioritised or escalated a problem, which usually means it has entered the Hopper.

When CSC agents raise a problem these days, it is passed to the Comms team for initial validation and prioritisation. This means we can test more thoroughly than CSC agents are often able to, and helps us pick up on more widespread issues much quicker, ensuring that the correct priority is set for the issue. This is valuable, as a problem seen by one CSC agent can easily be missed or raised as an individual ticket to a different department, however if four CSC agents raise the same problem to the Comms team it’s clear that there is an issue that needs to be addressed. Agents can also use our internal forums or alerting procedures to advise other agents to watch for certain issues, which is very valuable for other teams coming on shift and such like.

Dealing with all problems here in Comms means we have a much better grasp of which problems are affecting our customers, and means our input into projects or improvements is much more tailored at the wider customer base and resolving current lower priority issues as part of project work where possible.

Each one of our different departments has a dedicated resource to work problems, particular in Development and Networks, who have between 4 and 10 people working on problems at any one time (dependent on how many are assigned to that department at the time). These departments work problems in order of priority, and each individual takes ownership and sees the same problem through to resolution where possible (minimising duplicating the investigating stages, and ensuring the problem is fixed as quickly as possible).

The main area we focus on when dealing with problems is Development, both because there tend to be more problems raised relating to development issues, and because these are the problems which require more testing traditionally.

We’ve spent a lot of time in the last few weeks grouping problems together, working closely with the development team, in order to create mini-projects to resolve the most prevalent issues. This means we will have dedicated development resource to work on grouped problems, and will be able to feedback throughout the resolution process. It will also save lots of investigation time, as it is likely that at least some of the issues are related, yet present different symptoms to the user.

One area we are focusing on currently is email, as there are a few email problems open at present which are causing problems for customers. We are hoping to get some timescales in place for this later this week, and of course I’ll keep you all posted.

If this process proves successful we will take it forward and use it on other problem groups, but time will tell!

As always, we’d like to hear any feedback you have on the information above, and will change the process as required to ensure the best possible allocation of our available resources and priorities.

Regards
Mand

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Hardware problems
We have had a number of customers calling to advise that their equipment has not been delivered by HDN (Home Delivery Network), or that the insert sheet is missing. In addition to this we have had problems with reporting from HDN leading to confusion over whether the hardware has been delivered or not. This is something we hope to put a stop to very shortly as it leads to an extremely negative first impression.

Faults
There has been a larger than average number of faults raised in the past week. This unfortunately had a knock on effect, meaning a longer average resolution time and therefore an increase in the number of requests for updates.

Sales calls and signups over the phone
This week has also seen an increase in the amount of customers calling to ask about the specifics of our various products and also wanting to signup over the phone. This is a very good thing and will hopefully continue to be one of the main reasons for people contacting the support centre.

Router configuration
New customers are still not putting in the correct username to connect, missing out the realm (@plusdsl.net, for example) as in previous weeks. This will in part be due to the lack of insert sheets shipped out. Again once the Welcome Setup pack begins to be sent out the numbers of these calls should decrease.

Provisioning updates

There have been a few delayed orders this week and given that we are unable to display detailed information regarding orders, customers have had to call in to find out what progress had been made. There have also been a few issues with delayed house moves that have led to additional contacts.

Matthew Taylor

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Please Note: This weekly post represents the significant topics our customers have raised with our support team over the course of this week. The information is provided in the spirit of openness for which PlusNet strives. Each day we review pertinent items and this drives internal discussion around what we can do to improve the experience for customers.
It’s expected that issues like ADSL faults, service problems and assistance with setting up software or equipment will always be near the top of the list for our support team. If people didn’t have problems and questions we would only need a sales team!

Customer feedback or suggestions on any of these items (especially if it helps us improve the experience for other customers) is most welcome via the comments section below.

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Yesterday I (re)started posting an End of Day report - veteran Force9′ers might remember these reports yonks ago on Usenet. What is an EOD I hear you ask? Simply a quick update from around the departments here at PlusNet Towers. I’ll try to provide you with some insight into happenings and events from our perspective. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, it’s not meant to be absolutely comprehensive and it’s not meant to be scientific.. it’s just meant to be vaguely interesting (well, I hope it is anyway) and provide a feel of what it’s like here today.

I’m eager to hear from any of you who remember the original EODR’s and certainly about what you’d like to see. So here we go then..

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A long, long time ago (in a building not so very far away) I used to compile ‘end of day’ reports from around the business and post them to our customer service Usenet newsgroups.  Someone mentioned to me the other day how similar they were to a blog and then someone else asked.. “Why don’t you still post an end of day?”  I couldn’t answer them.  So we’ll try it out, see how we go and commit to keep posting for as long as you’re reading.. how’s that?

Such updates can’t cover everything (they’re not meant to) but I hope that in reading them you gain some insight into what each department here does, and what some of the issues we face look like from our side of the web browser

So.. today’s update from around the business.  I know it’s a bit dry today but I’ll do my best to get some interesting stuff out as we get the EOD ball rolling.

And we’ll move this posting to live on the front of the Community site once we’re up and running too.

Customer Support Centre:

These figures provide approximate numbers from an analyst’s perspective, of the key reasons for contacting us today.

• Authentication & Faults 30%
• Router setup from new 20%
• Email setup from new 5%
• Sales 45%

Networks:

Metronet customers have been affected over the weekend with intermittent ‘timeouts’ when collecting email. These problems are only evident when using the server address ‘mail.metronet.co.uk’ for the sending and receiving of email.  Affected customers can circumvent the problem by using the following settings in their software:
Incoming (POP3) pop.metronet.co.uk
Outgoing (SMTP) smtp.metronet.co.uk

Our DNS servers are being replaced to ensure resilience; we expect this work to be completed on Wednesday.  More information.

An end of an era as our old Usenet (newsgroups) servers are turned off today, with the server addresses (eg. news.plus.net) being directed to our news suppliers (Supernews) directly. Update on Usenet.

Development:

The dept is working on many projects currently.  We hope to share these with you in future daily EOD updates.

We’ve recently published our Data Retention Policy. Work for several associated database changes is ongoing.

Website changes to be announced shortly are being tested this week.  We hope to be able to bring more news on this for you tomorrow.

Website:

Preparation and testing is currently underway for a website change project to be announced very shortly.

Information presented to new customers immediately after they sign up is known to be ineffective.  We are working to improve this by improving the post-signup information screen and the automated confirmation emails.

An improved ‘My Account’ section is in the first stages of development.  Ultimately we aim to update the ‘Member Centre’, making self-service easier on the website.

Product & Marketing:

We’ve been working on some ongoing issues with hardware stock availability today and hopefully have got a process that will allow us to be more proactive with stock levels at the warehouse.

Another recent addition to the team, Darren (who’s our graduate placement) had a good day, for the first time running a load of our reporting processes solo. Especially on a Monday, our team presents a lot of detailed data each week for analysis by the rest of the business.

We’ve also had a bit of a look at Freedom to Surf’s new gaming product (to decide if it will change anything major in the market). Our initial take is that we’re not convinced it offers very much special or different for gamers. That said, there is no doubt among us that gamers are both a demanding yet worthwhile market to cater for and we’ll be watching how things develop.

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