PlusNet Community Website

So, a lot of my colleagues at PlusNet know that I like a jolly good knees-up, the occasional beer (ahem) and talking about technology, especially where it can enhance my life and work. The chance to combine all three is usually an opportunity not to be missed, and one such opportunity came up last Wednesday at Leeds GeekUp. More…

1 Comment »

It’s not exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to read in the red tops but the subject of SEO (dressed up admittedly in more reader friendly terminology such as ‘online profiling’) snuck its way into the Sunday Mirror at the weekend. More…

12 Comments »

When our Jonny returned from a visit to Poland recently, he brought some fudge back for us.  Opening the wrapper made me think just how ubiquitous smilies now are.  This wasn’t always the case of course. More…

1 Comment »

I blogged last year about the software development teams that we have set up in India so I thought that now was a good opportunity to bring everyone up to date with the progress we have made and of our future plans.

In my previous post I didn’t give the real big picture around why we are diversifying the physical locations of our software development team, so grab a coffee and read on…

PlusNet’s internal Operating System (known as Workplace) is an extremely large and complicated software system that has been built-up over the previous 9 years. Way back in 1999, PlusNet’s software development team consisted of myself and 3 other guys, sat round a single desk at Victoria Quays, Sheffield. The live web-servers were located under the desk, so quite often you’d get up to make a cup of tea, kick the power cable out and the website would go down for a few minutes while we waited for the server to reboot. This is how it was back then; a small group of people around the business worked round the clock, 7 days a week to build up the business, build the system, support the customers, fight the fires and put in place automated software systems that enabled our customers to “self serve” instead of having to call and speak to our customer support centre. More…

5 Comments »

A few departments missing from the EOD today. It may have something to do with Colin’s post in the internal forums asking for an “EOF”… End of File? Enterprise Objects Framework? Empirical orthogonal functions? Ethyl ortoformate? Electroosmotic flow? More…

No Comments »

Have you met someone you want to ‘add’ to your Facebook but don’t want to bother with all the troublesome introductions, words & eye contact? No problem! Simply use your phone to scan the barcode printed on their back! More…

11 Comments »

It’s Friday, YAY! Apparently Pete’s been reminded of Talk Like a Pirate Day so is looking up people’s Pirate names… and the rest of us are getting ready to go home. Although by the time I publish this the sensible ones will have gone.
Technorati Profile
More…

2 Comments »

(or How Random Internet Funkiness Can Spoil Your Basecamp Experience)

At the end of last week’s hacking session, I was happy to report that I had a working PlusNet beta OpenID and was able to use it to access my Basecamp account.

That following Saturday I wanted to show off to my partner (who uses Verisign PIP for OpenID) my working PlusNet OpenID by logging into Basecamp. It didn’t work. PlusNet’s server wasn’t responding.

“Ah well”, I said, “as it’s a beta, maybe it’s only accessible from within the PlusNet network. I’ll switch back to logging into Basecamp with my username and password like before.” Oh no, I won’t! I clicked the “Login with your username and password” link to switch to the conventional login form and found that I still couldn’t get in. Mild panic ensued.

As it turns out, registering an OpenID against a Basecamp account disables the password-based login! Fortunately, my partner is also the administrator of my Basecamp account. She was able to login, de-register the OpenID from my account and set up a new username/password combination to let me get in.

It was only a minor inconvenience but it worried me for a while. What if my partner’s OpenID provider goes offline? The administrator of a Basecamp account being locked out would be a major inconvenience.

The problem here isn’t with OpenID as such. It’s a problem with the implementation of OpenID on Basecamp but it highlighted for me the good practice of having a backup identity provider for important services. The OpenID specification has an elegant solution to the problem - delegation.

My OpenID identifying URL isn’t my PlusNet one, it’s the URL of my blog. Placing a couple of META tags in my blog header template allows me to redirect the relying party to my identity provider of choice. So, in the situation I found myself in, where my primary identity provider was not available, using delegation allows me to switch to my backup identity provider as and when I need to.

Footnote:
PlusNet’s beta OpenID server was taken off-line last weekend as a security measure to protect it and our customers from an attack that had been perpetrated against one of my colleagues’ accounts. That’s a correct reponse that any provider of OpenID identities will instigate from time to time. Beware random internet funkiness!

3 Comments »

We’re delighted to announce that following a recent disappearance, the referrals bounty scheme is back, even bigger and better than ever before, allowing you to earn even more money with PlusNet!

More…

3 Comments »

Since we published the iPlayer Usage Effect blog we’ve been doing a bit more analysis of the usage and reading up on what other people are writing.

As before we’ll have a couple of headlines.

• iPlayer usage is continuing to grow but at a slightly lower rate, up between 10% and 25% per hour comparing last week with the same week in January.

• iPlayer streaming outnumbers downloads by 8 to 1.

• iPlayer usage now accounts for approximately 5% of our network capacity. More…

  26 Comments »