Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - bbc

Availability is hard it seems

2011-03-30T10:27:00+01:00

It's a mark of how reliable some websites are that the first thing you do when you can't access it you assume it's something up at your end. As it turns out the BBC has suffered a major DNS outage knocking all four of their DNS servers off the 'net. At a stroke anything with a bbc.co.uk domain name became inaccessible. It seems this was due to routes to the DNS disappearing (similar to how Egypt disconnected itself last month).

When major sites like the BBC go down it's real time services like Twitter that come to the fore. We spent a good half an hour chortling at a number of humorous tweets that exploded a minute or so after the outage. You can see the peak of activity on Google's real-time search. Of course the value of this real-time information quickly falls off as spammers and conspiracy theorists jump on the meta-tags to promote their own products and theories. This included rumours that Anonymous was responsible for bringing down the BBC.

It's a salient reminder for all the "invulnerability" of the Internet high availability is a hard problem to solve.

UPDATE: It's ironic that my post hasn't made it's way to my LiveJournal mirror yet due a separate outage that seems to have lasted most of the day.

Question Time

2009-10-23T12:48:00+01:00

Well the reaction quotes are in from last nights Question Time, as are the viewing figures (7.9m, easily beating the previous 3.8m water mark at the height of the MPs expenses scandal). I'm not sure I'm cynical enough to accuse the BBC of engineering the media storm on the run up to boost ratings but it certainly promised to be a media circus.

I have no problem with allowing the BNP (now they have national representation) to come onto programmes like Question Time. Free speech is not a privilege that can only extend to the right-on. Nothing from last night has changed my view that when exposed to questioning the facade of respectability quickly falls away to expose their true colours. I was a little disappointed that the odds where obviously stacked against Griffin and will probably re-enforce the idea he was brow beaten in the minds of some. While I don't think Dimbleby was totally biased as the chair he certainly wanted to make sure Griffin was pinned down on some of the things he has said in the past. Unfortunately the whole thing degenerated into a bit of an unstructured clusterf**k. This meant many opportunities for Griffin to hang himself on the rope he'd been supplied with got lost in the interruption and barracking.

The questions were all focused on the few areas where the BNP have a political view namely immigration and Islam. It was obvious members of the audience wanted to ask wider questions to expose them as a one trick pony they are, however it was not to be.

It was disappointing to see the failure of most of the other politicians to deal with the issues the BNP so obviously play on. There is unease about radical Islam and the level of immigration out there but it seems people are worried about being labelled a racist for even questioning the current received opinion. I was impressed with Baroness Warsi who seemed to be the only one willing to tackle the subject of immigration.

I'll just add a brief aside to the new interactivity offered by micro-blogging sites like Twitter. No longer is interactivity gated by sending text messages to the BBC in the hope it gets published on some red button feed. Now everyone can join in by tagging their posts (in this case #bbcqt), truly a democratising technology. I'm sure there will be analysis of the trends in the next day or so but it does seem the twitterati are generally anti-BNP and that view didn't change over the program.

Guilty Pleasures

2008-09-14T17:58:00+01:00

I've finally started taking advantage of all the memory I put in this machine to indulge a guilty pleasure. Seeing as I'm only testing the next Ubuntu in my virtual machine I can install Flash on it so I can watch iPlayer. Although I'm obviously critical of the fact it locks people into the closed Flash platform to use it. The web-based solution is slick, easy to use and quite obviously the future of TV. I just caught up with the film of the last show Humph did before he died. It was filmed at the Lowry which reminded me of where I saw him last live. There is also a nice recording of one of his Jazz performances currently showing which I'm enjoying now.

The weekend has involved a touch of garden related activity including a very overdue grass cutting and the acquiring of many potted herbs and flowers. We also have a lovey baby maple tree which is now shading the Wizard which has been wondering where it would sit every since I fetched it from Manchester. We are enjoying whats left of the nice weather while we can. I hope it lasts the week, it's quite nice for cycling in the morning.

Bright Lights, Big City

2008-03-14T12:18:00+00:00

We headed down to London last night to meet up with some of Fliss' old friends for a few drinks and a meal. As we wondered past the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus I saw the adverts flashing up on the multi-media advertising for the BBC's iPlayer, now available for the iPhone. The background information on the blog makes interesting reading, no WMV or Flash for the iPhone, but a nice standards compliant H.264 video stream. It has not gone unnoticed that the iPhone isn't the only thing that can play such a stream although some hoops do have to be jumped through. All I need now is a little Gnome App that fetches streams from the BBC so I don't have to tell my main browser to lie about itself all the time, assuming that the BBC doesn't decide that Linux users are about as likely to pirate the shows as their polo-neck wearing, iPhone carrying cousins.

UPDATE 13/3/08: And the hole is plugged. For now...

UPDATE 14/3/08: Didn't take long