Anybody who follows me on Twitter will know that I have recently returned to Virgin Media for my television, fixed-line broadband and telephone after moving back into a cabled area, and they will also know the major issues that I have been having with the service that I receive from them, particularly with regard to the broadband – allegedly the fastest in the UK, but rarely able to even get near to top speed and consistently suffering from outages.

So now they have launched the “Virgin Media Player”, a model not dissimilar to that of the BBC iPlayer or Channel 4’s 4OD – offering television shows and movies on-demand, in this case to customers who subscribe to their full television package, which I do.

The first question has to be, will it work? And the answer, almost immediately, is no.
The site looks very good, the aesthetics are pleasing to the eye and it makes use of AJAX technologies, programmatically it is very advanced, but the pitfall comes when you try to watch content – surely, the reason that it exists.
On my 50mbps broadband pipe the playback is of poor quality and is stuttery. I made three attempts to get an episode of South Park to play before giving up, it just would not load.

Advertising banners point out the fact that they have a mobile version of the site where I could watch videos on the move – the question I had to ask myself here was; “Do I want to give myself a coronary trying to get it to work?”, and the answer was … let’s do it.

Unfortunately it was a very short test, I pointed my mobile browser, a very recent and popular handset – the BlackBerry Bold 2 9700 on an Orange 3G contract, and I was immediately told to “Please use a browser that is supported and make sure you are on a 3G connection.”

First thing to wonder here is; why are Virgin Media not supporting one of the most popular handsets on the market at the moment? The RIM BlackBerry is currently doing very well for itself and is increasing its market share month on month, Virgin Media are clearly cutting out a very large proportion of their user base.

The second thing to wonder is; If my handset was supported, would I only be able to use the service when connected to a 3G data source, and if so, why? I mainly use my BlackBerry for browsing when I am on WiFi. Are Virgin saying that I have to be on a slower connection to use their mobile service, and if so, why? This makes no sense at all.

So, this entire test was a major fail. The Virgin Media Player appears to have some good content, mostly what is on the “On Demand” section of my HD set-top box, but unfortunately I cannot access any of it, despite using “the UKs fastest broadband”, so what chance has anybody else got?

The Virgin Media Player is available to XL television package subscribers and can be accessed at http://www.virginmedia.com/player

With Twitter rapidly losing money through lack of revenue, it must start to bring their platform back to themselves as the first part of their plan to get into the black.

As it stands the third-party application is King, in February 2009 only 31% of Twitter activity was performed through their website, Twitter.com, the other 69% was done through various third-party applications, on desktop and mobile devices, like Tweetie for iPhone, Ubertwitter for BlackBerry and Tweetdeck, for iPhone and all desktops.

In April of this year Twitter announced that they would be taking back their service – launching new features and their own mobile applications, including apps for iPhone and BlackBerry, but are these any good and have they been successful so far?

Twitstat keep a running total of the most popular Twitter clients and are currently showing that Twitter.com is still the most popular single "client", but its usage has been chopped in half to 16%, a momentus drop. Tweetdeck retains its second place and Twitter for iPhone, the official application, is all the way up there at #4 with 6% share. This does hint that the attempts by Twitter thus far to take back what is theres is working, on one platform at least, albeit one of the biggest platforms. Official apps for Android and BlackBerry do register on the list, but at lowly 23rd and 29th places.

So what next for Twitter? With their core gateway, Twitter.com, taking such a massive hit, can they continue to plod on with their plans to monetise their service? Surely the website is where they will make their biggest profits as revenues through mobile are still relatively marginal. What can they do to attract people back to the browser?

Brands of the world, it seems that whoever you have employed to manage your social networking presence does not know what they are doing and you need to sort it out, now!

I am finding more and more that certain brands are monitoring keywords using Tweetdeck or similar applications to reply to tweets either with a sales pitch for their similar product or even to try to redeem themselves in a “pro-active customer service” move.

The first point that I must make is that if you’re going to take the latter stance, appoint somebody who knows the product and is familiar with twitter etiquette. I recently had my broadband company reply to a rant about their service, to which I replied to them with the issue and didn’t hear another thing for a week. I then commented on this lack of response, after-all, they contacted me, and they replied, quite snappily I might add, insisting that they had DM’ed me. Well, anyone who had been using Twitter for more than 24 hours would know that you cannot send a direct message to somebody who does not follow you. And why would I be following my ISPs customer service department? So of course, I didn’t get their DM.
When I did get a response to my technical question, their response didn’t make any sense. Apparently my ”IP address email addresschanges daily”. The question I asked them was about the LAN IP addresses that their router gives. Duh.

Another experience was with UPS who clearly monitor the use of “UPS”. Unfortunately it seems that only their US branch use Twitter so when I complained by way of a tweet to the world and they contacted me, they clearly didn’t look at my location before offering assistance, as when I replied with my issue they said they couldn’t help and to call the UK call centre (by this time I had already).

Other companies monitor for use of words that are attributed to their product, or even their competitors company names in an attempt to poach customers. This may all be fine, as long as they are offering you a comparable service or product – not something that is 3-4x the price or isn’t in any way the same.

Twitter can be a great way to get your companies names onto the computer screens of customers or potential customers, as long as it is executed properly. The rules of the real world still apply in Twitterland. It may be a new way to be in contact, but that shouldn’t change anything.

My top tips

• Your brand is not my friend. Do not pretend that it is. Don’t @ me after randomly finding me through keyword searches offering comment only to lead up to a sales pitch.
• If you’re going to offer customer service by twitter, offer to take my telephone number and call me. I’m sure that most issues cannot be sorted out in 140 characters.
• Know how Twitter works. Don’t DM me when I can’t receive it because I don’t follow you. Oh, and don’t @ when you mean to DM, that could be disastrous.

Follow me on Twitter.

I downloaded the Windows 7 RTM last week using my MSDN subscription. Great OS. Not going to get into a review right now – I’m sure you can find many of them.

The one thing that was annoying was that Firefox was crashing, pages were taking an age or not loading at all, especially javascript heavy websites like Gmail or Facebook and after moving to Google Chrome for a week and complaining a lot on Twitter I decided to do something about it.

First I loaded Firefox up in safe mode. This cleared up the problem. Then I found from a Windows 7 forum that apparently some add-ons (extensions) don’t sit quite right with Windows 7. This seems plausible, especially since I’m using the 64-bit edition. So I disabled all of my extensions and switched them back on – one by one.

Low and behold, luckily I went from bottom-to-top as the offending plug-in was … Skype Extension for Firefox. With this add-on enabled the browser grinds to a halt almost completely, eats all memory and stops JS from working almost entirely.

So if you get this problem, check for this extension, disable it and let me know the results in the comments. I can’t be the only one experiencing this, surely?

The BBC has launched a new version of their iPlayer. Previously only really available for Windows (though we could watch using a flash video player in-browser), it uses Adobe Air, which is cross-platform. This brings the iPlayer to Mac and Linux, finally!

The iPlayer desktop; currently still in labs, but now available to the public, can be run on any platform that is supported by Adobe Air, which is most. Adobe Air has been revolutionising application development of late, bringing innovative programs to Mac, Linux and Windows users without having to create three completely separate distributions. My favourite other application that can be found on all of my computers, Windows, Linux and Mac is the Analytics Reporting Suite for Google Analytics, is a great example of how Air really is making cross-platform programming a reality.

Bringing iPlayer content to more platforms will guarantee the BBC a bigger audience. Their rivals are nowhere near as advanced as they have been forced to become by the BBC Trust. Channel 4 and Sky are still stuck with Kontiki and ITV have their in-browser flash player which you have to be online to watch. Hopefully the new Adobe Air based ‘iPlayer desktop’ will coerce the BBC into seeing their Kontiki based player for the memory-hogging, cpu-munching bohemoth that it is and drop it completely.

Innovation is what has driven the BBC for the past 6 decades and the release of the iPlayer desktop is the proof that there really is somebody in the organisation that is still thinking ahead; still thinking that they don’t have to be limited to a bought-in ready made package that is limited in so many ways (not just that it is Windows only).

So, Linux, Mac and Windows users (yes, you can join in too!) rejoice at the release of the iPlayer desktop. Download it. Show your support. We have whinged and moaned and campaigned for this for long enough, now that we have it, use it! Windows users download it too, embrace Adobe Air and kick Kontiki to the curb, your processor will thank you for it.

Download iPlayer desktop
Opt-in to iPlayer labs

You may have noticed some very odd things going on around the site over the past week or so. This is because I have moved this website from a Linux box, which has been very good to me over the past 4 years, to the dedicated Windows server that I got up and running a few weeks ago for Pineapple Boudoir.

This posed a few problems, the least of these being that WordPress runs on MySQL and we’re currently using SQL Server 2005. The two can (and do) run in perfect harmony, but obviously security is paramount and also we needed to make sure that there were enough resources available to run two database servers, so a few hours was spent making sure that the MySQL server was configured to be as tightly locked up as possible and running optimally.

Then there were permissioning problems. I run quite a few different plugins for WordPress, a few of them integral to the site, like the Google Reader feed that you can see on the right hand side. These use API’s to pull from their respective providers, the data then gets written (somewhere) so that it can be included in the sidebar. The problem was that each of these different plugins was writing the data to somewhere different and the way that I have set up the accounts on the server is so that the ability to write data to a folder is given on a case-by-case basis, to ensure that random scripts and plugins cannot write to any folder that they wish whenever they wish, thus maintaining a high level of accountability.

But, I’m glad to announce that hintofsarcasm is now functioning to its full potential and having tried all ways that I can to break it I have managed to iron out all the bugs that I have come across.

Let me know if you find anything though.

Pineapple Boudoir is a startup that sells lingerie, candles, sex toys and other products, aimed largely at women.

The first challenge was to design an infrastructure to support the web-application and cart.
Having previous experience with Windows and the .NET environment we decided to follow this route, based on Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. At launch we are running SQL and IIS on this single server, although we intend to run SQL on a separate server in the near future, as growth should warrant.

The server is a Dell PowerEdge with 2Gb RAM and an Intel Itanium processor. It’s racked at BlueSquare 2 in Maidenhead, Berkshire, a brand new facility that went live in May 2007 with a 20GBit resilient Ethernet ring. The server also sits behind a Cisco hardware firewall.

A shopping cart application was next on the list to be found, or else designed bespoke.
A small open-source project called nopCommerce came to our attention. It ticked all of the boxes and the support is very good, as the project is still small enough to receive personal responses from the developer.
The cart software is written in C# with ASP.NET 3.5. It uses DAL (Data Access Layers) and modules for payment gateway integration, including Paypal, Moneybookers and Authorize.net.
It has an impressive back-end which can handle products with multiple variants, some of which are required, like size or colour and some of which are optional items which go with the product, such as batteries.

With knowledge of C# and ASP.NET this cart is extremely easy to customise and modify, either to add custom code to change how the page displays, like the Lightbox effect on the product pages, or to change what functions are performed in the background, like showing ‘featured products’ on the homepage.

Pineapple Boudoir launched on December 1st 2008.

Apart from the Windows Cloud stuff there were some other speakers and demos that interested me, including a neat use of Silverlight at the Hard Rock Café website which you may have seen before as it has been bounded around as the pièce de résistance of Silverlight 2 since about March this year.

When you click that link you are presented with the Hard Rock Café memorabilia website, in the middle you will see an image that can be ‘Deep Zoomed’ into and each different node (item) can be interacted with separately. The resolution on the pictures of the items is amazing and the detail to which you can zoom in to is awe-inspiring. I have just spent a few minutes reading a contract drawn up for a Beatles performance in 1965, the text is so clear and takes no time at all to load, according to the speaker (whose name I forget, sorry) image optimisation has been a big part of the development of ‘Deep Zoom’ in Silverlight 2 in an attempt to deliver the best quality content to the widest range of users, narrowband and broadband of all speeds. This is definitely something that I can applaude as when I find myself on the road and using my 3G data stick I still want to view high resolution pictures in order to send them on or post them to the web but find myself hanging around, usually having to start again more than once after passing through tunnels, for what seems like an age for rich content to load, which is more than mildly frustrating.

The hot topic of the day however was Hyper-V and OS virtualisation.
All but two Windows Server 2008 editions come with Hyper-V services built in. If you don’t know what Hyper-V is, let me try explain it as quickly as possible so that we can move on;

You have one server. Hyper-V can then split this server into two (or more) ”virtual” servers which means two servers running on one piece of hardware. To anyone but the sysadmins they respond and look as two completely seperate pieces of kit, but they aren’t. (Something VMWare has actually been doing for years)

The whole point of all this is that, if it suits your business model, you could potentially chop your server and datacentre spend into tiny little pieces and make huge savings. Servers these days are so powerful and often only a small percentage of that power is utilised, so one could easily gobble up three others and still have power (CPU, RAM, etc.) to spare in an emergency.
For example, if you had four file servers each running pretty steadily at 10% utilisation, why buy 4 pieces of kit that are only going to be using 40 out of 400% when you could buy one piece of kit that would use 40 out of 100% and do the same job? It’s the choice between paying £10,000 for 1 server or £40,000 for 4, in the end they’ll both be doing the same job. The green freaks amongst you too will be happy, because only 1/4 the power is being consumed.

OK. Maybe that’s a little simplistic, but you get the gist of what I’m trying to say, right?
Of course, it ends up introducing other problems such as single point failure, but even if you ran it as a high-availability cluster then you’d still be saving 75% on your hardware bill by only buying 2 servers instead of 8.

Also, by happy coincidence, Microsoft Hyper-V Server (notice no ‘Windows’ as there is no GUI) was released yesterday, October 1st as a free download and is free to use by anybody. It doesn’t support clustering, it doesn’t have a GUI, it doesn’t support high-availability clustering, in fact, it doesn’t support very much, but, it would be great in a development or testing environment.

During these times of recession and depression and smaller purses Hyper-V may have just come at the exact right time for Microsoft to maximise profit. Way to go Steve.