Lemonrock Editor

Blog (152)

Go Now

22 Apr 2020Go Now

Over the last 5 weeks, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and our change of patterns, I have been having an interesting time (aka a dreadful time) with Virgin Media.

You might say I am a little bit moody, a little bit blue...

Between February and March, our street's cable system became so slow and intermittent that it was useless. Virgin and I have had an unpleasant relationship over the years, starting from the time when they used to be - in our area - known as NTL.

NTL, I recall vividly, and with some pain, were absolutely the worst company I had *ever* dealt with, full stop. No idea about customer service, appalling technical department, and very frustrating to deal with. I jumped out of that particular frying pan, into the fire that was BT. BT gave me poor service for the next few years (although not as bad as NTL) and then, about 10 years ago, Virgin came to the rescue with a smartly designed advertising campaign that made me up-sticks with BT and go to my mate* Richard Branson's company: bright, young, energetic, forward-thinking... nothing could go wrong.

Having experienced the Virgin offering for these 10 years, I just want to say one thing: they haven't learned a thing.

I suspect that the people working for Virgin are the same incompetent bunch who were running NTL 16 years ago.

Cut a long story short: I am no longer with Virgin, because they don't care.

Two things that might interest anyone who's also fed up with Virgin: 1) 4G mobile Internet is very reliable, and consistent in speed**, neither of which apply to Virgin. And 2) You can get some very good deals with SMARTY and with EE if you're in a good 4G reception area. I've had constant, fast Internet now for 6 weeks, using both EE and SMARTY. I'm very impressed with 4G Internet so far. The speed is better than Virgin, although the latency (delay) is worse. If you're a gamer, or use real-time tools on the Internet, using a 4G connection may not be for you. Currently, SMARTY (which runs on the Three network), is offering an incredible deal of unlimited data for £20 a month.

https://smarty.co.uk/plans/unlimited

For your £20, you get free calls, free texts, and unlimited data. On a 1-month, cancel anytime plan. It's mint, as they say up north.

Don't take my word for it. Virgin needs a good shake up (or is that a shake down?) and forward-thinking outfits like SMARTY and EE are the future.

Happy (and fast) surfing!

Mac, Editor

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* Actually, he's not a mate. I use the term ironically.

** 15 - 22Mbps, consistently

You askin'?

12 Apr 2020You askin'?

Some good news. Well, we need *something*.

Good news #1: Looking after our members

Lemonrock has extended the holding period for all lapsed memberships. This was previously 2 months - it is now 6 months, and means that your precious data (photos, blogs, MP3 tracks, free dates, etc.) won't be automatically cleared from the site until 6 months after your membership has expired. We'll review this as the COVID-19 situation develops, and may extend this cut-off point even further if necessary. Bands and venues: you don't need to worry about losing any data, and if you can't - or don't want to - renew your membership, that's fine. We'll wait for you!

Good news #2: QuizMaster

We think that it's time for a bit of fun. Starting on Monday 13th April, we'll be starting our very own live online daily quiz - Lemonrock QuizMaster. A quick 4-minute quiz, every day, to test your knowledge of music, based largely on the songs played by bands who list their gigs on Lemonrock. Give QuizMaster a go, and see if you can get into the Lemonrock scoring charts!

QuizMaster is played LIVE every day at exactly 11.15am - don't be late!

https://my.lemonrock.com/quizmaster.php

Stay Safe.

Mac

Lemonrock Editor

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The photo is my old NAD CD player. I had just opened the CD drawer, and when I looked at the display, it announced that "1970 is open". Well, I'm game if you are...

Gig Cancellations

18 Mar 2020Gig Cancellations

As a musician, live music lover and proud supporter of local pubs, I feel deeply for the bands and venues affected by the Government's response to the coronavirus threat.

As the Editor of this web site, I want to ensure that the correct information is being published about local gigs that are not going ahead.

We have an easy to use Cancellations system on Lemonrock. If your gig is cancelled, you can login and mark your gig as CANCELLED at the click of a mouse, or tap on your mobile screen. This system not only updates your page, but it also updates our gig listings pages, and sends email notifications to people who have signed up for these alerts.

For the health of our industry, I truly hope that this situation will be short-lived and that we continue to enjoy the incomparable pleasure that live music provides.

If I can help anyone who isn't able to update their pages for any reason, please email me personally with your instructions, and Lemonrock will edit your cancelled gig(s) for you.

Mac, Editor

P.S. Check out the rate of gig cancellations here »

Promises, promises...

7 Mar 2020Promises, promises...

It's not every day that I have difficulty understanding technical concepts. I've always been good at maths and logic. In fact, pure maths was my favourite school subject.

JavaScript.

It's used everywhere, all over the world, in web browsers. It's what makes the modern web what it is; snazzy, dynamic, intuitive, fast. Easy.

But one part of the language recently tripped me up; something called Promises.

Technical alert: the rest of this is technical. Really. If you have other things to do, I suggest you do those things first.

So...

JavaScript only runs in a single thread in the browser. It has lots to do: handling key presses and mouse movements, calculating widths and heights of things on the page and arranging things on the page, as well as sending data via AJAX to the server and processing the responses. When you have this limitation, asynchronous programming becomes rather messy and disjointed. Somehow, when you initiate the AJAX request to your server, you have to remember where you were, and resume where you left off. This gap could be a few milliseconds or longer depending on the network connection and task required on the server. But eventually, you get your response, and you remember where you were, and that's how JavaScript used to work. Until Promises were invented.

A Promise in JavaScript is a programming construct. It reads like normal code, but it isn't normal code. It encapsulates the idea of a time delay: I do something now, and when the response comes back, I want to carry on right here, in this same piece of code. And that's where I tripped up. Because it looks like normal code, I assumed that the context was the same either side of the call; that the variable scope was the same before and after the call. Wrong. Just because the code is all in the same place, doesn't mean that the scope is the same. The scope when the Promise is fulfilled is different, and you can't rely on variables that were accessible in the previous lines to be still accessible. The scope has changed. So in my case, referring to variables in the object from which the server call was made, was incorrect. They no longer existed, even although this was simply the next line of code on the page.

I think this is a poor design choice. Given that JavaScript knows the context when a Promise is made, it could easily store the context and set 'this' to that context when executing the Promise. But it doesn't.

And so Promises are not really kept, are they?

And programmers are hurled into a bizarre and confusing world of thinking that they are going bonkers.

Which they're not.

Are they?

Mac (not bonkers) (yet)

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