Nokia says that Symbian is no longer open source, just “open for business.” The definition of “open” in the mobile space is apparently completely different than it is everywhere else in the software industry.
Ryan Paul, Nokia transitions Symbian source to non-open license
I shouldn’t have to ask this, but what is the fastest way to eject a removable disk in Windows 7? So far I’ve been finding an explorer window, then right clicking on the drive, and picking eject. Why is this three difficult clicks? What’s the one thing that you know is going to happen with…
I use the systray icon. I don’t think it’s that bad. Except when it breaks… yeah, that shouldn’t be a concern but it is; even under Win7 I’ve seen quite a few occurrences where right-clicking that Unplug/Eject systray icon does nothing. Then you have to double-click said icon, and navigate through the resulting dialog box, which is too many clicks. Also, even when the systray icon isn’t broken, sometimes the autohide logic decides to hide it (and I understand the sad state of affairs that led MS to implement autohide for systray icons, but I don’t think it should choose transient status icons like this one). I just set it to always show.
I’m not 100% with you on “what’s the one thing you know is going to happen with” removable disks. Just because it’s connected to a bus that technically supports hotplug doesn’t mean you’re going to remove it. On my Mac, I have a couple drives connected via Firewire that I never unplug, and I actively dislike that there’s always an eject button staring me in the face and tempting me to press it, or waiting for errant clicks. I’ve only ever accidentally ejected one of these drives once, but that’s still once too many. And in no case should the guest user be able to eject the Time Machine drive. (I complained about this before; unfortunately that was on Facebook and links from the public web won’t work well so apologies if you’re reading this and can’t see that.) And even for disks you do unplug sometimes, the OS gets no guarantees as to when.
I’m fine with how Windows exposes this (though it should actually always work). And I wish that Mac OS had a way to say “treat this drive as nonremovable”, or at least require admin abilities and a confirmation dialog before ejecting it.
Given the reliability problems I’m experiencing with my otherwise nicely fast Comcast DOCSIS 3 connection, I’m looking for something new. It has to be reliable, and it has to be at least competitive on speeds for both download and upload, though I’m willing to sacrifice some speed for reliability and better policies.
The long and short of the Comcast connection: it’s flaky (manifesting as modem crashes. I’ve called Comcast multiple times and they’ve twice told me to remove splitters, twice visited and measured the signal and said it looks good and once replaced a poorly wired splitter; after all this the problem is less frequent but still occurs multiple times per month.
So what are my other options? Astound worked ok for me but is too slow (esp. for uploads); AT&T’s best is U-verse which also has slower upload speeds and apparently isn’t available here anyway; other DSL options have even slower upload speeds; then there’s this newer indie ISP, Sonic.net, with a DSL option I haven’t seen before.
Sonic.net Fusion Broadband is intriguing: an ADSL2+ connection advertised as 20mbps/1mbps, but supporting an optional Annex M mode where you might get can get upload speeds as high as 3mbps by sacrificing some download speed, and it allows you to bond 2 lines together for double the speed in each direction. Even accounting for some falloff due to distance (I’m estimated to be about 3000 wire feet from the central office, which should be just fine for ADSL2+), it seems like dual-line Fusion should get me back in the ballpark of 30mbps/6mbps like I have now. And from a company whose entire business is data, not trying to tie me to legacy TV or voice business models, to boot.
So, provisionally, I’m trying out Sonic: The plan was to get the lines installed, see a nice 40mbps/2mbps connection, then see how good Annex M actually does for upload speed (nobody will make solid predictions, so I just have to try it for myself), and if (across 2 lines with Annex M enabled and at my loop distance) the resulting speed is even, say, 75% of what I was getting from Comcast (30/6mbps), consider it a keeper, due to friendlier policies and reliability.
Easy in theory. In reality, signing up with Sonic was easy, but the going got rougher right after that. Sonic doesn’t own the wires to my house; they have to rent them from AT&T; as I found last time I tried indie DSL in 2001, this isn’t a perfect recipe for success. The day they were supposed to connect the wires, AT&T showed up 7 hours late, then told me they couldn’t do the job because it was too late in the day and they’d have to come back the next day. The next day, they connected the wires, I plugged in the DSL modem from Sonic, and found myself the proud owner of two 4mbps/1mbps DSL circuits. This wasn’t going exactly as planned.
I called Sonic; they looked at the statistics they monitor from their end of the DSL equipment and immediately agreed this was a problem that AT&T would have to look into; they made an appointment and AT&T sent someone back to my house a few days later; the AT&T tech measured a bunch of stuff, said “looks good to me”, and left without anything having improved.
Fast forward a few weeks. Sonic seems to be going to heroic lengths to get AT&T to up the quality of the wiring, but the fact that heroic lengths are necessary, and haven’t succeeded after 6 weeks, is disheartening. They’ve managed to speed up one line and not the other, so one line syncs at 18mbps/1mbps and the other at 4mbps/1mbps. (Now that one line is behaving as promised, it’s also hard to believe they can’t get the other one into shape — before that, I was starting to think the distance to the CO was wrong and there was another 6000 feet of wire in my loop.) In any case, I have yet to even get to the second step of my plan, after dozens of calls to Sonic and 5 visits from AT&T service technicians.
At this point, it continues to be a race to see who can give me fast reliable access. I’m continuing to try to get Sonic to get AT&T to provide the promised line quality and speeds. The more time that passes, the harder it is to remain optimistic about this. Meanwhile Comcast seems to remain the owners of the highest-bandwidth wires into my house, so at the same time I keep trying to get them to fix their reliability problem, though they’ve been charging me $30 for troubleshooting visits which didn’t find or fix the problem, which is not cool.
My current plan is still to stick with Sonic — I really want to like them — but the difficulty of getting AT&T to give me a good line (after 6 weeks and counting) is disheartening, and even when they do get that fixed, I’ll have to cross my fingers and hope that Annex M works out ok. Also, the Comtrend 5361 modem Sonic sent me has now crashed 3 times even though I’m barely using it, and generally seems buggy (which is scary since, you’ll recall, I only reached this point because of cable modem crashes). And worse, the reported 22mbps speed I’ve reached so far is just the sync speed reported by the modem — actual usable transfer speeds to any site I’ve tried top out around 7mbps down, which I suspect might also be a bug in the modem firmware when bonding lines of different speeds (maybe it won’t shove any more data over the fast line than the slow line). If once the lines are the same speed, usable speed remains only 1/3 of nominal sync speed, I’ll be sorely disappointed.
So. Maybe all these problems will be resolved and I’ll get a reliable modem that syncs at 30+/5+ and actually delivers that as usable speed. And maybe I’ll have to consider other options.
Backup plan 1: Get Comcast to fix the crashtastic-cable-modem problem. I’m losing hope in that, too, after multiple service visits, all they want to do is yank on wires, and that hasn’t fixed it; also their monitoring is poor (I called in while modem was down and they say they have no record of outages and I say what about right now?); also I filled out a survey about customer service and got a phone call from a manager saying “ok I see you’ve been having this problem for a while, we’ll make sure to send you the good tech guy” and the next tech guy they sent did seem better but still didn’t fix it.
Backup plan 2: Maybe Comcast’s business options have better tech support, troubleshooting abilities, or reliability guarantees. A business-class line of my own costs a lot more than what I’m paying now; the teleworker plan is actually cheaper but relies on support from my employer, which may or may not exist.
Backup plan 3: Stick with Comcast, but route around the crashtastic modem: install a USB-controlled kill switch/STONITH device, connect that to my router, and teach the router to reboot the cable modem when necessary.
Backup plan 4: A low-tech version of #3; run a pull cord toggle switch (like those used for lamps), controlling the cable modem’s power line, from the modem’s home in my server closet up through the furnace duct to my office.
Backup plan 5: Hmm, I wonder how much fiber from fastmetrics would actually cost. Way too much, I’m sure. But still.
Given the reliability problems I’m experiencing with my otherwise nicely fast Comcast DOCSIS 3 connection, I’m looking for something new. It has to be reliable, and it has to be at least competitive on speeds for both download and upload, though I’m willing to sacrifice some speed for…
Backup plan 6: move to a burb that has FiOS
Right. Remind me again why Silicon Valley and the Bay Area as a whole doesn’t have FiOS or anything comparable? (There are a few trial areas in Palo Alto and Sebastopol with FTTH in small areas, but no wide scale deployments.)
I’m pretty sure there’s a market for it here.
In summer 2009, Comcast rolled out DOCSIS 3.0 in the Bay Area, including my neighborhood in San Francisco. Specific offerings included speeds as high as 50mbps/10mbps up/down, and a pretty decent price on 30mbps/6mbps.
So: I abandoned my Astound 18/2 connection and signed up for Comcast 30/7. That was September 2009. Looking back, I see that it was only 4 months later that I signed up for pingdom monitoring of my home IP address. That’s a bad sign — I wouldn’t need to monitor something that was working properly, would I?
I spent a lot of time traveling in the middle of 2010 so I didn’t realize quite how bad it was getting, but it was getting bad — the Comcast connection would drop out entirely a couple times a month, then a couple times a week, then almost daily, getting worse and worse over time. I don’t remember thinking it was really bad until November 2010, but looking back at the data, the problems dated all the way back to January.
Click on the Pingdom history link for the pretty graphs, which unfortunately don’t tell the whole story: they show the amount of uptime (or downtime), but the problem is more insidious. At first, the connection failures would happen at night or when I wasn’t home, and would fix themselves after a few hours, and I just assumed the whole network was down. Over time, as this happened more and more, sometimes when I was home, and I gained familiarity with the problem, it acquired a very distinct signature: when I noticed an Internet connectivity failure, I’d ping the modem on its LAN address (192.168.100.1), it would fail to respond, I’d reboot it by unplugging and restoring power to it, and it would work fine immediately after reboot. This looks a lot less like a problem with the network itself and a lot more like a problem with my modem. So, Pingdom sees very little downtime because each time it goes down, if I’m home I immediately notice and bring it back up — it’s the number, not the length, of the outages that’s annoying me. You can click on the month links in the Pingdom status page to see the details; December 2010 through February 2011 sure isn’t pretty, with about 10 outages per month.
So I arrived at a succinct description of the problem: modem suddenly stops carrying traffic; at this point it also stops responding to ICMP or HTTP requests on its local address. Reboot. It comes back fine. Speaking as a software engineer, this looks like a bug in the modem firmware — something goes wrong and the modem crashes. But I have no way of telling what went wrong, since the modem doesn’t have any useful logs or diagnostics accessible to me (even though I own the modem, its firmware and operational parameters are controlled by the network provider, namely Comcast, not me).
I tried calling Comcast to see if they had any suggestions, but instantly lost a lot of faith in their monitoring acumen when they said they couldn’t see any history of problems, at a time when the modem was actually unplugged. I tried replacing the modem, but a brand new modem (different brand, Zoom) failed the same way within days. (I went back to the original modem, a Motorola SB-6120, since it reboots much faster, and given how often I have to reboot it, that’s actually an important feature. Plus it was already paid for.) I tried calling Comcast and had them send a troubleshooting tech out, twice. Both times, the tech measured the signal at the modem, said it looked great, then for good measure went around inspecting wiring (and the first time replaced a splitter). The problem persisted, albeit less frequently. Meanwhile, a few more calls to Comcast support yielded only suggestions to remove every splitter in the path (which is weird because (a), I didn’t realize that splitters are the root of all evil, but apparently everyone who’s worked on cable networks considers them the first thing to check, and (b), most customers have to be using splitters — how else are you supposed to connect your cable modem and your TV at the same time?).
I do have to hand it to the first Comcast tech, who not only replaced one splitter but found an uncrimped connector on one end of a homemade cable (made by, er, me). It’s funny to me that this poorly made cable had no effect on speed or measurable signal quality at a given time, and not all that much effect on reliability, since the cable modem connected via that cable worked at a good speed for weeks or months between outages. But I’m sure it’s better to have that cable connected tightly. I’m also at a loss to explain why poor wiring causes modem crashes — it seems much more likely to cause signal degradation that causes persistent speed loss; it’s hard for me to see how (without measurably degrading the signal) it can occasionally just crash the modem. But hey, I’m not a cable modem designer. Maybe the bad wiring or rogue splitter would occasionally push the modem outside some operational parameter, electrically, and the modem responds by entering some untested area of its firmware and locking up. Who knows. Now they’ve removed all the splitters and then put back exactly one professionally installed one, checked the cabling, measured the signal and it all looks good, and yet the problem persists.
Summary: the problem persists, and at this point Comcast charges me extra every time they send a tech out to not fix it. Right now, I’m just living with an Internet connection that forces me to reboot the modem once a week when it crashes.
Pros: fastest Internet connection available in my area; pretty cheap at introductory rate; serious upload speed; I haven’t seen any speed degradation due to other customers on the same cable — I get full speed any time of day I’ve tried.
Cons: Flaky connection; Comcast customer support and policies (no servers, per-month cap of 250GB, past bad behavior including throttling, entire Comcast address block is on the Spamhaus PBL so my NAS can’t email my Yahoo account to tell me about firmware upgrades); listening to ads for pay-per-view boxing matches when calling tech support; opaque pricing (between bundles and introductory rates, just try using Comcast’s website to figure out how much it actually costs).
Summary: The network itself is competently run on the best technology available in this area, but nobody knows how to troubleshoot my problem and it’s apparently not worth it to Comcast to care for the price of one consumer connection.
When I moved between houses in 2008, since I was moving anyway it seemed like a good time to re-evaluate my options for Internet providers.
In this neighborhood of San Francisco, I actually have a lot more choices than are available in most of the USA: 2 cable providers (Comcast & Astound), first-party DSL from AT&T, or 3rd-party DSL over AT&T’s wires.
I wanted speeds faster than DSL (the only affordable DSL connections topped out at 6mbps/768kbps), so I decided to try cable. The 2 cable providers offered similar speeds at the time, and I’d heard bad things about Comcast, so I signed up with Astound.
Unlike telephone wires (one company has a local monopoly and owns all the wires, but is required to share the wires for rental by other companies, hence the existence of 3rd-party DSL), cable companies don’t have to share their wires, that I’m aware of. That’s why there’s no 3rd party cable internet, and most areas don’t have multiple cable providers. But this area does. So, there are 3 different sets of wires running along the poles along my street (4 if you count AC power): Comcast coax carrying Comcast signals, Astound coax carrying Astound signals, and AT&T twisted pairs carrying who-knows-who’s signals. There was already a Comcast wire running to my building, but not an Astound wire, so when I first signed up, they had to run a new wire.
They did it wrong. I didn’t realize at first, but over the first 2 weeks, my Internet connection would be reliable and plenty of fast most of the time, and then every couple days would break entirely for half an hour or so. I called Astound a couple times and they tried various troubleshooting purely from their dispatch center and couldn’t find any problems; eventually they sent a tech guy to my house, but he decided the problem was with the wiring which he couldn’t reach. It turns out that Astound, as the newest company on the pole, is also high man on the pole, as in their wires are mounted higher than the others; also, they use a combination of their own employees and independent contractors as service techs, and the guy they’d sent this time was a contractor. His ladder wouldn’t reach as high as the Astound cable, so he had to call a real Astound guy with a cherry-picker truck. Finally the real Astound guy showed up, replaced the cable from my house to the main line on the poles, and showed me that the original cable had a big gash in it, and basically as it moved in the wind could make or entirely break the electrical connection. And yet, with a physical connection so tenuous, it worked fine most of the time.
After that, I didn’t have any more speed or reliability problems for the next year.
Pros: pretty fast (18mbps/2mbps down/up); pretty cheap (especially at the 1st- year introductory rate); worked fine after the first problem was resolved; tech support was easy to reach and pretty easy to deal with.
Cons: shoddily run. Example 1: the original broken wire they gave me, and the service tech they sent who couldn’t reach the wire. Example 2: they forgot to bill me for 3 months, then noticed and reacted by just turning off my account, which got my attention to call them pretty quickly — but it’s not like I was failing to pay their bills; they were failing to bill me. Example 3: they had bogus reverse-DNS entries, so that my IP address would reverse-resolve to a hostname that forward-resolved to some other IP address, which made it hard to log into various remote servers by ssh as sshd looks askance at such tomfoolery.
Anyway, I stuck with this connection for a little more than a year, until Comcast rolled out DOCSIS 3 in this area, opening the door to faster speeds. Faster uploads, especially.
One note is that I never saw the purported disadvantage of cable, where the medium and associated bandwidth is shared among a whole neighborhood, and the rated speed is high but actual speed decreases when your neighbors are doing anything — I got the rated speed pretty much all the time.
In 2003 when I moved to San Francisco, I didn’t look around too hard but just signed up for the Speakeasy DSL connection that I had wanted before, and which was actually available at my new address.
I kept that connection for 5 years until I moved in 2008, and it worked out pretty well, though the speed was more impressive for 2003 than for 2008. Said speed: 6mbps down, 768kbps up, the fastest I’ve seen deployed in the US for standard ADSL (not ADSL2+).
The good: the connection was reliable; Speakeasy was easy to deal with; their tech support people were clueful; their policies were customer-friendly (no caps, no restrictions on server hosting or sharing my network with others); pricing was transparent and up-front. (Some of these shouldn’t even count as benefits, but compared to a lot of the competition, they are, so I list them.)
The bad: it was expensive ($116/month for “naked” DSL with a static IP and no phone line); no faster speeds were available. (They eventually rolled out a 15mbps ADSL2 service that would reach me, but the cost was really high — over $200/month.)
When I first moved in and got this service, I chose it because it was the fastest DSL connection available, I’d heard bad rumors about cable modems not reaching their advertised speed because of neighbor traffic (which I’ve since found to be untrue, but that’s a story for another time), and I wanted to deal with a company whose priority was the data network, not propping up an aging TV or telephone business. I was pretty happy with this over the years, but by 2008, I probably would have bailed on DSL and gone to cable internet even if I hadn’t moved.
(Note: all of the Speakeasy experiences described here were true at the time, before Speakeasy was acquired by Megapath. While I haven’t been a customer since, I don’t think all of these advantages are true any more; namely, the DSL lines have usage caps and it’s no longer possible to get a straightforward price quote from their web page. RIP, customer-friendly policies.)
In 2001 I lived in residential Los Altos Hills in a small rental cottage on the edge of a larger piece of property. Other than that tiny cottage, it’s a pretty expensive neighborhood these days, but also pretty remote, and again the only available last-mile Internet connection was DSL, and with a pretty long loop length at that.
I’d heard good things about Speakeasy, so I filled out their sign-up page, gave them my address, and their system did whatever lookups it does and decided it could serve me, so I signed up and scheduled an install. Then just before the install date a few days later, I got a message from them saying (paraphrased) “Er, we know we offered you you a nice fast ADSL connections for $50/month, but it turns out the PacBell “wiring” connecting your house to the phone network is actually just tin cans and string, or possibly rusty piano wire, and in any case is useless for ADSL… but would you be happy with SDSL, 144kbits in each direction, for $200/month?”
No, not really, I wouldn’t be.
Actually, I don’t have to paraphrase, because I still have the email from Speakeasy:
Your order has been canceled due to pair gain on the line and needs to be downgraded to 144k IDSL. Pair Gain is the multiplexing of a certain number of phone conversations (signals) over a limited number of facilities. Basically you have a couple numbers, and so does your neighbor, but guess what? You both use the same CO facilities to talk on. Very bad for DSL. If you are still interested in service, please see[http://www.speakeasy.net/pricing/](http://www.speakeasy.net/pricing/) for the 144k IDSL speed and it’s price difference from the service you originally requested.
They couldn’t offer any way to get my lines upgraded; just the observation that the wiring wouldn’t sustain a modern ADSL connection and changes to the wiring were out of their hands.
Long story short: I signed up for PacBell DSL service, and they delivered it with no drama. It was pretty much the same price and speed as what Speakeasy was offering but found themselves unable to deliver.
Over the same wires, right? Or maybe not. My theory is that PacBell had bad and good wires running to my neighborhood, and they were happy to switch their own DSL customers over to new shiny wires but relegate Covad/Speakeasy customers to the old rotten wires.
(As an aside, looking through other emails from the same time frame, I’m amused to see that before giving up and going with PacBell, I also tried signing up for two different services from Sprint which I’d forgotten existed — “Sprint Broadband Direct” which was a 1.5mbps line-of- sight wireless link, and “Sprint ION” which was some ill-fated ATM-over-DSL technology that was heavily touted for a short period but was never actually available in my area.)
In the fall of 2000, my last year at Stanford, I lived with a group of friends in one of Rob Levitsky’s Dead Houses. While most of the Dead Houses already had shared DSL connections, this specific house was new to this capacity and didn’t. We called up PacBell and asked for a DSL line; they said it would take 3 months.
(Seriously, here we are in residential Palo Alto — in the heart of Silicon Valley during the tech boom — and the fastest last-mile Internet connection available is 1.5 megabit DSL and even that has a 3 month waiting period.)
One of the friends moving into the new house had previously been living in another Dead House right across the street, and it turned out that the DSL line for that house was in his name and attached to his phone number. He wanted to keep the phone number, and PacBell was happy to move the line to the new house immediately, but then neither house would have Internet for 3 months.
So, like any self-sufficient group of tech-savvy geeks, we took matters into our own hands. We strung an Ethernet cable across the street, connecting the houses (there was enough tree cover that you could barely see the cable). One cat5 cable has 4 twisted pairs of wire, and the slower variants of Ethernet only need 2 pairs. So we connected one pair from this cable to the incoming phone line at the old house, moved the DSL modem across the street to the new house and connected it to the other end of that pair, then set up a NAT router at the new house, put an Ethernet plug on 4 of the remaining wires in the long cable, and used 2 of the remaining pairs to share the NAT router back across the street so the old house didn’t lose Internet access.
The cable crossing the street in the trees was probably illegal, and running both phone and Ethernet on different pairs in the same cat5 cable is not exactly encouraged by the Ethernet spec, but it all worked fine.
For about 6 months. Until a squirrel chewed through the cable.
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted. I don’t remember what we did after that, but I think the severe backlog at PacBell had eased and we were able to get each house its own DSL line relatively quickly.
In honor of World Backup Day, here’s a description of my current backup strategy:
My desktop computer backs up to:
My laptop backs up to CrashPlan to the server in my house, only.
I don’t really like Time Machine for local use, had even worse experiences with it on my LAN (my Mac Pro would frequently kernel panic on resume from sleep, and it hasn’t done that since I moved the TM drive local), and it doesn’t even try to work across the WAN. And TM is slow: even for local use, it seems like TM is almost always running or “cleaning” even if few files have changed since the last run — it will often take > 10 minutes to back up what it reports as 3MB of data (I haven’t used the trick described in the article above to dial back Time Machine from its default hourly backups, and intend to try that now).
CrashPlan has a lot of advantages over Time Machine (in addition to working with computers other than Macs) — it mostly works across the WAN, across networks and firewalls, and it doesn’t take nearly as long to run.
I don’t see the objections to offsite networked backup these days, assuming you have a decent Internet connection. Several different services have unlimited storage for $5/month, CrashPlan among them, but CP one-ups the others by also offering a free option if you host the storage yourself (or a friend does it for you). As for speeds, I have a 5mbps upstream connection and was able to back up about 300GB from scratch in about 10 days. The incremental backups for whatever I change in a day have no trouble running overnight. This is a DOCSIS 3 cable connection; if you have DSL your upload speeds are probably 3x to 10x slower and that could be painful; if you’re lucky enough to have fiber your upload speeds are probably 10x faster and this is a no- brainer; anyway I wasn’t wholly expecting 5mbps to be fast enough to make backups painless but was pleasantly surprised. I look forward to the day when we can take that level of speed for granted.