Information Super Highway

We can rebuild him...we have the technology - Oscar Goldman

I have been a customer of ATT High Speed DSL over the past two years and I've had a mediocre experience with it. It wasn't horrible, but it was a long way from being good. We paid for the maximum speed available to us, which was 3Mbps down and 256Kbps up. It's not the fastest out there, but it should be good enough for what we need to.
After running on this for about a year we were having a lot of problems streaming movies in the evening. I grew up in a world starting with 300 baud modems and I have been doing large content files since the days of 56k. So having to buffer a video for ten or fifteen minutes before watching it was no big deal to me. I was used to the early days of spending hours downloading a video to watch it later.Mrs.Chaos expects more from her internet. What we eventually realized was that during the evenings our connection speed dropped to 0.5 - 0.8 Mbps and that is too slow to effectively stream much. If we both wanted to watch movies at the same time? No go. Even during the working day I would have a online meeting and come running out, "Stop using the Internet!". No big deal to me, but I suppose in the modern era these things shouldn't happen.
We called ATT and told them the internet was slow and asked if they could do anything about it. ATT customer care reported that we had the fastest internet available to us. We tried again at a later time and got the same response. We looked at getting SureWest but they said they couldn't supply our home. SureWest could supply five homes down in each direction, but not ours. So we resigned ourselves to having a barely usable internet in during the evening "Netflix hours."When I got my iPhone 4s with its psuedo-4G speed, I ran a speed test, and it was blazingly fast. I tweeted it about it, sarcastically congratulating ATT on its ability to deliver fast internet to me through a highly saturated wireless spectrum but not through a copper wire running into my home. Something happened. @ATTMike tweeted back an offer to help. One of his team gave me a call, escalated me up to Level-2 support and they fixed things. "Looks like the upstream router is completely saturated during peak load times, let me just move you over to a different router." For the next eight month, we had pretty good internet speeds.Then came the dropped connection saga. The internet would drop unexpectedly for about 1-5 minutes. This would happen on average once an hour, but that meant sometimes it was happening every twenty minutes. You cannot have work teleconferences. You cannot stream shows. The Internet was mostly unusable. This went on for a few days and then everything was fine for a week and then it happened it again. I tweeted with ATT and Mrs.Chaos called ATT.I did what I expect anyone would do. I connected the DSL modem directly to my laptop, put the DSL modem into bridged mode, ran PPPoE on the laptop, increased the debug logging levels and looked at what was going on in the console log. AHA! The ATT PPPoE server was sending disconnect commands downstream and my client was happily disconnected and then immediately reconnecting whenever that happened.
I told this to each ATT person I talked with, but I was never able to gain access to one of the Grey Beards in the back room and so these comments fell on deaf ears. One of the ATT people on the phone said, "It looks like your DSL modem is about two years old. Those things tend to give out after a couple years so we'll send you a new one." This problem was intermittent, so as soon as everything was fine for a couple days, they would close the ticket. The problem would come back and I'd start over.They sent a technician to the house to make sure all of our wiring was fine. He was the first person who seemed like he understood my comment about the PPPoE server and said, "that makes sense. I'll put a note about that into the ticket so the server-side guys can take a look." Each time the problem would go away I hoped it would be the last and that there would be some person at ATT who looked at some dashboard and said, "Oh hey! That red light there is blinking and it should be green. Let me just reboot this." Everything would then start working magically. His last thought would be, "I wonder if there are open tickets about this issue? Whatever, I'm going home." But each time we had a few days of perfect service it would follow up with a few days of useless service.
We spoke a few times with SureWest. Surely they could pull their fiber six houses down? When complaining to one of my friends over this whole ordeal he talked to me about ATT U-Verse and I learned something very interesting. ATT runs two different internet services from two different companies that it acquired. It runs the "ATT High Speed DSL" over its copper wires. It runs the "U-Verse Internet Service" over its newer fiber cables. While our 3Mbps speed was the fastest "ATT High Speed DSL" available to us, "U-Verse Internet Service" ran with speeds of up 32Mbps running fiber to the home.I called to switch. It required a technician to come on site, but no problem, they setup the appointment for three weeks later. The cheapest way to do the install was to get TV for one month along with the service. Weird, but okay. Obviously, during those three weeks of time, the DSL line didn't have any issues. High Speed DSL was scared and making a last ditch effort to stay connected.
The installation was a bit more of an ordeal than I expected. The first ATT technician showed up at 9am to "run fiber" from the pedestal at the intersection down to the pedestal in front of the house. I assume this means lighting up some dark fiber, but maybe he dragged a wire through half a mile of smurf tubes. I can't say. I do know that it broke my home internet at 9am. He left around 10am and our internet didn't work.The second technician showed up at 1pm (when ATT told me he would) and started the home installation process. It was interesting to watch as he installed the fiber termination point into our garage through the wiring box and run the cables into it. He then plugged our home phone line and coax into the fiber termination device. Three and a half hours later and he the new ATT provided 2WIRE router installed and providing internet to the home. I let him go.Once he was out the door it was time to put the home internet back into non-standard configuration. I turned off the 2WIRE wireless network, plugged in my Airport Extreme and then set 2WIRE to provided the Airport Extreme an "External IP" and to use the Airport as the DMZ machine. It worked flawlessly (I'm thankful!).The end of the story? I now have 12Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up for the same price I was paying before. All of my home services are running exactly as they were before. Knock on wood for me that everything continues to be awesome. Stay classy ATT.(Update: The two days after installation, the internet dropped to less than 1Mbps during the day. But after those days it has been fine.)

You're Holding it Wrong

Things don’t have to change the world to be important. - Steve Jobs

The saying goes that every family needs a doctor and a lawyer. Something like that. Though in this past few decades the need for the family IT technician has clearly arisen. My circle of friends tends to serve that role for our families and much as an IT professional will joke to his savvy friends about dealing with clients, so we talk with one another about the family issues and excitement that we are having. One of my favorite positive stories come from the college days when most of us we dual booting, triple booting, quadruple booting out machines. One of my friends said over the summer he walked in to find his mom on his machine happily writing up a letter in StarWriter under OS/2 with no clue that she was on the cutting edge of computing technologies. Recently I have been seeing my family slowly making the shift from Windows and Blackberries onto Apples and iPhones. It's an interesting shift. Four years ago when my dad asked what phone he should buy I told him to buy a BlackBerry Bold. One month ago when he asked, I gave him the choice between an iPhone or Galaxy S3. My in-laws upgraded to the iPhone 5 while I was at their home for the holidays. I am their extended computer support as well. When I was a PeopleSoft consulting I was taught a very interesting way of thinking by PeopleSoft. "We are experts in human resource software and human resource process. Our software is designed around the best processes and the most common processes. If you consult at a company that wants to do heavy customization to PeopleSoft to support their processes the most likely thing you need to change is no the way PeopleSoft does things." Apple expressed a similar sentiment during the iPhone antenna issues explaining how people should use a case or hold it differently, aka "you're holding it wrong." "So we've been syncing our old iPhones to this older computer. Now we got our new iPhones and we synced it the new computer. We've got most of our settings back on the new iPhone, but our Apps, Photos and Music don't seem to be there. I tried syncing the old iPhones to the new computer but it doesn't get it back." Correct. To me this thinking is trivially wrong. But how do you fix it? So you've got 100% of your music on your old computer synced to your phone. And you've re-ripped 20% of that music to your new computer plus another 20% that's brand new. If you just copy your old files to your new computer you'll have 20% duplicates. "Can't you just download the music off the old phone onto the computer?" Sorry - no. You're holding it wrong. Now my dad is making the switch from BB to iOS. This one is going to be painful. I can feel it my bones. So I told him step #1 was go to Apple store (or AT&T store) and they will plug the two phones into their magic device that will transfer stuff from one to the other. I saw these thing work wonders when it transferred Ms.Chaos' Palm data into her first iPhone at the Apple Store. The genius told me, "we have a magic elf in the back that does it." Well done magic elf.

Social Segmentation

App.net will combine the simplicity of cloud infrastructure with the power of web frameworks to deliver the best platform for developing social web applications. - Orian Marx

I generate all this content and I lose a lot of it.  There was a time when my website was fully updated using a bizarre local workflow of text files and AppleScript.  As much as it was a person Rube Goldberg machine, it made me happy to know that the system of record of all of my stuff was on my computer and that was pushed up into the cloud.  You know - so centuries after I was gone archeologists could use the forensics of my hard drive to reconstruct my life.  Assuming someone saved my hard drive for centuries after I was gone and cared.
Now I am "in the cloud."  Truly.  My website updates are pushing into the cloud.  My micro-updates are pushing into the cloud.  My nerd updates are in the cloud.  My source code?  In the cloud.  It's all up there somewhere as the system of record and sometimes it's not on my computer.  In reality, in my day-to-day living and even in the grand scheme of things, I don't know why that should make a difference to me.  But it does.  There is something about knowing all the stuff that I create is sitting in my house.  Physically.
Anyway that's how things are.  I've also now fully segregated my three "social streams."  So if you're interested in my all the nerdy stuff I'm working on in my personal time, my attendance of various Sacramento technical user groups, compliments about my Drobo or Google TV, than the right place to go is App.net (short) and Google+ (long).  If you're interested in my nieces, nephews, vacations and other commentary the place to go is Twitter (short) and Facebook (long).  If for some reason you're interested in what I do for a living, find me on LinkedIn.

Birthday Spending Spree

It's not that HTML5 is bad. I'm actually, long-term, really excited about it - Mark Zuckerberg

I'm used to getting little bits of money for my birthday from parents or my grandparents and being told that I'm supposed to spend the money on "something fun." You know how that goes, they are trying to get you to treat yourself to something you wouldn't normally buy because it would be too expensive.
This year I did a little bit of a technical shopping spree! First I got myself a subscription to App.net for no particular reason. I now segregate my online streams to personal (Twitter -> Facebook), professional (LinkedIn) and Nerd (App.net / Google+). Why not collect them all?
Second I purchased Coda from Panic Software. In my new gig I we do PHP development and I've been using Sublime Text since its basically the only text editor that supported my Retina MacBook Pro. Sublime Text is okay, but I've been avoiding purchasing it since I know at some point in nearish future TextWrangler will start supporting Retina and I would have the option to switch back to a free alternative. Yet I've been having a stare down with Coda. After getting it, I have no regrets! I've got the Git integration working for my work as well as for all my personal projects. And for my personal stuff that gets SFTP uploaded the publish action is all built in. It's fantastic.
Third and last - I got iA Writer for iOS. I've been doing a little bit of writing for NaNoWriMo and since I've been mostly using my iPad as a Desktop replacement I wanted a program that I can write in that will sync across all my devices. So iA Writer to Dropbox sync across everything? Perfect. And why not iCloud sync? Because it would require me to purchase iA Writer for Mac, and I don't see a point in that.
 

Date Night at Home Depot

I live my life a quarter mile at a time. Nothing else matters. - Dom (Fast and the Furious

I *heart* the Library

This Library afforded me the Means of Improvement by constant Study, for which I set apart an Hour or two each Day - Ben Franklin

Your tax dollars pay for the public library system. It is worth every penny.
In high school I would bike down the road to the public library and spend a few hours there on an afternoon or weekend. I read the various computer trader magazines and would take down notes of what I wanted to do or photocopy pages out. My parents paid for me me to subscribe to one of them at home, but I wanted to read the others without letting my allowance take a hit. I remember that one (BYTE or PC World) would have assembly programs in them that I always looked forward to typing in when I got home. So it was a great habit of mine to bike there and read the magazines. I also devoured the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section of the library using the patent-pending "how to find an awesome book" method.
After college my habits remained when I was living in San Leandro and when I was living in Palo Alto. There was a period of time when I would stop by the library in SL on my way home Friday night, checkout a book, and have it finished by the time the weekend was over. I hyper-read books like Space Odyssey, Three Muskateers, Brave New World and more. My focus was on "classics," partially because it was the Jordan-system will typically lead you to and partially because there is a reason they have been considered "good" for decades or centuries. Timeless classics are called that, not because they are a fad, but because they are, in fact, timeless classics and amazing. Even ones I read for grade school or high school took on a new life reading them as an adult with an adult-level understanding of the world and it's problems. A character having trouble paying his mortgage means a lot more to me now that I have a mortgage than it did as a Freshman in highschool.
A lot of people think the days for the library system are going away, what with the internet and the Kindle and all, but they are wrong! Have you been to the library recently? In Europe that have renamed them from "Bilioteca" to "Mediateca." In America, though we have not renamed them, the spirit is the same. You can get movies, audiobooks and time on the computers to browser the internet, which is truly the library of the future.
Ben Franklin is usually cited as create the first public library back in the day. While he created it primarily to settle bar bets, I applaud the man. Not to be too preachy, but In America, where we talk about the dream that anyone can achieve anything, the most important thing to keep that dream alive is to give them the tools to do it. I find few things to be more American then our dedication to public schools and public libraries, those are the tools. Some kids can download "Don Quixote" from Project Gutenberg and put it on their Kindle and other kids can walk out of the library with it for free. Both of those methods are equally amazing to me--both triumphs of technology, one electronic the other social.
 

Virtual Wallet

And perhaps the horse will learn to sing. - The Mote in God's Eye

I have this dream where I live in the future and the only thing I have to carry on me is my pocket computer which takes the place of my phone, wallet, and keys. It's going to be the future soon. Carrying almost nothing is everyone's dream, right? Other people have this dream where they discard all of this other stuff and just carry this one thing around with them. To do it these days that thing would probably be the size of, oh, say a phone. Each passing year it should be getting smaller.
I dumped most of the cards out of my wallet a while ago by scanning them all (960x640 @ 290 dpi) and putting them into a photo album that syncs to my phone. I mostly haven't missed them, mostly. Sometimes doctor's offices get annoyed with making a photocopy of my insurance card off my phone (or I get annoyed with them taking my phone). Sometimes the barcode scanner has no problem reading off my phone and other times it works just fine. When it fails, people just need to type in the code. So that's basically worked.

Even ditching my rewards cards, health cards, ID cards, and other cards, there were still a few things I felt like I couldn't do without: (1) credit card, (2) driver's license, (3) emergency $20. I think that's all I need to make it through the majority of my days.
I really wanted to carry my ATM card - I mean really, but Mrs.Chaos has currently talked me out of it. "What do you need your ATM card for?" "To get money from the bank." "No you don't. You just walk in with your photo ID and they give you money. Also, what do you need money for?" Fair enough for now. I really wish I had a bank that would let me deposit a check by snapping a photo of it. Not yet.
So I'm going to try an experiment where I just carry my phone, my ID and a credit card. No more. To inspire me I bought a new iPhone case that can only hold those items. We shall see how it goes.