Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

Yeah, NetFlix asked me about this.

I was looking around on NetFlix website trying to figure out how to report video problems of instant viewed material. But, couldn't find anything.

At one point during the play back the video broke up and was green...and somewhere after that the audio/video sync was off. Tried pause, ff, rev, stop and restart, but it stayed out of sync.

The only thing I didn't try was switching broadband service. I stayed on Cox for the 3 that I watched yesterday. Even though I have a TiVo HD on Cox and the other TiVo HD on DSL, so it would've been a simple move.

Though both TiVo HDs are direct attached to the cablemodem router...there are two gigabit switches between the cable modem router and the dslmodem router, but wouldn't expect that to have much impact.

Cox should be the faster...pretty I'm supposed to be getting 7Mbps with up to 12Mbps with PowerBoost....though speedtests seem to indicate I get faster speed with my 6MBps DSL service (a fairly consistent 5Mbps). Haven't watched an HD stream on NetFlix, but those had worked better on Cox than DSL. DSL on the other hand is much more reliable. Last lights storm, Cox was out for a few hours. DSL never went down, in fact I managed to stay online during it as well (though I had to make various network configuration tweaks, since most of my home network has Cox as the default gateway)...and had to work fast, since DHCP server has no redundancy and that machine's UPS has short life.

Probably next on my list to get a big UPS for...

Link: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Rumor_Has_It/70039168?trkid=226871

I rated this 3 stars.

At first I was gonna watching it on my DSL connected TiVo HD, but saw that it was trying to stream in HD quality....but dropped down to not. So, I switched to my Cox HSI connected TiVo HD where I could get an HD stream.

Link: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Ratatouille/70045269?trkid=226871

I rated this 4 stars.

Used the Netflix Instant on my TiVo HD (connected to Cox HSI Preferred). Initially the quality was 9 bars, but it degraded quickly to only 6 bars.

Maybe I should've used the TiVo HD on my DSL connection?

Speed testing seems to confirm that I should've.....

I was bored and playing around with my AppleTV, I'm way behind on my video podcast viewing...but there's only so much I can take in at once.

So, I was playing around with other parts of it, and looked at Trailers. Finally saw the Star Trek trailer. I tried it in HD format. And, it keep stopping to buffer. But, watching SD format trailers were okay. Maybe Cox can't deliver the consistent speed I need for HD streaming, wonder if this'll be a problem when NetFlix HD streaming comes to my TiVo HD....except that the TiVo's are on DSL. Though I had contemplated flipping them over.

Later I was looking at my MRTG graphs, and saw that once again the transfers were considered Bulk. Guess I should set QoS marking for the AppleTV to Express. We'll see if that makes a difference next time.

I was kind of hoping that NetFlix Instant viewing would be available on my TiVo's this long weekend, but I guess it'll be sometime next month. Wonder if I'll have time off to inflict damage of watching too much NetFlix during the Xmas break

I thought of asking to borrow a NetFlix instant viewing device again, but now see that there's a limit of device activations that I can have on my account. And, I've already burned one. And, I think the plan is to activate both my TiVo HD's, so that I don't have to think of which one I'm on when the urge strikes. Even though, of course, they are both right next to each other and connected to the same display

Back when I first moved here, I wanted to get DSL.... they offered 3 tiers (that I knew of...) 1.5/384, 3.0/512, 6.0/768. Of course, I wanted the top one. But, they said for my area they could only offer me the lowest. But, it was better than dialup (and, I was using AT&T BusinessNet service, at the time). So, I pursued getting Cox HSI at first....because I wanted cable TV more than I wanted a landline. But, I was having trouble getting Cox at the time (though I have it now). So, I did order the DSL.

But, once I did get it...they locked me at 768/384 (for a week I did get 1.5/384, but then there was a storm and service became slow and unreliable...I called in for service and the phone tech. said nothing was wrong at their end, must be my side. During that trouble shooting they lowered locked me at 768k down. Moments before the field tech. showed up service started working again. He said something about replacing a line card or something just before coming over....I tried to get the 768k lock removed, but I couldn't convince anybody by email or phone that they had done this....and kept saying that I should get 1.5 and that it must be my line)....and efforts to upgrade weren't available. Even though DSLreports technician report tool said I could do ~2.0M down (and 690k for up).

More recently there had been upgrades in my area...and technician report had been reporting that I could get better downstream rates. Suggesting the next tier could be fully achieved. This mornings quick check say 3.1M.

So, once again I was browsing the AT&T site to see if I could order an upgrade in my speed. And, this time they showed offers of the 3.0/512 and 6.0/768 upgrade options. I wasn't that daring...I ordered the 3.0/512 tier.

Wonder how long the upgrade will take, and whether it'll mean that I can finally do VoIP over DSL (it works good now over Cox). But, the for consistency in speed and reliability...DSL has been the winner.

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Of course, I'm talking about my Ubuntu server (well, maybe not obvious....except that I'm not known for doing upgrades).

I had debated waiting for Hardy Heron's release before building this Linux server. Except that I had bought the box back in December, and delaying was preventing was delaying all that BOINC work that I've been doing.

There's other stuff I want to or have thought of doing with this server, but don't know where I actually stand on doing those sorts of things. If I had it to do over again, I don't think I would've gotten this box (it was knee-jerk response to replacing a dead server, which I was later able to resurrect...negating the ordeal of recreating things). OTOH, I probably would've continued on with buying something else....and I'm not sure if I would've been that happy with that purchase. Of course, it has delayed that purchase....and it may become too late to get it. Though perhaps Windows XP will continue to still be available after June 30th, and I'll make that one last upgrade in that department.

Anyways...other than taking much longer than expected to upgrade....either the upgrade servers are still badly hammered, or Cox is throttling me. Cox seems to be sluggish in general today. The download speed was dismal. And, then hidden in the terminal you don't see my default, it was asking if I wanted to proceed with the upgrade after everything had been downloaded.

Annoying enough when doing 'sudo apt-get upgrade', even more so here....because I wasn't expecting that I had to wait and interact (with a hidden screen) in the upgrade. Later there were dialogs that popped up on stuff that wanted input, mainly to decide if stuff I had configured in Gutsy could be unconfigured in the resulting upgrade to Hardy. Umm, I configured those services so that I could use them....

Finally it was done....it took forever to boot while it did fs checks on /home and /MMCVideo, but then everything looked fine.

Well, not totally. lm-sensors was changed, so I had to reconfigure that, and I'm not sure but the core temperatures seem to be higher now. The default is FireFox 3.0 beta....and all my extensions and themes got disabled. I've been avoiding upgrading to FireFox 3.0 on my other machines for this reason. Though people say that the new version is faster, and the memory leak is fixed, and some of the hanging/crashing problems on Mac OS X seem to be gone. But, I want it to work the way I've customized it....

So, I changed my shortcut to launch firefox-2 instead and reverted things.

Now other than network lag, which I hope will clear up on its own....the only main thing that doesn't seem to work in the update is vmware. Which probably just means I need to rebuild the kernel stuff again (or see if there's some hardy specific details to making that work). Not really a big deal though, since I never got around to running anything in vmware. It was on my list of things to try, but now I need more disk on this box.

I heard 8.04 was going to have support for PM SATA, wonder if that's true and if the PCIe PM SATA card that is in the box will now work, etc.

I survived....almost 7 hours without power. It got really cold. I was worried I'd have to sleep without heat....but I did find my old sleeping bag.

Unfortunately, I had trouble after power came back.

My Windows desktop lost its mind....guess I need a new CMOS battery for it.

My Linux server came up...but then went away. Just like its predecessor....extended power outage....the fans failed in it and it toasted itself. Hopefully it had some kind of safety shutoff, and replacing the CPU fan will get it going again. Though I don't know where I'm gonna score one....hopefully the computer store at work has one. Otherwise, I guess I'll put Amazon Prime to the test.

Not sure where things stand on improving my emergency preparedness or UPS replacement or other things....

Suppose I should figure out what I'm having for supper, just in case I lose power again....

Meanwhile Cox is still out

Looks like I experienced a nearly 24 hour outage of my Cox HSI service....

Wonder if my TV recordings for the period were affected....guess I'll find out when I get home from my business trip on Saturday.....

Apparently, they just don't care that they are unreliable....and its not just consumers, it hits KSU. (though it is especially bad because both primary and secondary DNS for the university go down, so not only are on campus sites down...but all name lookups fail, so off campus hosted sites are also unavailable).

Though KSU does kind of have an AT&T backup....actually, so do I.....but my living room is on Cox and my bedroom is on DSL....should come up with some way to do automatic failover or something

Because, line monitoring looks something like this (bottom is obviously Cox):

Too bad I can only get 768k down from AT&T/Yahoo! DSL (I'm paying for the 1.5M tier).

Now granted...it is partly my fault. I had been advised numerous times from people in this area before and after I moved here to stay away from Cox, etc. Even had somebody mention that KANREN is Cox, and its what the University....

Guess I had been spoiled by the service I had gotten from Time Warner's Roadrunner in Dublin, Ohio. Never had the choice of DSL back there, since the phone company uses linesharing in the apartment buildings (even though they were the ones that offered DSL when I ordered service from them, and said it was available, etc.)

Hopefully, there won't be any more outages like last Wednesday afternoon/evening....were everything digital was out, and analog was snow ridden. Hard to call during outages when it also takes out your phone service.... The only stuff I could watch was WIBW-DT using my OTA HDTV receiver.....

Well, I decided it was time to setup the other WRT54GS....in anticipation of getting Yahoo!DSL...which I ordered just as I was losing hope of getting Cox in time.... though I ended up getting it just in time, so I was able to check online if I needed to go into work at 12:01am or not

But, I decided not to cancel the order, even though I don't know how to live with landline again (and it is rather expensive considering that it is just basic local only service). There was a time where I thought about running a dual WAN home network, and it looks like I'm gonna do this.

So, to start this process....the first thing is to find my WRT54GS. I tried to remember which box it might have been stashed into, and hoped to myself that I at least marked on the box that it was in there. After about two hours of digging around, I noticed that it was sitting on the bottom shelf of my computer desk. Guess I had previously found it, and set it aside for this future event....

Now to check my laptop so that I can replace the firmware with Sveasoft and load in my various customizations.

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