Mick West

Our DSL connection here is through DSL Extreme, althought Verizon handles the wiring.   We’ve been havin intermittent problems, where it will work perfectly (3Mb/s) all day, and then around 6PM, it starts going really slow and hanging.

So I call DSL Extreme.  The first time I’m connected to an idiot who finds nothing wrong, and heck there is nothing wrong at the time.  He tells me to call back if I have a problem.   Grrr.   But a few days later I call back while it’s actually bad, and they tell me they can se something wrong and they have to send in Verizon.   

A few days later, a Verizon tech arrives to look at the external wiring.  After some poking around, he declares there is no problem up to the connection on the panel (which is in the garage), and since my phone works then that’s the end of his responsibility.  More grr!

So they are basically saying that something is wrong between the wiring block at the panel downstairs, and the modem.   The panel looks like this:

And the wiring inside the house looks like this:

Yay fun!  I had to buckle down, and actually figure out where all the wires went.   In the end it turned out to be relativly simple.   A phone line is just two wires.   We have six wires coming into the house, in three pairs (orange, green and blue).   Only the incoming orange wires are actually used here.    Since I only use one phone socket in the house (for DSL + wireless phone base station) I simply cut away all the other wires, so all I had were two wires going directly from the panel to the socket that was in use.  

In the end though, I’m not sure that was the problem.  I think the problem was this:

 

This is a wiring block. The wire from the phone company comes in on the left.  The wires to the condo are on the right.  See the orange wires labed 4 & 0 (for 407), that’s my phone line.   The bit of metal is a bridge clip, which makes a connection between left and right.   Only here, the bottom one (of my set) is not pushed on correctly, and seems to be barely making contact with the right hand side. 

So I pulled it off, pushed it on firmly in the right place, and my DSL has worked fine ever since.

What bugs me is that the Verizon guy tested all the way to the left hand side of this wiring block.  If he’d tested the right hand side (or just looked at the clip), then he would have found the problem.  But his responsibility ended half an inch from the actual problem.

I’m currently living in the US as a “premanent resident”, with what is known as a “green card”.  This means I can live here as long as I like, but I’m not a citizen.  I can’t vote, I can’t leave the country for more than six months at a time, and there are some tax problems.   

On Election day this year, November 4th 2008, I decided to apply for citizenship, and so filled in my form and sent it off.   This is what happened so far (I’ll update it as more thing happen).

Nov 4th 2008

- Filled in the N400 form.  This can be downloaded from the slightly confusing USCIS web site.  It’s a PDF that you can fill in at your computer and then save and print out.   I’m sure eventually they will accept it over the internet, but for now you’ve got to mail it in.
- Took some passport photos.   These have to be ratther particular, 2″x2″.  There’s a nice page explaining all the details, or you can just pay someone to do it for you.   You need to send them two, and keep two for later.   I did them myself, Holly took a photo of me with a white background, and I cropped it to fit.  You write your “A Number” on the back of the photo, in pencil.
- Wrote check for $675.   Somewhat expensive. 
- Sent it all in (I actually did the above over a few days, but I mailed it on election day).
(There’s a handy checklist for the above). 

Nov 13th 2008

An I-797C Notice of Action arrives, telling me my application has arrived, and I should hear from them within 425 days.  Yes, it actually said 425 day.

Nov 20th 2008

Rather surpisingly, I hear from them a week later, with a letter telling that I have an appointment to be fingerprinted on december 4th, at 12 PM.  Not too bad.  But I think the long wait comes after, waiting for the interview.

Dec 4th 2008

Fingerprinting day.  I arrive at 11:40 for my 12PM appointment.   Not very busy.  They are very serious about their “No Cellphone” rule, making me leave mine in the car.   I fill in a form, and am called in less than five minutes.   The fingerprinting took arount 10 minutes (a grumpy Russian woman, constantly berating the machine).  My fingers were too dry, so they were squirted with water several times, but eventually it worked. 

They game me a book to study for the Naturalization test, questions like:  What is the “rule of law”.  Now I just have to wait until an interview is scheduled.  No idea how long that will take.

Back in 1993 I took a trip to Nepal with my ex-girlfriend Carol.    I took a lot of photos on that trip, and finally got around to scanning them in:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mickword/Nepal1993#

Six days of the trip were trekking near Pokara, in the Annapuran region.  This is approximately the route we took:

From Nepal 1993

It’s about the easiest trek you can do. We walked for about five hours a day, maybe a bit more, but were really only walking 5-8 miles. It was a lot of up and down though. The heights on the map are in meters.

This is how I got started programming, 20 years ago, 1988:

Actually I started a few years earlier, but this is probably where I really got into writing code, and writing games.  That’s a Sinclair ZX-Spectrum in a dK’tronics keyboard.  Microdrive on the left.  TV as a monitor.  Sound sampler plugged in the back, plotter on the right.  Cassette player (from before I got the microdrive).  I still have that pink folder under the calculator.  This is all on my desk in my room at Needham Hall, from when I was at UMIST (now Manchester University).

This is in Hebden Bridge, near to Bingley, where I grew up.    If my life had a taken a few different turns, this could have been me:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8548110@N06/516706022/

Just downloaded the iPhone wordpress app. Seems to work quite well.

Is my computer now redundant? I think not, but it’s nice for blogging on the run.

[Update again - This is probably fixed in the new update.  So the real fix is now to connect your PS3 to the internet before you start playing - it will then download and install the patch]

I’d played GTA for a few hours, all seemed well. I then upgraded my PS3 system software (although this might not have been the root cause, based on comments below), to get the new Playstation Store. That went well, new store looks nice. But then I try to play GTA-IV, and it just hangs on the loading screen saying “LOADING - CLEAN GETAWAY” (the name of the last mission).

I tried various combinations of resetting and re-inserting the disk, nothing worked. So I then went to the “Game Data Utility” (at the top of the “Games” tab), and selected the GTA data, and deleted it (press Triangle, then select delete). This does not delete your saved game, but forces it to re-load all the data it had cached. I figured maybe there was something OS specific in the cached data. Anyway, rebooted, it re-cached all the data (”Installing data to hard disk drive“), and then IT WORKED. Phew! And poor work, Sony and/or Rockstar.

Step by step

1. Take GTA Disk Out
2. Reboot
3. On the “Game” tab, go to the top and select “Game Data Utility”
4. Select GTA, and press Triangle
5. Select Delete, then Okay.
6. Re-insert disk and start game
7. Game will re-load all the data, taking a few minutes.
8. It should now load the last saved game, hopefully!

[UPDATE] Stefan suggest a simpler fix. Try this first as it’s much quicker.

1. quit the game
2. sign out of psn
3. sign back in to psn
4. load game

Note I’ve not actually tried Stephan’s method, as deleting the game data worked for me. It could be there’s multiple bugs causing similar symptoms - just try both fixes.

[UPDATE 2] I had it crash again, so I signed out of PSN (did not bother to sign in again), and it worked.

Books I’ve read since Feb 4th 2008, with a ranking out of five of how much I enjoyed reading them.

1984 by George Orwell. (4/5)
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (4/5)
Sabriel by Garth Nix (4/5)
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (4/5)
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, by Marina Lewycka (3.5/5)
What is the What, By Dave Eggars (4/5)
World War Z: An Oral History, by Max Brooks (4.5/5)
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (3/5)
Lirial by Garth Nix (4/5)
Abhorsen by Garth Nix (4/5)
13 Bullets by David Wellington (3/5)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (4/5)
The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (3.5/5)
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch (4/5)
Gate of Ivrel by C.J. Cherryh (3.5/5)
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta (4/5)
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester (4.5/5)
In the Woods by Tana French (4.5/5)  
East of Eden by John Steinback (4/5) 
The Likeness by Tana France (3.5/5)
Duma Key by Stephen King (4/5)

So, my latest project is to actually wire the condo, to get around the slow and unreliable wireless connection and allow faster streaming to the XBox360 and PS3. The last wiring I did (for this same purpose) was in the Oregon house, where I laid Cat5e cables via the roof space. This was relatively straightforward, as I could get up there. But being in a condo means very limited access to the space above the ceiling, and one of my ceilings is twelve feet high. It seemed much simpler to use existing wiring.

There are actually four type of existing wires I could use. There’s the power lines, the phone lines, the cable TV lines and the TV antenna lines. The last two are basically the same thing, and luckily this condo is wired (more of less), with two sets of coaxial cables going to each spot where there’s a cable TV outlet. One is the CATV, and the other connects (presumably) to the rooftop antenna, shared by the building. That means it’s basically unused, since we just use cable TV.

Power line and phone line networking were discounted because of the slow speeds (10 Mbps, or so I thought, actually 200 is claimed now) and the unreliable nature of unshielded cables being dual-wielded, this leaves the coaxial (128 Mbps), with the obvious choice being the spare set of coaxial cables that can be dedicated to this new network.

There are a few competing technologies for this kind of thing, most notably: MoCA, and HomePNA, which comes in two flavors: phone line networking, and coaxial networking, which is sometimes called HCNA. The entire thing seems surprisingly fringe, and I had quite some trouble finding where to buy the equipment. I found a few options, but very few actually for sale.

• The Dynamix HP-30 Coax. (Unknown price)
• SendTek’s CET-330 (Unknown Price)
• Coaxsys TVNET/C PRO Target (”normally $199″, but price unknown)
• ReadyLinks IPCoax 602 (Unknown price)

Then some that you could apparently buy:

• The Highwire Connect ($179)
• The Alpha Telecom HPCE-322M ($83)
• Scientific Atlanta’s DPH548 ($128) (see pic, right)

[UPDATE:  The link to the DPH548 goes to VTI, who now don't seem to sell it, and have replaced it with something that looks like the HPCE-322M]

The Highwire seemed more readily available, but is too expensive, and seems like it works in pairs, rather than a broadcast over shared wire. Of the cheaper two that I could actually order online, the HPCE-322M and the DPH548 looked fairly similar. Indeed I would not be surprised if they had the same chip inside. They seem to offer the same set of ports: cable in and out, two ethernet ports, power, a two-position switch (host/client) and some blinkenlights.

I decided on the DPH548, swayed by the “In Stock Now”, the nice diagrams of wired house, and the fact that it’s made by a company owned by Cisco. They have a nice little brochure on the adapter. It’s a bit more expensive, but I like to have a modicum of reassurance. I’m slightly concerned that there seems to be only this one obscure store on the internet selling them. It seems like they are restricting sales to installers? I don’t know. Perhaps this technology is just going out of fashion, since more people use wireless.

So I’ve ordered three of them. One will sit by the main router in my office, which is connected to the DSL line (hopefully soon to be some kind of FiOS). That one will act as the host. One will sit behind the TV, and will be connected via a switch to the Wii, the PS3 and the 360. The last one will be connected to Holly’s computer. Those will both be configured as clients.
Speeds are promised as a sustained 80Mbps. We shall see. That’s actually slower than the best wireless out there (802.11n), but I’m hoping that in addition to being much more reliable, the real-world throughput will work out higher (Wikipedia lists actual 11n throughput as 74Mbps).

Now, the diagram on the right here shows the adapter sharing the wiring with the Cable TV system. Apparently this should work just fine, seeing as the DPH548 uses the frequencies in the range of 12-28Mhz, whereas “existing RF Video” is apparently 54-860Mhz). However, I don’t trust this at all, and since I have these spare cable runs, I’m going to put it all on it’s own dedicated cables, disconnected from anything else. I think this will give me a cleaner signal, and prevent any interference with the cable TV. Plus it should give me room to change over to some meatier cable network later. I mean, coaxial cable can theoretically support several Gbps - like with all those cable TV shows in HD.

Installation

While waiting for them to arrive, I tidied up the wiring I was going to use. There are eight antenna coaxial cables which converge in the wiring closet (actually just a closet) along with the CATV cables. I found the three of them that went to the locations I needed (by plugging in a small TV, and then unplugging cables until the signal went out). I then removed these three cables from the antenna splitter, and connected them all together with a single 3-way splitter.

The image above shows the closet. Originally there were two sets of cables: the “C” cables (CATV), which go into the two splitters on the left (for five TVs) and the “A” cables (Antenna), which used to go to the eight-way splitter at the bottom. Here you can see the new splitter on the right, and the three “A” cables I’ve combined into a new network with the 2-Way splitter acting as a 3-way combiner.

The adapters were shipped very promptly by NTI. The boxes they are in are labeled “WebSTAR”, which is Scientific Atlanta’s cable modem brand. There’s a sticker on the box that says ETH-COAX, which is what NTI call it, and a handwritten serial number (112). Peeling this off reveals the actual Scientific Atlanta sticker, which looks a bit more reassuring. Made in ‘06, I guess this is something they don’t make any more, and is surplus stock?

Setup is very simple. I just basically plug everything in. Connect the cable to the “COAX NETWORK” connector, plug the ethernet into the “PC/LAN” port, and connect the power. There’s a switch for host/client, which you don’t have to adjust as it will auto-configure. But I set the one near my router to HOST and the other two to CLIENT.

Results

It works! The boxes need about ten seconds to connect after you power them up, then it seems like I have a very solid 70Mbps (about 8MB/sec) Ethernet connection. I timed the speed by copying large files and observing the percentage used in the Process Monitor’s network window. There seem to be no problems at all.

While this is comparable to the reported peak performance of Wireless-N, it’s vastly faster than Wireless-G, which is what the PS3 uses. I did the same tests with Wireless-G (supposedly 54Mbp/s), and only got 18Mbps (This would not cut it if I were to get 30Mbps FiOS, which Verizon are offering here soon). Coax also does not degraded with distance or interference, so I’m getting the same solid 70 Mbps to the far corners of the house. Wireless seem inherently unreliable, for example, I just plugged in a D-Link wireless-N adapter to my laptop, and the speed DROPPED to 30% of the Wireless-G speed on the same laptop (should have been twice as fast)

I added a switch behind the TV to connect the Xbox 360, PS3, and the Wii, and that seems fine (I still need to get an Ethernet adapter for the Wii).

Overall I’m very happy. I’ve replaced a very unreliable slow wireless network with a fast wired network. I’ll still keep the wireless connected to use with the iPhones and laptops. But for the fixed devices, it’s a vast improvement.

Powerline 200Mbps?

Of course, now I’ve actually got this set up and working, I discover that powerline ethernet adapters actually go up to 200Mbps now, with 400 planned soon. Grrr! Still, reviews are mixed, and it’s not clear if you’d actually get that 200Mbps (and it’s probably 100Mbps on-way, which is the figure that counts), what with the power lines being unshielded, and having 110 Volts running through them. So I’m still pretty happy with what I’ve got.

[EDIT August ]  I’ve seen mixed reviews of the powerline ethernet, anything from barely working (2Mb/s) to very fast (150Mb/s),  so i’m pretty happy to get a solid 70.  I even bought another unit, so I can locate it in the wiring closet if needed, for when the FiOS arrives (which looks like it might not be until September or October)

Some “new “adapters, which I’m thinking really all run of the same chipset (D-Link is apparently Entropic’s EN2210 c.LINK chipset).  I opened up the DPH548, and the chips are:

AD9865BCP 10-Bit Broadband Modem Mixed Signal Front End - the actual PNA interface.
CG3011QI-10 Probably the controller/ASIC type thingy
AM29LV010B - 1 Megabit (128 K x 8-Bit) CMOS 3.0 Volt-only Uniform Sector Flash Memory
88E6060-RCJ - Closest I could find was LinkStreet 88E6063, 7-Port fast Ethernet switch with 801.1Q.

And these are the new adapters

D-Link’s DXN-221 (for a pair) aand DXN-220 (single add-on unit - Soon to be released.  Seems like the same basic thing as the DPH548.

Gefen’s TV-ETH-2-COAX. $178 for a pair.  Only comes in pairs, but looks pretty robust, and has a four port hub at the reciever end.  Claims 200 mbp/s (full duplex, so really 100 mbp/s)

It works great!

My wife and I both like to read. I recently got a Kindle, and Holly just had to have one too. One downside of e-books is that you can’t share a book with a friend. However, if two people can share one Amazon account (at least, just for Kindle purchases) , then they can share all their books between their two Kindle’s.

It works really simply, and really well. When you get the second Kindle, you just register it to the same account as the first one. Then when you buy a book, or download a sample, you get a drop-down box that lets you choose which Kindle you want the book sent to. In the image to the right I’ve selected “Mick’s Kindle”.

So it gets sent to whichever Kindle you like. There’s no option to send it to both Kindles, but once you’ve bought it, then it’s in your “Media Library” on Amazon, and from there you can send it again to either Kindle.

You can also buy books on the Kindle itself, and with that it works just as you would expect - the book goes to the Kindle you ordered it on, and to the Media Library, so it can be downloaded to either Kindle at a later time.

Finally you can also get a copy of the book on the other Kindle without using the computer. Just go to the “Content Manager” on the Kindle’s main menu. In the Content Manager, some books are labeled “Kindle”, meaning they are in your Kindle, and some are labeled “Amazon”, meaning they are just in your Media Store. If Holly buys a book, it will automatically show up here.

So, to download a book Holly just bought on her Kindle, I just select it in the Content Manager, and then select “Move to Kindle Memory” from the Menu. The book will transfer, and twenty seconds later you can start reading.

This all brings me to an unexpected advantage of the Kindle. We can read the same book at the same time. Normally you’d read a book and then lend it to someone. But since we have two Kindles, with two copies of the book (for less than the price of one paper book), we can both be reading it at the same time. We are currently both reading What is the What by Dave Eggers, and it’s a novel experience to be able to discuss the book while were are both still reading it.