Overall I was pretty disappointed with their technical product.  The wireless receiver was nice and so was the number of HD channels.  XFinity has a highly superior Internet product, however, and that was more important.  AT&T’s customer support was pretty friendly and accommodating, surprisingly.  Although they should be considering the hassle this caused.  In the end, I don’t really see how AT&T will compete in this space. Their U-Verse product is based on VDSL which has some serious distance issues.  I’m not that far from the central box in my neighborhood and yet they still couldn’t even deliver 19Mbps to my door (max!) from which 3-4Mbps would be reserved for television at the minimum.  It gets worse, though.  When the system is “retraining” due to noise your phone goes out.  So if you have an emergency you can’t even call 911!

I do wish XFinity would let me use HBO GO on my XBox 360, though.  For some reason it’s not authorized to do so.  Boo.   If XFinity could provide a wireless receiver similar to how AT&T’s works that would solve the last of my issues.  Oh, and drop the price on 50Mbps service, too.  :-)

1. Cost – We get everything we had and then some under Xfinity (aka Comcast) for $10 less a month.  Plus another $300 in gift cards.
2. Channels – XFinity has been continually removing the number of HBO and other HD channels available to us in the last 6 months.  We used to have 5 or 6 non-Spanish HD HBO channels less than a year ago I think – as of the other day it was 2 maybe.  But then again it’s almost impossible to find them because for some inexplicable reason they decided to spread them out!  With U-Verse there are 12!
3. PITA factor.  So this isn’t entirely XFinity’s fault but we don’t have a cable jack where we have our main family room tv.  It’s against a load bearing wall with cross-bracing and I don’t feel like paying the cost, if it’s even possible, to have the wall retro-fitted with a cable jack.  So I have to run a cable down the wall from upstairs.  U-G-L-Y.  Enter U-Verse.  They now have a wireless box so that no wires are needed.  Sweeet.
4. Crappy DVR.  You’d think after like 3 or 4 years we’d get a better DVR from XFinity.  No, same crappy one with limited disk space.  It’s a pig too.  When we were visiting my father-in-law in Chicago I got to play with his U-Verse DVR.  Much faster feel when using it.  Way more responsive.

So how has my experience been?  Well, mostly good.  And much better after tonight.  First a few things that haven’t been as good so far:

1. Internet speed.  I’m not getting 18 Mbps of data.  The tech advised me I might not.  I’m at the virtual limit distance wise.  He says they’ll bring in a tech to setup a bonded pair to improve signal strength.  I’m guessing that will help.  Basically, due to distance I’ll probably see more noise and that impacts speed.
2. Crappy router.  It’s a pretty new 2Wire router but the thing is still not very Mac friendly.  At my father-in-laws I had to reset the router every morning or else it’d just stop working with my MacBook Pro until I cycled the AirPort on the laptop.  And I’d have to do that about every 30 minutes once it started.  I had to do that about once a day here or it’d start to get crappy too.  Uggh.  Almost took back Xfinity due to this.   The positive I will say about the 2Wire is that the new version does look pretty nice and its web interface does have some nice stats to provide but that’s about it.  More on my solution below.
3. The wireless DVR / central DVR architecture seems a little flakey.  I’ve had stutters and drops in the first week.  I’m hoping my solution to the above problem will help this one.

So what do I like?

1. Channels.  Lots of ‘em.  Lots of HD.  Am pretty sure they use a lower bit-rate than Comcast, though.  The picture doesn’t pop as much but I can live with it.  I’m not as much of a home theater snob as I used to be.
2. Huge DVR.  I got a newer model that has a 500GB hard drive in it.  It’s good for about 150 or so hours of HD recording.  Sweet.
3. The web interface for managing my DVR subscriptions.  Again, sweet.

So what about the wireless router problem?  Well, what I wanted to do was just use the U-Verse modem (since it’s VDSL I believe and you can’t just any DSL modem apparently…) and continue to use my trusty D-Link router.  The thing has been rock solid and needs re-booting maybe 2-3 times a year at most.  You can’t really shut-off the U-Verse wireless router and you can’t run it in true bridge mode but you have two other choices basically.  One, you can setup your router on a different sub-net and connect to your router or you can just wire your router in as wireless access point and act as a pass-through.  This thread at the AT&T forums has all the gory details.  I chose the wireless access point option on page 2, post 3 at this link in the thread.

Basically you do the following:

1. Shut off your DHCP on your router (mine being the D-Link)
2. Connect my router to the 2Wire with a Cat5 cable from LAN port to LAN port (NOT WAN port on either end).
3. Set my D-Link to use the static IP address of 192.168.1.10.  I chose this because the 2Wire-3801HGV model that I have seems to default of using the range 192.168.1.64 – 192.168.1.254 so this would insure not having an IP address collision on my network.
4. Left everything else the same from my previous configuration (SSID, security type, password, etc.)

It just worked basically.   Everything seems more stable since I did this and moved most of the devices on my home network back to the D-Link.

That’s about it.  If things change I’ll post more details.  Hopefully the router configuration above will help someone out.

Some areas I’ve been spending more time in and that I’ll try to post about are Spring 3.1, especially around the new @Configuration options and how they can impact testing, Mongo for fun data management and document storage, and the figuring out the right workflow for our development team in moving towards Git away from Subversion.

On the work front I’ve been to China twice in the last year with most of my time spent in Shanghai.  I was lucky enough to spend a few days each in Beijing, Hangzhou, and Seoul (took a weekend jaunt over to South Korea on the way home).  I’ve also visited a few customers domestically in New Orleans, East Chicago, Northern Indiana, and North Dallas.  It’s pretty amazing to see how our software is being used to help kids learn.

During this last year we’ve also been working furiously towards moving the company’s delivery from on-premise to on-demand and managing to keep a code base that is almost identical in the process.  It’s been interesting to say the least.  We work towards a lot of automated testing wherever possible.  That’s where some of the changes that are coming as part of Spring 3.1 come in handy.

That’s about it for now on the technical update front.

Work and the kids have kept me pretty busy the last year but I’m hoping to get back to some more technical articles in the near future. I’m doing a lot of coding these days so there are plenty of topics I could spend some time on.

Well, they’re asleep and the cowboys/giants game is on so I’m going to finish watching that now.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

I should vote for this to be fixed.

My big wish list now would be:

1. Templates templates templates!  I’d love to be able to build templates for things like one-on-one meeting notes, team meeting notes, daily notes, and technical research notes.  It’d keep me from forgetting things for different types of note taking sessions.
2. Better formatting.  I noted this when I first evaluated it and it’s still true.
3. Better export into the clipboard when I copy content.  Right now I generally just export to PDF and then e-mail that if I want to keep my formatting in-tact.  Pasting into an e-mail (on Mac) just looks bad, especially if I have lists in my document.

So far I’ve been pretty impressed with Evernote. They have a nice Mac and iPhone client as well as a web interface that works. Your data is synchronized through their web site and supports tagging as well as basic formatting. They have other support for uploading/indexing documents such as Word and PDF documents but I haven’t found a great use for that yet. There is also image uploading with support for geo-tagging from the iPhone. They have a premium plan that I’ll probably pay for once I’ve passed my 30 day test of software.  Basically, if I’m still using it after 30 days at a consistent level it’s probably something I’ll continue to use.

The only downside is I wish there was better formatting options since I’m a little bit of a stickler about that but the data is way more important than that. OneNote on the Windows Office suite was really cool about that and they’re going to get more “cloud” support in the 2010 version but the lack of Mac support there really killed it for me.  I don’t want to start up a VMWare instance everytime I want to take notes.  Also, not having an iPhone and web interface really limits its flexibility.

What does Woopra promise?  Real-time analytics is their biggest draw.  When I’ve used Google Analytics and CoreMetrics in the past both require you to wait until the next day for most analytics.  That is really annoying when you’re trying to see how a new promotion or feature is performing after you deploy it.

The client is built in Java so it’s cross-platform and on the surface it looks pretty slick.  As I started hitting my site from a few machines at home they showed up right away in the client.  I didn’t even have to hit refresh anywhere.  After I’ve had some time to look at traffic for a few days I’ll post some screenshots.  So far they have a lot of the same analytics that other packages such as Google and CoreMetrics like browser, OS, resolution, search referrals, etc.., however it reports it real time.  I have to say the real-time aspect is pretty damn cool.

I’m hoping someone posts some reports on how well it works and how useful the real time aspect is on a high traffic site.

WiFi on BART would rock if it were available.  It’s now starting to be deployed due a contract BART signed with WiFi Rail recently.  They’ve been testing their hotspots in the main 4 downtown stations for a while now and a few weeks ago I noticed that I could keep connectivity partially through the TransBay tube.  The speed and consistency in the tube is not that great but in downtown I was able to get upwards of 400-500 KB/s (yes, bytes, not bits) from Powell to Embarcadero even while moving between stations.  It was enough bandwidth to download the latest version of Sun VirtualBox.   I do wonder if the speed in the tube is the issue since I don’t know how well WiFi will roll over from one hot spot to another.

All I want to know is when are they going to put the WiFi on the rest of the Pittsburg Bay Point line?  That’s the busiest line in the system (hint hint WiFi Rail).  My advice, fix the TransBay tube and extend through Oakland next.  The longer it’s available continuously the more use it will be to people and the more willing they will be to pay for it.

Myleene and I recently welcomed our twin boys, Evan and Carter, into the world. They were born early at 33 weeks, 6 days so they spent 3 weeks and 4 weeks in the NICU, respectively. They are both home now and doing well. They’re gaining weight and Carter is already over 7lbs and Evan is right there behind him.

I’ll post links to photos soon but I’m exhausted (as expected) and need to get some sleep before the next feeding.

One day I’ll finish my technical posts that are all still in draft mode.

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