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Posts Tagged ‘Internet’

Time to Break some eggs

24 Oct

We're now in about day 8 or so since Fox, My 9 and Cablevision parted ways. It doesn't really bother me that much since the main program that I watch on Fox is Fringe and to be honest this whole season so far is stacked on the TIVO since I haven't had time to watch it. Darned if I can think of anything on My 9 that I watch even when I do have the time. I did try reconnecting my roof antenna but in the tangle of cables down in that corner of my basement I seem to be missing that particular cable. 

Meanwhile, the FCC, proving just how irrelevant they are these days, has done nothing but issue media sound-bites. It really is too easy to get programming from the internet these days for these two organizations to be acting the way they are. In fact, if they hadn't been given effectively a government monopoly, they wouldn't be able to act this way due to that annoying practice called competition.

I dropped the land-line phone a year ago along with about 70 percent of the bill that I used to give to Cablevision – I think that by this time next year, and probably a lot sooner the rest of the Cable services will be dropped as well. As for FOX, blocking the Cablevision signal only hurts themself – I can't get FOX over the air so when the Cable goes, FOX goes with it and any of their content I might have watched, will be coming from the internet if I still want to bother watching it. In an era of literally 100's of channels and all the programming that you could wish for on the internet, the broadcast networks are on very rocky ground. A lot of people are cutting th cable card and a lot of tech-savvy viewers o never even bother with a cable subscription, preferring internet based entertainment sites. 

That's it, Day eight and it is time for our elected officials to go break some eggs-

 
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Posted in Just Business, Observations

 

Internet: A series of Tubes

10 Aug

Former Senator Ted Stevens died yesterday (August 9th) in a plane crash.

From wikipedia: He was a United States Senator from Alaska, serving from December 24, 1968, until January 3, 2009. Stevens was President pro tempore in the 108th and 109th Congresses from January 3, 2003, to January 3, 2007. Stevens was the longest-serving Republican senator in history and seventh longest-serving senator in history.

This may not be a part of the legacy that he had expected to leave, but much like when Al Gore “invented” the internet – Senator Stevens defined it in a speech that launched numerous music videos.

The Internet is Tubes

 
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Posted in Observations

 

Apple, Big Brother? No, Apple, Big Nanny

19 Jul

Apple Big Nanny is watching you.Perhaps it is the curse of being Number One – a future sociologist may already be penning a thesis on the phenomenon where companies become Number One and start to operate completely out-of-character. The companies seem to turn against the very principles  that put them into first place and even more strangely start to take on an adversarial relationship with their own customers (Dell, Microsoft, Sony, HP and that’s just recently in the tech industry) .

Apple is now the Number One PC company and within weeks of that piece of news we get the iPhone 4 fiasco and a cover-up from a company that a few years ago would never have released buggy hardware – it would never have passed old Apple’s quality control and useability standards.  Remember,  Apple is the company that made Frog design a household world (for a while anyway) – why Steve Jobs didn’t use them for the iPhone OS 4 work is something that he should regret.  Compounding the problem with a cover-up and then blaming its own customers for not holding the phone properly? Steve call in the Frogs -  you blew it.

The other piece of the platform that has gotten Apple to where it is today is the App store. Have you tried to buy an App lately? Apple seems to be going out of its way to satisfy the lawyers and marketing folks and just paying lip service to design and useability – arguably the concepts that have finally gotten them to number one and increased their customer base. Some Apple critics have been comparing Apple to Big Brother (a riff on Apple’s famous 1984 Big Brother commercial) but Apple seems more and more like Big Nanny as it tries to protect its turf? its users? its investors?  from  the rest of the world. So, let’s go buy an iPhone App.

Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Just Business, Observations, Technology

 

OOMA and the internet connection state.

02 Mar

Having problems with keeping your OOMA phone system connected? Before you blame OOMA, the problem could lie with your ISP. Fortunately, the fix is relatively easy.

ooma hube and scout

OOMA Hub and scout

The OOMA hub and scout units have a tab indicator that show at a glance when the device is working correctly. A blue tab indicates that the box is working and has a good internet connection.  A red  tab indicates there is no internet connection (and you cannot make or receive phone calls through the OOMA).

After about a month using the OOMA, I began to notice OOMA connectivity issues that I thought might indicate a problem with the unit. I have about a half dozen always-on devices running on the network. So when OOMA started showing no internet connection but everything else (most but not all of the time) seemed to be humming along just fine I blamed the OOMA. After one frustrating saturday evening when the OOMA connection would not stay connected for more than about 30 minutes at a time, I turned to my firewall logs to try and determine what exactly was going on. .

The logs showed that a lot of DNS requests (UDP port 53) were failing or taking a really long time (latency) to complete. Compared to the Popcorn hour media center, the XBOX, TIVO and other network connected devices, the OOMA was sensitive to DNS errors and was making a lot (comparatively) of external requests. Each request to the OOMA server would first go to the ISP’s DNS server to resolve the name into an IP address and when that request was not resolved in a timely fashion, OOMA would apparently think that the internet connectivity was lost and the tab would turn red and . Meanwhile, other devices on the network would not notice anything or would perhaps slow down but not indicate any connectivity issues.

Once I figured this out, I looked at my network configuration and made some changes. As I said, I have my own firewall behind the Verizon DSL modem (Westell 6100), which can also act as a firewall. When I first setup the Verizon DSL I had turned off all of its firewall features so that it would not filter or block any services that my firewall had already permitted. I did let the Westell unit assign the IP address and DNS server to use to my firewall (which in turn propagates that DNS server to the LAN).
The solution to fix the problem was relatively easy, instead of using the default Verizon DNS settings I assigned my own DNS server, using the OpenDNS service. I had used OpenDNS on individual computers on the LAN in the past but had not made it the default choice at the firewall. I made the change, restarted the Westell DSL modem as well as the firewall and my wireless router (I wanted to ensure that everything came up fresh). It was like I had just received a brand new OOMA unit! Instead of seeing that red tab show up anywhere from one to five or six times a day I rarely see it anymore and when I do it usually corrects itself before I can get over to the box to take a look.

So, if you are having performance issues with your OOMA try changing your DNS server I recommend OpenDNS as a free and very stable choice.

 
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Posted in Technology, Web Services

 

Cablevision triple play expired

10 Dec

Cablevision convinced me about two years ago to add on some services with their triple play promotion. I had Cablevision internet for about $60.00 a month and DirectTV (Satellite). When I bought an HDTV I would have had to install another satellite dish and another (two) receivers plus some wiring changes. Cablevision said that I could add family cable plus all the STARZ movie channels plus a digital phone line for about $100 a month (actually came to about $115.00 with fees plus their DVR cable-box) – so I dropped satellite and went with Cablevision.

Fast forward – the triple play expired and now the cable bill was jumping to at least $185.00 a month and while I never got a straight answer from the sales reps it looked like it was probably going to top $200.00 a month for the same service that I had been getting. Time to unplug the cable. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Just Business