FiOS Ping Test
Posted by evan on January 2nd, 2010
Ran a ping test at pingtest.net today. Overall I can’t find fault with the FiOS service so far. Port 80 and 443 are open and I have them forwarded to my Linux box so I can actually run a webserver in my basement. I’m debating moving this domain over to my own linux box, since it’s super low traffic, but I probably won’t.
Cablevision drops HGTV, Food Network, and Travel Channel??
Posted by evan on January 1st, 2010
Boy, good thing I left Cablevision when I did… HGTV is my wife’s favorite channel.
In a separate case, the owner of the Food Network and HGTV, Scripps Networks, removed its channels from Cablevision’s lineups on Friday, a consequence of a breakdown in talks between those two parties.
“Viewers love our talent and our shows, which is why Food Network and HGTV rank among the top networks in cable,” Kenneth W. Lowe, the chief executive of Scripps Networks Interactive, said in a statement Friday morning. “But our valuable networks simply are not being compensated like top 10 networks by Cablevision. The distribution rates Cablevision pays for Food and HGTV are among the lowest in the industry.”
The dispute may linger for some time; Cablevision said it had “no expectation of carrying their programming again, given the dramatic changes in their approach to working with distributors to reach television viewers.”
Source: NY Times and the HGTV website.
Got my first FiOS bill today…
Posted by evan on December 26th, 2009
Not good. The rep I spoke with had said she’d intercept the first bill and apply all the credits up front. I guess being Christmas she couldn’t, so I got this first bill of $208.22.
Single sign-on with Linux clients and Active Directory LDAP, Part 1
Posted by evan on December 25th, 2009
One project we’ve been working on for a while is single sign-on across all our servers and other services (e.g. SVN repository, a few other things). One thing I wanted to avoid, I guess for mostly religious reasons, was reliance on a Windows instance for any of our production environment. The logical part of my brain knows that people build huge websites with Windows farms and AD, but my gut still doesn’t trust it. So what I wanted to do was setup OpenLDAP as a “slave” to an Active Directory “master” and have all the LDAP info propagate over the slave whenever any changes were made in the master. I’ve done this with DNS – setup Bind as a slave to an AD server and everything basically works as I expect in a Bind-Bind master/slave scenario. Well, it turns out that it doesn’t work like that when it comes to LDAP. Apparently AD doesn’t follow the RFC for LDAP (surprise!) so many things that would be expected to work with OpenLDAP won’t.
Snow on Long Island
Posted by evan on December 20th, 2009
I almost bought a snowblower the other day. Almost…
FiOS it is.
Posted by evan on December 5th, 2009
Fios was installed today. Took longer than expected but I guess it went well. FiOS digital voice is pretty good, has one or two niceties that Optimum Voice didn’t (caller ID info in the emails it sends, for instance). The Motorola STBs are way better than the Scientific Atlanta (or whatever) that CV provides… I’m awestruck that when you hit the Channel + button, the channel actually changes.
Cablevision offered to woo me back again but since the service was already installed I said no thanks. They did say they’ll pay the termination fee for me to go back. Interesting… Anyway, Fios’s speeds are pretty good, I got as high as 26/20 on the 25/15 line. The Actiontec router is pretty nice too (model #MI424WR-GEN2).
FiOS speed test to Cablevision's server 2009-12-04
… or maybe I AM going with FiOS.
Posted by evan on December 3rd, 2009
Well, this was unexpected. Verizon is really playing hardball with pricing. When I called this morning to cancel my install appointment, Verizon countered and they offered an extra $30/month discount. I asked for an extra STB for free (I figured all they can do is say no) and while the rep said she couldn’t do that, she did increase the credit to $40/month which would more than cover the cost of the 2nd box. So as of this moment, I’m on for FiOS tomorrow.
Ain’t competition great?
Suffolk County High School Rankings by total SAT scores
Posted by evan on December 3rd, 2009
I just found this cool site which has SAT scores for high schools all over NYS, but for me the sorting didn’t work, so I copied the stuff into Excel and sorted by total score (and added the % columns). The data are supposedly from the NYS Department of Education for the 2007 graduating class. Found the link via the Long Island City-Data.com forums. Rather than trying to HTMLify the table and make it work inside Wordpress, I just decided to print it to PDF, but the summary is below.
Oops… sorry FiOS, I’m sticking with Cablevision.
Posted by evan on December 3rd, 2009
Well that didn’t take long. I got a call this afternoon from the same Cablevision rep I spoke with to talk about cancelling after I signed up for FiOS. Apparently they received Verizon’s request to port my number over and learned I wasn’t kidding when I said I was going to move to FiOS. And good news! I can now qualify for the Optimum Triple Play again!
I guess I’m getting FiOS… Farewell Cablevision
Posted by evan on December 1st, 2009
So I’ve had Cablevision for years. I mean, except for the couple of years I lived in Queens and when I was in college, I’ve basically had Cablevision my whole life. The service overall has been pretty good but the prices have been rising steadily. When I signed up a couple years ago for the Optimum Triple Play — TV, internet, and phone service — my bill came to like $90-$100. That’s a pretty good price for all 3 services as far as I’m concerned. It helped that Cablevision was for years the top-rated ISP in the country – I’d get 20 mbps down and 8 mbps up all the time. Over time they added caps to upload and I haven’t seen uploads over 2 mbps in a residential Optimum line in years, though at work I see ~5 mbps up over cable. I’ve moved around a lot over the past few years and I’ve kept Cablevision in each location and the service has always been at least acceptable. With this latest move, the service is still good, but download speed seems to top out around 8 mbps. That’s certainly not terrible, but not as good as the 15 mbps I was getting in the previous house.
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Recent tracks- Nirvana – Something In The Way March 3, 2010
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