More broadband woes

This is getting weird. I am wondering if I have accumulated some bad network karma somehow. Maybe I should change the byline for this blog from "random musings with a technical bent" to "incessant whining about broadband". Just composing this entry, the Vodem claims to be connected but is experiencing DNS resolution failures.

Anyway: Mo's laptop was refusing to connect to the wired connection in our apartment. No sign of life at all on the PCMCIA card (the machine is so old it doesn't have integrated Ethernet). She tried the obvious solutions then had me look at it.

No problem with the wall -- our other laptop connected just fine although I did have to explicitly ipconfig /renew. I suspected the PCMCIA adapter. Quick look in the XP device manager (long time since I poked around in there) showed that Windows had disabled the device. It claims this is usually because of resource conflicts. Very strange. The only change in the config of this machine in recent memory is unplugging the PCMCIA smart card reader that Mo no longer uses.

When things work, it's sweet. But sometimes I wonder how the hoi polloi are supposed to manage.

Define "gmail"

We gave our kids (5 and 2.5) toy plastic cell phones. They were thrilled. Tyler told Andrew he was going to send a gmail to his phone. He then patiently explained that a gmail is an email except it goes to a phone instead of a computer.

I was amused at his definition but even more amused because while at a different software company I actually worked on a product feature called Intellishrink (research and product) that routed email to cell phones, shoehorning them to fit into the smallest number of SMS packets.

Free Wifi

Robert Kang of Augen mentioned to me that the Parnell merchants were sponsoring free wifi so off I went to Starbucks on Parnell Rd. (Veinte Americano was four shots of espresso!)

Usual drill: open browser, register for free account, hit submit... and nothing. Rats. Simple enough PHP form, but no evidence that a postback occurred. The form was on the 192.168.1 private subnet...maybe IE7 is blocking something?

Fried SIM

All of a sudden the Vodem got confused. It would ask what Vodafone subsidiary to connect to. Specifying Vodafone NZ didn't help -- it would just say you had to be registered on their network. WinXP system restore the previous day's state didn't help, but some sleuthing (take the SIM card from my phone and put it in the Vodem)led me to believe the SIM was fried. With a different card it at least knew about Vodafone NZ. I wasn't game to try connecting since I don't have a data plan for my phone.

The EULA is generic and doesn't pertain to the release software but there is a EULA for NZ on the flashdrive of the Vodem. The tech support numbers in the EULA are no longer in service so I went to my friendly neighbourhood Vodafone franchise and $20 later had a new SIM card and a connection again.

Why did I have to pay for the SIM card, you may well be asking yourself? The store was not owned by the same franchisee as where I bought the Vodem. I figured $20 (actually $30 incl a $10 credit on the account) was better than a drive to the North Shore in rush hour traffic.

Interestingly the EULA claims they used a GPLed SAX parser.

Various menus in the Vodafone "Mobile Connect Lite" have problems -- including unhandled exceptions that make the whole app terminate unexpectedly. Do you ever get that itch to debug someone else's stuff, or is it just me?

White screen of death

Since moving back to NZ we have discovered texting. Along the way I have been exploring uncharted menus on my little Motorola cell phone. I told it to clean up all read texts. There was a brief pause then all was white (the white screen of death?) then after a few seconds the phone came back in it's default desktop. Can't repro -- the next time I tried, it prompted Y/N and then deleted the messages just fine.

When the boat comes with my worldly belongings I really must read the manual for this thing. I've been finding menu items that suggest it can receive faxes. Maybe I should start carrying a loupe.

Vodem as tamagotchi

Remember those tamagotchis -- electronic pets that needed constant love and attention? My wee vodem is a bit like that.

As I noted in another post, the driver software doesn't cope very well with hibernation or stand by modes on my laptop. The solution seems to be to disconnect the device and wait until it has unloaded (systray icon disappers -- sometimes requires mousing over for XP to realize it shouldn't be displaying the icon anymore) and THEN go to standby. I just thought I had done it right but no, when I resumed there was the dialogue asking if I wanted to fire up Visual Studio to debug it.

Fortunately this time it didn't require a restart. Before I figured this out I would often end up with some weird contention where the driver software was half-dead and then it had loaded another instance. You get two icons on the systray and can't connect.

TradeMe

I signed up for the New Zealand Software Association and attended their monthly dinner in a restaurant at a yacht club. Rowan Sampson, one of the founders of TradeMe.co.nz gave a talk on their business. They recently sold for a gazillion dollars to an Australian newspaper syndicate, so they are quite famous in NZ.

TradeMe is the eBay of NZ, with an ethos reminiscent of Craig's List e.g. a dating section, having the "community" vote on contentious issues like whether to auction the chainsaw used to chop down the tree at One Tree Hill (a significant Auckland landmark). The presentation style was refreshing -- mostly about considering the user experience, understanding the demographics of your user base etc. PowerPoint without bullets, and very few words. I was reminded of a presentation by Lawrence Lessig (Stanford law professor who is well known for work on Creative Commons) that was more like a Laurie Anderson multimedia performance -- single words flashing by on screen behind him.

TradeMe accounts for 2/3 of all web pages served up in NZ. I assume they are hosted within NZ. I wonder if there is sane pricing for broadband somewhere.

Broadband in temporary housing

We've gotten spoiled living in Seattle. There's free wifi at coffee shops, whole neighbourhoods (like the U District) that have free wifi, and failing that you can always piggy back off people's unsecured wireless networks.

The biggest shock coming to New Zealand is that you not only have to worry about bandwidth, but you have to think about how much data you are consuming each month. With data caps and overage fees, noone is offering free wifi.

Meanwhile we are staying in a temporary apartment on the edge of the CBD. You can pay for wired internet: $70 NZD per month for 10Gb cap, 1Mb speed. The actual performance is terrible. Their IT guy tells me they are not throttling people and are experiencing severe congestion. Plus their ISP blocks VPNs (or else I am timing out on password validation). I need to connect to two VPNs on a daily basis if I am going to get any work done so let's talk about the Vodem.

This is a cute gizmo from Vodafone that offers 3G broadband. Plug it into a USB port and wait a minute or so while it installs. It contains a flash storage device with the installation software. Pop in a SIM card and away you go.

To its credit, it does work, most of the time. Signal strength is good from everywhere that I have tried in Auckland. VPN connections work just fine.

The downside? Terrible latency, buggy driver software that can't cope with standby or hibernation modes on my laptop, a tendency to go dead after a few hours (name resolution failures), a UI that doesn't actually tell you that you are near your 2Gb cap (for accurate measurements, poke around in the dump of registry keys under File/Save System Information, then click "Extended Information" and scroll to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER], then divide the numbers by 100... you get the picture), and a EULA that doesn't even remotely pertain to the actual product.

Sigh. Soon we will be in a house and we'll be able to sign up for a proper broadband plan. Meantime I am limping along.