Doing some work refactoring old hand-written code using PEAR libraries at the moment. Just have to say, structures_datagrid and HTML_Table_Matrix are very, very useful tools sometimes…
Archives for August 2007
Wireless Broadband continued
The more I look at this, the worse the picture gets…
- There’s the boards.ie sticky which is saying (amongst other things) that gmail and torrents are throttled, that everyone is getting horrendous latency, throughput and reliability, and that Comreg is getting complaints from all sides about three;
- There’s the occasional complete refusal of the modem to be recognised by the computer, requiring either the Huwai software to be restarted, the usb cable to be plugged out and back in again, the restarting of windows or all of the above;
- There’s the occasional failure of the modem to authenticate without any further error message telling you if it’s a hardware or a software or an account problem or who to call to fix it;
- And now there’s news that all this is due to be gone over by Today FM tonight at 1800 on 103FM…
Wireless broadband? Not by a long shot…
A while back, I got one of the new “wireless broadband” modems from 3. I can’t say I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with it, because for the most part, it’s done what I expected of it – access to the net from herself’s place without having to go through some crowd like ripwave. And for the past week, I’ve been away in the UK and it functioned well there as well.
Right up to last Thursday that is, at which point I badly needed email to send press releases back home and net connectivity to send photos but the modem was having none of it. I thought it was something to do with my setup, but between aonach and tom raferty’s blog, I’m getting the impression that these kind of glitches are nothing unknown. In fact one of the people working with 3 has confirmed the gmail thing is a known bug.
Harumph. Not what I expected at all, that. I mean, I wasn’t expecting youtube or to be able to do video conferencing or to download Good Eats by bittorrent or even to play quake 3 over the thing, but email is rather basic, y’know. Yeesh. Next time I’ll have linux properly configured (the modem works very well on linux by the way) and just stick to using mutt for sending stuff; but that still means I can’t receive emails. Which really, when you think about it, isn’t acceptable. I mean, email is pretty much the primary thing for most people who use this sort of thing, and google mail is one of the most popular solutions for email these days (it’s not the 900lb gorilla that Outlook is, at least not yet, but it’s still up there). If nothing else but gmail worked, I’d probably … Read the rest
