Flaky Wireless Router

I purchased a new Airport Extreme wireless router the other day, and also a new networked HD tuner. I installed both at the same time which is something I usually never do to avoid ambiguity when something breaks. I noticed some flaky internet performance so thinking it was the new Airport Extreme (which gets very good review), I made changes to a bunch of settings. The performance problem was also very hard to notice because it was random flakiness. The most noticeable problem was with live video including Skype and my girlfriend's live video feed for the class she was taking.

Long story short, it turned out to be the cable modem. Why? I inserted an extra 1 to 3 coax splitter before the cable modem.

Prior to this problem I never payed any attention to the signal strength readouts on my cable modem's web page. My Motorola surfboard modem serves up a page at 192.168.1.100 on my network. Following are some snapshots from the web page with different coax splitter configurations in between the coax line entering our house and our cable modem.

1:5 coax splitter at the house + 1:3 before cable modem:


1:5 coax splitter at the house:


1:2 coax splitter at the house:


An explanation of these numbers can be found here. As you can see, with the 1:5 and 1:3 splitter my downstream power level was at -16dBmV which is out of the recommended range. With just a 1:2 splitter, the downstream power level increased to 0dBmV, SNR has increased, and our flaky internet problems are gone.

I'm still trying to make sense of the upstream power level and why it should be *lower*. My current theory is the cable company sends commands to the cable modem to increase its output power if the cable company can't hear the modem? If that was the case, then seeing a lower upstream power level would mean the upstream signal is clear with lower upstream power.

Goodbye BlueWordsLive

Here's the story. Google e-mailed and said "We're automatically renewing your domain." Since that's what I wanted, I immediately purged the topic from memory. Google had out of date credit card information and failed to inform me that they weren't successful in renewing my domain. What's worse is there is a grace period that had passed, and the domain goes in to some state (I forgot what they called it), where it can't be reclaimed until it goes back into the public pool. It would have cost me a bunch of money to retrieve it from this state before my domain was returned to the public pool.

Alternatively, GoDaddy offers a domain backordering service where they monitor domains in these states and register them for you as soon as they are released for public reregistering, so I gave that a shot. GoDaddy charged me and either failed or has a business relationship with another company.

BlueWordsLive is no owned by findyouadomain.com. Its a cheesy name anyways. Ahtilog is way cooler.

Hacked and Tethered iPhone 3G Speed Test

My friend and I just benchmarked a tethered 3G iPhone connected on the 3G network. Quite impressive throughput for a cell network. It actually felt like I was surfing on wifi. Now if they would just make this free and officially supported, I would be one happy customer and perhaps I might feel like I was getting my money's worth from my cellular phone provider. I've never felt that way before.

OSX Screen Sharing Bug

I accidentally shared my laptop's screen with my desktop and my desktop's screen with my laptop. The result was psychadelic man! Don't do it though. Both machines hosed.

Ubuntu Install: Buffer I/O Error on Device SR0

Installing Ubuntu has been a bit of a challenge due to errors reading from my optical drive.  I was able to get through some installs successfully with a CD burned with Ubuntu but in most cases it fails while trying to read from the CD before the install is finished.  I tried moving devices around on the IDE cable, burning the disc at a slower speed, verifying the disc burned correctly, making sure the ISO image checksums correctly.  It just appears that the drive I'm using to burn the disc or the media I'm using just isn't compatible with my Ubuntu machine's drive.  The one thing that did work is using DVD media instead of CD media.  If you're having the same problem, I recommend giving this a shot.