Live from Austin!

Time Warner turned up yesterday and hooked up the Internet. We now have a nice, reliable high-speed connection again. There seems to be nobody in WiFi range who has a wireless access point; either that or they’re not broadcasting SSIDs. Reception is fabulous throughout the house. The modem and router are in the office, and I have the music server up and running again.

It turned out that Time Warner have some kind of lock on their back-end systems to restrict the allowed set of MAC addresses for cable modems. If your modem isn’t on their approved list and in the MAC range their system knows about, you can’t use it. So, I now have a surplus US Robotics USR6000 cable modem. eBay time…

On the plus side, the Cable Guy tells me that RoadRunner in Austin includes the cable modem in the cost of the service, unlike Comcast who charged an extra monthly rental fee for a modem. We’ll see.

For once I don’t feel too bad about the $40 hook-up fee, as the cable guy had to string coax from pole to pole using a long metal hook and a tall ladder. He says the signal quality is great, and the download speeds certainly seem spiffy–at least 50% better than Comcast for about the same price.

Unfortunately, Time Warner aren’t so reasonable when it comes to TV. To get the essentials–Cartoon Network, Comedy Central and BBC America plus scrolling program guide–we’d have to pay $68.21 a month, plus another $10 for a DVR. Or, $64 a month and put up with decompress/compress artifacts from using the old ReplayTV.

So, we’d already decided DirecTV with TiVo was the way forward. $41.99 plus $4.99 for TiVo, but it records the MPEG stream direct from the satellite to the hard drive so there’s no quality loss, and you can record two shows at once while you watch a third show recorded earlier. Plus, all the channels are digital quality, unlike with cable.

DirecTV presents its own problems, however. To get the full channel lineup for Austin you need two pieces of coax going from the dish to the receiver, and for the TiVo option you need a phone line too.

The phone line thing wasn’t such a problem. I needed a real phone line for the home office anyway, and SBC may be Satan, but they’re cheaper than Verizon. The TiVo could call out on the office line overnight and that would be fine.

So, SBC came out. They also played the game of running wires from pole to pole. Their technician got the phone connection as far as the outside of the house, but then he hit a snag. However he wired things up outside, no phone service inside; and when he put a signal generator into one of the sockets inside, he got signal on all four wires. I’ve wired phone connections, and I know that that ain’t right–the phone signal should end up across exactly 2 wires.

I tracked down the electricians who wired the house. They came out to investigate, and discovered that whichever of their colleagues had done the job had completely botched it. No two sockets downstairs were wired up the same way. In the end, they opened up and rewired every socket. On the plus side, I found out that although the sockets are CAT-3, the wire in the walls is at least CAT-5e. So theoretically at least, I could switch the wall plates to Ethernet one day and switch the entire telephone network to VOIP.

But not today. TiVo needs a real phone line for its modem, and I want to see how reliable the Internet service is before trusting it for my phone calls.

Since the electricians were at the house anyway, I paid them to run a second coax from the living room to the nest of cables on the side of the house, plus another CAT5e phone connection for good measure. To do this they had to drill down from inside the house, because they couldn’t find exactly the right point to drill up from underneath, and obviously nobody wanted to risk drilling up through the beautiful wood floor.

So right now there’s a missing faceplate and some damage to the drywall, but I can patch that up and put in a 4-hole plate, install an RJ-11 and two coax sockets plus a blanking plate, and I’ll have a nice clean DirecTV hookup point exactly where I need it. The DirecTV installer can stick the dish on the roof, run the wires down the side of the house, and hook it all up from outside without having to drill holes in anything or run unsightly cables inside the house. Free installation sounds great, but I’ve seen what happens when free installation involves routing a cable from your living room to the outside world, and it isn’t pretty.

Could I have routed the extra coax myself? Probably, but what I really paid for was not having to spend an hour of my time doing it, and not having to crawl under the house, where there could be poisonous spiders, 6″ centipedes, snakes, or scorpions.

Moved to my work-related web site.

I have broadband. I have a PlayStation 2 next to the router and cable modem. I have disposable income. I play video games. Yet, I do not have a PS2 network adaptor, and I haven’t played any online games.

I’ve been thinking about why not. I decided to put together some suggestions for Raph Koster, who’s the big cheese at Sony in charge of online PS2 gaming.

1. Either charge a subscription, or charge for the game, but don’t ask me to pay twice.

   If I need a subscription to play, I’m very unlikely to pay $50 for the game, because if I decide I don’t like it I’m left with a $50 coaster. Games which are offline or online can get away with charging for the game itself, but it’s still a bad idea if the main point is the multiplayer: A high up-front cost to join a subscription game screams “We don’t think you’ll stay a member for long so we’d better get some cash up front”.

2. Monthly subscriptions don’t work for me, unless they’re really cheap.

   Your market is people with broadband and significant disposable income. To me, that says adults with jobs. Like many adults with jobs, there are months when I don’t really get any time to play video games at all.

   It seems to me that it’s not technically hard at all to have a “per hour” fee, capped at the cost of a monthly subscription. That would encourage casual gamers and people who aren’t sure they will like the game enough to get really into it and spend hours on it every month.

3. It has to be co-operative.

   I have zero interest in player-versus-player. If I want a competitive challenge, a computer opponent is better for several reasons:

   • You know they won’t cheat.
   • You know it won’t be a hopeless mismatch of abilities.
   • You don’t have to deal with network lag.
   • The computer won’t camp, sulk, or otherwise behave in a deliberately game-ruining way.

   My motivations for gaming are primarily exploration, puzzle solving, and new experiences. Looking at the top selling games of all time suggests to me that the majority of gamers are the same way: “The Sims”, the “Myst” adventures, “Tetris”, the “Super Mario” games—none of them are about combat. There are a few combat games in the list, but they’re the ones that have lots of exploration and a strong plot—“GTA Vice City” and “Half-Life”.

   Furthermore, the multi-player combat game market is glutted already. People who want that already have lots of options.

4. It has to be social.

   This is where it gets hard. There’s no point in having other humans involved in the game unless you can talk with them, but on the other hand there has to be a way to get matched up with players who have similar gaming interests, and to keep out the assholes.

   This suggests to me that an essential part of any multiplayer online game is persistence in user IDs, and some kind of feedback or rating system at least as good as eBay’s.

   That doesn’t mean massive censorship. If people want to talk trash all day, just let ‘em go do it with other people who want to talk trash all day.

That’s all I have so far, but I live in hope that someone will take notice and come up with some multiplayer games that appeal to me.

My router decided to crap out. It’s an SMC. It was over $200 when I bought it, back in the mists of time, but a few years later you can pick them up for $30. Mine suddenly decided that it would be a good idea to lock up (a) every time there was an incoming SSH connection, and (b) any time I attempted to log in to change its settings or reboot it.

So I stomped off to Staples and picked up a new router. This one’s a Netgear, it was the fastest and most reliable in PC Magazine’s tests, and it happened to be on sale locally.

In a glass-half-full kind of way, I must admit that router technology has improved a lot in the last couple of years. I plugged this one in, and was rather startled when it detected the cable modem, worked out the right settings for Comcast, and just worked. I disconnected the SMC, used the iBook to configure the Netgear to have the same SSID network name the SMC used to use, and all the other Macs kept working. No reboots.

Then came Linux. That seemed more reluctant to accept change. There were probably cache files for dhcpcd that I could have found, but it was easier to reboot and have everything just work again.

Then came Windows. It seemed to be confused by the sudden loss of base station, and wouldn’t renew a DHCP lease to get a new IP address. So, I tried rebooting it. Once I did that, it decided it didn’t have a network connection at all. I tried running the wireless card control panel, which told me I had the wrong driver version installed and that I should reinstall it.

So, I downloaded the Orinoco driver software on the Mac, wrote it to a USB memory stick, transferred it to the PC, and reinstalled. The installer seemed to finish, but when I rebooted there was no change.

Next I used Add/Remove Programs to remove the Orinoco software, rebooted, and installed it again. Still no change.

Finally I removed the wireless card, rebooted, removed the software, rebooted, and plugged the card in again. Windows helpfully started installing something it had found lying around somewhere. It got as far as installing Net Firewall, and complained that the code wasn’t signed by Microsoft. I told it to go ahead anyway, and it told me that a file was missing and the install had been cancelled.

Then it started the Net Firewall install again. And again. And again.

I rebooted again, pulling the wireless card as I did so. This time no spontaneous install. I plugged in the wireless card… and wonder of wonders, it worked this time.

So, I tried running the VPN software… and that’s broken. It just goes into an infinite loop of trying to set up the connection. Tech support can’t help. I’m gonna fiddle with it some more, but right now it’s not working, so I might be spending Monday doing a full Windows reinstall.

I just got e-mail from a random AOL account containing nothing but a small JPG of a woman giving some guy a blow job. Looking at the raw text, it claimed to be a .WAV file, but had a .SCR extension; and it was sent by some sucker on a cable modem in Canada.

No virus code, as far as I can tell. These viruses are getting downright bizarre.

I have the IBM VPN client working across my home firewall and cable modem connection, without interfering with the Macs. Now I can work at full speed at home, wirelessly from the laptop. Come springtime, I’ll be able to sit on the back porch… I am 31337 h4×0r.

Mark came over, bringing his Compaq PC which has been behaving oddly. A little exploration revealed that all kinds of vital files had been deleted from the hard drive—some DLLs needed for Windows domains, a few key bits of Internet Explorer, and the whole of Outlook Express, for example.

After half an hour or so fiddling with the Network control panel, rebooting, then fiddling with it some more, I managed to get the machine to request an IP address and join the network. Once that had been achieved, it was relatively simple to siphon off all his data via a combination of SMB and FTP, and burn it all onto some CDs.

Then we tried booting from the recovery CD, only to find that the recovery CD merely starts a batch file on a separate partition of the hard drive. Yup, no Windows install CDs supplied, and you’ve guessed it, the recovery partition was hosed. So we deleted the data, and Mark’s going to take the machine back under warranty for the store to reformat the drive and reinstall Windows.

I’m not sure what the cause of the problem was, but it looks awfully like a malicious hacker or trojan horse program. I’m guessing ‘hacker’, because we’re talking about a non-firewalled Windows box on a cable modem connection, but with up-to-date virus scanner software.

Anyway, after seeing how much faster my 350MHz G4 is than his 600MHz PC, Mark now has Mac envy.

We have cable modem!

I have finally ordered a cable modem.

I’ve got the wireless router accessing my dial-up ISP. Next step is to get a wireless card for the other Mac, then I can get cable modem…

It seems there’s some incompatibility between the router and IE on the Mac. Oh well, maybe a firmware upgrade’ll fix it.

Went to a bi brunch at Pho Pasteur in Harvard Square. Excellent food. Afterwards I browsed the music stores and somehow managed to avoid spending any money.