Category: Tech

FCC confirms FiOS delivers as promised

Ars Technica reports that the FCC has studied internet service provider speeds and, no surprise to me, found Verizon FiOS to be the best in America. Not only does it have the fastest throughput, the speed is consistent throughout the day.

Speaking of FiOS, a few weeks ago I talked about trouble with the battery that keeps the FiOS landline phone working during a power failure. We lost power for a few hours this past Sunday, due to “animal contact with equipment” according to the power company, and the battery was OK during the entire outage.

Revue review

The Logitech Revue with Google TV now costs a mere $99. The Revue has been a flop and the hope is the price drop will make it possible to compete with the Roku 2 and Apple TV. The Revue has some quirks, but it puts Google Chrome on an HDTV screen, and that recommends it for those whose viewing distance relative to the screen size makes text legible.

The Endurance of Bluehost

My former web hosting service, iPower, was OK until it was bought out by Endurance International, which is in turn owned in part by Accel-KKR. As iPower’s technical problems became more chronic, I prepared an exit strategy by getting an account with Bluehost. But I waited too long to jump, and iPower cut me off for using 30 GB of my unlimited storage. I was forced to spend an extremely stressful weekend doing nothing but making the switch.

Bluehost’s founder, Matt Heaton, had a definite “my way or the highway” attitude, but the service was reliable, if not necessarily fast. The servers are over-committed — according to Domain Tools I’m one of almost 3000 sites sharing a single server, although many seem to be junk sites or placeholders (dograt.net is a placeholder). To speed things up I added caching in WordPress and switched to memory-resident PHP processing on the server.

Since the start of this year there have been rumblings that Bluehost was sold to Endurance International. There was a widely circulated announcement of the iPower buyout, but there’s been no notice of Bluehost being sold; however, Heaton has said goodbye: It’s been a blast!!! Now its time to move on… So something is up at Bluehost.

Because of my bad experience with iPower, I’m on the lookout for trouble with Bluehost, and lately I’ve been finding it. This weekend the site went down at least twice. The SQL database server was offline yesterday, and the server was unavailable when I got up this morning. When I tried to log onto the management console, I saw this message:

Refusing to allow you to login because your server box468.bluehost.com is not responsive enough right now. Please allow a little time for responsiveness to return before trying again.

Bluehost offers something that I had thought was a great idea — a Pro plan for $20/month that supposedly provides more CPU and memory, without resorting to a VPS (virtual private server). I was seriously considering switching to this plan when my account comes up for renewal next month, but if Bluehost is now part of Endurance International I’m worried about the service’s policies changing and its reliability slipping.

Netflux

Netflix is taking a lot of heat for the big increases in plan pricing. My account page says:

The price of your Unlimited Streaming + 2 DVDs out at-a-time (Unlimited) plan will change to $22.98 (including $3.00 for Blu-ray) (plus any applicable tax) a month starting with your next billing period on or after Sep 01, 2011.

To stay at the same $18/month I now pay for streaming video and two discs at home, with the Blu-ray option, I have to drop to one disc with Blu-ray. So that’s what I’m probably going to do. Right now there are only two Blu-ray titles in my disc queue, so I’m even considering dumping the option, because that would be $7/month less than the $23/month the 2-disc plan will cost in September, and that’s $7×12 months=$84, which would cover the $79/year that Amazon Prime costs. It’s a classic Economics problem in determining marginal utility.

Bad battery! Bad! No, wait. Good!

Praise and thanks to the local Batteries Plus store. The “replace battery” light and buzzer came on for the battery backup that keeps the phone working with Verizon FiOS for a few hours during a power failure. This was the second battery. I replaced the original battery just a year ago, after four years.

I took both of the allegedly failed batteries to the Batteries Plus store, and the guy there, working by himself on a Sunday, said “Verizon FiOS? I bet they both test fine.” And, indeed, they did. His explanation was that the FiOS UPS seems to have a habit of overcharging batteries then declaring them worn out, prematurely.

He suggested discharging the battery with a light or letting it sit for a week or two. Well, the original battery has been sitting idle for over a year, so I figured I’d put that back in and, if the tech at the store was right, it would work. And it did. So now the question is, how long will it last? Maybe I should let it run down for an hour or two once in a while. The only catch with that idea is, unplugging the power supply will leave the phone working off the battery, but Internet and TV service will be down.

Follow-up: Six days later the original battery is still OK.

The grandfather of Internet worms

One weekday in 1988 I was waiting in line to order at a lunch counter in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts (or it might have been Au Bon Pain by then). In front of me were two MIT guys who were talking quickly and nervously about something that was going very wrong on the Internet. The problem was the first software worm, written by Robert Morris, who is now at MIT himself. His father, one of the creators of the Unix operating system, has died.