So Netflix and a clue went out on a date... and she won them over! Yea!

Yeah, profiles are staying and I resumed our subscription.

Posted by ra at 23:21 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

to: publicrelations@netflix.com
cc: lkilgore@netflix.com
cc: reed.hastings@netflix.com
subject: Netflix profiles feature

To whom it may concern:

As a direct result of the email I received from Netflix last night regarding the elimination of the profiles feature, I have just placed my Netflix account On Hold.

For us, profiles are the most important feature differentiating Netflix from its competitors like Blockbuster Online. Profiles are integral to our Netflix experience. We are not interested in trying to merge queues or manage reviews and recommendations for three different people on a single profile/account.

My subscription is currently set to resume on 07 September 2008, but rest assured that if profiles disappear on 01 September I will instead cancel my subscription outright.

Posted by ra in rants at 00:04 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

What a lovely evening.

First of all, around midnight tonight some fucker rings our doorbell and runs off.
Great. So now I get to wonder whether it was just punk kids, or someone checking to see if anybody was home so they could rob the place. I might not be as concerned if someone hadn't rang the bell earlier today as well. I didn't answer it then because I was busy and I wasn't expecting anyone. But I can't help but wonder if someone was canvassing the neighborhood looking for unoccupied houses to return to at night.

Then, when I come back inside I'm greeted by an email from Netflix that says they are removing profiles. WTF. Their profiles are in my opinion one of their best features. We have three profiles on our account. Their email tells me they are eliminating profiles to "help [them] continue to improve" their site. If this is a taste of "improvements" to come then I guess it's about time to "upgrade" my Netflix account... to the ZERO discs plan. I'm canning their asses to let them know what I think.

GRRRRR. FUCK. THAT IS ALL.

Posted by ra in rants at 01:33 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I had one hell of a networking problem crop up at a client the other day. I was called in to troubleshoot an odd problem where some machines suddenly could not get to the internet... sometimes.

Damn I just LOVE problems that start like this. I poked around and checked their router and rebooted their shittier-than-turds Dell VLAN switches and came up with nothing.

The router has several interfaces and the only ones being affected where those which have VLAN's on them, so I was fairly suspicious of those Dell switches since they've given me trouble with VLAN's before, but the symptoms here were downright bizarre.

I did some packet monitoring and some other experimentation and came up with the following observations:

- Local internetwork traffic is mostly passed just fine (there was one case where we saw some packet loss from one VLAN subnet to another but it could have been a fluke)
- From the affected machines, Internet bound traffic goes in the switch and never comes out-- doesn't even make it to the router.
- Moving devices from one switch port to another would sometimes make them work--or if they were working, fail to work. But the problem was never static across any given ports.

After several hours of troubleshooting and headscratching, I had but one pathetically weak theory. I knew that new device had been connected to the network, and we eventually found that after unplugging this device, the problem seemed to gradually clear up, however plugging the device in did not reintroduce the problem, at least not within a reasonable period of time. The new device was connected across a hallway using a patch cable that was getting walked on. The cable under the hallway rug was stupid yes, but I didn't immediately associate it with this strange network-wide problem, but that became my main hypothesis, because everything else had been eliminated.

So we tested it. We went and started jumping up and down on the cable and sure enough, some of the machines on the network lost Internet connectivity. And unplugging the cable and rebooting the switches restored it.

So there you have it. Bad patch cables can seriously fuck up your network, especially if you're using Dell switches. But wait, how does one broken cable connected from a switch to just one device cause only certain packets with certain destinations to disappear? I HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE!

Posted by ra in computerish at 21:52 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

I've come to rely on my phone for much more than just calls. It is my morning alarm clock. I take pictures with it all the time. It is my wristwatch and calendar. It is my modem when I have no ethernet/wifi.

So that I am still carrying an original RAZR makes me feel just a bit crippled. I do get along OK with it, but the VGA camera is killing me, the lack of even EDGE for data use sucks, and bluetooth on this thing drives me fucking nuts (want to use bluetooth headset? might as well reboot first since 4/5 times it won't work otherwise. Want to send 20 pics via bluetooth? You have to select the recipient device before sending each one --UGH). So I'm thinking it's time for a new phone.

I had been kicking around the idea of a smartphone for a while but I've been really unexcited by everything out there. I've defiantly kept my PDA (Palm TX) and phone separate all this time but I think I'm prepared to relent, if I can only find the right device. The truth is my Palm is dying. Maybe it has cancer of the touchscreen, I don't know; but what's clear is that it is getting less reliable and less usable all the time. On the bottom half of the screen, my pen touches register about 1 mm above or below where they really are. This throws off my graffiti at times, and makes using the onscreen keyboard nigh-impossible. Then there are the crashes. I didn't used to experience them much, but now they happen all the time. Blazer is the biggest culprit but earlier I simply ticked an option in the system prefs and it abruptly reset on me.

My mind made up, now I just need to find this mythical device that will combine and improve upon the capabilities of my RAZR and TX.

Uh oh. It doesn't seem to exist. I wouldn't consider windows mobile anything unless I were to first get a lobotomy, so that's out. I want to like the Treos, but this is 2008 and I can't bring myself to buy a NEW phone running Palm OS 5. The iPhone is cool, but is more or less incompatible with my Linux desktop/PIM. Anything else I've found (which isn't much) just doesn't move me. At this point I think there is only one hope.

Android. I am watching and waiting, with great anticipation, for the first Android-powered phones. I don't know if they will fulfill my every desire, but they certainly have the most potential, and I really hope they live up to the hype because they are pretty much my last hope.

Posted by ra in gadgets and phones at 20:44 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Kind of like VOIP, but the voice is mostly replaced by silence.

I put together my awesome Asterisk server last year, bought five SIP phones on ebay, and was ready to rock. I guess I was thinking "if you build it, they will call" but it's been a bit lamer than that.

It's not all bad though. Despite that hardly anyone dials our VOIP number because they already have our cell numbers, it's nice to have for emergencies if teh cell network is doing the suckage, or battery is dead, etc. Most of our calls are internal (call downstairs from the bedroom, etc), which is certainly convenient, even if it seems a bit silly at times.

I have been racking up some minutes on my home-office VOIP line however, which rings only at my desk and the softphone on my laptop, so I don't feel that my PBX is not going to waste, even if it is underutilized.

I still need to finish hacking my PAP2 ATA (ugh., still haven't broken in) and I'm going to play with conference calling when I get a chance, and oops-- I still need to arrange to test 911 dialing; but in the mean time my little Asterisk server is doing everything I need and much, much more.

Posted by ra in computerish at 00:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

OK, I'm back and I'm going to try not to let my blog rot, like almost EVERYONE else's I know...

Recently I've had a awful pain in my side, and it turned out to be a pointy Cisco license restriction.

It started with sporadic trouble at the client as they began to use their VPN's more heavily. They had purchased a Cisco ASA 5505 to use as their VPN router, on my recommendation, and everything had been fine until we added another IPSEC tunnel and had more people accessing the remote sites. After some experimentation, we found the magic number to be 10 users, after which no one else could connect to anything across the VPN's.

Whoa... that sounds just like the "user" limit on this device! I hate user limits. Artificial restrictions on the capability of some hardware tends to piss me off. But I digress... This user limit restriction was a complete surprise because although we purchased a "10 user" ASA, I had talked to two different Cisco reps before the purchase to clarify the meaning of this and had been assured that this "user" limit did not pertain to users/IP's connecting over the IPSEC tunnels, and we didn't care about anything else as this device is strictly a VPN-gateway--they already have a m0n0wall in use as their primary internet gateway router.

So, Cisco screwed up. Fortunately I am a digital pack-rat and could produce a year-old email proving that the rep told me that the "user" limit meant 10 IPSEC tunnels with no limit on number of users. The truth is that there were two limits: 10 tunnels AND 10 users/IP's. Unfortunately, it took about two and a half weeks of dealing with assorted Cisco people to finally get a resolution, in the form of a free unlimited user license upgrade.

The outcome is satisfactory, but it really pisses me off that I had to waste so much time troubleshooting and getting it resolved after I tried hard to avoid this very problem by contacting them before buying. Furthermore, based on my conversations with half a dozen Cisco employees I can say that most of them didn't really understand the licensing terms of their own product, which is pretty sad. How am I supposed to understand if they don't? The less clear the license terms, the more likely that someone is going to get surprised by some restriction at the worst possible moment, and then swear off ever buying that brand again.

Posted by ra in computerish at 23:35 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)