It doesn’t make any sense and causes irritating popup windows, like this…
(also, Linus is right… Gnome 3 is awful, like they saw a Mac once through a shop window and decided to copy it without actually using one)
I just noticed my blog/website has been running for just over 10 years which is a reasonable achievement. During that time I’ve written about various things and it’s kind of fun to go back and read through the entries.
This month, ten years ago I’d been playing around with my Palm IIIx and had managed to connect it to the Internet. A task that I do several times daily with my iPad and iPhone – technologies that were unheard of at the time. If you flick through older entries there’s a recurring theme of me owning some sort of portable device that connects to the Internet. I’ve had a Palm IIIx, a Nokia N800, Nokia N810 and then a selection of Apple devices. Gradually over the years I’ve seen Wifi going from a nerd’s toy to something as common as a lightswitch.
Broadband’s been fun to watch develop too, I first got a “Wires only” ADSL account (this simply meant you bought the service with no hardware, so had to buy an ADSL router yourself – this was when ADSL was originally delivered into your Windows PC via the “Squashed Frog” USB modem) and was utterly gobsmacked at being able to download a gigabyte of data in a few days. Then I was totally surprised when I had the speed bumped up to 2 meg.
Now I can easily download data at a rate faster than the home network my first ADSL router used to be connected to! How technology marches on. Hello future me! How do we connect to the Internet now?
I’ve also been to lots of places over the years, and had a few interesting little adventures along the way. I’ve also discovered whole new realms of boredom!
Anyway, it’s gone midnight and I need to get up tomorrow so I can visit Ikea and buy a new desk, go to the rubbish dump and also wait for a Tesco delivery. Yes, I’ve gone from jumping into water and climbing up rocks to shopping for desks and buying food. If I have time left I might continue my coding adventures in C++ and OpenGL on my iPad – some things never change 
I just did a whois on my domain. I registered the domain on the 31st May 2000, and it seems we filled in the form incorrectly since the address is no longer valid, and the registrant was never at that address. Oh well, I doubt anyone cares. I’ve had my shell provider for the past 10 years too, and in that time can’t recall any noticeable downtime.
Earlier this week we had our Internet connection upgraded to fibre. I think there is some clever (or broken) traffic shaping and bandwidth control going on with the downstream link though. You have read the image correctly, our upload speed is more than twice as fast as the download speed.
Yep, it's down for me!
Seems my ISP is having routing problems. A bit of traceroute and ping seems to indicate the USA has either vanished, or someone has unplugged it. If you’re in the Atlantic and you find a big fat wire could you leave it alone, ta.
Am now engaged in highly pointless but fun games of SSH to get back into IRC.
There I was, happily Consuming some Internet and doing my part to fill popular social networking sites with noise when … things started to go a bit funny. First browsing stopped working, then Skype went offline followed by Google Talk finally noticing my Internet was offline. After some investigation I noticed my ADSL router no longer had an IP address but was syched with the line.
So I switched it off, waited a bit, switched it back on… Lights flashed, lights went green… then orange. Orange is a bad colour, it means “something is broken”. Thinking that maybe my ISP had finally got around to enabling my static IP address I configured that. Lights went green, but no data flowed. Having run out of options I dug out the router provided by my ISP (it was in the loft in a box, it’s not very good) and that also failed to work. Just to check things over I plugged in the ADSL router I used to use before I moved house – this one hadn’t been reconfigured or messed with since I unplugged it in my old house. That didn’t work either, it also didn’t sync at a speed faster than 7Mb so that went away again.
There then followed a series of support ticket requests with my ISP, with my problem being escalated to higher and higher levels of support technician. I even requested a line test from BT after my ADSL router decided to tell me “No ATM activity detected on line”. To further confuse matters, my ISP rang me on my landline and I couldn’t hear them, but they use some nasty VOIP rubbish for their calls, so I figured that was broken and hung up. Then I picked up the phone again and … it was dead. Uh oh. But my ADSL was still synched OK. Err…
Another support ticket from my ISP solved everything. They gave me the details for my static IP address again and also told me my phone handset is probably faulty as they could hear me fine. I phoned myself using my mobile phone and sure enough, my cordless phones are broken. Nothing to do with my Internet being down, but irritating all the same. Now got a corded phone plugged in and a renewed desire to work out where these phone extension wires run so I can use them.
The source of all this weird confusion and problems? My static IP address details were wrong… or perhaps not wrong, but different. I think the house move process went a bit wonky and I got a new static IP address assigned to me. Or they couldn’t figure out why nothing was working and gave me a new one, the support technician did say he couldn’t ping me either at one point. They even had the phone exchange configuration reset and tested to make sure that was correct, so at least I now know I have a properly working line with no errors.
Tomorrow I might give this post a try to see if I can convince my Zyxel router to do more than 7 meg.