X111.com

Line attenuation and SNR, part 2

XIII — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 07:16:26 +0000

Following up on my previous post, it seems I have now achieved a stable connection. Emphasis on seems as I still want to wait and see how it holds up next weekend because drops are worse on Saturdays.
There was nothing wrong with my cabling as I switched, swapped, shortened and tried everything to improve that last Saturday and still got dc’ed about once every five minutes.
The magic trick turned out to be lowering the downstream in my profile. I’m supposed to have 8Mbit downstream, but at that speed I have a downstream signal to noise ratio of 6dB, which is bottom of the barrel. Add a crappy line, other people using equipment during peak hours and poof, there you go.
However, letting the provider switch the profile and set it back to 4Mbit boosted the SNR up all the way to 24dB. I then told them to set it 6Mbit and seem to get a comfortable 16dB, which should still leave me more than enough of a margin to handle peak hours.
I hope it holds up this weekend, and then I can start complaining about paying too much for a 6Mbit connection. ;)

WoW forum?

XIII — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:24:49 +0000

Hmmm, maybe I should start a WoW forum for our guild and the other people we’ve met along the way and play with on our realm. Could be fun…

EpicWin

XIII — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 14:33:29 +0000

An iPhone app that’s a todo manager that works with rpg elements to motivate you to do your chores.
Sadly, I’m interested.

Unjailbroken

XIII — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 09:44:34 +0000

I have invented a new word. Maybe not. But yeah, this week I finally decided to jailbreak my iPhone using the new jailbreakme.com, which works as advertised. Simply go to the site using Safari on your iPhone and slide the slider to jailbreak. It’ll start working it’s magic and after a minute or so you’re done and you’ll have Cydia added as an app which you can use to tweak the crap out of your phone and add lots of apps.
This is however where I started getting an icky vibe as I added a few apps like LockInfo which is supposed to give you a nice screen with all your mail, calendar, phone and what not info, Android style. Except it didn’t work. Added a few more with varying results as well, but then when I wanted to check my mail the app was behaving oddly, not marking mails as read, not even opening some others. That was the final straw for me and I rolled back using iTunes restore to a nice pristine fully functional iOS 4.0.1. Maybe the jailbreak apps aren’t fully iOS 4 compatible yet, maybe I just had bad luck, but for me the biggest joy of the iPhone, or anything Apple really, is that it just works. This little side adventure reminded me a bit too much of olden linux and windows days where you have to tweak everything to get it working the way it’s supposed to.
And those days are, for me anyway, over.

Line attenuation and SNR

XIII — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 10:09:58 +0000

After our move the adsl internet connection has been less than stable. Sometimes it’s up for a week, sometimes it disconnects 20 times a day. According to the isp this is due to us being 4km from the exchange, which is kinda weird as we only dropped a floor and never had problems before. So now I’m reading into things like line attenuation and dB signal to noise ratio so I actually measure what the hell is going on and if any improvements I make to the indoor cabling have any effect whatsoever. Now if only the cable isp didn’t block certain server ports I’d switch to cable in a heartbeat.

A high SNR (signal to noise ratio) simply means how loud the signal is over background noise. The higher the SNR margin the more stable the connection. You have a strong signal and have plenty of head room to receive faster speeds. Generally you would have a high SNR if you’re on a restricted speed plan eg. 256/64, 512/128 or 1500/256. The faster your connection speed the lower your SNR will be. Generally on unrestricted speed plans like Adsl2+ up to 24mbit the isp will set the SNR margin at which your modem connects generally a range between 6dB to 14dB. This will give you the fastest speed while maintaining a relatively stable connection.
Attenuation on the other hand is a measurement of the resistance to the signal on the line and should never change regardless of speed.

There are many factors which affect both SNR and attenuation. A few are line distance, gauge or thickness of line, quality or age of line, number of bridge taps on line etc.

So now I can start focusing on the latter, one step at a time, as the inhouse cabling is the only thing I can influence myself. And if that doesn’t help… time to start thinking about cable after all.

Flipboard

XIII — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:14:55 +0000

Dammit. I’m sort of keeping a mental list of reasons I do and I don’t want an iPad. The reasons I don’t are mostly lack of money as well as preferring an iPhone4 to be honest, but other than that I really haven’t seen any killer apps yet. But this is just, for lack of better words, amazing. It can basically slurp your entire network and reading preferences and create an on the fly magazine custom tailored for you. I like. A lot. I also like the interaction options it presents. This redefines lounging. I just hope they’ll add rss later on as well.

Wrath of the Lich King

XIII — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:13:08 +0000

We’re finally starting on Wrath of the Lich King, albeit a tad handicapped at the moment. Our warlocks were level 69, so we started the Lich King 10 day trial while we waited for the full version to arrive by mail. Unfortunately Blizzard has levelcapped the trial, so we’ve been stuck at level 70 for a week now. At least it gives us time to do some farming, my enchanting is lagging immensely compared to my tailoring. It’s insane how much it costs to gain even one point in enchanting at this level.
Then again spellfire tailoring isn’t exactly cheap either, but the mats are a whole lot easier to gather.

We’re back! Now what?

XIII — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:30:46 +0000

Awesome. The site’s been down for a month and we’ve apparently completely fallen off the Google bandwagon, and therefor for all intents and purposes, off the internet.

We moved and so did our internet connection, except my ISP (xs4all) failed to send me a new modem 3 times in a row, resulting in the extreme long downtime of the sites.

So yeah, no traffic left whatsoever, now what?
At least it’s good to be back. I’ll add some vacation piccies, some from the move, and then finally upgrade to WordPress 3 and take it from there.

WordPress 3.0

XIII — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:09:07 +0000

My my, how does time fly.
WordPress 3.0 has been released and brings us;

bulk updates,
a new default theme,
merge between WordPress and MU<,/li>
new theme apis,
post types (I like, a lot),
taxonomies and lots and lots more.

The only thing now is to find time to actually upgrade.
I wonder what the impact on MU is going to be. And if my theme is compatible.

I like to move it move it

XIII — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:57:24 +0000

We’re gonna be moving soon. So soon in fact that we’ll have a bit of a problem with our internet connection, so the site will probably be down for the first days in July.