Verizon FIOS Disappoints … Again.

When I heard FIOS was coming to my town, I got in line.  I couldn’t wait to get what I felt was the best technology in the market.  True, I’m no fan of Comcast.  Competition is good.

The core technology that gets me my signal?  Fine, can’t complain.  As far as I know it’s even faster than I had before.  I have no complaints.

It’s the extras.  The user experience.  For instance?  Take the DVR option.  I have several TVs, and a common scenario is to start watching some primetime show, like a Grey’s Anatomy or something, downstairs in the main family room with HD.  But often my wife will say “Can we finish watching this upstairs?”  Verizon has a Home Sharing option that allows exactly this.  Very handy.

Except for the limitations.  Like, for instance, it won’t “downscale”.  So with a standard tv upstairs I have to record all my programs in standard (even though the box itself is a HD box) if I ever want to stream them.  I’ve learned to live with that. It also can’t be programmed from the remote boxes, so if you finish watching most of your programs upstairs on the bedroom tv you can’t just hit Delete – you have to remember, next time you’re downstairs, to purge all the old shows you’re done with.  An annoyance, but you can live with it.

The latest disappointment though comes with the new Media Manager for Mac.  I’ve got all the family photos on a Mac Mini (which, also, is connected up to the HD tv in my family room).  That’s also where I rip the kids’ DVDs, and manage all my iTunes stuff.  So when they said “Run this software and your iTunes media will show up on your FIOS boxes” I thought, “Awesome.”

Except for one small problem – it only works on the DVR box.  In a “Home Sharing” setup, you only have 1 DVR box in the house, and the rest are just dumb satellite player boxes.

See the problem?  In order to share recorded television shows, you need – are required to have – exactly one Home Sharing DVR.  If you had a DVR box in every room, you could get Media Manager content on every DVR box.  But then you couldn’t share recorded tv programming!

That’s what bugs me.  I appreciate having to work the kinks out of the system.  But here you’ve got a clear cut case of Verizon setting up mutually exclusive features, and then leaving it up to the customer to realize that.   I’m not even misinterpreting it, either, as I had a lengthy conversation with Verizon Support over Twitter when I discovered this problem and they confirmed that yes, the options are mutually exclusive.  Get multiple DVRs to share media manager content, or get one DVR to share recorded tv shows, but not both.

I hope they get some of these major problems worked out.  I doubt it, given the underlying architectural problem (namely, the remote boxes are without a hard drive and thus doomed to be brain dead).  But, still.  Hope remains.

Who Is Blocking / Locking My Windows Clipboard ?

Ever had this problem? Suddenly you realize that cut-and-paste doesn’t work.  You try it a couple of times to make sure you’re not being an idiot, but nope, something’s wrong.  You try it in several apps, and it’s just plain stopped working.

Turns out there’s a reason for this, and it has lots of blah blahs.  Eventually you should end up over here where someone was nice enough to create an unlocking utility.  I just tried it, works great.

iPhone Keypad Tip

I suppose this could work for any cell phone, really, but I never fully appreciated the need for it until my iPhone.

You know how you call a service that requires a boatload of button pushing, like checking your bank balance or phoning in a renewal for a prescription, and you’re left constantly pulling your phone up to your ear to see what’s being said, and then down in front of you so you can type the next number?  If you ever make a mistake while typing and it starts talking to you, you won’t even hear it until you’re 8 numbers into your mistake and thoroughly confusing the thing.

Next time, put it on speaker phone.

Now you can keep it right in front of you while you type, and still hear what’s being said.

When you’re done with the typing, take it off speaker phone and talk to the human.

Spying On Competitors with Bit.ly

I see a link on Twitter that I’m not interested in retweeting personally, but I’d like to see how well it’s doing.  In this case it’s a work-related URL that’s not appropriate for my personal Twitter account.  But couldn’t it just as easily be my competitor that I want to check up on?

Bit.ly is my URL shortener of choice because it lets you track the action that your links are getting – as well as how many other people have used bit.ly to track that same link.

* Click on the bit.ly link to get to the original source.

* Now, use bit.ly to shorten it yourself.  Make sure you’re signed in.

* When your new shortened link appears at the top of your history, it’s going to say something like “0 out of 50”.  The 0 represents your copy, because you haven’t done anything with it.  But if that second number is anything greater than 0?  It means that other people have used bit.ly to shorten and publicize that URL.

So for instance if you run a blog, sending your headlines out to Twitter, and you’re following your competitors wondering how much traction their headlines get?  Now you can check up on them.  You can even delete your own copy of the links if you don’t want to clutter up your own list.  Just use this trick to take a peek.

Don’t Rely On Windows Update

http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2009/09/windows_7_some_ingredients_may_not_be_fresh.html

You’d think that something like this would be obvious, but it’s good when a high profile blogger brings up the problem.  If you think that just clicking Install everytime Windows Update tells you to will get you everything you need, you’re quite mistaken.  Microsoft only serves up drivers that the vendors have provided to them, and in the case of Windows 7, only those that have passed the approval process.

It doesn’t necessarily tell you that, though.  So you’re left thinking that if Update has no updates for you, you’ve got the most recent.  And that’s not true.  You’ve got the most recent that Microsoft has provided.  If you head off to the vendor’s site you’re often going to find a more recent version.

Disclaimer : If I haven’t mentioned it in the past, I work for DriverAgent (http://www.driveragent.com), whose flagship product specializes in exactly this service.  We do go out and crawl the vendors, keeping a database of the latest drivers for everything we can get our hands on. 

Unpacking Packed Javascript

You ever try to learn a new trick from a web page by looking at the source, only to discover code that looks like this?

eval(function(p,a,c,k,e,d){e=function(c){return(c<a?'':e(parseInt(c ….

That’s been “packed” (note the parameters to the function?) specifically so you can’t read the source.

It’s also easy to get around.  The browser at one point or another has to unpack it to run it, so what you need to do is catch it someplace where you can display it.

Copy your ugly packed code, and open up Firefox’s Error Console. 

Paste the packed code into the “Code” text box.

At the front of the string add the text   “eval=alert;” and then click Evaluate. 

This should bring up an alert box containing your unpacked code.

It’s such a pain in the neck, in fact, that there are also plenty of online tools that will go ahead and just do it for you.

Testing with Rails : Can I Test External / Outside Apps?

Most of our application is written in PHP, and not likely to be rewritten anytime soon (though that is a different topic).  However I’m well aware that this doesn’t have to stop the introduction of Ruby on Rails into the mix.  Our newest push for enhanced quality, testing and metrics gives me an idea:  Can I use the latest and greatest testing tools like Cucumber and RSpec to build up a test suite to run against our existing application?  I particularly like the idea of having a business language for test cases so I can write things like this:

Feature : Have a pleasant and useful homepage

In order to navigate around the site easily

As a Guest

I want to see useful links in the navigation menu

Scenario : Main Menu

Given I’m on the homepage

And I am not logged in

Then I should see a link called “Member Login”

And I should see a link called “Register”

And I should not see a link called “My Account”

That works for me.  I could write bunches and bunches of those.  (It may help that I’m an old natural language guy who’s always had a soft spot for such interfaces.)

However, the natural behavior of Cucumber if I’m doing it right is to assume that “homepage” is a route into the existing Rails app, and that’s not what I want.  I actually want it to map to my production site, complete with http://www.mysite.com syntax.

I found this link from Erik On Rails that talks about creating a new Mechanize session.  But when I do that, my next statement (“should see”) fails because it thinks I got nil content back from the visit to my url.

Is it supposed to be this hard?  I see a whole bunch of articles about using these tools to do what sounds like the same thing I want (i.e. testing something other than a native Rails app) but I can’t seem to find the answer to my question.  Can I hit an external, fully defined url, get back the content, and crawl/test that content?  How??