It’s the price stupid!

Posted by jmrodri on

Stop the Cap! ran a story regarding the proposed DOCSIS 3.1 standard. While many of the cable companies offer 50Mb+.

Comcast has 105Mb for $90/month,

comcast

Verizon has FiOS rated at 150Mb even 300Mb. They’re 75Mb/35Mb option is $70/month.
fios

Cox Communications even has 100Mb for $100.
coxcable

Time Warner Cable is always the hold out. They offer 50Mb / 5Mb for $75. While the other companies are offering something about $1/Mb Time Warner Cable is at $1.50 / Mb. And the upload speed of 5Mb is abysmal especially compared with Verizon’s FiOS.
twcable

And Time Warner’s CTO clearly doesn’t think we want fast internet.

LaJoie dismissed triple digit megabit speeds as a novelty that is not “very deeply penetrated” in the marketplace — marketspeak for “not attracting many customers.”

“There has not been a demonstrated appetite for it,” LaJoie said.

I suspect not many people are subscribing to the 50/5 offering so clearly their data would show little demand. But I think the problem is the price. 50/5 for $49.99 would be totally worth it. But for $75 that’s just outrageous. It would be great to have more competition here in NC, but with Time Warner Cable lobbying against competition, that will likely never happen.

what tag is this commit in?

Posted by jmrodri on

Thanks to jbowes for saving me time with git. I had a commit and wanted to find out what tag it was in. I tended to do the opposite, given a tag is this commit in it. And boy did I do it the hard way:

git checkout TAG
git checkout -b TAG # assuming there wasn't one already
tig # search for the commit in the list

That was cumbersome and a bit error prone. Now with a simple command I can find the tag more easily.

git describe --contains COMMIT_SHA

Setting primary display

Posted by jmrodri on

When at home I hook up the laptop to an external monitor. For the most part it works great, plug it in and it works. I want the external monitor to be the primary. Pretty simple with xrandr --output DISPLAY --primary so I adapted my vij command to list out the monitors and present the list to me.

#!/bin/sh

monitors=$(xrandr | grep " connected " | awk '{print $1}')
matches=$(echo $monitors | gawk '{print NF}')

case "$matches" in
    0)
       echo "No matches found"
       show=""
       ;;
    1)
       show=$monitors
       ;;
    *)
       echo
       echo "Multiple matches found..."
       i=1
       for option in $monitors
       do
          echo "$i: $option"
          i=`expr $i + 1`
       done
       echo "q: Quit"
       echo
       read -p "? " ans
       if [ "q" == "$ans" ]; then
          show=""
       else
          show=$(echo $monitors | gawk '{print $'$ans'}')
       fi
       ;;
esac

if [ "" != "$show" ]; then
   xrandr --output $show --primary
fi

When you run the script this is what you see:

$ bin/prim 

Multiple matches found...
1: LVDS1
2: VGA1
q: Quit

?

Gnome 3 why do you hate me?

Posted by jmrodri on

So my Gnome 3 (gnome-shell, Fedora 18) went to screensaver. When I unlocked it this is what my desktop looks like.

lockup

How do I get out of this? My machine is running fine. I can ssh into it and it’s running normal but I can’t interact with the desktop. Quite annoying.

Gasland

Posted by jmrodri on

Watching Gasland is depressing. While I like the idea of being energy independent and getting off of foreign oil, I don’t like the idea of fracking. It seems very short sighted and trying to solve the near term problem.

What I wonder is what the hell have we been doing since the 1973 oil embargo? Or even the panic in 1979. You would think that as a nation when we had to ration gas we would’ve learned and tried to solve the problem. But here it is 34 years later and we consume gas like it’s no tomorrow. Clearly we didn’t learn anything from our past. It’s quite sad actually.

I realize for every view point there’s a counter view point, the Natural Gas industry has a different opinion on Gasland:

Natural gas is a clean, abundant and domestic energy source that holds vast potential to promote cleaner air, grow local economies and enhance energy security in the United States and, increasingly, around the world. The natural gas community is committed to the safe and responsible development of this energy source, and we welcome questions about the film Gasland because it gives us the opportunity to set the record straight in a fact-based way.

Personally I think they’re full of it :) Many will blame the Administration for not doing more but clearly the people to blame are the special interest groups that actually run this country. We have this belief that WE THE PEOPLE are in charge, we’re so wrong. I think the problem isn’t Congress or the Executive branch, but the lobbyist that have our leaders ears (or more likely other parts of their bodies).