Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Update on RT-N12B1 router - still recommended

We have had this router for about a month now and so far I am very happy with it. Original .38 firmware was relatively stable but it rebooted for some reason about every 3 to 5 days. I have not noticed the reboots and only knew about them from the router logs. I upgraded firmware to the 2.1.1.46 and will report on stability later in the month.
Other than the unnoticed reboots, the router is great. I handles all the traffic splendidly without a hitch. There are no issues with VPN or tunneling or anything else for that matter. Router can handle two Roku boxes streaming at the same time - one locally and one from Hulu. There is really nothing bad I can say about this router and would recommend it to anyone.

Update

After 11+ days there is no reboots with the firmware version 2.1.1.1.46. So far this update working out nicely. Before reboot write down router settings and after reset the router to default settings and restore the settings you have written down. Without that I had trouble reconnecting with my wireless devices.

Update #2

After 12 days router finally rebooted. I think from now on I will reboot it after 10 or so days if I remember.

Update #3

It appears that the router does not reboot as I previously thought. The uptime in the interface changes to indicate the router is rebooted but the system log has no indication of reboot. That would explain why I have not observed service disruption upon reboot. I will try to contact support and see what they say.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Another rant on Accurev

Today I had to perform a merge across two unrelated streams in Accurev. One stream was the root stream which contained the changes I wanted to merge. The other stream was created off a snapshot about 6 months old. The idea was to merge the fixes in the latest code in to an older branch. The fixes affected maybe 100 files across 30 or so issues. This took me whole day. None of the merges were particularly complex but yet here we are. So if you value your productivity do not use Accurev.

It was easy to find related issues. I did a diff by issues between the respective streams. From the diff it was easy to find the issues and each issue contained changed files. So far so good. Now the question is how to send these particular file versions in to the relevant workspace? The manual recommends to use change palette, which is conveniently greyed out and not accessible. I had to involve two of our support engineers, nether of them knew why the button was disabled.

Finally I figured out a way to look at the same issues from the stream history and there change palette was available. This is the most idiotic thing - one dialog has a button disabled, another similar dialog has it enabled. Now I would expect a merge function of some sort to be available in the change palette so I could selectively pick the changes that I want to merge with the version in the workspace. No such luck! You have to send your file in to the workspace overwriting the version with irrelevant changes, then you have to diff the version with the predecessor and revert most of the changes except for the ones you want. Instead of one simple operation it becomes two non intuitive ones. Although if the file did not need merging, it could be simply promoted if the promote button was not disabled. When it was disabled another merge was required.

After having the pleasure to use merge function of Mercurial, Accurev is terrible in comparison. As I described in my previous post, things get disabled and enabled using some arbitrary rules. The dialogs, described in the manual ether look different or dont exist or not accessible in a way presented in the manual. Somebody told me that I need to upgrade to the latest version and it is way better. Somehow I doubt this. If I am to go through the pain of upgrade, it would be to something like Git or Mercurial.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Why Samsung Galaxy Player is better than iPod

I have been using my Galaxy Player 4.2 for a while now and definitely find it much better than iPod touch in many areas. In fact I did not find one area in which Galaxy would be equal or worse. I speak from experience of owning iPod touch for number of years. So here is why Galaxy Player is better.

Absence of iTunes! iTunes is a useless monstrosity which installs useless QuickTime and other Apple crap which makes your computer slow. I was told that on Mac iTunes work better. I do not have a Mac but on Windows iTunes is an abomination. Yet you must have it if you are going to backup your device and your content. With Galaxy you can just plug it in and use mass storage driver to access all of the content and apps. You can copy to and from the device just like you would with a flash drive.

With Google Play you can download apps from the store and save them on your PC. Later you can install these apps from SD card. There are also apps on the Android itself that would allow you to backup and restore your applications and data. With iPod and without iTunes you are toasted if Apple overwrites your app with non working version and you did not make a backup.

You can add Micro SD card to your player and expand its capacity cheaply. With iPod you can only go with what you originally purchased. I currently have 8GB card in the player making total memory to be 16GB. The card is used to store movies and larger games. If I run out of space, I can upgrade it easy. And it only cost me $6.

Larger screen is a big improvement over iPod. Although latest iPod has higher resolution screen than my Galaxy, the size of Galaxy screen is much larger. I can not see the individual pixels on ether device and both look similar. I compared this player with iPhone 4S and 5 and I have not found one person who could point out any difference. The Samsung phones with larger and higher resolution screens beat iPhone's screen to the punch.

Replaceable battery is a big thing for me. I replaced my iPod battery one time and it is not an easy task even for a DIY person like me. To replace battery in the Galaxy, you just open the back, replace battery and close the back. That is it. You can do it within 5 minutes.

There is NO good book reading application on iPod. Probably the best that I found was Megareader. But even this app does not render some epub files correctly. All other readers do not work well at all on the small screen. FBReader on Android is much better application and there are several just as good - Aldiko or Cool Reader for example.

Standard USB connector is a plus for me. Now I only need to take one charger for the phone and the player. I do not use a smart phone since I value the two weeks battery life that my regular phone provides. I had to carry a separate cable for iPod and a charger for the phone. Not anymore.

I do not have to convert videos to mp4 to play on the Galaxy. It plays pretty much any format that is popular with resolution up to 1080p. iPod only supports mp4 files and resolutions are limited.

The only thing where iPod is better than the Galaxy player is the amount of accessories available. But the Player is by far less popular that iPod. If you compare more popular Samsung smart phone against Apple iPhone the shortage of cases is not a problem at all.

In the end I am very happy with the Galaxy Player and I hope this post will help someone to choose a better device.