Once again, darn AT&T sucks… When I got home my data connection on my AT&T phone no longer works and I only have 1 bar of signal. Yet, my verizon phone has 5 bars and full data and it is sitting right next to the AT&T… Need to look at getting rid of the AT&T one. They really need to work on their coverage, if they want to “have the most bars, in the most places” cause as it stands now I get better coverage on a provider that is not even native to the area than I do with a native coverage provider.
More bars in more places…. but only if it is an urban place
Since having my cell phone switched to AT&T, I have noticed more problems that when I had US Cellular. Now while driving up the interstate the signal goes up and down, sometimes cutting out completely. In fact at home my signal goes between 1 and 2 bars… US Cellular at least had 4 or 5.. So everytime I see one of those commercials, it just makes me mad, as unless you are in a highly populated area, your stuck with the same old crappy coverage that Cellular One had before AT&T bought them out. The only good thing about the new one, is that the GPS works in it with Google Maps. But other than that, the internet access is slow, calls dropped and the coverage sucks.
OpenSolaris vs Solaris
This weekend I went to install the new Communications Suite with Convergence and I decieded to install OpenSolaris 2008.5 on my machine and put the Comms Suite in a zone on it (so I could easily blow it away after my testing was done..)
Let me be probably not the first to say that OpenSolaris != Solaris.. I have been using Solaris 10 since it was in beta, and OpenSolaris through me for a couple of loops…
First are some of the cool things I liked:
1. The interface, it is updated and seemed a lot faster.
2. The ease of “patching” only took about half an hour to do a pkg image update.
3. Zfs root made it easy to roll back changes..
Now the parts that i had problems with and did not like too well.
1. I had to download a driver for my ethernet card as the one Sun delivers (sk98sol) is still too old and did not support my card which is one built on to a 3+ year old motherboard.
2. To create a zone, you MUST have a network connection (and at least to the internet for the time being). This really made me mad as I sometimes don’t have access to the Internet, and if I need to create a zone, I don’t want to have to wait for it to download 200+ Mb of packages, that are already on the machine in the first place.
3. No more “full root zones”, I created a zone in the hopes of installing the Comms Suite in it, only to find out that it was not a full root zone and stuff that is required by the Comms Installer to be there wasn’t and therefor I could not install it… Such simple things like unzip and perl are missing from the newly created zone.
In the end, I ended up reinstalling the box with Solaris 10 05/08, which was a task in itself. See when you install OpenSolaris it makes the root drive zfs, and did some weird things to the VTOC. Therefore when I went in to do the install of the “older” Solaris 10 05/08, the installer would show me the disk, let me “carve” it up like I wanted in the gui and via command line, but when the install went to go on, the installer always came back saying that there was not enough disk to install Solaris. What I ended up having to do was go and do a “format -e” and then fdisk and delete the Solaris partition that was made by OpenSolaris, and let the Solaris installer create it’s own fdisk partition again.
So after finally getting Solaris 10 installed and the latest Recommended/Security/Sun Alert patches put on, I called it a night and left the Comms install for next weekend.
Overall I think OpenSolaris is going in the right direction, but there needs to be a lot of things fixed in it.. The biggest is the zones, there should be an option for “cloning” the already installed OS, since it is already on a ZFS pool. The second is that there should be an option when creating the zone as to what kind of zone it should be, whether a full (which would load every package, so you don’t have to try and do it your self), sparse or maybe a new one called Jail which has everything in it read only.
Oh the irony
Always nice to see this in your Cable bill: Funny that the title is “Demand more at Comcast” and it is talking about how they are increasing the price of a service. Just another way they charge for the littlest thing.
USAirways and delayed flights
Yesterday I started my trip back home. I got to SFO around 11AM or so, we got the car taken car of and then on to the terminal. Everything seemed to be fine, and then we got on the plane. They started the plane’s right engine and everything seemed fine. So they pushed us out on to the taxiway and they tried to start the left engine. I knew something was wrong and I was right, so they came on and said we had to go back to the airport and have the plane looked at. They thought they knew what it was and took 15 minutes and tried it all over again. Nope, the left engine still was having problems. The problem it had was that when they went to start it, it never wanted to stop “starting”. Sort of like if you keep holding the key in the ignation and try to start a already started car engine. By now we have missed our window and was 30 minute delayed so far. The pilot came on and said that we were now delayed for an hour to see if they could fix it. Just great, we were already supposed to get back at 9:21PM, now it was going to be 10:21PM.
So about 5 minutes after we were told it would be an hour, the flight attendants starting coming through offering people water. (I already had mine, see last post.) So I declined some. I then heard them coming through offering cookies.. What they should have said was a small biscoff, (the size of a single ritz cracker). Wow 1 hour and all they gave out was a 4 oz cup of water and a 0.5oz “cookie”. We finially got to the runway about 1.45 hours after our original departure time. So up up and a way…. Everything was smooth till we got close to the east coast and hit the remenants of Hurricane Ike. We got a 80MPH tail wind which helped, but on the discent, it got quite bumpy. The one they they did do was give out free beverages to everyone on the plane because of the ‘delay’ that had happened. We ended up landing about an hour later than we were supposed to so they must have picked up the slack with the tail wind.
It took about 30 minutes for our bags to come out which just sucks as we were the only flight at the airport. So by the time I actually got out of the airport and drove the 2 hours home, I had been traveling for almost 11 hours straight.. The bed sure felt nice…