December 2007 Archives
I was planning on re-shuffling my Cable TV channel subscriptions to save a few bucks, and just happened to open my Cable TV bill from Comcast. Towards the very end, I see a 17.99$ charge for "Service Call Charge". Hmmph!!! What is that? A 17.99$ service should be a reasonably good "service". At the very least, I expect it not to be an invisible service!!
I connected to their Online Chat service, and in about 15/20 minutes, after being told I'm behind 68 other people (C'mon guys, it's day after Christmas, you should be fighting hangover and enjoying gifts, not chatting with Comcast? Get a LIFE!!!), I get to connect to a very helpful Mark. Here is how the conversation went (abridged):
user JohnDoe has entered room
analyst Mark has entered room
Mark> Hello JohnDoe, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Mark. Please give me one moment to review your information.
Mark> Good Day, Thank you for giving us the opportunity to assist you today, I will be more than glad to clear any doubts or troubles you may have, feel free to ask anything you need, How are you today?
JohnDoe> I'm good, how about u?
JohnDoe> In my latest bill, I see a 17.99 charge for "Service Call Charge". What is this?
Mark> I am really sorry, I understand this situation may cause you a lot of inconvenience, I promise I'll do all I can to solve this situation for you the best I can.for security reasons may I please have your account number, the name on the account and the last four digits of the Social Security Number?
JohnDoe> Yes, XXX-XX-XXX-XXXXXXX
JohnDoe> that's the acct number.
Mark> Perfect! thanks for the information, one moment please.
Mark> Thanks for the information I have located this charge type was generated due to a service order, it should have been a trouble call, this is an error, I will gladly remove this charge from your bill.
JohnDoe> Thanks.
JohnDoe> How come it was added to my account? What kind of calls cause this charge?
Mark> Thanks to you JohnDoe for letting us know, I have applied a credit to your account in the amount of $17.99 You should see this credit on your billing statement within two billing cycles.
Mark> Well its nothing related to phone calls you do, its for when a technician drops you a visit.
Mark> the reason for the tech going to your address is why the charge is generated
Mark> for example, a tech wont charge for service orders, but will charge for a trouble call.
JohnDoe> But there was no technician scheduled, or no-one was here. How come the charge showed up?
Mark> Yes precisely there was no order processed, therefore we removed it.
JohnDoe> Do you think such errors are possible in future? Do you expect me to check every bill I get for such mistakes?
Mark> I will record the account about this matter to avoid problems in a later future.
JohnDoe> Thank you.
Mark> I really hope I was helpful to you, is there something else I can help you with?
JohnDoe> No that'll be all. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Duh!!!
I have come across many people who have been using Windows all their life, and when asked to try out a variant of Linux, waves their hand and says "too difficult to install" or "Linux is crap" or mumble mumble mumble. Not surprisingly, when I specifically ask them if they ACTUALLY have tried a distribution ( I normally ask "And what distribution did you try?"), the answer, in most of the time, is a NO. It just astounds me with the amount of FUD that can be spread that would make people come to a definitive conclusion without even trying something else.
I completely agree that at the dawn of time for Linux, it was only for geeks, didn't have a user friendly GUI (remember, I'm saying GUI, not UI.... a shell is way more powerful than a command prompt, even from the dawn of time). However, things have changed drastically since then. The user friendliness is very much here in the GUI, installations are a breeze, most of the apps work out of the box, and once they start working, they never stop working.
Given this, I think people ought to try out Linux, at least once. Come on, give it one chance, please?
The next thing I hear people say is, "Okay, but why would I want to wipe out windows" or "I don't want to play with dual boot" or "Installation is too tough". For you folks, here are some of the ways you can try out Linux.
I completely agree that at the dawn of time for Linux, it was only for geeks, didn't have a user friendly GUI (remember, I'm saying GUI, not UI.... a shell is way more powerful than a command prompt, even from the dawn of time). However, things have changed drastically since then. The user friendliness is very much here in the GUI, installations are a breeze, most of the apps work out of the box, and once they start working, they never stop working.
Given this, I think people ought to try out Linux, at least once. Come on, give it one chance, please?
The next thing I hear people say is, "Okay, but why would I want to wipe out windows" or "I don't want to play with dual boot" or "Installation is too tough". For you folks, here are some of the ways you can try out Linux.
- Live CD:
- Fedora Live CD. You want to go down to the GNOME or KDE Live Media section, and use the download links. If you don't know what is BitTorrent, use the "Direct Download" section. If you don't know what is GNOME or KDE, you can either read about Desktop Environment from HERE, or just choose one of them (I suggest GNOME).
- PCLinuxOS
- OpenSuSE
- Wubi, what would you be?
- Virtual Machines
This is the easiest and the least intrusive way to try out Linux. This is not recommended for long term use, but then, if you are going to use Linux long term, you probably like it and wouldn't mind a full installation.
In Live CD model, you get a CD with Linux installed, and you boot up using the CD, and voila, you start using Linux. Most of the live CDs come with a lot of applications pre-installed. So, you should be able to browse the web, do chatting, check mail, play with tools and apps, and get an overall feel to it. It will NOT touch your hard disk (unless you ask it to), so, your windows installation and all the data remains safe and secure.
I'd suggest using Ubuntu Live CD to begin with. THe good part of it is, it's also an installation CD, so, you can just install Linux from the same CD if you want to. You can download the Ubuntu CD from HERE. Try the Desktop Edition. If your connection is slow, or you are not sure how to burn a CD from the downloaded image, you can ask for a free CD in the mail HERE [Free account required]. If you choose the second option, and like Ubuntu, Please pass on the CD to a friend.
Other options for non-Ubuntu LiveCDs are:If you are not sure how to burn an ISO image into a bootable CD, HEre is a nice GUIDE.
A word of caution, since you are running from the CD, bootup and usage will be quite slow, especially if you have low memory size in your computer (Why? because you are running with no swap space!!).
Wubi is probably the best middle ground between Live CD and full installation. In short, this allows you to install Ubuntu (a full fledged configurable installation, instead of LiveCD based setup) inside WIndows filesystem, without worrying about the geeky stuff like re-partition and all. And if you don't like, un-install it just like any windows application, and poof!! it's gone!!
What Wubi essentially does is, it creates a large file in windows (the size of the file is configurable, recommendation is about 8GB) and uses this file as a partition for Ubuntu installation. Then it adds a Ubuntu boot option in windows boot menu (no mucking with the MBR, so, you're safe).
Installation of Wubi is very very straightforward. It won't ask you much except the Windows drive to install on, the initial installation size, and username/password of the first user in the Ubuntu environment. More detailed steps of Wubi installation are available at Full Circle's (the open source Ubuntu Magazine) 8th issue.
Cautionary words about Wubi... it depends on the Windows filesystem as its partition. With fragmentation windows filesystem becomes slow. So, it's suggested that you defragment your partition before installing Wubi. This also makes Wubi's filesystem accesses a little slow, albeit imperceptably in most of the cases. The other problem with Wubi is, some of the features (like Hibernation) remain disabled, since they depend on a physical hard disk, not a virtual one.
In spite of these shortcomings compared to a full fledged Ubuntu installation, it's a very good starting point to start getting used to Ubuntu. The part that would get Windows users to try this out is the fact that you can add/remove the whole Ubuntu just like you'd do for any of your small Windows application, and it's probably easier than most Windows applications (and wouldn't leave around those hideous overheads in your windows registry file). There is another neat feature where if you fall in love with Ubuntu, you can actually move the Wubi installation to a stand alone partition, thus removing the restrictions and speed issues that comes with Wubi. Nice, huh? Try doing such a thing with Windows!!
Among these options, my recommendation will go with doing a Live CD first, followed by Wubi followed by a full installation (or moving Wubi installation to a partition).The only reason I'm listing this at the third position is because they are kind of ... geeky!! The idea here is, you can run one OS inside another. This means, you can actually run Linux along with Windows, together, at the same time, on the same machine. Yes, that's possible. Yes, that's possible for free too.
With this option, what will happen is, a Linux installation (Ubuntu/Fedora/anything else) will run inside a window on your Windows machine. The way it works is, a virtualization software is installed on your windows machine, and then, under the virtualization software, Linux can be installed as a virtual machine.
The first step here is to get a virtualization software. There are some insanely expensive ones, if you have a lot of money. If you don't there are some equally capable ones:After you have installed one of them (I went with VirtualBox), you can start the virtualization application, create a new machine, and install Linux on that machine.
- If you love love love Microsoft, you can use their virtualization software named Virtual PC.
- If you are not too inclined towards MS, you can use VirtualBox.
- And, of course, if you have a lot of money to spare, you can use VMWare.
The cautionary word for this method is, again, it's a little more geeky than the first too, so, a regular PC user may not like it (although it's very convenient). There are fine grained controls of which of the hardware (like network card, wireless, USB etc) you want available to the virtual machine. A mainstream desktop user may find this a bit confusing.
The other negative side of this is, it WILL BE slower, much slower than the first two options, since your PC's memory and CPU is shared by two OS-es. Things will be better if you have tons of memory and one of the latest CPU's.
I got a Xbox 360 as my birthday gift last year. I had some plans in mind for building a HTPC someday. However, given my shortage of time, and huge collection of mp3's, the Xbox presented an option for being used as a streaming point, especially, with the High-Def connectivity.
The two primary challenges I faced are, what to use as a source for media, and how to connect that source to the Xbox. My house is a two story place, with my network connectivity and computers upstairs in the office, whereas my home theater is located downstairs in the Living room.
For the first entity, I had the following options:
1. Buy a big hard drive, 120G one, for Xbox. But that would cost me almost 200$, and I'll be bounded by that 120G upper limit, with no way to upgrade easily. The hard drive is going to die eventually, and then I'll have to shell out money for Microsoft again. After all, 200$ for a 120G is not expensive, it's atrocious!!
2. Buy an Ipod, and connect it to the Xbox 360 through the USB connection. This seemed fine since we already have an Ipod lying around, except that I won't be able to manage the media on a PC using a easy to use Graphical interface. I anyway hate the Itunes interface. Plus, I'll have to plug out the Ipod every time I want to load new songs onto it. Plus, I'll have to hide the ipod somewhere so that my kid doesn't get his hands on it :-).
3. The third option was storing and streaming the media from a Windows PC. On searching a little, it seemed like I'd either need a Windows Vista, or a Windows XP media center. I have neither, and don't plan to get Vista anytime soon... if possible... never.
4. I did have a low powered Linux box running 24x7 though at my home. Primarily for server purposes, downloading my mails, giving me ssh access from outside etc. On doing some research, realized Xbox, fortunately, is using uPnP, a standard protocol. There are a few uPnP servers available on Linux. One option was to use the free ushare. But at the time I was looking, ushare didn't have Xbox360 video support. So, I decided to go with a paid program, named TwonkyMedia. This can stream both Video and Audio to the Xbox360 and has a neat web based configuration interface.
After solving my first problem, next issue was, how do I connect my Linux server upstairs to the Xbox360 downstairs. Wireless was strictly no no, as my living room normally gets reduced wireless signal, which drops even more when we run microwave. On top of that, most of the time I'm on my Laptop while watching TV, and would hate for my connection to lag if I'm streaming some HD content, or vice versa. So, it had to be a wireline connection.
However, since I live in a rented house, making big holes in the wall, and running cables behind the drywall all across the house was not acceptable. My research brought me to Ethernet over Power. After experimenting with couple of models, I settled for this Netgear combo.
Finally, my setup looked like following:
The two primary challenges I faced are, what to use as a source for media, and how to connect that source to the Xbox. My house is a two story place, with my network connectivity and computers upstairs in the office, whereas my home theater is located downstairs in the Living room.
For the first entity, I had the following options:
1. Buy a big hard drive, 120G one, for Xbox. But that would cost me almost 200$, and I'll be bounded by that 120G upper limit, with no way to upgrade easily. The hard drive is going to die eventually, and then I'll have to shell out money for Microsoft again. After all, 200$ for a 120G is not expensive, it's atrocious!!
2. Buy an Ipod, and connect it to the Xbox 360 through the USB connection. This seemed fine since we already have an Ipod lying around, except that I won't be able to manage the media on a PC using a easy to use Graphical interface. I anyway hate the Itunes interface. Plus, I'll have to plug out the Ipod every time I want to load new songs onto it. Plus, I'll have to hide the ipod somewhere so that my kid doesn't get his hands on it :-).
3. The third option was storing and streaming the media from a Windows PC. On searching a little, it seemed like I'd either need a Windows Vista, or a Windows XP media center. I have neither, and don't plan to get Vista anytime soon... if possible... never.
4. I did have a low powered Linux box running 24x7 though at my home. Primarily for server purposes, downloading my mails, giving me ssh access from outside etc. On doing some research, realized Xbox, fortunately, is using uPnP, a standard protocol. There are a few uPnP servers available on Linux. One option was to use the free ushare. But at the time I was looking, ushare didn't have Xbox360 video support. So, I decided to go with a paid program, named TwonkyMedia. This can stream both Video and Audio to the Xbox360 and has a neat web based configuration interface.
After solving my first problem, next issue was, how do I connect my Linux server upstairs to the Xbox360 downstairs. Wireless was strictly no no, as my living room normally gets reduced wireless signal, which drops even more when we run microwave. On top of that, most of the time I'm on my Laptop while watching TV, and would hate for my connection to lag if I'm streaming some HD content, or vice versa. So, it had to be a wireline connection.
However, since I live in a rented house, making big holes in the wall, and running cables behind the drywall all across the house was not acceptable. My research brought me to Ethernet over Power. After experimenting with couple of models, I settled for this Netgear combo.
Finally, my setup looked like following:
