Brian Jepson’s Weblog

I’m not making this up! Everywhere I go, and even at home, I have a problem with Wi-Fi. People are making bad channel assignment choices; everything from choosing the same channel as their neighbor or picking something outside the range of non-overlapping channels (1, 6, and 11 in the USA). The hotel I’m staying at right now is using 8, which (as I understand it) means they are fighting with channels 6 and 11.

Is this why Wi-Fi is slow everywhere I go, or is it something else? At home, I had to put in some short runs of structured cabling because iTunes kept dropping its connection to my AirPort Express.

Google is trying to be helpful here, but it’s wrong. If you click on that link, it’s for 2006.

At the moment, I’m obsessed with buying HD video online. My Xbox 360 lured me in, with HD movies and TV shows available to rent or buy. And Apple TV has got me so excited, I’m un-unwiring my house.

When news broke this morning that Wal-Mart was entering this market, I thought it could be pretty cool. I went to their website and checked the FAQ. The first thing my eyes caught was the compatibility with Windows Media Extender. But then I read “Technical Specification: 640 X 480 maximum resolution” and it all fell apart for me; that’s even lower resolution than a DVD. So until Wal-Mart catches up with the movies I can get on Xbox Live Marketplace (up to 720p and higher in some cases) and Apple TV (720p max), I can’t see why I’d want to buy movies that will look horrible on my TV. There’s been a lot of skepticism about the prospects of video downloads, and I think it’s all justified until you start talking about HD. Given the limited line-up of HD channels in my area, I am very hungry for high-def content. It’s a big opportunity for whoever can sign up lots of studios.

Way back when, I registered jepstone.net with Network Solutions. It used to be kind of tricky to deal with them: I remember having to fax a lot of stuff at one point to make some changes. It’s a bit easier right now, since they have a web interface that’s pretty decent for maintaining your domain name.

It’s basically a matter of changing your Designated DNS servers from your old hosting provider’s DNS servers to those of your new one (in my case, it was a matter of changing all the he.net entries to yahoo entries, for example ns1.he.net to yns1.yahoo.com). Then, the waiting begins.

It can take up to 48 hours for the new settings to propagate far and wide. The name servers for Cox, my home ISP, were slow at picking it up. So I tried connecting to T-Mobile’s EDGE network using my Treo as a bridge, and I found that T-Mobile’s DNS was up-to-date. So, I used that to test out my links (Yahoo! also gave me a domain name that I could use during the transition, but it was more fun to see everything working with the real domain name).

So, I was able to start playing pretty much right away. But, I got tired of the slow EDGE speed and finally called it a night. When I got up in the morning, I restarted my AirPort base station (it proxies DNS, and was caching the old, incorrect entries), and everything was working fine.

Yesterday, I got it in my head that I’ve be happy moving my blogging over to the free hosting at wordpress.com, and it didn’t work out so well, since I tripped over a bug that confused me. It was fixed pretty quickly by most measures, but I got impatient, and started thinking about what I was doing. It made the most sense to move the whole site over to a WordPress-friendly host. So here I am, after moving my blosxom blog over to Yahoo! Web Hosting. I did not have to pull a total all-nighter (and when you are changing DNS entries, it’s best to put some space between the update and when you start tinkering a lot).

In a few subsequent posts, I’ll describe some tips and tricks that I learned along the way in case it helps anyone else:

• Moving jepstone.net from he.net to Yahoo!
• Importing my blosxom entries
• Recategorizing the WordPress entries
• Setting up a semi-intelligent script to figure out where old permalinks should go

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: “The romance of the Net came not from how it was built or how it worked but from how it was used… America’s romance with the highway system, by analogy, was created not so much by the first person who figured out how to grade a road or make blacktop or paint a stripe down the middle but by the first person who discovered you could drive a convertible down Route 66 like James Dean and play your radio loud and have a great time.”