After 8 years with virgin media and not being able to stand their Indian call centres or traffic management policy anymore, two weeks ago sky tv was installed at our house and 4 days ago BTOpenworld installed our new phone line for £39 and the sky Internet was immediately available.

To my initial disappointment speediest.net reported 1-3mb download speeds but then I read one of the emails from sky that mentioned their “training period”, where for the initial 10 days your line is increasingly made faster to determine the maximum bandwidth it can handle while remaining stable.

On day 3 (yesterday) it jumped to a consistent 5mb speed, today a consistent 7.5mb with 1mb upload speed. You can login to your router admin page at http://192.168.0.1 with he username admin and password sky (these details are for the current Sagem router at least). There you can see he current speed you are allocated during testing, today I am on 9 so 7.5 is fine.

Six more days raining to go, we live about 1000 metres from the exchange so I’m optimistic that faster speeds are coming tomorrow.

Just a tip for those who are also starting or considering starting with sky ;).

EDIT: Day 5, and the download speed is between 10 and 12.5 Mb… bloody awesome and faster than I was getting with Virgin Media – if it gets faster that’s great, if this turns out to be my maximum then that’s perfectly fine.

Two tips would be to place the router centrally within your house (potentially difficult as it’s pretty much needed to be near your TV set top box so you can connect Anytime + via ethernet to broadband. Second tip is to use something like WIFI analyser for android to work out which channels your neighbours are using so you can pick one with minimal potential interference that has not yet been taken.

coder++

A 20 minute crash course reviewing the essentials of computer programming

Can’t understand most of the german…. but I’m so excited I found this long documentary on YouTube about my most favourite of nightclubs…. all my graffiti filled east german memories come flooding back when I see and listen to this documentary..

I first went to Berlin around 1999, every visit since then has not been the same, I still love the city though :)

My usual way to find the ID of a database to reliably filter a trace running in profiler is to look through the sysobjects table in master.

I found this way is far nicer select db_id(‘yourdatabasename’)

DOH!

In the process this week of doing a rediculous amount of devlopment work, part of which is migrating my three sites hosting on windows 2003 server with iis6, to windows server 2008 with iis7….

If you are also wondering why as in my case jMail was not happy on iis 7 win2k8, it seems to be because it’s now using the network service account rather than IUSR, so you need to assign the correct execute permissions to the dll that you need to access….

I’n my case, I just granted execute permisson to C:\Program Files\Dimac\w3JMail\jmail.dll to “everyone”… now that machine happily sends emails using that object…