Category Archives: Personal Projects – not AD

2 factor authenitcation

Two Factor Authentication

Since last summer when a well-known, sophisticated web meister Mat Honan was hacked and his whole web identity trashed I have been taking steps to improve my own online security.

What Is Two Factor Authentication?

2 factor authenitcationWhen you walk up to an ATM machine you conduct a two factor authentication before you make a transaction. You must physically have the card (factor one) and insert it in the machine and then you have to know the pass code (factor two). This combination makes it very unlikely that the person performing the transaction is not you. Continue reading →

Coursera online courses

Online Education Leaps Forward

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Coursera online coursesOnline education has been around for over a decade. Questions abound about the efficacy of e-learning. Here are two TED talks about the move by our flagship higher ed institutions into this space. The first talk by Daphne Koller:  “What we’re learning from online education”  is just plain thrilling.

“Since we opened the website in February, we now have 640,000 students from 190 countries. We have 1.5 million enrollments, 6 million quizzes in the 15 classes that have launched so far have been submitted, and 14 million videos have been viewed.” 

We appear to be rapidly approaching a point where we can say that the Web is delivering on its potential to expand access to education on a global scale. An interesting insight is that all of these courses are offered on a schedule, with homework assignments, quizes, exams, all of the scheduling features that drive people to actually get to the end of their course work. Deadlines do work, even in the virtual world.

Then for a closer look at just one of these online courses watch the 6 minute TED talk by Peter Norvig,  “The 100,000-student classroom“

Now, the class ran 10 weeks, and in the end, about half of the 160,000 students watched at least one video each week, and over 20,000 finished all the homework, putting in 50 to 100 hours. They got this statement of accomplishment.”

You can go to Coursera.org to view the schedule of classes and maybe even enroll. What are we doing in the evening? TV?

Internet Access and Service Levels in Hudson and Columbia County

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The Register Star featured an article today about internet service in the county, “County dials up broadband efforts: Working with local providers and developing a map of who can’t get high-speed Internet access among officials’ goals” By Nathan Mayberg. 

Counting the Number without Access Is Not Enough

It is good that our government officials are concerned with improving Internet access across the county. It is painfully obvious that Internet access is more important in our time than even rural electrification and telephone service was to earlier generations. Without Internet access people are increasingly cut off from an array of opportunities. They cannot participate fully in our culture and economy.

I want to focus on the quality of Internet access. Even in Hudson, the most densely populated part of the county, we barely have broadband service. Mid-Hudson Cable provides download speeds that are only marginally broadband. Despite their advertising campaigns proclaiming “blazing speeds” up to 5 MB/s (or for $5 extra per month – 10 MB/s) the actual service I have experienced, tested with easily available test sites on the Web, has averaged 3.7 MB/s over the last 2 years. Worse, the quality of this service is so bad that it has frequently made it difficult for me to conduct my business conferences over the Web. And, because cable Internet service is provided through a party line, when lots of people are online at the same time, the service becomes even slower and less responsive.

Some have said, “You live in Hudson, Get Verizon DSL.” Recently I have done just this. Now I get 5.2 MB/s download speeds and the service quality consistently allows for good video-conferencing. But this is as good as this service will ever get. DSL has its technical limitations. To be competitive in broadband access we need to reach for 20 MB/s and higher.

Use Next Contract to Leverage Services from Mid-Hudson Cable

What to do in the short term?

The contract between the city and Mid-Hudson is coming up for renewal next year. Our local government officials need to get involved.

  • Any new contract with Mid-Hudson must contain service level standards that are enforced by monetary means. 
  • We should expect Mid-Hudson to come to the table with a plan for enhancing Internet service in the future and this plan should be made part of the enforceable language of the contract. 
  • And, the contract should address a real economic barrier to access in Hudson. We need a three tier system. It might look like this: basic Internet with 5MB/s service for $20 per month; better Internet access with 10MB/s service for $35 per month and world class service with 20MB/s service for $60 per month. In all cases the service level agreement would guarantee that Mid-Hudson actually deliver these speeds not just their current “blazing speeds”. 

Hudson Takes the Lead –  County Benefits

If Hudson takes the lead on this, everyone in the Mid-Hudson Cable service area will benefit. We have the density and economic power to get Mid-Hudson to improve Internet access and service. Once we set the standard other communities in the county with less economic power can tag along.

Goodbye Mid-Hudson Cable – Verizon DSL and a Surprise

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We pulled the plug on Mid-Hudson Cable (MHC) for our internet service a couple of weeks ago in favor of Verizon DSL service. I have written about MHC’s terrible service and misrepresentations earlier. Most recently here.

Being fortunate enough to live less than 17,000 ft ((the current maximum distance from a switch office for DSL)) from the Verizon office next to the Post Office, DSL is available to me. Through acquaintances I learned of their good luck with DSL. 

After the installation I ran a number of tests using the same test site, Speedtest.net,  that I have used to measure the bad performance of Mid-Hudson. This showed that Verizon is very consistently delivering 5.2 MB/sec download and 750KB/sec uploads with a ping of 50 millisecond. And, my continuing tests using Speedtest.net show that the service is consistent throughout the day. No more of the slow downs so common to the party line affair of cable internet services.

Though this is hardly world beating service ((the US is 13th in the world with South Korea at the top with an average 13.8MB/s download speed of )) the real surprise came from the impact of the fast ping speed. ((Ping is the time between the click of a mouse and the return of a packet of information from the host server to your web browser))

I use Skype videoconferencing for both business and family purposes. With MHC the ping regularly measured in the hundreds of milliseconds. This caused jittery or frozen video and chronic echoes in the audio. My first Skype conference with clients revealed great audio without echoes. I even abandoned by headset. Just using the microphone on the desktop gave me great sound and the frozen video are now a memory. ((Verizon logo used without permission))

3/19/2012 – Mid-Hudson Cable Continues To Be a Rip Off

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Mid-Hudson Cable continues to provide substandard internet services here. I have written of this earlier. Last summer I suckered up for the “up to 10 MB/sec” service for an extra $5 per month. Recently I updated my test results over this time span. The average download speed (all results based on 130 tests from August 2011 through today) is 5.9 MB/sec; the average upload speed is .43 MB/sec. The ping time average is 160 milliseconds.

So, in the strange world of Mid-Hudson Cable 5.9 equals “up to 10 MB/sec”. One does not need a calculator to see that there is a 40% shortfall here.

You can download the spreadsheet here to check out the data

Internet Service in Hudson and the Surrounding Area – more about Mid-Hudson Cable

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Mid Hudson Cable Internet OfferThis offer from Mid-Hudson Cable showed up today in a bank statement from The Bank of Greene County. Mid-Hudson always gets my attention but almost never for good reasons. This ad is a continuation of their finger in your eye approach to customers. Note that it offers “DOUBLE” and “TRIPLE” your speed for Internet service without ever mentioning what it is that they are doubling or tripling. This is simply a further progression in making it hard to find out what exactly you are paying for or even what it is they are promising to provide.

If you pop over to their website you can find this (my screen grab from today with added red arrow), that says that the regular residential service package provides “5 meg”. From other advertising I know that this is likely to mean 5 MegaBits/second (MB/sec) a meaningful identifier.

Here is the rub. In almost two years of experience with Mid-Hudson I have never experienced this level of service nor the 10 MB/s for which I am now paying in an effort to get my service level up to something useful. In fact, after hundreds of measurements over the last year, I can tell you with some assurance that “5 meg” really means 3.8 meg. And, if you use the Internet services during the peak hours of late afternoon and into the evening, the service level is significantly lower.

Mid-Hudson Cable screen grab 05232011

All of this has led me to think that Hudson and Columbia County needs an Internet Service Provider that is serious about both providing service to everyone and at world competitive levels of service. I had thought that perhaps when the contract between the City of Hudson and Mid-Hudson comes up for renewal that we could put some real teeth in a new contract. Yesterday CCSCoop published this story, “Mid-Hudson Cable Gets Icy Reception in Greenville” that included the following: “

The non-exclusive contract between the town and Mid-Hudson is for “video” service only, meaning for cable television and not internet service, explained Pat Johnson, senior municipal consultant with the state Public Service Commission (PSC).

“I think you are all here for the wrong reason,” Johnson told residents, emphasizing that by state law the cable agreement cannot include conditions for internet even though Mid-Hudson provides both.”

So this appears to leave us in a situation in which Mid-Hudson has a de facto monopoly on high speed internet service in the county (Verizon only offers DSL service which is, for technological reasons, limited to below 1 MB/sec service levels) without any regulatory or contractual leverage.

Bloated Files at Conde Nast

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Once the New Yorker came to it’s senses about offering subscribers access to the iPad digital version as part of their print subscription I downloaded the New Yorker app. After suffering through the klutzy registration process I settled in to see what it looked like to read one of my favorite magazines on an iPad.
When I clicked on the download button I saw that the file was 117 MB. This is big enough for a short movie! What are they doing at Conde Nast? Are they sending me the PDF that they send to the printers? Even on my relatively fast cable Internet connection downloading a file this size is several minutes. Today, I downloaded the Wired Magazine app only to discover that the free issue was 320 MB!
Unless I am grievously in error it is hard to understand how apps dedicated to delivering magazines to iPads could possibly require this much data to fill such a small screen.
Curious in Hudson.

Mid-Hudson Cable and Internet Service in Hudson

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Last week a story appeared in the Register Star, “Mid-Hudson turns down $3.5M in stimulus money“. This followed by two days Sam Pratt, always at the ready with in depth commentary, who wrote about the continuing failures of Mid-Hudson and the troubled life of a wannabe rural internet user in his blog posting, “MH Cable: Not tapping that grant after all“. Mid-Hudson Cable always gets a rise here. I posted the following comment at Sam’s article:

I sympathize with the troubles of those just beyond the reach of high speed Internet. Clearly bringing high speed access to everyone in the county is an important issue. However, the troubles of Mid-Hudson as an Internet provider go beyond their sluggishness at extending service.

I live right on Warren St, in the middle of MH’s most densely populated area, and their service level has been poor. They have never lived up to their advertised speeds. When we had 5 MB/s service it never ran better than 4 and the average over hundreds of data points was 3.6. I had technicians come to investigate. They pronounced my equipment to be up to snuff and left commenting “The advertising says ‘up to 5 MB/S’, it never gets there.”

Since I use the Internet for both my business coaching and web development work I felt compelled to cough up $5 more a month to get the 10 MB/S service. Now I get 7 MB/S until the evening when it slows down, as it did before, when all the other users come on line.

I believe that the contract between the city and MH is ending in 2013. Time to get ready to fight for some real service level standards that can be enforced. Or, let’s find another provider.

Mid-Hudson Cable continues to practice misleading, deceptive advertising practices with its pitch of “blazing speeds” upto 5 MB/S. The upto is Mid-Hudson’s bit of clever marketing. They never have delivered  close to that level of service.

A Suite of Plugins to Enhance Your Web Reading Pleasures

The other day I posted information about Readability, a great bookmarklet that strips away unwanted web garbage and presents text is a very reader friendly style. Since then I have come on two more web services that aid those interested in finding and reading some of the more interesting stuff on the web. The first, Instapaper,  adds to the ease of bookmarking interesting web material for later review. The second, LONGREADS, is a growing database of pieces on the web that are longer than the sound bite format that now dominates the spare real estate of web screens and the even sparer attention spans that seem to predominate these days. I have now put these three together on my web browsers and on my iPod Touch. These are my suite of web reading tools.

Instapaper screen grab

Instapaper provides you with a tool to bookmark interesting web material that you would like to review later. Unlike bookmarking material in your browser, these bookmarks live in the Web cloud and therefore are accessible to you on whatever device you happen to be using. As you bump into interesting material ion the web you simply click on the “Read Later” button in your Bookmarks bar to save it. Later when you are ready for some serious reading you bop on over to your Instapaper page and there are all of your items. Instapaper allows you to organize these in folders and also download in various formats for reading on Kindles, iPads, and so on.   See the screen grab to the left for a flavor, then go to Instapaper to set up your account and download the bookmarklets to install in your favorite web browsers.

OK. Now its time to make the reading experience more pleasant and productive. This is where Readability fits in.

I stumbled on this wonderful tool and want to share it. One of the frustrations of the Web is the enormous clutter of many web pages. This seems especially true of the magazine and newspaper style sites which feel compelled to have blizzards of sidebars, advertisements, and all sorts of other junk. Worst of all are the sites where there are moving Flash animations constantly distracting your eye from the content you might be trying to read.

Along comes this great bookmarklet. Readability from ARC90. Rather than use a lot of words, here are a before and after screen grab. You can guess which is which. Go to Readability and copy the bookmarklet to your browser tool bars. Then, try it out on this posting and see how much easier it is to read in text automatically sized to your needs and without the two sidebars present here.

Web page before using Readability bookmarkletReadability-afterLONGREADS is a site that catalogs longer articles available on the web. You can search by length and keywords. It is a perfect closer  to this suite of tools devoted to improving reading on the web.

Making the Web More Readable – the Readability Project at ARC90

I stumbled on this wonderful tool and want to share it. One of the frustrations of the Web is the enormous clutter of many web pages. This seems especially tru of the magazine and newspaper style sites which feel compelled to have blizzards of sidebars, advertisements, and all sorts of other junk. Worst of all are the sites where there are moving Flash animations constantly distratcing your eye from the content you might be trying to read.

Along comes this great bookmarklet. Readability from ARC90. Rather than use a lot of words, here are a before and after screen grab. You can guess which is which.

Web page before using Readability bookmarkletWeb page after using Readability bookmarklet