Qwest finally got my Internet working, *phew*, after an agonizing 13 days. Now a new problem has reared it’s ugly head: My internet connection is ridiculously slow. I mean seriously slow. My gateway shows the downlink speed at 1100kbps. At my old apartment, it was usually around 6900. What’s worse: my actual connection speed is slower than what the gateway displays.

SpeedTest.net gives me an average of ~800kbps, just barely faster than my uplink speed! The meter jumped wildly between 1200kbps and 200kbps, during the test. This is absolutely ridiculous. I haven’t called yet, but I’m hoping it will end up being a simple fix. This whole experience has left me dismayed and flabbergasted. This is the first time I’ve ever considered Comcast as a serious alternative.

So, when it came time to move, I called Qwest to have them transfer my services. They were supposed to be setup when I arrived, and guess what… They weren’t. Not only that, but I had to wait on the phone for 2 hours, just to schedule them to come by, at their convenience, to fix the problem, while listening to “Your call is important to us”… Yeah right, more like your money is important to us.

Not only that, but it took them a week just to show up. Not only that, when they finally got around to hooking everything up, they routed me to the wrong ISP. And so here I am, waiting 10 days, and counting, for them to fix the problem. The only reason they can get away with this, is because they are a monopoly.

Comcast PowerBoost is useless. They ramble on about how Comcast Internet is so much faster than DSL, with PowerBoost giving you speeds up to 12mbit. Read the fine print, you’ll notice that PowerBoost only works for the first 10MB of a file (attached), and even that isn’t guaranteed. To put this into perspective, if I downloaded a 10MB file on my 7mbit DSL, and did the same on Comcast Internet with PowerBoost, Comcast would be a whopping 5 seconds faster, assuming both services work as advertised. Now if I were to download a 700MB iso with my 7mbit DSL, that would take ~14 minutes. If I did the same with 6mbit Comcast, compensating for PowerBoost, it would take ~16 minutes, DSL being about 2 minutes faster. Even if you had 8mbit Comcast Internet, the speed difference with DSL would still only be about 2 minutes.

Comcast relies on trickery to try and win over customers, by saying their internet service is way faster than DSL. In reality, PowerBoost does nothing to make downloads faster, there’s almost no difference between DSL and Cable download speeds (assuming that both services deliver exactly what they advertise), and Comcast’s methods of advertising are shady, to say the least.

I’m growing sick of Mozilla projects. The problem I have with them? Bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs.

Just for instance, in Mozilla Thunderbird there’s this bug that has been around for years and is driving me mad. After it’s been running for a while, it suddenly starts sucking up 100% of my CPU, and I have to restart it. It has been reported by many users, and it still doesn’t seem to have been fixed.

Also, with Firefox, after it’s been running for a while (maybe a couple days or so) it starts slowing down. And I mean really slowing down. Sometimes it takes ten seconds for it to respond to a single click. Other times, I have to kill it because it won’t respond. What’s worse, is it also crashes completely on some sites; I’ve run into this many times on del.icio.us. Firefox 3 beta is even worse!

It’s plain and simple: Comcasts HD lineup sucks.I live in the Tacoma, WA area, and Comcast’s HD lineup here is absolute crap. I have, maybe, 20 HD channels. For Christ’s sake, Dish Network has more HD than Comcast, and I am pissed off because Comcast keeps running these commercials, saying they have more HD than anyone else. LIES!Let’s run through a couple HD channels that DirectTV has, and Comcast doesn’t:

• CNN HD
• TLC HD
• Discovery HD
• Nickelodeon HD
• Cartoon Network HD
• FX HD
• Spike HD
• SciFi HD
• CMT HD
• MTV HD
• TBS HD
• CNBC HD
• Bravo HD
• Food Network HD
• Versus HD
• Science Channel HD
• MGM HD
• Speed HD
• Movie Channel HD
• Fox Business HD

Comcast started rolling out new HD channels in the Philadelphia area, and they promote those channels in their advertisements, even though that’s the only area that has those channels. I’m fed up with this BS.

I’ve come across a lot of hardcore MySQL fanboys who say they use MySQL because it’s faster than PostgreSQL. On a certain level, this statement is wrong. While I agree that, generally speaking, MySQL is faster than PostgreSQL, you have to understand that developers like that don’t take load into account. Most of the benchmarks they cite aren’t real world benchmarks; they test how fast data is delivered from the database, but don’t test how well the database performs under high load. In that respect, PostgreSQL beats MySQL hands down on multi-core, multi-processor, real-world servers, while MySQL crumbles under the load. This is due to the way PostgreSQL is built; PostgreSQL is an excellent example of good multi-threaded programming, and it scales almost linearly up to about 16 cores (as of version 8.0). And honestly, who cares if MySQL can deliver a simple query 0.01ms faster than PostgreSQL under no load? Promoting your database of choice with that argument is childish.

But that’s not the reason I like PostgreSQL. I like it because it offers a wealth of features that make my life a whole lot easier, it allows for better data integrity than MySQL, and it does all that with far less “gotcha’s” than MySQL.

For most projects, I use PostgreSQL. It’s great, it scales extremely well across multi-core multi-cpu machines, it’s loaded with features, and it handles everything you can throw at it with grace. I also try to maintain respect for MySQL, and the last thing I want to start is a flame war, but dammit, every time I try doing something with MySQL, I run across bugs, things that weren’t thought out, and very unelegant solutions.

Just for instance, today I was laying out some tables for a MySQL project I’m working on in my spare time, and I came across one of the most retarded things ever: you can’t create a field with “now()” as the default value, unless the field is an actual timestamp (ie., doesn’t work for date, time, etc). Now that wouldn’t be so bad if you could use current_date() for the default value, but apparently MySQL won’t let me do that either.

Here’s the result on MySQL 5.0:

mysql> CREATE TABLE test (d DATE NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_DATE());

ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘CURRENT_DATE())’ at line 1

Update: Comments are disabled due to spamming.