Monday, March 23, 2009

New Upgrade

Today we had a little upgrade to our internet access. We went ahead and moved from Vonage to Comcast for phone service, and included in the upgrade were a few cable channels and a boost in bandwidth. Channels: who cares. Bandwidth boost: yeee-haw!

I'm now 80% faster on downloads, and nearly 5x on the upload. I had an afternoon's worth of remote pairing with WebEx and Skype, and it went pretty well indeed. I'm sure it was just the emotional optimism on my part, but I like to think that the audio and video were smoother and that I had less lag with the keyboard.

I still have lag, and sometimes when my partner is refactoring the screen refreshes too slowly and I miss what he's done. Sadly, whomever is on the "hosting" side of things gets to do any work that has a lot of edits in a lot of places.

Some funny stuff, though. A change we thought was the "easy bit" took most of the day, and the ugly-seeming part took almost no time at all. I learned some new tricks. One trick was the 'introduce parameter' being cooler than I thought in Resharper (great job, JetBrains) and the other I'll blog separately.

It was a good day generally. We ranged around the code further than we expected, but left it in better condition. And our merges went really smoothly. It's not all that it could possibly be, but classes are shaping up quickly and we're cleaning like a white tornado. Watch that unit test count and test coverage rise!!

Now if we only can just get that feature done...

2 comments:

  1. Do I read from that that Cable is better than DSL for remote working? And just the thought of doing a whole day's work with keyboard lag makes me shudder.

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  2. No, I was comcast before. You might more correctly read that comcast subscriber equipment in 2009 is better than comcast subscriber equipment in 2006.

    I had vonage from well before leaving Indy, and they never upgraded my equipment so I'm really just going from era to era (in internet time).

    What numbers do you get from DSL?
    I'm getting as high as 18Mbps down, and as much as 8mbps up though it can be as low as 14 and 6 at times.

    It's a significant bump for me.

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