About 2 years I was on Roadrunner. I loved it; so much so that I always reccomended it to friends and family. Download speeds were blazing fast 10+mbps, sometimes even 15mbps. I moved away to Comcast and feared for the worst (after hearing a lot of bad reviews from them).

Boy have times changed. I’m back home visiting for the holidays and Roadrunner is absolute crap. What was once 10mbps is now a mere 1-4mbps, 4 if I’m LUCKY.

Pinging google:

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 56.777/171.755/1155.530/229.523 ms

1k ? 8% packet loss? To google.

Honestly I can’t believe how far down hill their service has gone. The cable TV is skippy but the internet is just downright SLOW.

Comcast, on the other hand, usually gives me between 8 and 20mbps consistently with an average upload of 1mbps - compared to Roadrunner’s 400kbps.

While some people have Comcast horror stories, at the moment Comcast is better than RR by far to me. Things like streaming videos (watching SouthPark on Comedy Central’s SP Studios website) or watching Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Netflix (fallen in love with that BBC series) is painful at best. Low quality from Netflix’s streaming (understandable since the connection is *slow*), and skipping on streaming videos.

Never thought I’d say Comcast was better than Road Runner / TimeWarner, but they are - at least for me.

As a side note: typed this from my shiney new Macbook Pro which I’m in love with. Everything’s nice and snappy.

So I’m planning on purchasing a shiny new Macbook Pro 2.4 ghz 2GB ram 15″ screen and the 250GB 7200 RPM HDD. I was going to pick it up in store, so I first called one location. After being put on hold about 5 times while she figured out what “250GB @ 7200 rpm” meant, she said they didn’t have that model in store.

So I called the second store - she informed me that they carry ZERO upgraded models in store. So if I wanted to get the base 2.4GHz macbook pro with an upgraded HDD, I couldn’t find this in the store. Ever. Or the 2.5 GHz model with a 7200 RPM HDD, order online. Basically anything but the stock model I’d have to order online.

Needless to say I’m now just ordering online instead of going to the store since they have free 2 day shipping. Can anyone else confirm this?

After toying with the idea to use SVN (or possibly Git) I decided to try SVN and find a nice web interface that was easy to setup.

In comes WebSVN, which I thought would be easy to setup. Well I created the SVN repo following the instructions in the SVN book and had it up and running fine for my new server monitoring script.  Then I wanted to create a front-end to this repository (and for BlueBug once I made that one).

I looked at Chora but it was a bit more time than I wanted to spend on something simple, so I went with WebSVN. I uploaded the files, moved the distconfig.php to config.php and it looked as if it was working. After clicking on a repository I got a blank page.

Upon looking into the error log I found this lovely message:

[STDERR] XML error: no element found (3) at line 1 column 0 byte -1
cmd: svn –non-interactive –config-dir /tmp list –xml -r 1 ‘file:///home/bluescri/svn/mbm/’

Googling around a bit I found quite a few suggestions but none fixed the issue. For curiosities sake I did a svn –version and got

# svn –version
svn, version 1.1.4 (r13838)
   compiled Aug 21 2005, 20:56:55

apparently I was running an archaic version of SVN. Downloaded the latest version and installed it.

wget http://the.earth.li/pub/subversion/summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/rhel-4/i386/subversion-1.5.1-1.i386.rpm

wget http://the.earth.li/pub/subversion/summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/rhel-4/i386/neon-0.27.2-1.i386.rpm

wget http://the.earth.li/pub/subversion/summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/rhel-4/i386/neon-devel-0.27.2-1.i386.rpm

rpm -Uvh *.rpm

# svn –version
svn, version 1.5.1 (r32289)
   compiled Jul 25 2008, 00:38:53

Bingo, upgraded.

And voila, it worked! Awesome looking SVN repo front end.