All the ways Murphy can interfere with RJ45 termination...

I been terminating a fair amount of network cables with RJ45 connectors during the years and I have had a good track record, until now...

I have pulled wires in my apartment and was terminating them to RJ45 for computer usage as well as extensions for USB and control signals.



From experience here are the things that I know Murphy could do prior to today:

1) All the wires are not pushed in enough into the connector, resulting in no connectivity on that pin. Start over and ensure the cables have an even length when arranged in the right order.

2) One or multiple wires didn't get the right position. Make sure to check the wires properly before punching them down. Just try again until you get it right, it might help to strip a bit extra of the wires and then cut the excess once the order has been arranged.

3) One or multiple pins is not pushed down properly. Try to crimp it again and if that doesn't help it's time to get a new crimp tool.

4) Cutting through the inner wires while removing the shielding. This is easily done, and I would require anyone to redo a cable if the inner core of any wire can be seen. Having damaged wires could lead to intermittent faults which you don't want to risk!

5) Placing the cables the wrong way around. Easily done if you stick the cable on the opposite way from what you are used to. If not a critical cable you might get away with doing the same on the other side since the pairs are still intact but preferably the cable should be redone.

6) Mixing EIA-568-A and EIA-568-B. For resons which I don't know there are two standards for how the pairs should be connected, EIA-568-A and EIA-568-B. For some reason USA only recognize the A standard resulting in patch panels and other equipment to only be marked with the A standard sometimes. The B standard is supposed to be an improvement and is recommended in Europe. The important thing is to follow the same standard on both end of the cable, if in doubt I would suggest EIA-568-A since that's supported by everyone. If the standards get twisted, just redo one side to correspond to the other.

As you understand the connectors do go wrong sometimes. But if you are careful and inspect the connector properly before terminating it most of the problems can easily be avoided.

So when I terminated the wires at home I did as I always have done and ensured the wires was in the right order roughly the same length and that I managed to push them all the way into the connector. After I finished all of the wires and started testing them I found out that I had a short on the first cable. I thought I had been quite gently when I pulled the wires and started to trace the cause of the problem. Using a standard multimeter I could see that the fault must be in or near the connector because of the minimal resistance to the fault.

I cut of the connector to validate that the problem was on the connector end. I continued to strip of the shielding from the cable completely to ensure I hadn't damaged the inner cores. Everything looked fine, I then cut the connector in pieces to ensure that the cables wasn't touching each other. I _STILL_ had the short on the cables, I could not believe it! I checked and double checked and finally I found the cause. The tubes that the wires are pushed in to ensure they get to the right location didn't go all the way to the end of the connector, at the very front of the connector the conductor of the stranded cables that I had used had been pushed towards the front wall and made a connection with the neighboring wire.



After finding the problem on the first wire I checked all my connections and all of them had at least two wires short circuited one of them had 4 out of 8 shorted but non of the cables that I done with the Cat5e cable was without a fault.

So I can now add a 7th possible problem when terminating RJ45 connectors, pushing in the cable to far. The fact is that even after knowing of the problem I could still not ensure a proper termination.

7) Short circuit by pushing in the wires to far into the jack. Solution: get other jacks! The plugs

This whole story has convinced me to start using Platinum tools EZ-RJ45 (http://www.platinumtools.com/index.html) connectors istead. The wires are pulled through the connector and their crimp tool then cut of the excess, should be both quicker and more secure and most important Murphy can try to put a number 7 on me then!

Low fares big surcharges

Just booked some flights for two person with Ryanair and their price model is just ridiculous.

The actual cost of the tickets are four times as high as the marketed "fare" price. And there isn't possible to remove the extra charges for wheelchare insurance which is part of the taxes, web check-in or the handling fee for paying with a credit card.

618.00 SEK Total Fare
1021.62 SEK Taxes, Fees & Charges
220.00 SEK Passenger Fee: Web Check in
220.00 SEK Passenger Fee: Handling Fee
-----------------------
2079.62 SEK Total Paid


Unfortunately the same trip with any of the other airlines would have been around 8000 SEK which was to much for me to give the finger to Ryanair. Lets hope they get broke so we can't be tempted by their unfriendly business methods any more.

10 000 meters almost barefeeted

Back home after Midnattsloppet in Göteborg.

So it was time again this evening, for those how haven't followed the blog I could recommend to take a look at my previous post http://tansaki.blogspot.com/2009/06/no-pain-no-gain-or-no-shoes-running.html first.

As you all should know now (if your did read the previous blog post) I have experimented with running bare feeted. Unfortiently it does take some getting used to so since I needed some new running shoes and a friend recommended the Vibrant 5 fingers I thought it would be a great thing to try. On Wednesday I registered to the Midnight 10 000 meters race in central Gothenburg, on Thursday I bought the 5 fingers shoes and run 2300 meters. Maybe not the best of preparations but the more interesting to see how it would work out.

Normally when you buy new running shoes you need to run with them for a while to get them to fit your feet and minimize the risk of blizzards. I didn't really have time for that. After the test run of 2300 meters I did however noticed that I got a small blizzard on the Achilles' tendon on my left foot from the new shoes. With hope that there wouldn't be any more blizzards I got changed and put a piece of Compete over the blizard on the Achilles' tendon an hour before the race and went down to the start.

The race went fine and I'm quite pleased with the time of 42 minutes and 25 seconds, slightly more then 4 minutes over my personal best but with my preparations I'm pleased it wasn't more.

So how did the shoes perform? Remarkable well I would say, I did get a small blizzard on the inside of each foot. Considering how my feet looked after running without any shoes at all I was almost "disappointed" that my feets looked so good after the race. The biggest blizzards that I got was not from the shoes themselves but from the timing chip and my foot pod that I use to get the speed while running. Since the foot pod doesn't work if it's not positioned horizontally on the foot I strapped the chip and foot pod around the foot instead of around the ankle. On normal shoes and also on different models of the 5 fingers you do have straps or strings to put the foot pod on but that's not available on my shoes as you will see on the pictures below.

So if you like to give bare feet running a try without massive blizzards I can highly recommend the 5 fingers shoes from Vibrant, you can find them at http://www.kettlebellcenter.com/en/art/fivefingers-classic-m-walmut-brown.php among other places. And if you don't want to take my word for the benefits you can also hear it from Tim Ferries at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdluEiApUtQ


My feet and the 5 fingers back home after the race, the blizzards on the left foot is from the chip and the foot pod and not the shoe.


Maybe not the best shoe if you don't like to be noticed.


Underside of the shoes.

Voddler - A free movie library on the net

First I must admit that I had missed all the fuzz about Voddler, guess that is what happens when you spend 10 weeks at sea.

The story really started this spring when I signed up as beta tester for a service called Galaxter. At the time it was only providing previews of movies but I knew that the idea was to stream full length movies. Let me return to this soon...

A few weeks ago I started to get e-mails from a company called Voddler, if it wasn't for the fact that it was based in Sweden I would probably considered it to be spam. The first e-mail message was wishing me a "filmtastic summer" a bit currious I went to www.voddler.com only to be greated with the question if I was a Voddler. A What? I didn't quite feel like signing up for yet another service which I didn't know what it was and probably didn't need. That was the end of my Voddle experience I thought. I got a few more e-mails regarding updates and actually replied back and told them that I wasn't interested in any more updates.

Less than two days after I had been taken of from the e-mail list I wanted to see what had happened with Galaxter while I had been away. Judge of my surprise when I was redirected to the Voddler home page. Finally things started to make sense to me.

After a quick research I realized that Voddler was what Galaxter was supposed to become, the answer for legal movie downloads from the net. Before I give you my first impression and run through of the Voddler client let me tell you a little bit about Galaxter and what I think the Voddler webpage is going to be if they continue where Galaxter was six months ago. Galaxter was in many respect what the Voddler client is today but without full length movies. You could play trailers etc directly from the site in HD and just as with the Voddle client the delay was minimal.

Enought about the history, Voddler has been called to be the future for online movie distribution and yes the future is looking bright.



The first thing that you get when you start the client is the profile window, I suppose that the idea is that the whole family can have their own profile and their own favorite movies etc. This functionality is however not part of the beta yet.



Once logged in you have three options, Movies, TV-series and settings. So far there is no TV-series available. The settings page is just to adjust the video window and subtitles position, so lets focus on the movies, that's the reason you are still reading isn't it.



The default view is the wall, where movie covers are stacked together. Once the selection is moved over a movie some more informaion is displayed and when selected a new subpage with the different options is shown. Besides the wall there is also a list view with the benefit of showing the details and options directly as the selection moves. See below.







Once a movie is selected it can be played and depending on how much info that has been filled into the database their trailer and list of cast can also be shown.



Trailers start playing straight away while you have to watch a short commercial before watching the selected movie. I hope that they will keep the commercials to a minimum, while I been testing the client I have ony had to watch a single commercial before the selected movie started.





All interaction is done by 7 keys, left, right, up, down, space, enter and escape, all to make it easy to use the system with a normal remote. During playback you can pause the movie by pressing space or get the menu with alternatives by pressing enter.

There is also a settings page which can be accessed from the menu during playback to change the language subtitles and audio settings. See below.



---

So after that rundown of the basic interface what is my impression?

First of all there is no hiding it, this is a beta, and there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure that the client will work for everyone. For example wouldn't the playback work with the graphics card in my PC but to my surprise everything worked relatively smoothly under Parallels on my Mac, a true Mac client has been announced once the beta phase is over.

But the most important thing is ofcause the movie quality and the availability. The movie quality is really good, I have attached screenshots so you all can judge for yourselves but I would guess that the video quality is as good as the source it been taken from.

How about the availability then? Unfortunately at the moment there is some occasional problems with getting the movies to start and on my PC I didn't manage to get any movie to play properly. On the Mac however the movies starts as expected most of the time. My main concern regarding the availability is however the fact that this is streamed video, it will require a reasonable bandwidth for the normal movies and around 10 MBit or more for HD content. So for movies on the run I suppose we have to look elsewhere still. But hopefully they will provide us with a solution that enables predownloaded movies to be watched.

I hope you enjoyed the introduction and let me finish by wishing that you also will get a filmtastic summer.