Monday, December 20, 2010

ATT DSL -- making ppoe password work

Ok, this is just a regular blog post I wanted to help out others with this att setup, but it's nothing to do with cs-education.

ATT is offering $20/mo DSL in my area, and it seems like a great deal. It goes up to some terrible price in one year, so you have to remember to call them. Seems shabby to count on the customers forgetting to call and reset the rate, but for $20 I'm in, so I guess they have me figured out.

I don't mind that they have the super no-brainer install script to run things, but it's crazy that they don't ALSO have just include the few needed factual details for the tech savy. Not only are there no instructions included, but what's on their help boards is incorrect, so here is the right answer. I'm assuming you want to connect their modem to some networking gear, like a router or whatever:

1. Make a hardwire connection to the modem. Connect to 192.168.1.254 and change PPP to bridged

2. Now on your router, the att instructions tell you to enter your att username and password for the ppoe login. This is incorrect on my setup (I'm guessing it was correct at some time in the past). Instead, there is a special "network" password which you are not told, and this is what ppoe wants. Seems like this password would have been good to print on the data sheet that comes with the install. You can go to the following url, and use it to get a new auto-generated network password. Then type that in as the password for ppoe.

https://uversecentral2.att.com/uvp/home/password_reset

I suspect att would have been better off just leaving the ppoe without any authentication, instead solving it with a little logic at their end. Just looking at the help forums ... a vast amount of user and support time has been wasted on this, in contrast to the elegantly hard to screw up "I'm on my telephone line so I'm me" authentication scheme.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

JavaBat gets Python support, now CodingBat

Wow, well there's a big new feature -- Python support! So now there's online python problems on the 'bat! This is something I've been thinking about for a long time, but it just took a lot of coding. I had to change the name of the site from JavaBat to CodingBat. The name JavaBat sounded silly and weird at first, but I grew fond of it with so much use. So I hope the name CodingBat will grow to make sense, although of course today it sounds a little funny.

There are not as many Python problems as Java problems as yet, but I'm adding them quickly. I wanted to cut the Python capability over to be live so I can see how it works before adding any more. I am, of course, very interested to hear bug reports given the large new features -- email me at nick.parlante@cs.stanford.edu

I had to make the front page look very different .. now it lists some Java sections on the left and some Python sections on the right. I hope this is not too confusing for people accustomed to the old all-Java look. You can get to the old all-Java page by clicking the Java link.

If you don't know Python, try it out for a few problems. You can start playing with the Python Warmup problems where the solutions are available to get a feel for the language. I wrote some basic Python help docs to help you get started.

Since the Python problems are so parallel to the Java problems, it might be an interesting way to learn Python .. since you can look at your own Java solution for a Java problem, and then work out how it goes in Python ...heh, your personal Rosetta stone.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

JavaBat Jan Features GO

There's a few features in the pipeline for JavaBat. Prompted by a suggestion from a loyal reader, I tried putting a copy of the GO button up at the top, so writing code is less constrained by the availability of vertical space, like on a netbook. I'm hoping we all get used to it, since it seems useful, but it does look a little funny after all this time with the button at the bottom.

Also, for people using the authoring feature, the tag parsing was so primitive, it could not tolerate any spaces like in "section : Logic-1" ... anyway I fixed that bit of lameness.

A teacher suggested that it would be nice if a teacher could see all the problems a student has attempted, rather than just the ones completed. That would be easy enough to do. One disadvantage would be that currently students can attempt but not solve a problem privately, and I like it that way. I don't want anyone to feel inhibited about thrashing around trying to solve things, since that practice will lead to excellence, but it won't look excellent at the start! Anyway, it's maybe worth trying as a feature.