My travels with WDF : FiOS

When it leaks, it pours

patman — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:09:00 GMT

Greetings from the Pacific Northwet. After our recent Snow-pocalypse, we also suffered a run of flooding. Amazingly enough, it wasn't directly due to the 13+ inches of snow I had at my house, it was a combination of the snow and the monumental amounts of rain that followed. Quite a few people were literally cutoff from the rest of Washington State as their egress roads were under rivers. The only hassle I had to suffer was one of FedEx being a day late with a new laptop. Oh bother.

The leaking I did have to suffer was of my own doing. It was my usage of IWDFIoRequest::GetCompletionParams in a test driver. In trying to be a good boy and clean up my I/O requests, and especially since I was going to be using asynchronous I/O, I wanted to get the completion parameters with out having to mess around with a completion routine. Funny thing is, that call takes a reference on the pointer returned. All was fine and dandy until I turned on Object leak detection (using WdfVerifier) and reference tracking. Debugger breaks prevent things from running smoothly I've found. :)

Now those of you much smarter than me would have told me I could have avoided that by using the CComPtr class on the CompletionParams interface as shown in the sample, but if you're like me and still think you know better and didn't use the CComPtr class, you had best make a subsequent Release() call.

pWdfRequest->GetCompletionParams (&CompletionParams);

hr = CompletionParams->GetCompletionStatus ();
CompletionParams->Release();

Now to answer a question nobody asked, yes my dog LOVES snow.

I'll spare you all part two of my FiOS TV installation rant because the guy who came out and installed the CableCard in my TiVO made up for the previous incident, ten fold. All I can say is wow. I really enjoyed watching Rush R30 in un-bitstuffed HD via the Palladia channel. Thank you FiOS.

*Currently playing - Porcupine Tree Blackest Eyes

The ups and downs of laser ownership.

patman — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:26:00 GMT

WARNING: Rambling and ranting ahead. Read at the risk of losing time you could be spending doing other things!

As I noted in my last post, I was to be migrating to FiOS TV on 21-November. Well, first let me say that every person I've talked to on the phone with Verizon has been very nice and helpful. Even if they weren't able to help me get things resolved.

You'll notice there's a decidedly inclusive statement there. Every person. As you guys have demonstrated to be quite the smart bunch, you probably will have gathered that I've been on the phone with Verizon a number of times recently. So here is the first part of my frustrations with FiOS.

All was going well on the 21st. I had a scheduled time between 10-12 and they had informed that I would be called ~30 minutes before they showed up. As I was on vacation that day (and the subsequent week), I decided to see if I couldn't cut down on some of the installation steps they needed to go through by disconnecting our DirecTV boxes and getting the A/V rack in the living room setup for easy access.

I had been told that since I had FiOS Internet service already, the TV service install shouldn't take more than a couple of hours. They simply had to run cable from the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) to the exiting cable lines in the house then simply setup and then register their Set Top Boxes (STBs). Well, much to my chagrin, 15:00 rolled around and I had heard nary a word from the installer. So I called the lovely people at Verizon and asked where my installer was. I know those windows are rough estimates and that things can (and often) do creep up in other installs. Which is the reason I had waited until 15:00 to call. Three hours past my window is reasonable in my opinion.

The very helpful man on the other end of the phone apologized, and then placed me on hold in order to call the installer and find out what was going on. When he got back to me, he apologized again and said that the installer was about 90 minutes away from completion of the other job. My first (and biggest gripe really) is that I never got a call from the installer saying he was running behind.

I have another slight problem here and some of you can probably figure out what that may be, but I'll explain it later.

I wasn't happy with that result, but what can I do at this point. I fired up my Xbox 360 and started watching some episodes of 30 Rock over Netflix to keep me occupied. For some reason that was allowed to last for another 3 hours.

Yes, 18:00 rolled up on me and still nary a word from the installer. From being done with the previous job in 90 minutes to 3 hours passing and still not a word. Yup, at this point my patience was gone, I had been with DirecTV for 14 years and had never had anything close to this happen. This was the kind of service I expected from Comcast honestly, not Verizon. My FiOS Internet installation experience was awesome, end to end. The guys that came and did the service, their handling of my request during setup, the whole show was great.

Anyway, I called Verizon again at 18:00 and told them I no longer wanted any part of this, I had yet to cancel my DirecTV service and I'd be more than happy to carry on with them if this was how things were going to be handled. They were very apologetic and informed me that I would have to be transferred to my local billing office to cancel the order. Which they kindly did, or at least attempted to do... Yes, I was transferred only to find out that my local billing office closed at 18:00 PST, and would not be back open until Monday morning.

18:30 the installer called. He had the gall to call me and submit that he would be more than willing to come out and do the installation right now. By 22:00 he was finished with the install. Now let me be very clear here, the ONT was some 25' away from my existing cable feed to the house, we only had two STBs to be installed (which I did in about 5 minutes while he was outside, 2xPower Outlet + 2xHDMI = 2xDone).

All he had to do was run cable from the ONT to the existing line in to the house, then come inside and run their little registration application to log the boxes as live for service. That took nearly 3 hours.

So here's where the race condition comes in - After doing all the exterior work, he came in to register the boxes, which partially failed. The DVR STB had a partial registration, the other failed wholly. After another 30 minutes of retrying and resetting the boxes, he called their Technical Support center to find out...they had taken down the registration servers for maintenance. Meaning I had one box in my house that only got part of the programming package I had paid for, the other box wasn't functional and my multi-room DVR service was not functioning. The kid doing the install apologized ad nauseam. At this point I seriously just wanted my DirecTV back. But again, I'm a sucker for new technologies, and I was already on this boat floating down the river Styx, so might as well ride it out.

At this point the kid promised he would get the box registration done tomorrow morning first thing and I'd be up and running by the time I got up. Sure enough, he kept his promise on that one.

Now in my "playing" around with the STBs Saturday morning, I discovered that my multi-room DVR was not working. One of my reasons for moving to FiOS TV was so I could watch stuff recorded on the DVR in my bedroom with out needing to have another DVR. So I called my new friends at Verizon FiOS tech support. The lovely lady had me run through some of their STB menu items for her, then she showed me the super secret method to access the STBs diagnostic and installer menus. Everything in there checked out okay on both boxes. Which left her stumped. So she put me on hold to talk to the senior support person. Upon her return, I was informed that the two boxes the installer dropped off were incompatible. Yes, you read that right. So after hanging up and entering a fit of cursing, I decided to call back again. This CSR person was stumped as to why the previous person told me such a thing. So after he and I went through the same things, he asked me a few more questions and then told me they might actually BE incompatible. But he was asking a senior technical support person a few questions.

In the background I can hear the familiar noise of the MSN Messenger service. A few "mmm" and "ahhh"s later he informed me (via his contact over Messenger)that they WERE compatible, but for some inane reason the registration application he was using wasn't resetting the feature flag on the box, so he was going to use his super secret registration application to fix this. A scant 2 minutes later, it was working just fine. All was well in my house finally. It only took 18+ hours to get my FiOS TV installed and running 100%....well not really 100%.

So in deference to the one person who managed to read this far, I'll let you have a break before I start with the second Act. :)

Now, there's one thing in this that I'm sure some of you have picked up on, and I lightly called out previously. It's way back at the top of this babble; my installation window was set between 10-12. I would normally assume that I was 2nd or maybe 3rd on a list of work items for that person on that day. And my assumption here also was that none of those work tickets prior to mine would take more than a couple of hours.

According to the kid that did the install, every work ticket he got was setup between 10-12 and they stacked him up with 6 or 7 of them.

Yeah, I thought the same thing.

This blog is reader supported

patman — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 04:39:48 GMT

Thanks to the intrepid reader, TJ, who notified me that NHL Center Ice was now available on FiOS TV. After 14 years of service, I will bid a adieu next Friday to DirecTV. For those of you wondering why I've been touting FiOS, it's currently the only TV service that does not recompress their HD signals before throwing it down the wire. Well, other than OTA, but show me where I can get Montreal Canadiens or San Jose Sharks games in HD via OTA in Seattle.

Just so this post isn't devoid of anything other than another gloat, here's something we were just throwing up to stumble each other;

void
main ()
{
    int * m;

    m [1,2] = 5;
}

This does what?

I believe the great Jeremy Clarkson said it best...POWEERRRRR

patman — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:46:51 GMT

Some of you may remember much earlier this year I had upgraded my FiOS package to 15/15Mbps. Well some time between then (February) and a few weeks ago (late October), I discovered that the price for my 15/15Mbps package was the same as the newly minted 20/20Mbps package.

Needless to say I called Verizon and let them know that since I was paying for 20/20, I'd really kind of like to have it. Pay no attention to the distance, my IP address is flagged as being from the Toronto area. Which is even more humorous considering how much I pick on Toronto.

They're offering FiOS TV in my area as well. But as I've told every Verizon person that I have talked to, "No Center Ice, no deal". You have no idea how much that pains me.

That's all I had for you today. Gloating. ;)

*Currently playing - Transatlantic All of the Above

What goes up fast, must come down as fast (in theory) -

patman — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 03:31:00 GMT

It's actually the 15Mbps / 15Mbps package, but I can't find any test servers that will actually push the 15Mbps up limit, so it may not be a "pure" 15Mbps up, but man is it close.

Next question is "why"? It does make it easier to work from home and also access my home machine from work...and stream music from it...and host really big GTR2 multiplayer races...you know, all the good stuff.

Don't know how much of the second act of the Musical I'll have for you this weekend, I may have to publish it in two parts.

*Currently playing - Spocks' Beard, The Planet's Hum

This.Is.Post.Version.1.4.5.23.9.54.2.1a

patman — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:08:00 GMT

Yes, I'm alive, just have been very busy lately.

I just had to share this because I was joking with a friend of mine not long ago about all the iTunes updates after the iPhone was released. (Aside: Yes, I own an iPod. No they do not fire us for using them. But it would be a career limiting move to be in the presences of Mr. Gates with one). Anyway, I was joking that I was going to wait for version 7.4.2.5.2.1.34.5.1b before I upgraded because 7.4.2.5.2.1.34.5.1a had playback issues when I selected 24bit. He then informed me that 7.5 was coming soon, and I told him I'd wait for 7.5.4 which was going to be out a couple of days after 7.5.

So any how, I was fiddling around with some of the advanced settings on my FiOS router / modem last weekend and decided to check if there were any firmware updates;

What happened to versions 4.0.16.1.55.0.10.4.1 and 2? I'm all for isolating and indicating versioning, but holy buckets guys!

This was all made even more humorous as there was a discussion internally not long ago about how to version the Frameworks. Should there be a 1.5.1 or should we just call it 1.6 at that point. Personally I'd love to have the Product Support guys suffer with the subsequent "that version isn't supported on your OS, you need Framework version 1.9.5.11.25.34².A∩B.5.6a". But I'm evil like that.

WDK RC1 is close to complete so the release of the Hybrid Drive is UPON US ALL!!!

Mass Effect is great. If you loved Knights of the Old Republic, you'll adore Mass Effect.

More later

*Currently playing - Rush, Red Barchetta (Exit...Stage Left version)

I have a laser on my house...

patman — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 06:33:00 GMT

A little "before" action

And now the AFTERS!

It's funny to see the differences in tests though

Speakeasy's test gives me;

Download Speed: 15456 kbps (1932 KB/sec transfer rate)

Upload Speed: 1596 kbps (199.5 KB/sec transfer rate)

SpeedTest.Net gives me;

And DSL reports gives me;

Anyway you cut it, still worlds better than what I was getting. :)

And the nicest news of all, they'll be upgrading the areas to new controller cards and the 15/2 service I have now will be migrated to 30/5 for free. :)

The only downside is the router / modem they give you does not work w/ the X360 Wireless network adapter.

So I took my old router, turned it in to a client, changed a few other settings and connected it to the "new" network wirelessly.

But by far and away, the coolest thing about this whole process is the new communications box they installed at the side of the house, there was a warning on it; "This device uses Lasers that comply with FCC regulations..."

Now all I need is a shark.

I have seen the light at the end of the tunnel!

patman — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:39:00 GMT

A scant 7 days (and 8ish hours) from now I will hopefully be tripping the fiber light fantastic. I've been dying to get my hands on FiOS for a long while. More so after my wife had her business cable line installed at the house (she's a virtual worker for an insurance company); a 26Mbps down, 5Mbps up Mississippi River of Internet goodness...*tingly shiver*.

It's been miserable this past year with that huge connection pipe sitting only a router away from me and not being able to use it at my leisure. It's more painful to know that I'm surfing away on a 1.5Mbps / 132Kbps DSL line.

But lo, three months ago the construction notifications went up at the top of our street. The flags and spray paint was layeth down! The machines rumbled and hustled, things were done, trucks scurried to and fro, and as of yesterday, I have a standing order for a 15Mbps / 2Mbps Internet connection to cometh upon my abode!

My excitement for FiOS is really two fold, I want the bump in bandwidth (hosting Halo 3, here I come!), but I also want the FiOS TV service. It appears that will have to wait until the City of Redmond (King County et. al.) allows them to start offering the FiOS TV service in this area.

I'm not unhappy with DirecTV, but I'm not terribly thrilled with them either. As a DirecTV subscriber for 14 years, I have no desire to go through another upgrade to the dish, both the receivers in my house and lose all the stuff on my TiVo in order to get the MPEG4 streams. Especially when they expect me to pay for it and they're going to be short on bandwidth again, eventually. Which will mean the return of the compression artifacts that make watching fire / smoke scenes in Rescue Me an exercise in deciphering abstract art in Lego form.

Okay enough babbling, I had mentioned two posts ago about how UMDF didn't allow for you to use specific functions for completion routines. I figured if you read through my missive about FiOS you should get a cookie or something. Since I haven't mastered my cookie teleportation device and projectile cookie delivery is still a bug I have to work out of my product-a-pult system, I'll drop some more sample code for you guys and gals and Wookiees to chew on.

A few notes here;

I'm using the context to just throw the I/O Control code around for giggles. There is a method within the IWDFIoRequest interface to get the control code if you want to use the context value for something else.

Since IWDFIoRequest has pretty much all the data buffers I would generally need for completion anyway, the context parameter really was just there to be used for something. And in some weird effort to just make things run a little bit faster, I avoided maybe one clock tick by not calling GetDeviceIoControlParameters. Yes, I'm crazy.

void
CVDevParallelQueue::OnCompletion (
                                  __in IWDFIoRequest*  pWdfRequest,
                                  __in IWDFIoTarget*  pIoTarget,
                                  __in IWDFRequestCompletionParams*  pParams,
                                  __in PVOID  pContext)
/*++

Routine Description:
    Base request completion and completion dispatch routine.

Arguments:
    pWdfRequest - current request.
    pIoTarget - current I/O Target.
    pParams - Completion params.
    pContext - completion context.

Return Value:
    VOID

--*/
{
    ULONG ControlCode;
    HRESULT hr = pParams->GetCompletionStatus ();

    UNREFERENCED_PARAMETER (pIoTarget);
    
    if (FAILED (hr))
    {
        pWdfRequest->Complete (hr);
        return;
    }

    if (NULL != pContext)
    {
        ControlCode = (ULONG) pContext;

        switch (ControlCode)
        {
            //
            // These are place holder functions to demonstrate
            // a method for dispatching to specific completion routines
            //
        case IOCTL_ALLOCATE_ADDRESS_RANGE:
            {
                this->OnAllocateAddrRangeCompletion (pWdfRequest, pParams);
            } 
            break;

        case IOCTL_FREE_ADDRESS_RANGE:
            {
                this->OnFreeAddrRangeCompletion (pWdfRequest, pParams);
            } 
            break; 

        default:
            {
                pWdfRequest->Complete (hr);
            }
            break;
        } // switch
    }
    else
    {

        //
        // if we get here, we should just complete the request
        // with its current status.
        //

        pWdfRequest->Complete (hr);
    }
    return;
}

*Currently playing - Buddy Holly, Well... All Right (Alt. Ver. 1)