Captain’s Blog

Finally, we get a bit of snow on the last day of 2005: I walked a few blocks from my apartment to get some cash and lunch from Rex Saigon: this is what I saw as soon as I walked out:

Give this posting a quick read.

Will people find a use for (or at least will they pay for) faster internet service? This is the interesting table from that article (copied locally so as not to abuse that bloggers bandwidth: I didn’t make it):

Right now, assuming the average widely-available download speed is 1.5Mbps, people don’t mind sitting around and waiting for a MP3 to download so they can listen to it. Waiting 15 minutes for a 30 minute TV show is about as much time as I’d hang around for semi-immediate gratification. But, today, do people sit in front of their computers for an hour waiting for a 2 hour movie to download? Or almost 4 hours for a DVD image?

No.

That requires kicking off a download now and remembering to come back to view it later. Honestly that’s a bit much to ask for a person who could otherwise just turn on a TV, rent the the DVD, or even drive to the theatre… watch the movie… and come back before the download completes.

But would they wait around 12 minutes for a DVD? Absolutely! It boggles my mind how people can think that excess capacity won’t be used: when there’s already a huge market for entertainment at the quality of a regular movie or DVD. Look at the market for higher megapixel cameras. Driving higher resolutions for games on computers. Big-screen and HDTV TV’s. Digital cable and satellite subscriptions. People will pay to put prettier pictures in front of their eyeballs… and that table shows that people can get higher quality entertainment with near-immediate gratification by paying for quicker internet access.

I pay about $90/month for Internet now. Which sounds like a lot, until you consider that connectivity replaces the costs I’d otherwise pay for news/cableTV (web sites) and phone bills (Skype and webcam). Would I pay for faster access? Possibly: right now Toronto has excellent (for North America) speeds for DSL and cable ISP services… so I wouldn’t pay for extra download capacity. Though I would pay for extra upload capacity.

So, I just got back from Xmas with my family in Kenora. A quick hop on the scales shows that yes, I did gain weight (curse Grandma for stuffing me full of food!)

I had a lot of fun driving around on the neighbours (thanks Fred!) quad. My long-time friend Jamie took time out on Boxing day to show me some local trails (that’s him on the right on the blue quad):

I think we covered over 70km in a couple hours. I can’t wait to go back in the summer and do the same route in the mud. Thanks James!

…to just throw stuff out?

I did a bit of pre-Xmas cleanup today, and pulled a dusty old computer out of my closet. I remember it used to be my firewall, so it had Linux on it, but other than that I couldn’t remember the last time it was used. So I plugged it in and as luck would have it, it booted! The filesystem checker shows I had neglected it since 2002…

It was a AMD 486 DX4-133 w/16MB RAM and a 10GB disk drive, running Slackware 8.1. Back when I was in UWO it was a kick-ass system… now my old PDA could run circles around it, and my cell phone would probably give it a run for its money.

I hate getting rid of things that still work. Hate it. But for the life of me I can’t think of a use for this old PC.

I suppose I should wipe it of any personal info, and send it to meet its maker…

…so, for the last few days my Rogers cable internet connection has been acting strangely. BitTorrent (BT) downloads were coming in at a trickle, yet both the Rogers and Sympatico speed tests showed things were fine. Debian updates were lightning quick downloading, and FTP uploads would max the connection… so it wasn’t a problem with the modem or signal strength.

After combing through firewall and routing rules to see if I messed things up (though I hadn’t changed anything), I decided to check some newsgroups and ISP forums.

It turns out many people had seen the same problems, and some claim to have talked to Rogers reps on the phone and were told that, yes, BT in general was being throttled. And it sounded more sophisticated than just port throttling, as people that were using non-standard ports were affected too. Suggested workaround: change your BT listen port to 1720, as 1720 is apparently the port used by Rogers’ own VoIP service (and thus opted out of any sort of throttling).

So I made the change…

…and my BT speeds jumped from what were 5KB/s up and down, to capping my upload and 200KB/s download (see jump at 10am):

All my Linux distribution downloads use BT, as do games like World of Warcraft for their updates. I wonder if enough people will complain about their legit BT downloads being throttled that Rogers will revert the change?

I have two Pioneer 109 DVD burners (one white, one black) bought 3 months apart. Identical firmware. After making coasters of about 20 Memorex DL media the last couple months I finally clue in that the white one works 100% of the time for the Memorex media, the black one fails to verify the second layer 95% of the time.

??? They’re supposed to be identical burners.

All other media I’ve used, any brand, burned at any speed, work fine for both. I switched which burner I used as primary when I did some hardware upgrades, and never figured out that’s when the problem started.

So, I’ve tossed about $40 of good media in the trash the last few weeks, just because I didn’t look at the problem sooner. Bah!

I live in a fairly high-density area: lots of apartment buildings. Looking out my window I can probably see a hundred other apartments facing me from several buildings on other streets. A perfect place for a community WiFi network? Apparently not:

I don’t know how you find other WiFi/computer enthusiasts when they’re all locked in other buildings with restricted access. With a street full of houses you could at least put some paper in the mailboxes to get the word out.

Maybe I’ll buy a couple hundred LED Xmas lights and punch them through a big square of cardboard to spell “802.11g” and put it up in my window for all to see.

Christmas spirit and all that.

Ho ho ho!

So, Sun has announced that pretty much their entire software stack is now “free”. Really, if you want to pick up the phone and yell at somebody when things break you still have to pay, but it does allow you to dabble with software you may have ignored before due to license costs, or start using some of the more basic infrastructure bits you simply couldn’t afford before for small projects.

Hopefully this helps SunMC adoption, as I often run into admins who would like some of its more advanced features, but don’t have the money to do so. Anything that gets it out there and more widely deployed has to be a good thing…

Thanks to some prodding from my friend Ian at work, I installed WordPress. But I did it on my existing Gentoo system. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna install Debian just to make him happy