Mon, 23 Jun 2008
Sandvine in the News
Via arstechnica: Sandvine: close to half of all bandwidth sucked up by P2P - http://tinyurl.com/54ynjo but note--
... we should note that Sandvine has an interest in showing that P2P traffic is clogging the tubes. The company sells gear to ISPs that, among other things, helps to throttle Internet traffic based on the needs of its customers.
"Half" is a lot, I'm still not sure about that, and yes the article mentiones a German company saying it's actually more. . . .
btw- isn't Skype technically a p2p app? 23 Jun 20:41 | /tech | 2 comment(s)
Mon, 09 Jun 2008
Twitter Fail and the WWDC Nerds
There are tons of articles and posts about how Twitter has lots and lots of problems. KC sums it up well here (and also here in a more serious way). They've been down *a lot* recently. I don't care that much, but I do think it's interesting to follow as I'm a casual user of their service. This week is Apple's WWDC and Twitter has a blog post up about how they're anticipating the load and are making some changes to handle it. Because lord knows, all the geeks are out in force . . . And something interesting happened this morning. I have twitter set up to 'post' anything I share in my google reader feed as a link. Basically, when I'm reading various blogs, if I find something interesting, I mark it as shared and people who follow me on twitter see the link (or they can look at the shared links I have on various pages on my site in those sidebar widgets). So this morning, I'm cruising through my feeds and I read a snarky post on a financial blog I read called Infectious Greed. Here's the post. Anyway, I thought it was witty and I clicked share, which 20 mins later sent it through the tubes™ and it went out as a 'tweet'. So just a few moments later, some goober called eggmanjohn posted a tweet basically telling me to stop harvesting traffic. He's obviously trying to follow WWDC and iPhone news and is tracking it on twitter. So he must think I'm a problematic user trying to get more eyeballs or worse, someone whose spam can either a) mess up those trying to follow iphone and wwdc or b) mess up twitter itself (zomg!) Twitter needs some serious work, and people need to stop treating it so seriously. It's just a fun site for now- nothing more (until they get their kinks worked out at least, then the power of it could shine through). 09 Jun 12:01 | /tech | 0 comment(s)
Tue, 03 Jun 2008
Transportation Strike
I wonder if any tech companies based in Hyderabad will have a lot of problems starting tomorrow due to a planned transportation strike which includes cab drivers. As part of employment, a lot of tech jobs (and job offers when recruiting) include transportation to and from work in India. The way a lot of companies do it is to hire out groups of private cabs to come at scheduled times to pick up or drop off small groups of employees who live in the same neighborhood and/or have similar shift times. It's key for US companies too as their offices in India typical have overnight shifts to match our business needs- especially in Customer Service and QA teams. Free rides at 3am is necessary, especially for the female workers. That article I linked to above mentions protesting a 12.5% increase in the VAT. That's a pretty big increase. 03 Jun 12:56 | /tech | 0 comment(s)
Mon, 14 Apr 2008
Inevitable Mac Update
Well, I'm starting to get used to the iMac. Whenever I would get confused I'd remember that Cory and Angie had reminded me that it's basically the linux box I'm used to, but just with a shiny UI (and a much faster nicer one too). I'm still taking my time to move things over, like my old mail archives and some other files. I'm not letting iPhoto or whatever it's called index my picture archives (yet) either. Speaking of, I uncovered my backup archives that have the pictures of some of you "cage dancing" in Tahoe. I'll upload them to my site sometime next week. ;) As far as necessary apps, I haven't really gone crazy installing things. I'm glad to have TrueCrypt back on a working machine, and other than that I'm playing with Quicksilver> more and just like on my Windoze box, I have Twhirl, a Twitter app, installed. Twhirl's kinda cool, it's based on the Adobe Air platform, and I've yet to have a problem with it on any platform I use-- although maybe Pridkett will figure out something cool or horrible with it soon. Don't get me started on Twitter, I both loathe it and like it at the same time. That said, let me know if you use it so I can follow you. But so far so good- there are still some minor things I need to figure out like setting up a preferred Terminal and figuring out why the stupid end key doesn't do crap on the keyboard. . . . oh, and get a squid proxy on this. . . etc etc 14 Apr 20:40 | /tech | 1 comment(s)
Thu, 10 Apr 2008
Damn iPhone
This is more of a question than a rant- Have any of you iPhone users had to reboot your iPhone because you realized you weren't getting any calls, or that the calls you were trying to make weren't connecting? I had this weird problem this morning where I was trying to dial in to a conference call and the phone just pretended it dialed and just sat there. I thought the problem was with the conference line at work, maybe the meeting hadn't started yet or something. But then I tried to dial my desk, and then the local time and nothing was working. So I shut the phone down (which took forever) and turned it back on. Suddenly I had 3 voice mails and some text messages from earlier in the morning. Great. Apparently people had been trying to reach me and couldn't. Has this happened to any of y'all? 10 Apr 13:40 | /tech | 7 comment(s)
Fri, 04 Apr 2008
I have a secret
I have a dirty little secret. I wasn't hiding it but it was bound to come out sooner or later. Yeah yeah, I "switched teams". I bought a Mac. I don't have too much to note about the new machine yet other than it was inanely easy to set up. I had planned on just building a new linux box, lord knows that would have been cheaper, but I dunno, it just kinda happened. I still have my other main machine- "tequila", which Fitz helped me build back in the stic.net days. Yes, 97-98ish. That's right, I've been running a i386 for 10 years (700mHz upgrade in '01 or '02!!) and it is time to upgrade. Although, tequila is still running Fedora Core and is my main proxy w/o problems . . . I guess I have to slow down on my mocking of hipsters now that I have one of their fetish objects. Who knows. I still have more in common with the guy on the right:
04 Apr 17:07 | /tech | 3 comment(s)
Thu, 27 Mar 2008
Comcast is still full of it
(via GigaOm) SPIN CITY: Comcast, BitTorrent Non-Deal
BitTorrent Inc. and Comcast announced a new deal today, thanks to a helping hand provided by Comcast CTO and BitTorrent adviser, Tony Werner. It.s actually a bit of a non-deal and a way for Comcast to save face after its P2P traffic management gaffe. Chris Albrecht over on NewTeeVee sees this as a .let.s be friends. move. To me it seems more like the marriage of Michael Jackson to Elvis Presley.s daughter.And I realized that this plugin for Azureus doesn't work on my ancient Linux box. more 27 Mar 12:26 | /tech | 0 comment(s)
The press release basically says nothing and gives me a headache.
Tue, 18 Mar 2008
Oh Noes!!11
Uggh, my headphones just died. My glorious "Plane Quiet NC-6" headphones. . . I don't know if I'll be able to come into the office tomorrow unless I go get new headphones somewhere tonight. Unrelated- what's up with all the freaks running around SF? Is the slight turn towards good weather bringing them out? On Sunday Angie, Mike and I saw more crazy mother effers in 30 mins at the bad burrito place than I had seen in a month. And today on the bus this hippy jackhole wouldn't let a woman sit down on the remaining seat because "there was someone sitting there". There wasn't, he had his unmuzzled, non-service dog hidden by his feet. I turned around and asked him to let the woman sit there- and he repeated "there's someone sitting there, don't you see him?" and about 3 of us said "no, we don't". But no dice. The goober didn't even realize it was an express bus either. 18 Mar 16:50 | /tech | 3 comment(s)
Thu, 28 Feb 2008
iTunes Smart Playlists
Although this is geared to iPhone users, this article on crankingwidgets.com has some pretty good iTunes playlist ideas. It's helping me keep my stuff a bit more organized. 28 Feb 18:29 | /tech | 0 comment(s)
Mon, 21 Jan 2008
New '08 Bonus Plans
HR makes quantum physics, vegas odds calculations, and fractals look easy. New bonus plan!
if company makes x% of target, or better where x is less than y% and/or there are no sunspots, and lindsay lohan stays dry then there's the potential to make 7-18% depending on group goals, but only if the potential of goals is greater than but not equal to x+y over the % of your goal sheets column of "goals met" being greater than M (met) but not C (canceled)* and that percentage is lower than the individual share of the group funds (provided they haven't been spent by the Finance Dept.)Uhhh, ok. 21 Jan 16:53 | /tech | 2 comment(s)
*unless C was caused by course change by managerial-level or higher, but not e-staff
