February 2006 Archives
« January 2006 | Main | March 2006 »
February 28, 2006
Netflix and So-called Throttling
There has been a lot of talk around the net lately about the business practice that Netflix uses to optimize profits. Basically, they slow down shipments to frequent renters. Since they charge a fixed fee per month and, I'm sure, the licensing is on a per rental basis plus shipping.
But it doesn’t actually work that way. Using a technique called “throttling,” Netflix identifies customers who abuse the all-you-can-rent DVD service by viewing and returning movies too frequently. The nerve! Using an algorithm that notifies the company when a customer is going to start costing it money, it “throttles” them back by delaying the shipment of their next movie—and thereby ensuring its profit. Customers who rent infrequently—otherwise known as profitable customers—are also given preference for DVDs that are out of stock due to high demand. Frequent renters just have to wait. I myself have been waiting for more than a month to see Cinderella Man.Biz Bytes : Netflix Throttling: Anatomy of a Customer Hierarchy
What's interesting to me, though, is that I have not personally experienced this. We have had Netflix for a long, long time. So long, in fact, that we still get 4 movies for the price of 3. In any case, we are usually heavy users. We'll often watch 1-2 disks a night, when we have them (and especially when you count weekends). This means we send movies back very rapidly.
Read the rest of "Netflix and So-called Throttling"
Flash on the PSP
But why didn't Sony just do this the first time around? Flash based user interfaces can be great.
Oh, right, I forgot. It would allow someone to run stuff on the PSP that they don't want you to run. So now look what happened?
MAKE: Blog: PSP Homebrew Flash Player! (with photos!)
February 27, 2006
My NAS Tale: Picking a NAS
For what feels like a couple of months now, I've decided I wanted to take a handful of external hard disks and get them on the network so they wouldn't have to move around as much. These disks range in size from 20GB to 250GB and there are 5 of them (the 20GB only really counts because it's a physically tiny one -- and it might not even go on).
The easiest and most obvious way is to stick a PC on and chain them all to USB (2, of course) and go. However, this has the disadvantage of power use, cost, size, and noise. I didn't want to do this because we've switched to laptops and I've been wanting to dump the last of our desktops; they're outdated anyway.
So, I went on a hunt for various solutions. Most of the solutions involve no-name NAS cases that have 100Mbps ports and can hold one drive. A nice choice, but not workable due to only have a 100Mbps port, was the Linksys NSLU2. It has a couple of USB 2 ports for putting a couple of drives on the network.
Another promising option was Kuro Box (by Revogear, a brand of Buffalo) (or the hardware equivalent, the Gigabit Linkstation). This box takes a hard drive, has a couple of USB 2 ports, has gigabit ethernet, runs Linux, and is designed to be modified right out of the box.
Now, some big issues started coming up with performance. I tested one of the drives locally on USB 2.0 and it came in at least at 20MBps and sometimes as high as 25-28MBps (these were, for the most part, all 7200 RPM IDE disks). I started to look around at the performance of the various NAS solutions. I wasn't impressed at all.
The NSLU2 is on 100Mbps, right? Well, at 100Mbps a site reported seeing up to 6MBps on FTP and only up to 3.5MBps via Samba. Considering the link is 100Mbps, this is too bad. 100Mbps should top out at around 10MBps given protocol overheads and stuff. Interestingly, the raw disk speeds were coming in at under 9 MBps, which is far lower than the drive the site was using should have performed. Why?
There were no reviews of the performance of the Kuro Box HG that I could see. However, at Tom's Networking I saw some graph's showing the normal Kuro Box outperforming both the Synology DS101 and the NSLU2, but it was pulling in less the 6MBps!
Looking at the Terastation at Tom's Networking showed it peaking at nearly 9 MBps with gigabit networking. Given the Kuro Box is basically a drive-less Linkstation and they are all made by Buffalo this, unfortunately, seemed indicative of the sort of performance that might be seen by the Kuro Box HG. It did see a 20-30% improvement using Jumbo packets. However, considering that it isn't using USB 2 internally, that it can get top performance with using various RAID modes (although actually the non-RAID mode was the slowest), and that gigabit ethernet is actually faster than the 480Mbps of USB 2, you would think that it could do better.
Tom's Networking also did a series on converting an old Xbox into a NAS. (It's a great read, BTW.) This sounded interesting since we'll eventually get an Xbox 360 and just have the Xbox sitting around (so to speak). The last article in the series has some very interesting performance numbers, though. They compare the Xbox NAS performance to direct PC to PC performance. Here we see the Xbox peaking at just over 10MBps, a very nice number for 100Mbps networking. The PC, however, peaked at nearly 11MBps but actually was slower in many of the tests.
This appeared to tell me that there were, perhaps, some PC problems with the performance.
In any case, when I got around to start dumping the old desktops I ended up just installing Linux Fedora Core 4 on an old Athlon XP 1600+ system with a measly 512MB of RAM. Inconveniently, one of our external cases died so one of those drives went into the desktop, which already had an 80GB and a 160GB disk. Unfortunately, except for the two in the Linux system, all of the disks from the cases are formatted as NTFS. Although there are good drivers for reading NTFS on Linux, the only drivers for writing are incomplete and run in user mode so they are slow. (By incomplete, they mean they don't support every possible method for adding nodes to the tree that is NTFS. This means occasionally a delete or a write will fail. Reads never fail and data is never corrupt.) This, however, is better than stories of having to completely reformat drives to use them with various of the above solutions. (Ultimately, though, I'll probably reformat them with something more interesting or maybe even find a hardware RAID card for cheap.) I haven't bothered to test the performance yet since the system only has a 100Mbps ethernet card in it right now.
While writing this, I went to check out more performance stuff at Tom's Networking (which seems to have the most frequent reviews of this stuff with easy to read data). The ReadyNAS is a competitor to the Terastation, although usually more expensive. Recently they release a newer X6 version. This increases performance even more. In fact, this system apparently however, around 20MBps when using Jumbo frames with gigabit ethernet. With normal gigabit ethernet it looks like it can still pull in numbers above 15 MBps. This is over 2x the performance of the Terastation and much higher performance than the other NAS devices I've mentioned. However, it's not as flexible (from what I've seen) in that you can't run a custom Linux install on it to do much more than just serve up files. But then, maybe that's why it's so fast!
Bittorrent: The Slow Download Method?
So, last week I needed to download the Fedora Core 4 DVD. It's about 2.4GB. I started by just clicking on the main download link. The download rate on this was really slow. Having recently downloaded the same thing at work for a work project, I knew that many of the mirror sites were no faster, though. So, I decided to try out the torrent.
I didn't have a torrent client installed, so I did the natural thing. I downloaded Azureus, arguably the most popular client as it's also always near the top of popularity for all SourceForge projects. i got it up and running and grabbed the torrent. Within a few minutes it was transferring at 50KBps (B is for byte and b is for bit). This wasn't too bad, but for 2.4GB it was going to take a long, long time. I gave it another 10 minutes and it was still only hovering around 60-70KBps. On a typical site, I normally get well over 300KBps, with peaks up into the 600KBps range.
So, I decided go and try out one of the mirrors for the hell of it. What would it hurt? Instead of the typical HTTP mirror, I decided to try out an FTP mirror, figuring it might have less protocol overhead (is this true). Well, the top link in the western US section fit the bill; it was an Oregon university link. So I clicked. It immediately started downloading at over 500KBps and went up to 550KBps. All of this while the torrent was still running. Already I was getting 10x the speeds. I killed the torrent and after just about an hour I had downloaded the entire 2.4GB at a sustained transfer rate of 622KBps. Why would I ever use a torrent if it's less than a tenth the speed of a decent site?
I've been doing a lot of thinking this last week on why the torrent was so slow. The idea behind torrents, of course, is that the bandwidth is distributed and the entire universe of people downloading the particular torrent add to the overall download bandwidth of the torrent. So why would it be so much slower?
Well, there are a number of factors. On factor for many people is that they have a firewall where they can't open up the ports on it. This is not the case for me; we run a WRT54G with OpenWRT on it. The ports were open and configured properly.
Another factor is that the universe of people isn't always large enough to give everyone full theoretical bandwidth. In particular, we have a fairly fast connection (for US standards) and so we expect faster transfer rates than normal. For a normal user, getting 80KBps is roughly have of their expected 1.5Mbps connection.
The other big problem as I see it, though, is that the vast majority of people are on connections were the uplink is a tiny fraction of their downlink. A typical US DSL line will have 1.5Mbps down and 128Kbps up. Our connection is around 6 Mbps down and 608Kbps up, a similar ratio. That is, a typical ratio is 10x the dowlink speed as the uplink speed. So, from here we can do some simple math.
Let's say everyone in this hypothetical torrent universe has the same connection speeds. For simplicity, we'll use 1MBps down and 100KBps up. So, now let's say we have 10 clients in the universe downloading the same torrent. We now have a bandwidth demand of 10MBps but only 1MBps of bandwidth being provided. Why would the eleventh client join in when they'll just get one tenth of the current available bandwidth (they don't download from themselves). Interestingly, one tenth of the bandwidth happens to be equal to the speed of the uplink everyone has: 100 KBps. In fact, the bandwidth available when everyone is downloading is exactly the average of all of the uplink speeds summed divided by the number of clients. Since, on average, everyone's uplink is a tenth of their downlink this means that, on average, each person will get a download speed of about one tenth of their maximum download speed. Funny enough, that's exactly what I was getting.
Now you might be asking, "What about seeds?" Well, this is the single piece that seperates reality from theory. The theory is that when a client is done downloading it will continue to upload but it will no longer have any download demand for that particular file. So, if after our first ten theoretical clients finish downloading, another 10 will come on. Now we still only have a download demand of 10MBps. However our available upload bandwidth is now doubled to 2 MBps. This means that the new 10 clients will each get to download at 200 KBps. So, if this follows, we need 100 clients in the system, with only 10 downloading and everyone uploading. This gives us a total bandwidth demand of 10 MBps and a total bandwidth supply of 10 MBps. (You'll actually need more since there is some protocol overhead in finding peers but we'll leave that out for now as it's relatively irrelevant.)
Unfortunately, reality doesn't quite work that way. And, in fact, I don't think it can realistically work that way. First off, a typically person downloads a file and gets off the network. Yes, this means their bandwidth demand goes away. However, they take their bandwidth supply with them. There are a few reasons why someone might want to do this. One reason is that they may be turning their machine off. A more typical reason is that they need the bandwidth for something else. It's common that when your uplink bandwidth is saturated your overall net experience will suffer. Response times get worse, other people on the network complain, and you get booted. (QoS can help solve some of these problems, but it isn't available in most routers.) However, another more common reason might be that the client is going to go off and start downloading another torrent. If they left their old torrent in seed mode and started a new one, the bandwidth would likely be split between the two. This means that they would only be giving a twentieth of their download demand back as bandwidth supply. This makes it even harder for this next torrent universe to build up the supply they need, even if this particular client goes into seed mode.
Take, for example, a torrent for a daily podcast. If a particular client decides to leave each torrent they download going in seed mode indefinitetly, after only two weeks each torrent will only get 10KBps of supply, or a hundredth of their download demand. If everyone did these, then the universe would need 1000 clients to provide enough bandwidth supply to only 10 clients. This is not realistic. So it's actually in the next torrents benefit that a client stop seeding the previous torrent. However, the previous torrent suffers for this.
Now, when you compare to a single server feeding to 10 clients, you only need a server with a 10MBps connection to feed them. This is fairly trivial for a single server to provide. Now why doesn't that server just join the torrent as a seed? Well, sometimes they do. In our example, each server that can seed at 10MBps is equivalent to 100 clients worth of bandwidth supply. This is also a great way to load balance between multiple servers rather than having to do (relatively) complex routing, bandwidth sharing, and load balancing. But do 10 servers seeding at 10MBps actually provide the same amount of bandwidth as a single 100MBps server?
Usually not, since there is protocol overhead and for clients there is often a loss of bandwidth when a lot of ports are in use. Not only that, since all bandwidths get averaged out, those that could have downloaded of a server and gotten off the network more quickly won't be able to. This goes back to my real example. I could have been demanding 622KBps of bandwidth for hours on the torrent, but instead I used that much bandwidth for about an hour on an FTP server and went away, freeing up the bandwidth much sooner.
I don't think torrents are the solution to overall network bandwidth. I think they are a great solution for small sites to distribute the bandwidth demands to others. This is because the torrents scale. In our example, each additional client adds demand ot the tune of 10x their uplink however, I've shown that they will typically only get bandwidth equivalent, on average, to their uplink bandwidth. This means that 10 people can download at the same rate as 10000 or even 1000000 people. They don't get to use their full download bandwidth, of course. In the end, the bandwidth actually becomes synchronous in a particular torrent universe.
So, the reason torrents are so popular isn't because a particular client can download faster. It's because they scale with the downloading universe. And anyone who can stay behind for however long as a seed just helps the situation by however little. So, if you need to download quickly, finding a fast FTP server will always win out unless it takes you hours to find that server. For Fedora Core DVDs, I'll stick with finding an FTP server since that will almost always be faster for me -- and I'll end up taking more than my fair share of bandwidth out of the universe of torrent clients since I won't stick around to seed a file I need to burn to DVD and delete of my system.
(There is, of course, another reason people like torrents. Sometimes they are the only way to download something. But that's a completely different topic.)
February 26, 2006
Sprint's Power Vision: Any Good?
So, I recently heard that Sprint's earnings had dropped significantly last quarter. I'm thinking this was due to the acquisition costs of Nextel, but I haven't looked it up yet. If it's not, then Sprint is doing so hot competing against Number 1 Cingular and Number 2 Verizon.
However, I recently had a reason to go look at Sprint's offerings. I've been in the Verizon Wireless camp since it was GTE Wireless and digital phones were still a new thing that analog fans griped about. I do end up seeing a lot of wireless news, so I knew the basics of what Sprint offered. They've got some TV stuff they've had for a while (mobitv) and their new music download service. They have video clips, games, and GPS. They have J2ME phones that should be easier to load up user content than Verizon's BREW phones.
Verizon, of course, only has video clips -- no true, round the clock TV, as Sprint seems to have. They do have their new music download service, too, and it's even cheaper than Sprints. (Both of which combine it with a desktop music license, as well, so you get both -- which is nice.)
But is Sprint's stuff any good? The feature set seems very compelling. Why aren't more people raving about it? Or are they and I just miss it? Why do I want to know?
Actually, that last is the key question. As it turns out, I've been picked for the Sprint Ambassador program. I should be getting a Samsung MM-A920 Power Vision phone next week. Consider this the disclaimer. Although I'm not being paid to write anything, or even being asked to write anything, it is being prompted by Sprint giving me free stuff. Who am I to complain, though? Not only do I love gadgets, free gadgets are even more fun! :)
Of course, as I've told people this, the same comment comes back loud and clear: "Enjoy the crappy Sprint coverage and service!" Especially with the coverage, this statement is surprisingly universal. I know a few people with Sprint service and who have had Sprint service for a long time, so it can't be that bad, can it? I'll definitely be writing about it here, though, regardless of how good or bad it is.
The nice thing is that I'll be traveling a bit during the 6 month time I'll haave the service. If plans go well, this should include Hawaii. ;) It won't cover our Africa trip, but I doubt it'll work in Africa. In fact, that's a completely different topic I have to research some. But that's for a different blog post.
I have had phones from different carriers in the past few years. These have included a Boost Mobile (Nextel's youth brand -- I wonder if they're still around?) J2ME phone (The Motorola i730, IIRC) with GPS and a color screen and the Nokia NGage QD on T-Mobile (not that the carrier mattered here). Neither I used much with voice or even data, especially the NGage (which I actually sitll have with no service and just to play the cool games that stillcome out on it).
However, I have never had a Sprint phone. This will be a great opportunity to review both the phone and it's service. I'm used to just paying for whatever (well, at least within reason) so the lack of service charges won't really affect the review much. I've also had plenty of Verizon phones with work plans on them, too.
I actually don't usually like reviews that knock things for price, anyway, since prices often go down with time. For instance, a gadget that is perfect but gets a bad score because it's expensive may end up being truly great after a year when the price drops to 25% of what it was. But no one will do a new review, of course, because it's already been out for a year. It's old hat, if you will.
But anyone, clearly I'm off and rambling. I'll post more here when I get the kit from Sprint -- assuming I actually do (they said I would with 5-7 business days, which should put it Friday through the following Monday).
Other links:
HowardForums: Your Mobile Phone Community & Resource - Sprint Ambassador Program-I'm IN!!!! FREE EVERYTHING!!!!!!! - Of course there is a thread on HoFo
SPRINT PCS - MM-A920 by Samsung - about the phone (I'm not sure if this will directly work)
BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Smart Sprint’s unadvertisement - Got in much earlier, but on an MM-A900 (thin, but less features)
hyalineskies 6.0 » A Sprint Ambassador - Sounds similar to my experience
bookofjoe: I'm a Sprint Ambassador! - An interestingly different experience
The Pondering Primate: Sprint Ambassador Program - Someone else who already got their MM-A920
TADSpot Sprint Ambassador Phone » Sprint Ambassador Phone at TADSpot - Another person with their phone already -- and a poor CS experience
pearsonified » I'm a Sprint Ambassador - Also got a phone already, with some more good insight into the program.
Wireless Muse: Reiter's Wireless Internet Weblog: Sprint's Ambassador program: Testing the Samsung A920 - No surprise that Alan Reiter got a phone, too. Yet another person who checked it for phishing, first. ;)
Jaffe Juice: I am now a Sprint Ambassador - Another one with a phone already.
There are many more, of course.
It's interesting how many people have phones already -- and how many
February 23, 2006
Microsoft Office Live vs Google Services
So I recently went over and checked out the new Microsoft Office Live beta stuff. Interestingly, you can't just create an account and go. You have to go through an approval process. I think I entered something, but I'm not sure. It didn't ask for much information.
So basically, it offers a free top level domain, a web site with web site design tools with 30MB of storage of some amount of transfer, as well as five 2GB email accounts (only accessible via the web -- and it looks like hotmail). This is the free offering. Not too bad, really. It doesn't cost them much but it gives a decent value to small businesses, which is exactly what it's targetting. It doesn't seem like you'll be able to just sign up any ol' account and create a web site with any particular domain.
So then Google just launched their web page creator. It has the design tools for creating pages and linking them together. I guess you don't get to put it on a particular domain. However, they recently also started a program for providing email accounts on your own organizations domain. These particular accounts all have 2GB of storage. Sound familiar? Naturally, they're all free, too.
Sure, Google and Microsoft don't have the same target audiences, but the services are surprisingly similar. How long before Google starts offering some other services, like asset tracking and CRM and other such things?
I'm not using either, but I am curious in checking them out because it's interesting to see all of the new web applications from the companies that spend money on making these things rather than the small one to two person ones that are sweeping the web (and being acquired by the likes of Yahoo and others). ;)
Dell Inspiron Laptop For Sale (again)!
I have finally been able to relist my old laptop on ebay now that all of the fraud stuff has been dealt with. Overall, the experience was annoying but not nearly as bad as I though it would be. More on that later...
Shane Conder's Whateveritis of Nothing: Dell Laptop For Sale!!
February 22, 2006
Odd Insert in Amazon Order
So, I had to order a couple of external disks from Amazon the other day.
Yesterday, they arrived. The Amazon box had the two drive boxes in it, two very deflated packing pillows, and one free sample of Degree deoderant stick for men.
What?
Yes. Deoderant. Free. With external hard disks. For men. I wonder what I would have gotten if they were pink? I mean, are they actually targetted are just drop-ins in the shipments until quantities are out?
It was rather odd...
February 20, 2006
NTFS for Linux
My next challenge is getting NTFS for Linux to work. As it turns out, there are two ways to go about this. One is by installing the NTFS kernel module, which only allows for reading. This is only half useful, though. Writing is fairly important, as well. Apparently, though, NTFS is sufficiently complex enough that making this a safe proposition has taken years -- and even now, although it's safe, it doesn't work 100% of the time (but it does work safely, according to the authors).
So, my first step was to install the kernel module so it was available for simple and quick mounting. This is easy enough, although yum didn't choose the correct package first, so I had to do a list and find the right package name that matched with my kernel (2.6.15) (which had to be updated first, anyway). I now have "kernel-module-ntfs-2.6.15" installed. This allows me to mount an NTFS partition exactly like any other -- but it will only ever mount read-only. These modules were available via livna.
Now for writing, which the Linux-NTFS project is working on. This method involves doing a user level mount via ntfsmount. This means it's a bit slower than running at the kernel level, but it adds support for writing.
The website wants you to install FUSE and then ntfsprogs. I found that FUSE was available via yum, so I installed that version. I then downloaded and installed ntfsprogs-fuse-1.12.1-1.i586.rpm from their website figuring that I could save a step. Well, I also had to install the plain ntfsprogs-1.12.1-1.i586.rpm first. After doing that and installing fuse via yum, ntfsprogs-fuse still wouldn't install. This is perhaps because it only had i586 versions and I'm on an i686 platform. Off to download the source and compile, like the instruactions show. Well, this means also downloading gcc and installing it (luckily, yum is easy with this one).
This then gave the following error even though I have 2.4.2 of FUSE:
configure: error: Linux-NTFS FUSE module requires FUSE version >= 2.3.0.
And that's where I'm at now, having decided to wait on this and instead setup Firefox extensions. I don't think I actually need NTFS support, especially only partially working support. I think for internal disks and archives where I might want to store files larger than 4GB I'll use ext3 and all of the other ones already have the limitations of FAT32, so they'll keep working out alright.
(Actually, I don't think I'm all that far from being able to get this to work, but I don't really care all that much. :) )
UPDATE: As it turns out, the only thing I was doing wrong was that I had only installed fuse and not also fuse-devel ("yum install fuse-devel" solved that).
Now I have the 'ntfsmount' command available to use. See, I actually found that I did, in fact, need this for writing because all of my external disks were also NTFS formatted. Whoops. :)
Installing Firefox 1.5 on Linux (FC4, Specifically)
So, another thing I found odd about Fedora Core 4 was that it had Firefox 1.0.4 installed in the base package. After updating everything, it then had Firefox 1.0.7. Annoyingly, it actually had both installed still and neither are the latest Firefox 1.5.0.1 that is currently available as of this writing.
So, to fix all of this, the first step I did was to go to the Firefox site and download 1.5.0.1, which comes in a zipped tar file. Now package here to help out. I had to uncompress it and move it into /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.1, the same area as the other installations of Firefox. Now I have three versions installed. Lovely.
So, to remedy this, I ran "yum remove firefox" and let it remove the older two versions. This was quick and painless. Firefox was still running so it left behind a file, but that was easily removed.
I think had to get Firefox 1.5.0.1 all linked up. I copied the firefox script into /usr/bin and edited it to change /usr/local/lib to /usr/lib since that's where I put it rather than in the other lib directory. Finally, I launched it. Except that I didn't. It failed looking for libstdc++.so.5. Some googling later, I resolved this issue by installing "compat-libstdc++-33" with yum.
And now I'm typing all of this in Firefox 1.5.0.1. Now I just have to get some extensions set up so it's a better browser. :)
Playing DVDs on Linux (FC4, specifically)
I recently began installing FC4 on some old machines that I was preparing to sell. I thought I'd start using one of them just to check out some of the desktop items since I installed the "Personal Computer" configuration (as opposed to Server or Workstation).
I was surprised at a couple of things. One was that I could play DVDs by just shoving one into my DVD player. Fedora Core 4 comes with totem, a video player. However, after some research, I learned that to do DVD playing I'd need to install totem-xine. Now DVDs start playing automatically when I stick them in the drive. And they even play rather smoothly on this old Athlon XP1600+ with an old ATI 128MB Radeon 9700 Pro.
So what did I do? Well, without going into too much detail, I added the livna repository to yum, uninstalled totem, then installed totem-xine, then set the system preferences to start DVD playback when one was inserted.
To get livna configured, I ran this command:
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release4.rpm
To uninstall totem and then install totem-xine, I ran these commands:
yum remove totem
yum install totem-xine
Finally, within GNOME, I went to Desktop->Preferences->Removable Drives and Media Preferences and then chose the Multimeda tab. The second option down has a check box that I checked for "Play video DVD disks when inserted" and the command was already correct ("totem dvd://")
On a reasonable fast connection, the total time to complete this is under 5 minutes.
The final thing I had to do to fix the playback quality was, in totem, to go to "View->Deinterlace" to toggle the setting to on. This got ride of terrible tearing and other artifacts. Then switching to full screen mode is just a matter of hitting the F key. This makes for a great media player.
It may not be the best tool for the job. Many people prefer VLC (videolan client -- having little to do with LANs) and other players. I used this because it was mostly already configured and quite easy to get going.
I hope this will help someone else get it going even easier. At the least, I know where to search when I need this information again. :)
Fraud on ebay Sucks!
So I listed my laptop (see the last post). After a only a few hours I had a number of bids, which was great. And then by the next day it had been purchased with Buy It Now!
Except that wasn't so great. Turned out to be a Nigerian scam. But the problem is, I need to figure out how to get ebay to cancel the post so I'm not charged the listing and final value fees. And that now means that the auction isn't active and won't be active again for a while. Dammit!
Yeah, I'm quite annoyed by it. It's hard enough trying to find the time to list stuff that I need to sell much less trying to find time to deal with fraud. And I don't know if I can relist my item right away without worrying about losing the listing money from the last one. Either way, the listing time before was almost perfect and now it's not going to be. *sigh*
Oh well...
February 18, 2006
Dell Laptop For Sale!!
Update: The laptop is no longer for sale.
The following is from my ebay auction:
Dell Inspiron 8100, PIII 1.13GHz, 512MB RAM, 64MB Video, 30GB Disk
Win XP Pro, Office XP SBE, 802.11B, USB 2.0, Case, 2 Batteries, Upgrades++
Included in this auction are the following items:
- Dell Inspiron 8100 Laptop (see below for details)
- Leather Carrying Case (see below for details)
- Xircom RealPort CardBus Ethernet 10/100+Modem 56 (RBEM56G-100)
- ADS Technologies USB Port for Notebooks CardBus to USB 2.0 PC Card (USBX-502)
I originally purchased the laptop in December of 2001. It was well used nearly every day until about 6 months ago when it was replaced with a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2. During it's 3 year warranty period a number of parts were replaced. Included among these are the following:
- Keyboard replaced twice, the latest about 2.5 years ago
- Hard disk replaced, about 2 years ago
- Motherboard replaced, about 2.5 years ago
- DVD/CDRW replaced with a working DVD-ROM drive (you will get the extremely used CDRW drive, too -- it might just need to be cleaned)
- Bottom cover plastics and plastics around display were replaced about 2.5 years ago
- RAM upgraded with two 256MB PC133 memory modules (512MB total -- a single 64MB PC133 memory module is included from the original configuration)
- An extra AC power adapter is included
- Video card upgraded to a 64MB NVIDIA GeForce 4 440 Go (ordered from Dell as a new part for the Inspiron 8200, which is where drivers can be obtained). The original 32MB NVIDIA Geforce 2 Go video card is also included and in working order.
- An extra battery is included. (Both batteries are original. Although they are in good working condition, they only hold about 50% of the charge that they did new. When new, it could get over 5 hours battery life when used lightly. Now it's down to something over 2, but I haven't tested it lately.)
- A USB 2.0 card is included as the built-in ports are only USB 1.1.
As configured, the laptop has the following built-in:
- A Pentium III at 1.13 GHz
- 512MB PC133 RAM
- 64MB NVIDIA GeForce 4 440 Go 3D accelerator (this was a very common user upgrade)
- 802.11B wireless support is built-in via mini-PCI card (Ethernet and modem are available via the Xircom card
- 30GB hard disk
- 2x 59W 14.8V batteries
- 2x 70W (20V at 3.5A) AC Adapters
- 1 floppy disk that goes in one of the battery slots
- DVD-ROM drive
- 15.4" UXGA display (1600x1200)
- Cable for S-Video, Video, and digital audio output
- Stereo Speakers, microphone, IRDA
- Pointy stick mouse as well as track pad mouse
- Stacked PC-Card Slot (2x Type-2, 1x Type3)
- Firewire/IEEE1394 4-pin
- Microphone, headphone, stereo line-in
- Power
- PS2 mouse/keyboard port
- VGA DB25 for external monitor (can be used as 2nd mirroring display or extended desktop)
- Dock connector
- DB25 parallel port
- DB9 serial port
- 2x USB 1.1
- Proprietary plug for cable to get S-Video, Video, and digital audio
Included Software (original disks):
- Windows XP Professional
- Microsoft Office XP Small Business Edition: Includes Word 2002, Outlook 2002, Excel 2002, Publisher 2002
- Roxio Easy CD Creator 5.1 Basic
Also included is a Wilsons Leather Black carrying case. This cases works well with the laptop and has an amazing amount of pockets for various gadgets, accessories, papers, magazines, junk, etc. Including pockets-in-pockets and mesh pockets, this case has 23 pockets, slots for pens and pencils, and a special padded section for the laptop. The case is well used, about 2-3 years old, but is still in good working order. It has a shoulder strap as well as hand straps. It has so many pockets that airport security hardly ever got through them all (that's what the xray is for, anyway).
Although this system is in working order, it is being sold in as-is condition. It is over 4 years old, although some of the parts are much newer than that due to the warranty replacements mentioned above. Many replacement parts can be found elswhere on ebay, including CD drives, batteries, hard drives, and other parts.
See the ebay listing for purchase details. ;)
The Browser Appliance Virtual Machine
I've been using the VMWare Player a fair amount lately. It's great for running Linux without using a dedicated machine. The performance is really quite good -- in fact, if there isn't much running on the host system I hardly even notice that I'm running inside a virtual machine.
I recently decided to install the VMWare Player onto my main machine. I also decided to try out this Browser Appliance I've been hearing so much about. It's been relatively fun to both try out Ubuntu and other Firefox extensions and settings.
The first problem I had was that the BAVM (Browser Appliance Virtual Machine) was only running Firefox 1.0.7. So, I had to upgrade that, which was relatively easy. Just download the package from getfirefox.com, copy the directory into /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.1 (the version I installed), copy the "firefox" file into /usr/bin and edit it to point to the install directory. The next step was to change the default login stuff to launch the new version (the browser button in GNOME already had the right one). All of the user settings are kept, which is nice.
The next step was to figure out how to run the thing in a higher resolution. By default, the BAVM runs at 1024x768 and can't go any higher. Running that teeny resolution on a 1920x1200 screen was just completely unacceptable. After some Googling, I decided that trying to reconfigure the VM and the installed version of Ubuntu to support a higher resolution was going to be more work than it was worth -- especially since I had a backup solution.
As a developer, I have Cygwin installed on my system as well as PuTTY. My Cygwin has an X-Server available. What this allows me to do is configure PuTTY to login over SSH, directly launch Firefox exporting it's window to the main computer. The way the Cygwin works with it's X server is excellent, too. In fact, the windows come up in a native Windows window. Even popups and dialogs come up this way. About the only way you could tell that I was running Firefox remotely (well, remote to a virtual machine, at least -- this can worked just as easily to a real remote machine, too, offloading the processing) is that the font is slightly different. This means the window can be resized to whatever your desktop can support. This is a much smoother experience that running a browser window inside a GNOME desktop inside a VMWare window anyway. Cutting and pasting works perfectly between them as you would expect it to work between native applications.
Now, to get all of this working I had to fix a few other things that were wrong with BAVM. First was that the updater was set to use VMWare's internal proxy. Off that went. Next was that I had to install a text editor (emacs, of course). And lastly, I had to install an ssh server. Curiously, BAVM already had a client installed. In fact, it had a few other things installed that were odd for a browser appliance and a few things not installed that were equally odd.
Now, you might wonder why I bothered to use SSH instead of just telnet. Well, with PuTTY I can configure it to use a private key against the public key that I configured inside BAVM to auto-login without a password. I then configure it to run a single command, firefox. This means I can launch PuTTY and double click on my "Firefox on BAVM" to launch the browser.
You might also wonder if it uses up much more memory than Firefox would normally use. Well, on my system I usually find Firefox using upwords of 200 megabytes of RAM. This can continue to grow as more tabs get opened, etc. With BAVM running, it takes up about 300 megabytes of RAM, total, with the default settings of the virtual machine getting 256MB. However, this amount won't go up or down. However, I think I can clean up the installation, remove some services, and drop the memory down to 128MB, which would mean it would never use more than what I typically see. I don't know if this is really worth it, though. I have plenty of RAM to go around. Now, I also have to run the X server and PuTTY (which is usually running anyway).
As a safe browsing solution, it works great. As an everyday browsing solution, it works alright. As a browser that'll popup when links are clicked in other applications, it won't work at all -- at least not without a bunch of custom stuff to send off that URL to the VM and have Firefox launch it. It also won't do some other stuff, especially media related, due to some other limitations of the VM. So, it won't be the 100% browser. But then, even Firefox isn't my 100% browser. I still end up using IE7 for a variety of things, including selling on ebay (this is ebay's fault, actually).
The default font setup on the BAVM was very poor for my LCD monitor. I switched it around to using sub-pixel smoothing and some other things that started to make it look MUCH better (and much more like my normal font in Windows). It's still not quite as good, but I can live with it.
This also gives me a Linux available to do things in, I want or need to. That's relatively minor, though, for me since I can always log in to my dedicated server and do something under Linux. ;)
Maybe this will help some use the Browser Appliance Virtual Machine to more of it's potential. Maybe this will give someone some ideas on the fun of X servers and clients across VMs. Maybe you won't have read this because I already bored you away. Regardless, this whole post was done with Firefox running inside BAVW in a Cygwin X server window.
February 9, 2006
Barbie's Boy Toy Gets Makeover
Barbie has gone through a number of changes over the past half-century. But Ken, with his shiny pecs and glassy eyes, has been just about the same for the longest time.
No, he's been 100% solid plastic, all the way to the roots of his hair, for as long as I can remember, with that shit-eating grin. And no wonder he looks so pleased, he's a lone man in a sea of silicon women!
But over time, his look has gotten, for lack of a better word - old. He's faced competition from other men, some with real, brushable hair.
But now his agents have announced that he's turning over a new leaf, to make him more of a hottie for his blonde bombshell, Barbie.
Mattel Inc., the world's No. 1 toy maker, said Thursday it has given Barbie's boyfriend a makeover, calling him "a changed man" who "exudes a new sense of his own personal style."
Mattel, which reported lower fourth-quarter earnings last month on slowing sales of its Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels cars, said that Ken now sports two new looks: the first aimed at making a love reconnection with Barbie, including torn rough jeans and a weathered motocross leather jacket, and the second, reflecting his beach-boy roots, complete with sun-kissed hair.
...
"Ken has gone through this transformation to show Barbie that he is a changed man," Mattel said in a statement. "The new Ken exudes a new sense of his own personal style."
Mattel said that Ken is now "more than arm candy -- he's spent time exploring the world and himself, so his look reflects that time spent on his own."
More At: MSN: Mattel Gives Barbie's Boyfriend a Makeover
And if that's not enough for the pink-loving blonde bombo, there's always Legolas...
February 6, 2006
The Super Bowl -- In HD?
Well, we watched the superbowl this weekend. It's too bad the Seahawks didn't win -- it could be a while before they have the chance again. ;)
Now, we don't have cable anymore so we couldn't watch it at our house. However, a friend of ours does a Superbowl party almost every year. We went over this year to find that he had just had a new TV delivered -- literally, the morning before. It was a nice, large, Sony LCD (I think?) 1080p TV. The TV was exceptional. The contrast ratio was amazing and the size was great.
However, the ABC HD broadcast wasn't so amazing. The video compression artifacting was terrible. You could see it on all of the overlay graphics. In some cases you could see the whole lower status part blur away into artifacting because the low bandwidth compression couldn't keep up. This is in no way the TV screen's fault. The decoder could be partly to blame, or Comcast could be partly to blame by over compressing the signal.
Either way, it looked a whole lot better when it was either smaller or when you were farther away. But don't get me wrong: the quality was fart better than a normal TV. In fact, the overall video experience was one of the best that I'd seen. And I like oggling the big screens at Costco. :)
It's actually curious that right now on the HD channels you can get a better signal over-the-air (satellite HD, cable HD, or even just broadcast digital HD) that you can via a DVD. Sure, HD DVD and Bluray are coming soon to solve that problem, but it's an amusing short term situation.
February 3, 2006
New Router and Access Point
So, we finally broke down and got a new access point and DSL router. I've been hating our Netgear for quite a while. It couldn't be used for wired and wireless and the same time without locking up. It's the Netgear MR314. I'll be selling it. They are fairly cheap on eBay, so I don't expect much for it. It's only a WiFiB access point, too.
So, the new one is the geek gadget all the way around. It's a Version 2.2 Linksys WRT54G. After verifying that I didn't get bad hardware I flashed it the RC4 of OpenWRT. This worked great and was quite quick.
I then proceeded to waste and evening trying to get it in to client mode. Since it could support this, I thought it would be fun to stick it up on our printer for a few days until getting a new network cable up there. Well, I never did get it to work as a client to the Netgear MR314. As I test, I took it in to work to try against our own WRT54G router. It mostly worked. I couldn't get it to see the real world, only the inside network. This had a simple solution and proved that the problem was likely with the MR314.
Now it's up and running as a full replaced to the MR314. It's smaller, much faster (the MR314 peaked at about 350 KBytes per second while this one is getting full speed of 550-600 Kbytes per second to the real world), and smaller.
Did I mention that it's running the OpenWRT distribution of the Linux firmware? This is a wonderful distribution with all kinds of packages that can be installed. I have a bandwidth tester and a traffic analyzer installed. I'm not sure if I really need LUA installed, but the fact that I could is cool. That and micro-perl sounds like it could be fun, too.
During a full speed transfer the load stays at almost zero meaning there are plenty of processor cycles on it's 200Mhz processor to do some fun stuff with. I just have to figure out what now. :)
