Carl Hutzler’s Blog

Yahoo! has been losing exec’s faster than, well, AOL used to. If you have been following the Terry Semel firing and the failed MSFT take over news, you know that Yahoo has really lost a lot of talent lately. Techcrunch.com had an article on a site that makes the resignation easier for people still there. And it is rather funny.

Don’t forget to hit SUBMIT for the great subject line :-)

http://yahoorezinr.com/

“It’s like Deja Vu all over again.” - Y.B.

There has been a lot of talk lately from the cable broadband providers (Comast, TW Cable, etc) that they are looking to implement bandwidth caps on their cable internet customers. Some will begin capping your download to 5GB a month in the fall, which is a VERY small amount of data when you consider your download pipe is around 10Mbps! That means you would hit the cap in about a half a day if you were downloading at the max speed. So much for unlimited internet for $50/month.

The cable companies have been saying caps are needed because of a very small percentage of people using 80% of the bandwidth. And we have been led to believe these evil people are also breaking the law as it is mostly P2P traffic (bit torrent, etc) and music/video steeling.

But me thinks the caps are for a little different reason….

Basically, if you look at what the major TV networks are doing lately, you start to realize that you can watch shows online more conveniently than ever. If you have a computer hooked up to a TV, you can simply visit abc.com or nbc.com, etc and stream the show you want to watch. And even smaller cable only stations are doing streaming shows too. And it’s free (ad supported).

And you can also stream and download movies from iTunes, Netflix, and many others. And there are more and more set-top boxes available now to allow you to stream or download movies and watch them.

Well, as you might guess, our Cable companies don’t like this and are scared we might actually ditch their Cable TV service and just subscribe to their internet service….which of course we will. So what do they do to preempt becoming a dumb pipe provider? Implement bandwidth caps to make the whole thing useless.

Yet more companies in the long list of companies that have tried to stop technology from moving forward instead of seeing the trend and adapting. Cell phone companies will be next. No one wants voice connections. They want data so they can do voice, video and data how they want.

Now, if Cable operators instead embraced the coming age of IPTV, they might be able to become more efficient at providing massive amounts of bandwidth, while charging more for it, and being more profitable. But the issue, I suspect, is that they have so much invested in the old system which is highly profitable. So even though they have other revenue streams (VOIP and Internet data), they want to keep everything. Sounds like a company I used to work for.

One of my clients wanted to download the front page of several newspapers each day and make them easily accessible to the entire staff. When they asked me for help, they were doing it manually by visiting the Newseum’s website and downloading the front page of each paper manually (via bookmarks in their web browser) and then using PDF Combiner to output 18 front pages as a single PDF. Then they would email the 10-20MB file to everyone.

Well there were a number of issues with that approach including the manual process (time consuming) and the large file which was filling up outboxes and inboxes. At first we explored how to make the PDFs into smaller files…perhaps a JPG of the page instead of a PDF. But this was problematic as it was then hard to read the fine print if the reader actually wanted to read an article as opposed to just seeing the headlines.

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I could not believe my eyes last week when I saw a pair of Bose 901 Series V speakers go up on Freecycle. The freecycler said they “needed some repair as one of the drivers was bad”. I responded immediately and tried to explain how handy I was and how I could likely fix them. An hour later, she responded and said I could have them. I jumped in the car…

When I got home, I didn’t even hook them up. I called Bose and they said for $100 plus shipping (one way), they would refurbish them to like new condition and ship them back for free! So $142 later, I have them back and they are awesome! Well, I guess a $1,400 pair of speakers should sound great :-)

Complete with sales receipt (from 1984, purchase at a Naval exchange for $800), two manuals, and stands.

If you don’t freecycle, you are throwing away stuff people want and likely missing out on stuff you would normally spend money on…perhaps BIG money.

Freecycle.org

If you like an eclectic mix of everything (and I mean everything) without commercial interruption, try Radio Paradise. The music is programmed by a real person who is a real DJ. Just like the good ole days when the DJ tried to put a half dozen or more tracks together that actually “worked” together. So much more fun to listen too.

They are listener supported. So if you like them and listen a lot, don’t forget to donate a little cashola.

….Playlist from today around 10am :-)

Heh :-)

Wanted to add one more thing to the story on how to do off-site backups using RSYNC. Once you get the set-up running you may find that some of your back-ups run into the day time hours. This can interfere with the speed of your Internet access as the back-up will typically use 99% of the uplink pipe at your house. (Don’t worry about your friend’s house as their download link will hardly be affected by the traffic since downlinks are usually 5-10x faster).

If you uplink is saturated with RSYNC traffic, it will be difficult to get your mail, browse the web or related things. I mean these things will still work, but they will have a lot of latency. Even if you are just trying to DOWNload a file, it will be slow as the file transfer does require a small amount of uplink capacity for ACKs and similar traffic.

So we need a way to allow the rest of the machines on the internal network to have full use of the uplink path while still allowing the RSYNC backups to happen. We could just constrict the RSYNC traffic to a small percentage of the uplink path but it is actually just as easy to dynamically allow other hosts to use what they need, when they need it. In this way the other hosts have a priority over the rsync traffic. So when the other hosts are idle, rsync goes as fast as it can. But when I want to do some work, rsync takes a back seat to my traffic.

Luckily doing this with a DD-WRT flashed router is fairly simply. You go into the NAT/QOS tab and the QOS sub-tab and do all the settings in that area. Basically you have to tell the router what your uplink and downlink speeds are in the first place….what does your broadband company cap you at. For me, it is 1.5Mbps (bits per second) uplink and I think 8Mbps downlink. Check here for your speed if you don’t know it. You will want to enter about 90-95% of the max numbers.

Anyway, after you program these figures (as Kbps so divide by 1000), you move on to the other areas. The first thing I did was configure a new protocol called RSYNC on TCP port 873. I prioritized this as BULK which is the lowest priority. Then I added in a number of common protocols we use in the house which are pre-configured in the DD-WRT software. I made all of these the highest priority which is EXEMPT. I went one step further and fully exempted the MAC Address of my primary work machine from all traffic shaping (just in case I forgot a specific protocol).

After hitting apply, any NEW TCP connections will have the traffic shaping applied to them. Be aware that if you are doing this WHILE an RSYNC backup is ongoing, the changes you make will NOT affect the current TCP connection.

Below is a graph which shows the RSYNC backup traffic running at a max of about 1.66 Mbps. The dips in traffic are due to an FTP upload that I started and stopped and started again. Basically the FTP gets priority over the rsync when it needs it.

Below are my configs in DD-WRT (click for larger)

The OLPC is a sub $200 laptop created with the goal of providing a laptop to every child in the world. Right now you can buy two of them for $400 and they will ship one to you and the other to a child in a part of the world that needs one.

The machine is fairly nice. It has Wifi, ethernet, USB ports, sound in/out, a decent screen which even works in the bright sunlight, a still/video camera, a nice battery, and more. It really is a lot of machine for the money. It includes a web browser and several applications for kids to learn how to work with computers like how to program, memory games, music composition, and more. And if you are at all linux savvy you can install other stuff too (the operating system is linux although you don’t have to be a geek to make the machine work). Their help site (wiki.laptop.org) is very well done and has great information too.

I just bought one (and donated one) because I think my son will love having his own laptop. I was even showing him something last night called “Turtle Graphics” which is programming language (formally called LOGO) on my computer and he was very interested in how to make the turtle draw what he wanted….and LOGO is built into the OLPC. It even has the PYTHON programming language built in which is what makes most of the web work! What a great thing to learn. And it comes with a number of games and funner stuff too like the ability to compose music.

So, if you haven’t found the perfect gift yet and are interested in something that is both educational and also might help a kid somewhere else in the world, this might be a great idea.

http://laptop.org/

As you can probably see from the last 4 posts, I am playing around with podcasting. Its very easy to upload an MP3 file to your blog and have it become a podcast. You just go over to Feedburner.com and give them the normal RSS feed for your blog. Feedburner will then massage it into the right RSS format for iTunes and other applications to consume as a podcast.

One small downside is that the normal RSS feed for my blog has ALL of my posts in it. What if I had a link to an MP3 in a post that I did NOT want in my podcast?? I was interested in how I could segregate those posts. Turns out its simple. If you apply a category (tag) to your podcast postings (like category=podcast) then you can very easily have wordpress create an RSS feed for just that category. Below is such an RSS feed link for my blog. I have all my test podcasts under a category called “podcast”…

http://carlhutzler.com/blog/category/podcast/feed

I then tell feedburner to digest the above RSS feed and produce an MP3 Podcast feed which gets published as:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CarlHutzlersBlog

Add in the special itns:// service delineation and you have a podcast rss feed that will automatically open itunes and subscribe the person to your podcast with just one click. Cool :-)

itns://feeds.feedburner.com/CarlHutzlersBlog