gwax's rumblings

Having recently used Virgin America to trans­port myself across the coun­try, I was very pleased to have Internet access while I was in the air. This, how­ever, is not the sort of air­plane band­width and latency that I am going to talk about. Instead, I would like to dis­cuss a com­par­i­son between the band­width and latency of typ­i­cal Internet con­nec­tions with those asso­ci­ated with tak­ing a hard drive on an airplane.

Let’s say we com­pare a high speed (15Mbit) DSL con­nec­tion to tak­ing a mod­er­ately large hard drive (500GB) on a plane for data rates between San Francisco and Boston (~7 hours):

Bandwidth:
DSL: 15 Mbit/s
Airplane: 150 Mbit/s

Latency:
DSL: ~100ms
Airplane: >7 hours

For fun, let’s try some­thing a lit­tle big­ger on both sides: OC-768 vs Boeing 747-400F plane filled with 2TB hard drives.

Bandwidth:
OC-768: 38 Gbit/s
747-400F: 93 Tbit/s

Latency:
OC-768: <100ms
747-400F: >7 hours

Clearly, hard dri­ves on an air­plane will win in a purely band­width dri­ven appli­ca­tion but air­planes suf­fer from incred­i­bly high latency. You will have to decide which is best choice based on your par­tic­u­lar use scenario.

I’m still (sur­prise, sur­prise) using Mozilla Firefox as my pri­mary web browser and I con­tinue to rec­om­mend it as the finest browser that I am aware of. A bit over a year ago, I sug­gested a bunch of exten­sions for use with Firefox; today I do the same. In the inter­ven­ing time, many new ver­sions of Firefox have come and gone and my needs in exten­sions have changed. Here’s an updated list:

• BetterSearch — pro­vides thumb­nails in google search results; some­times it’s the lit­tle things
• Bookmark Sync and Sort — allows the syn­chro­niza­tion of book­marks from mul­ti­ple com­put­ers through an ftp or WebDAV http/https store; essen­tial for any­one with more than one computer
• BugMeNot — bypasses many web­site reg­is­tra­tions; I really hate those com­pul­sory registrations
• ChatZilla — IRC client; some­times you just need an IRC client
• Colorful Tabs — col­orizes my tabs; another one of those lit­tle things that some­times it’s
• Download Statusbar — moves down­load sta­tus from the down­load man­ager to the bot­tom of your browser win­dow; the down­load man­ager annoys me
• DownThemAll! — down­load all files from a page; some­times you just need all the files
• ErrorZilla Mod — replaces the failed to load page with a more use­ful one; yeah, more useful
• Execute JS — exe­cute arbi­trary javascript or inject it into pages; some­times you just need a lit­tle more javascript
• Fasterfox — speeds up and opti­mizes page load­ing; faster is bet­ter after all
• Firesomething — rebrands Firefox wrong; Mozilla Taconarwhal never gets old
• Fission — puts a load­ing bar in the address bar; yeah, another one of those lit­tle things
• Greasemonkey — allows for the use of cus­tom user scripts (many of which are freely avail­able); so much cus­tomiza­tion, so great
  • (script) Amazon DRM Notifier — lets you know if a CD on Amazon is infected with DRM; I hate crip­ple­ware and want noth­ing to do with it
  • (script) face­book aim sta­tus icon — tells you if a per­son in face­book is cur­rently online with AIM; mar­gin­ally use­ful infor­ma­tion but I am a fan of infor­ma­tion overload
  • (script) Facebook Flyer Remover — gets rid of ads in Facebook; yeah, I still hate ads
  • (script) Facebook StalkrNET — rela­bels every instance of the name Facebook to StalkrNET; every­one uses it for stalk­ing, why not call it like it is
  • (script) Westlaw Title — puts the title of a found arti­cle in the title bar when using Westlaw; makes my law school research slightly easier
  • (script) Westlaw Window — pre­vents Westlaw from cre­at­ing a whole bunch of unneeded win­dows; makes my law school research less annoying
• Hit-a-Hint — press H or hold Spacebar and all links on the page get a num­ber, type the num­ber to select the link; some­times the mouse just slows you down
• Html Validator — puts an icon show­ing whether a page is valid HTML in the sta­tus bar; I’m a stick­ler for valid HTML and I like to know when a page passes or why it’s fail­ing to validate
• Link Alert — tells me what sort of thing a link is link­ing to; these kinds of things can be good to know something
• NoScript — dis­ables javascript and flash by default, allows whitelists; gets rid of so many ads and so much annoyance
• ShowIP — shows the IP address for and pro­vides infor­ma­tion about a page in the sta­tus bar; mar­gin­ally use­ful infor­ma­tion but I kind of like it
• Tab Mix Plus — improves tab func­tion­al­ity sub­stan­tially; seri­ously, Tab Mix Plus makes tabs so much better

So I went ahead and upgraded my web browser to Firefox 1.5 and my impres­sions so far are pos­i­tive, only slightly so, but still positive.To tell the truth, I haven’t really noticed much of a dif­fer­ence at all, except in so far as Mozilla Firesomething (which I men­tioned a while back) doesn’t work. I really like Firesomething, but I can live with­out it until they upgrade it to be v1.5 com­pat­i­ble. The big changes as far as I’m con­cerned are that Firefox 1.5 now has sup­port for CSS2, CSS3 and SVG; I expect I will update my blog and web site .css files to take advan­tage of some of the new fea­tures some­time soon. Other than that, there are sup­pos­edly bug fixes and speed improve­ments but whatever.

If you’re still using Internet Explorer, I really do rec­om­mend switch­ing to Firefox, it’s vastly superior.