Archive for the ‘intzorweb’ Category

On airplane bandwidth and latency

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

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: {{500 GB} / {7 hr}} * {{1 hr} / {60 min}} * {{1 min} / {60 s}} *{{8000 Mb} / {1 GB}} approx 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: {{250,000 lbs} / {7 hr}} * {{2 TB} / {1.7 lbs}} * {{1 hr} / {60 min}} * {{1 min} / {60 s}} *{{8 Tb} / {1 TB}} approx 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.

Posted in computers, intzorweb | No Comments »

Welcome to the Infinity Maze

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

Dear Intarwebs,

I feel that it behooves me to bring the existence of the Infinity Maze to your attention. Infinity Maze is the webcomic of my brother, Dave. As might not be surprising for the work of one of my kin, the comic is rather bizarre. The art is somewhat crude but the writing is usually pretty top notch, in my opinion. I may be biased by the humor matching my sense thereof but, that said, I do highly recommend the comic to you, my good Intarwebs.

–gwax

Posted in art & culture, intzorweb | No Comments »

Fishes and Internet Friends

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

Back in late 2002, there was a great Internet phenomenon known to many as the Star Wars kid. As some of you may recall, I was one of the first people on the Internet to find the Star Wars kid video; I decided to host the video on my web server, ozone-beast at that time–God rest that wonderful ozone spewing hulk of a computronium–and sent an e-mail out to random-hall-talk announcing its presences. Within a few days, ozone beast was being deluged with hits from all over the world. I also happened to receive an IM correspondence from a girl in Bakersfield, CA. Being a sophomore at the time and having way too much free time, I struck up a correspondence. McKenzie and I have since maintained an Internet friendship without ever having met in person.

After moving to the Bay Area, I had been planning to drive down California a bunch, meet Kenzie, visit people in LA and do the whole SoCal thing but then, as you may recall, I ceased to have a car. This week, however, Kenzie was in Monterey with her boyfriend, who had business; Monterey being reasonably close by California standards, I grabbed a zipcar, ditched out of work early and drove down to say hi. We went to the Monterey Aquarium, which is fantastic by the way, hung out for a few hours and had a generally good time.

It’s a rather interesting thing to meet in person someone that you’ve gotten to know through other means. The meeting and the hang out were surprisingly not awkward, though I’ve always felt that the best way to avoid awkwardness is to just not act awkward. Sure it was a lot of driving but it was very nice driving, the Monterey Aquarium really is great and it is really great to finally meet someone that you’ve known for over five years.

Posted in intzorweb, waksman | 2 Comments »

Let’s Talk Extensions, Redux

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

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

Posted in computers, intzorweb | 1 Comment »

Yesterday, the Internet called

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

Last night, I received a random telephone call from a number that I did not recognize and, as is my style, I answered it. My, “Hello” was met with an, “Is this George Waksman?” to which I responded in the affirmative, a response that met with much revelry from the other end of the line. The call eventually turned out to be from some guy who come across my research into Tootsie Roll Pops and taken advantage of the fact that I keep my cell phone number on my homepage. This man was calling because he wanted to know both if I was serious and if I had really eaten all those Tootsie Roll Pops. Not being a lying sort of person, I of course informed the gentleman that I was only kind of serious but that I had in fact eaten all of those Tootsie Roll Pops. The man on the telephone seemed overjoyed by the information that I had just provided him, thanked me and took his leave of the telephone conversation.

Posted in intzorweb, science & technology | 4 Comments »

Neutral Nets and Rockets that go Boom

Friday, June 23rd, 2006

I’ve started watching the daily vlog (please tell me I’m not becoming hip) Rocketboom because it covers issues that interest me in a style that I like and the host(ess) is cute. I mention this to you today both because I’ve been watching it long enough to think that it’s worth mentioning to the rest of you and because they actually did something that caused me to pause and take note. Today’s Rocketboom is probably the best piece I have yet seen on the topic of net neutrality; don’t get me wrong, Ask A Ninja did a fine piece on net neutrality too but the piece by Rocketboom does a really good job of explaining why net neutrality is a really important issue and why everyone needs to tell their governmental representatives to keep our internet free. I really don’t want to find myself, ten years from now, lamenting over the way the internet used to be.

Posted in blogs, intzorweb, politics | 2 Comments »

Freshly Packaged 1s and 0s sent to your Door

Friday, June 23rd, 2006

Between work and having hard drive problems at home, I’ve started listening to a lot of streaming internet radio and I’ve had some pretty good results. For a while I was on an NPR kick, listening to WBUR (my local NPR) and having a pretty good time with that. As is inevitably the case with me, I got tired of hearing old news and went in search of a decent music stream. In the past I’d had rather poor luck with finding a music stream to my liking but this is no longer the past. I stopped by Digitally Imported Internet Radio (di.fm) to see what they have to offer these days. Looking at what DI has to offer, ignoring the ones I know I don’t much like, I decided to give their Chillout Stream [.pls] a try and I have got to say, I am mighty pleased. DI sort of fell out of my favor a few years back when they were still playing mostly trance and most trance happened to turn into crap. In the intervening years DI added more streams, none of which quite grabbed me, but now this Chillout stream is really hitting me as just my sort of thing. They’ve even played a couple songs that I know and am quite partial to: Peace of Mind by Dark Soho and Behind Closed Eyelids by Shpongle. Color me pleased DI.

Now, if only there were some way that I could get this in my car.

Posted in art & culture, intzorweb | No Comments »

Don’t Shoot The Puppy

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

The internet has once again brought forth a glorious bounty in the form of the Flash game Don’t Shoot The Puppy. The game is relatively simple, you control a large cannon and there is a puppy; don’t shoot the puppy. I bid you go forth and shoot not yon puppy.

Posted in intzorweb, video games | No Comments »

Girls Are Pretty

Sunday, March 19th, 2006

Girls Are Pretty, aside from being an accurate statement, is a wonderful daily source of fiction. The stories provided are very short, second person narratives about down-to-earth but bizarrely outlandish topics and happenings. The second person structure is a bit strange at first, but once you get used to it, it becomes a refreshing and interesting change of style. I’ve taken to reading Girls Are Pretty daily and it’s often more amusing than most of the webcomics that I also read daily.

Posted in intzorweb | No Comments »

Firefoxy

Thursday, February 16th, 2006

For those of you partial to Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird, I have something that may very well make you weep (and probably not tears of joy): Firefoxy (NSFW).

Suffer like G did?

Posted in intzorweb | No Comments »

More Birfdays

Wednesday, January 4th, 2006

It turns out today is also Uncyclopedia’s first birthday. My blog and Uncyclopedia have the same birthday; now that’s synchronicity.

Posted in intzorweb | No Comments »

A Very Uncyclopedic Christmas

Monday, December 26th, 2005

I have been made an administrator on Uncyclopedia and I am immensely pleased.

Posted in intzorweb, waksman | No Comments »

Time flies when you’re IRCing fun

Friday, December 9th, 2005

You look at the clock and it’s only 11:30p so you figure you can stay on IRC a little longer. Then, one discussion on relgion and a chat about Akira Kurosawa films later, it’s nearly 2a and you figure you probably shouldn’t have stayed on. Oh well, it’s not that big a deal; I still have a few more days of sleeping in left.

Posted in intzorweb | 3 Comments »

You cannot be friends with yourself.

Thursday, December 8th, 2005

facebook: You cannot be friends with yourself. Well damn, that’s that I guess.

Posted in intzorweb | 1 Comment »

Firefox 1.5

Thursday, December 1st, 2005

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.

Posted in computers, intzorweb | 1 Comment »

The Uncyclopedia game

Sunday, November 13th, 2005

In my free time, I’ve been playing with the wonderful Uncyclopedia a whole bunch. For those poor souls out there that don’t know about Uncyclopedia, it’s basically Wikipedia but wrong; that and it’s the twelfth wonder of the world. I’ve contributed a lot to a few articles and a bit to a lot of articles.

Some articles which I’ve contributed heavily to include (but are not limited to):

And a couple of articles that I really like but haven’t contributed much, if any, to:

In conclusion, Uncyclopedia is awesome and everyone should use it more and contribute to it a bunch.

Posted in compositions, intzorweb | No Comments »

700 Hoboes

Thursday, October 27th, 2005

The internet has brought forth a true hobo bounty. Writer John Hodgman has produced a wonderful spoken word piece consisting of 700 Hobo Names. I highly recommend giving it a listen to. Also, word is that someone wants to use this at Roast, so keep it on the down low at Senior House.

Posted in art & culture, intzorweb | 1 Comment »