Category Archives: Technology

Network Neutrality

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Save the Internet: Click hereI have heard a recording of Alaskan US Senator Ted Stevens talking about net neutrality a few times now. Each time I hear it I am puzzled initially by how somebody who has so much trouble speaking coherently got into an office where public speaking is so essential. But then I wonder whether it is just that he feels so passionately about this issue that his mind is racing ahead of his mouth (I’m sure we’ve all been there before).

Once you get past that issue though, you can easily separate out his arguments:

  1. The internet has a limited bandwidth. His analogy is tubes that can hold a certain amount of data at any one time. When the network is busy, emails and other information for consumers can be delayed by people pushing large files (he uses video as an example) over the internet. Senator Stevens says an email sent to him by his staff took a several days to be delivered because it was “tangled up” with other traffic.
  2. Commercial users of the internet, such as those delivering the video content over it, are not paying for the improvements in the network infrastructure, so why should they benefit from it. Shouldn’t they be made to build their own internet?

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Skype Calls Fail

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So, they claim that all calls from US/Canada to US/Canada numbers (landline or mobile) will be free. And, sure enough when I tried to call my home number earlier this morning it rang.

Next I tried calling a Canadian number that was in my contact list: Call failed. So, I tried a US mobile number. That worked. I delete the contact from my list and try again, but it still knows the name I had associated with the number. Exit Skype and restart it. Now I can call the number in Canada. Annoying, but I guess it was free (the quality was pretty poor too, although the call to the US number was OK, so perhaps that was a problem at the other end, which happens to also be a VoIP service number).

A couple of hours later I try to make another call to a US landline: Call failed. So, I retry the call to my home number: Call failed. I don’t even know for certain whether people could have called me; since I could not call out, perhaps I was actually off the network?

Conclusion: I will stick with GizmoProject, which has worked flawlessly for me on Linux and MacOS as well as with hardware ATA and SIP phones. It might not be free to call US numbers, but at least I know the call will connect, and the voice quality will be acceptable. I keep seeing people in the Gizmo forum claim that Skype is better, but I’m not seeing it. Coupled with all the problems its architecture can impose (you give them permission to use your computer and bandwidth when you sign up), I don’t see any reason to stick with Skype.

Frozen Hard Disc

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Doesn’t happen often, but for some reason when it does happen it picks the most inopportune moment. Friday morning I get into the office, having done a little bit of coding on the ferry (I’m thinking twice about using the laptop on BART following this article in the Chronicle), and try to copy the updated files onto my main desktop system. But I get an unexpected message about not being able to write the file. A quick check on the desktop system and I see that my whole home directory has vanished. Not a good way to start a day.

Some investigation of the system logs tells me that the drive my home directory is on was somewhat unhappy, and was unmounted. Attempts to remount it proved useless, and the drive itself was making noises that should not be heard from a hard disc drive. In fact, the only time I’ve heard worse was back at school when the heads on a physically large hard disc attached to the schools TI-990 mini computer literally crashed into the very large platter, causing an ear piercing scream from the drive (it was clearly in pain). That was an interesting machine to learn programming on; some very simple programming mistakes could crash the whole multi-user system, making you very unpopular, but I digress.

I didn’t have a lot of source code on the drive that wasn’t already somewhere else in a code management system (checking in changes often is a good thingTM). There were a few documents, most of which are on my laptop too, but there are all those little things like bash setup scripts and preferences for applications that are just so useful to have. So, I thought I’d try something that I’d heard about a few months back: freezing the drive. It spent the night, wrapped in bubble wrap, inside the freezer in our kitchen at work. Today, fresh out of the freezer, it mounted and I managed to get eveything copied off of it. No errors, no strange noises. Now, I’m not going to trust that drive again, but it looks as though the freezer trick might actually work!

As for the replacement… well, it is going to be running with a software RAID-1 configuration, providing some redundancy, so hopefully I won’t need to worry about freezing any future drives that fail.