Category Archives: blogs

others’ blogs, previous posts, etc.

Blogger import

2008.06.20 – 9:36 pm PDT

So today I’ve just been trying to work on importing my blogs from Blogger to here. What a task. It’s a pain to spell check, browse over, then categorize each and every single entry into work comp, pain journal, or other, and there is no shortage of entries. Then try to figure out tagging of each post, if it requires any. I’m not having much luck and have had to restart a few times. Good thing I made a nice clean backup before playing around. Which I will have to create a new one after this post, seeing as it will be lost if I have to restore again.

By px | Also posted in WordPress | Tagged |

a bored, bandwidth, power user

2008.04.16 – 10:34 pm PDT

At one point in my life I considered myself to be a bandwidth power user. Someone who uploads and downloads constantly, maxing out their available bandwidth 95% or more of the time.

Dave’s post early this afternoon got me thinking throughout the day about bandwidth usage. He apparently used around 450GB of data transfer in one billing cycle, pissing off Comcast his provider, so they shut off his cable broadband.

DSCI0306

Flickr gives you 100MB per month upload. I barely even scratch that. I’d really like to take more pictures, but of what, is the difficult question posed to me. I’d like to try and use as much free upload bandwidth I can for any service. For Dave to use even 100GB of traffic to/from Flickr, that would be amazing in my eyes.

2008.04.16 ^ Azureus Seeding Screenshot

I use Bittorrent. I seed probably around 140 different files, +/- 10 for stuff I’m downloading. They certainly aren’t high traffic torrents, but I manage to peak my upload bandwidth, a measly 65KB/s, several times an hour on average. I also try to keep my seed ratio 2:1 or more depending on the content.

In general, while downloading my bandwidth will peak at around 900KB/s from tier 1 sites, which is the soft cap set in place by Cox, my provider, for my internet package, the lowest speeds available from them for $31.95/month.  This is a hell of a lot better than the “high speed” offered in 2001, except today the upload speed hasn’t stayed inline with downloads.

Now my home router keeps tabs on my transfer, and unfortunately it hasn’t been up since the beginning of the month, so much for nice good numbers. But here is 11days of up time statistics.
IN/OUT 37138780/9595423 (3.68 GB/3.64 GB)

My virtual server is allocated 300GB transfer per month, and for the last 9 months I generated virtually no traffic, perhaps only 15GB tops any given month

The source videos of this post is about 66MB, and the images another 2MB.  Do you know how much you use in your tasks?  I wish I had an easy to use bandwidth calculator off hand.

I would try and calculate the maximum possible transfer for both up and down in a given billing period for different speed connections.  I wonder if this widget, bit, chart already exists?  Internet service is already considered by many to be a utility, lacking only regulation.  Customers should be able to know how much traffic they incurred, and like a leaky faucet they should be able to pay for the usage instead of being turned off.

By px | Also posted in internet, thoughts | Tagged , |

“Technology is beginning to assail the underlying concepts of our educational system”

2008.03.21 – 6:35 pm PDT

This weeks Robert X. Cringley is a worthy read.  I won’t spoil too much.

…
That’s 30 years to become an overnight sensation, 30 years to finally settle into the form most useful to society, 30 years to change the game.

The key word here is “empowerment.” Technologies allow us to overcome limitations of time, distance, and physical capability, but they only empower us when they can be gracefully used by large, productive segments of our society. The telephone was empowering when we all finally got it. Now it is the Internet and digital communications.
…
Each new technology is difficult for the older generation and easy for the younger, which explains why I am a PC master but a texting idiot. I’m just too damned old.

…

By px | Also posted in links, technology | Tagged , , , , , , , |

Satisfaction is watching television on my own terms using my TiVo.

2008.03.11 – 8:17 pm PDT

NewTeeVee asked a question today. “Does TiVo have A Chance?” I responded with a comment on their blog, and here is more pertinent information.

Please forgive my incessant run on sentences. In continuing with my series about , my cable company. Today I received in the mail a pertaining to my use of the technology on the Cox Digital Cable Network.

Here is an image of the extortion letter from Cox, trying to get me to get rid of the CableCARD technology they developed, in order to access to their networks for use in Consumer Electronics Goods like the, commercial skipping and Televisions with built in DVR functionality, that are far superior even with their basic functionality, to the crap technology cable companies call Set Top Boxes and Advanced Digital Receivers.

Their attempt to offer me a “great deal” or helping me out is quite lame and I hope it does not sway TiVo users into submission.

As I am not a viewer of much of the ethic programming being moved to the Switched Digital Video service it does not bother me, but I am sure it bothers those who do watch this valuable programming which is in their own language.

I do take issue with the fact that they are again making channels I already am able to watch, like G4TechTV, with my current technology unavailable to me. Their continuing efforts to extort money out of me in the form of forced renting their inferior technology, which is never for sale, and isn’t inexpensive to the consumer like the $1.99/month CableCARD, makes me sick.

So if I want the even some of the same functionality as my TiVo HD, I need to shell out $12.99 or more a month, for their piece of shit DVR receiver, not counting the supposed discount they are trying to offer as compensation for the lost access to channels and services I know I’m already not able to receive thanks to the hours of time spent on the phone with the Customer Service people and constant beating in of messages repeated to you while waiting on hold.

Need I even mention the countless ads you are subjected to for their triple play services, of telephone, cable tv, and high speed internet, that they place on every non over the air broadcast channel. If they allowed you to easily and quickly skip their “subliminal” advertising then you would win. At what point does seeing something so often just become embedded in your mind like a catchy song. Is this right? I don’t think so.

Below is the letter reproduced textually in it’s entirety for search engine goodness.

Dear Rob Friedman:

Effective April 8th, 2008, Cox will implement a new technology(Switched Digital Video) that will allow us to maximize our network capacity. As with other services we offer, such as On Demand, and the Cox Interactive Program Guide, this new technology requires a device capable of two-way communication. Currently two-way communication is only availible with a digital set top receiver. Switched Digital Video is not compatible with one-way digital cable ready devices that require a CableCARD.

Due to the limitations of the one-way DCR device that you own, a Cox digital set top receiver will be required in order to view the following channels after April 8, 2008.

  • Pay-Per-View Channels - including movie, events, sports packages, and preview channels.
  • Paquete Latino Tier
  • Foreign Language Channels: TV-5, ART, RAI, ZEE TV, The Filipino Channel, TV Japan, TV Asia and CTI Zhong Tian.
  • The following digital cable channels: CCTV-9, California Channel, CMT Pure Country, C-SPAN2, C-SPAN3, Fine Living, Fit TV, Fox Reality, Fuel, FUSE, Game Show Network, G4TechTV, HRTV, Jewelry TV, Leased Access (Ch. 109), ShopNBC, TVG and WeatherScan Local.

Additionally, new channels added to the Cox Digital Cable and HD channel lineup may not be availible to customers with a one-way DCR device. Cox can offer you continued access to these networks with a digital or advanced receiver. These receivers enable access to the above channels, and any new channels, the Cox Interactive Program Guide and OnDEMAND on Channel 1.

If you are interested in a digital or HD receiver from Cox, we will offer you one for the same price as a CableCARD for the first year ($1.99 a month). Please call us at 1-888-202-2314 if you would like to take advantage of this offer or make any changes to your account.

Sincerely,

Colleen Langer

Vice President, Marketing and Sales

I made an investment in my television watching habits and chose to save money when I purchased a TiVo HD and 3 year subscription just a few months ago. Now I do have a bit of a hard time trying to comprehend how the needed subscription to television guide information, which is public information available via the internet, news papers, and television itself, has to cost so much, hell it’s free to DirecTiVo users. For all the reasons imaginable it is important to develop and support free, as in beer, solutions for everyone in an age where information can be conveyed in the blink of an eye. The mere ability to reproduce something without any loss of quality tells me that it’s time to change the way a lot of companies do business.

Could you imagine if Hollywood would actually allow a company to develop software and DVR hardware with automatic commercial skipping enabled by default?  It is technically possible with all the junk in the television streams.  But already it’s bad enough they forced TiVo to “hide” 30 second skip by making users enter a code via their remote first.

Select - Play - Select - 3 - 0 - Select

I’m sure the company would make wheel barrels of cash, only to be sued by and legally stolen by the TV, movie, and other related industry conglomerates.

By px | Also posted in technology, thoughts | Tagged , , , , , , , |

OpenID + Wordpress = <3

2008.02.16 – 4:52 pm PST

The pun is a little late for Valentine’s day, but I just noticed and installed it today. There is a working OpenID plugin for Wordpress. My previous method for using with Wordpress failed and stopped working several months ago, I forget when, I even left the plugin sitting there broken and activated until I just now removed it. How bad is that? haha, but anyways. You should also drop any old OpenID related tables from your database before enabling the new plugin. Enjoy the OpenID + Wordpress = <3 and always remember to back your database often.

By px | Also posted in WordPress, software | Tagged , , |

health care debates

2008.02.09 – 1:08 pm PST

Dave Winer is talking about health care issues on his blog again today and says something I can completely identify with.

“But if you have property, a car, a house, or if your kids go to private school, or if you want to take a vacation, or have a baby, or exercise between jobs, getting sick without insurance is a sure way to go from being middle class to being poor, quickly.” link

Even with supposed Workers’ Compensation insurance you can end up poor too.   So I chimed in with my two cents.

By px | Also posted in links | Tagged , , , , |

transitional title of importance

2008.02.01 – 12:37 am PST

Today I decided that I would import my LiveJournal posts. This process started off with manually exporting each month which contained a post. Taking breaks every 30-40 minutes this took me about 3 hours. The next part of my monumental task of importing took the longest thus far. A reason it took so long though was due to the pinging process happening for each post after it was imported. Once realized and turned off after completing about half of the data set, it only took me another 45 minutes importing each month. Holy crap is it a manual task to get information out of LiveJournal and into something else like Wordpress.

I imported roughly 700+ posts, and now have begun the task of categorization, tagging, spell checking, and filtering. Even if I attempt to break up the task into about 100 posts/day, I expect this to take the longest as there isn’t any quality plugins for mass post property editing in Wordpress. I don’t think it imported any of the comments, which is unfortunate, but fine as I rarely ever received comments.

It’s interesting reading and going over stuff that happened to me so many years ago. The earliest bit of information I now have is from July 2002.

Here is my tip to give to the community.  One key thing to remember is the more plugins you have activated in your Wordpress installation the slower it will function.  Before attempting such a task yourself, disable all unnecessary plugins you have.  This will save a tremendous amount of load time off each page/edit/task you attempt.

By px | Also posted in WordPress, personal, software | Tagged , , , , |

M$ wants your health

2007.10.08 – 9:00 pm PDT

After reading Doc Searls’ post Health Care or Health snare, I decided to try out M$ HealthVault and see what if any use it would be to me. Boredom ensued, and here I am writing about the experience.

I found the requirement to change my, unused Hotmail/Passport account, password to something stronger to be annoying along with the 20 minute timeout for using the system, and the inability to efficiently work with Firefox.

HealthVault is a neat concept, but alas it just seems to be a glorified file-sharing platform allowing the user to upload any file and provide an Access Control List like property to the files by email addresses and expiration date. I first decided to upload an image, which the system recognized as an image but would only let me view it by downloading the image. I’m sure this is the case with other file types as well. Having to download documents, and allowing for possible changes this could easily become a nightmare with different revisions and such. I’m thinking a Google Docs would be much more smart way to share docs.

Another interesting thing I saw, there is no visible limit to the file size your allowed to upload. How much space are they letting us use up for our records? I’m attempting to create and load a large Jpeg image right now to simulate an MRI, but it’s not working quite right. I wish I had an actual MRI file to try. I’m also trying to upload a series of larger binary files from 5MB to 20MB, generated via /dev/urandom. The largest size I’ve been able to upload is 5MB, and still got an error; “There was a problem in your last request. Please review the following issues: * Please specify a valid file.” Ohwell.

“I believe that many of our health care problems, including the high number of people killed each year by bad or absent data, can only be solved by a fully decentralized system, rather than by a centralized one (or ones) run by governments, businesses, or some combination of both.” - Doc

I fully agree with Doc, that our health records should be decentralized, and strongly protected. Perhaps M$ should think about integrating HealthVault into their Windows Home Media Server idea, and then making the storage a free and open standard so others can build off it. But we all know they won’t.

By px | Also posted in internet, personal | Tagged , , , , , , , , , |

MaemoWordPy

2007.07.27 – 10:39 pm PDT

I’m writing this post using MaemoWordPy. It is kind of nice with the thumb keyboard. Not so much for the on-screen keyboard.
I’m bored. ™
*sigh*

By px | Also posted in internet, personal, software | Tagged , |

my thoughts on broadband.

2007.05.18 – 6:37 pm PDT

Current Mood:Bored emoticon Bored

“What speed is really Broadband for you?”

Our CPU’s are much faster year by year and all this new user generated content has to come from somewhere. Let the users be free of their upload constraints!

Here’s my semi un-formulated explanation for what I feel should be considered “broadband” today and tomarrow:

I’m quite complacent having not used dial-up in almost 10 years. My first 1.5mbps symmetrical DSL line in 1998 was great, and inexpensive. Even @Home back in the day, provided 10mbit symmetrical for a good price. Nowadays these 8mbps/512kbps cable speeds are expensive and slow. In a perfect world all internet connections would be symmetrical. In this reality upload speed should be minimally 1/4 of your download.

I have a pretty old Ethernet hub from the early 90’s, it’s a 10mbit hub. Today, a 10mbit asymmetrical internet connection should be termed Broadband for cable, and DSL customers. For those of us lucky enough to live in an area with Fiber Optics, 45mbit asymmetrical, with minimally 1/3 available for upload.

Now, in about another year or so, the port cost of 1gbit home switches should transition to where 10/100mbit switches are in price. Spending $40 to get 8ports is a deal today. The lower cost in the near future will then make it a standard on most every computer bought. There by signaling ISP’s to turn up the juice, and that the term broadband needs an upgrade to 90mbit symmetrical. and a minimum speed of 45mbit asymmetrical for transitioning providers, or about 1/4 of the available bandwidth for a 100mbit Full Duplex Ethernet. Again if your lucky enough to live near fiber, then 125-200mbit with 1/3 upload speeds.

By px | Also posted in internet, technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

wordtube deleted.

2007.05.16 – 4:38 pm PDT

Current Mood:Important emoticon Important

OK, over the past week+ after updating this plugin, my site’s theme has magically changed to the Wordpress default Kubrick theme on a few occasions. I’ve decided to give wordtube the axe, I don’t need the hassle of an easily attacked plugin. Below is a quick set of statistics from May 10th, to today May 16th. Most of them were happily blocked with HTTP 403 by one of my other plugins, and .htaccess.

grep "/wp-content/plugins/wordtube/wordtube-button.php?wpPATH=" /var/log/apache2/blog.px.ns1.net_*log|wc -l
567
grep "wordtube-button.php" /var/log/apache2/blog.px.ns1.net_*log |wc -l
577
grep libwww-perl /var/log/apache2/blog.px.ns1.net_*log|wc -l
588
grep "wordtube-button.php" /var/log/apache2/blog.px.ns1.net_*log |grep -v 403|wc -l
11  # 6 of these were my own accesses.

Now I just need to checkout my system for any tertiary issues. *sigh*

By px | Also posted in WordPress, internet, software | Tagged |

Bad Behavior has blocked 2062 access attempts in the last 7 days.