A Little Off

I can’t even begin to describe how annoying it is to download a torrent and to discover that the person that compiled it added a bunch of trackers to it but didn’t bother to take into consideration that not all torrent clients (at least one) handle multi-trackers properly if you don’t put blank lines in between each tracker.

Like so:

Now I know for a fact that μtorrent requires this but I’m not sure about any other torrent clients. But the above list of trackers won’t work properly. In fact only the http based trackers will register because of the blank line. For all of the trackers to be used each tracker must have a blank line following it.

Like so:

So please if you’re going to post create a multi-tracker torrent at least list all of the trackers properly because it will only do any good if every peer in the swarm has all of the trackers listed in the torrent. Unfortunately most people treat bittorrent like a “set and forget” sort of file sharing protocol but if you setup one small part like that wrong everyone suffers and most people simply won’t notice.

It looks like Comcast is starting to roll out a data usage meter to customers in the Portland, OR area so they can gauge how far along they are in their 250GB per year limit. According to Gizmodo, Comcast says their median data usage is 2-4GB per month. I thought this was hilarious so I decided to do a little calculating of my own.

I’ve got a Linksys WRT-something-or-other router which I’ve installed DD-WRT on. Recent versions of the firmware have a section that keeps track of overall traffic through WAN that your router handles. It also makes it pretty easy to do a little calculation of your own with it since you can download the data in text format. It logs in terms of total data in and out per day of each month. November was my first full month of data excluding the the first of the month (something broke that day I guess), so I downloaded the log and looked at November’s data.

On average we downloaded 1917MB per day and uploaded 562MB per day. This is the total traffic between 3 people. Grand total we downloaded 54GB and uploaded 16GB. If we take a look at the ratio between the two I can approximate what our actual bandwidth is. We’re supposed to have a 20Mb down connection and the ratio suggests that our up bandwidth is ~5.86Mb which means our maximum upload rate is 750KB/s which we’ve never achieved before. When I use bittorrent to download Linux ISO’s I assume that in order to not choke our router with ACK’s I need to throttle the upload rate to about 70% of the maximum which hovers around about 120-130KB/s which is ~1Mb/s even and that’s only 70% of the max.

Basically I wouldn’t survive if I had Comcast and a 250GB limit per year.

Sorry I’ve been pretty swamped with school and things. Hopefully over winter break I’ll feel the urge to write again.

Epiphye Corp.’s business plan is about an inch thick, neither fat nor skinny as these things go. The interior pages are slickly and groovily desktop-published out of Avi’s laptop. The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores. An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.

That is probably the most epic description of anything I’ve ever read.

I have a couple of friends that either have already served in the military or are currently serving. And I’ve noticed one thing in a book I’m reading¹ that seems to be pretty close to what my friends have confirmed.

Guys and gals from his high school keep com­ing round to vis­it, and Bob­by soon learns the trick that his fa­ther and his un­cles and grandun­cles all knew, which is that you nev­er talk about the specifics of what hap­pened over there. No one wants to hear about how you dug half of your bud­dy’s mo­lars out of your leg with the point of a bay­onet. All of these kids seem like id­iots and lightweights to him now. The on­ly per­son he can stand to be around is his great-​grand­fa­ther Shaftoe, nine­ty-​four years of age and sharp as a tack, who was there at Pe­ters­burg when Burn­side blew a huge hole in the Con­fed­er­ate lines with buried ex­plo­sives and sent his men rush­ing in­to the crater where they got slaugh­tered. He nev­er talks about it, of course, just as Bob­by Shaftoe nev­er talks about the lizard.

While this quote isn’t exactly accurate it does have parts of the truth.

My friends rarely ever talk about what they did or saw when they served and for a good reason too. Typically it’s because there’s no way we can relate to their experiences and the story or feelings are completely lost on us. Only once did a friend share a story and it was after a somewhat traumatic experience, so it wasn’t exactly normal circumstances for him to decide to tell us about it. So next time you see someone who served, thank them and respect them enough not to pry a war story out of them.

1. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson [↩]

I think I may have found my new favorite professor. After having 3 lectures total with him I’ve noticed that he rates cleverness of his proofs//examples in terms of how many beers you could win by betting others at a pub on the outcomes.

I’m finally back in school with all of my friends and so far it’s not been too stressful of a transition from full-on nothing to full-bore school. Well speaking from not much experience since today I only had work lol.

I was lucky enough to not have class on Mondays and Wednesdays for my particular schedule. Which leaves me pretty large chunks of time where I can actually get useful things done at work.

I’d have to say the only stressful thing I’ve had to deal with until this point was fixing my sleep schedule which during the summer had lapsed into some sort of nocturnal scheme. Though I managed to tackle that really and here’s how:

First i did my research on sleep disorders and typical treatments for them, I even thought for a little bit there that I had a mild variety of DSPS¹ which you can read about in decently good detail at the footnote link. One particular treatment i read about that sounded really promising and really easy was a melatonin supplement which can be had at just about any pharmacy without prescription. As it turns out this actually works really well, granted I still have trouble sleeping all the way through the night, it is much, much easier to go to sleep when I intend to.

The other thing Idid that helped greatly to reset my sleep schedule back to typical hours of operation was going camping with some friends the weekend before school started. Besides being great fun, being exposed only to natural light and having a more or less forced sleep//wake time helped loads. It is kind of amazing to go for a couple of years living entirely with artificial light after sundown straight to camping with nearly no artificial light at all. Turns out it only took me a grand total of 2 nights in the wilderness to reset my sleep schedule. I can now wake up at a decent hour in the morning and not feel sick, sleep deprived or robbed of my sanity.

This bodes well for my classes.

On a somewhat related note: the University of Arizona is absolutely packed this semester. According to president Shelton’s email yesterday the freshman class is the largest it’s been, ever, at a whopping 7000. The university is the academic home to 38,000 students total.

I’m still trying to wrap my mind around how ridiculous all this financial crap is. I was talking to my mother on google talk the other night² and she was getting ready to pay my tuition online and asked “Uhh, why is your tuition $700 more than it was last semester?” to which I replied in a similar to but not exact wording “You see mom because of all the financial disasters the school is hurting for money so they’re taking it from who they’re used to taking it from, the students.”

On an even more unrelated note: I hate paid online services associated with classes. If you’ve taken math at the University of Arizona in the last 2 years you’ll know what I’m talking about. In just about any math class you have to fork out something like $15 to register for webassign³ which you’ll do a portion or all of your homework on. In my english classes this summer I had to pay $35 for an online service⁴ that the professor ditched 2 weeks in anyway because of technical difficulties; never got a refund for that. Now all of the sudden my thermo//optics class is having us do homework online, $45 for that⁵. It’s like they’re charging me just to do my homework.

1. Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome^W [↩]
2. Google talk happens to be the only instant messaging system//service my mom is aware of // can cope with, mostly because it’s integrated with her email account at gmail. [↩]
3. http://www.webassign.net/ [↩]
4. http://www.mycomplab.com/ [↩]
5. http://www.masteringphysics.com/ [↩]

    The boy had a peculiar relationship with sound. When a fire engine passed, he was not troubled by the siren’s howl or the bell’s clang. But when a hornet got into the house and swung across the ceiling in a broad Lissajous, droning almost inaudibly, he cried in pain at the noise. And if he saw or smelled something that scared him, he would clap his hands over his ears.
    One noise that troubled him not at all was the pipe organ in the chapel at Bolger Christian College. The chapel itself was nothing worth mentioning, but the organ had been endowed by the paper mill family and would have sufficed for a church four times the size. It nicely complemented the organist, a retired high school math teacher who felt that certain attributes of the Lord (violence and capriciousness in the Old Testament, majesty and triumph in the New) could be directly conveyed into the souls of the enpewed sinners through a kind of frontal sonic impregnation. That ran the risk of blowing out the stained-glass windows was of no consequence since no one liked them anyway, and the paper mill fumes were gnawing at the interstitial lead. But after one little old lady too many staggered down the aisle after a service, reeling from tinnitus, and made a barbed comment to the minister about the exceedingly dramatic music, the organist was replaced.

–Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

I just today picked up Cryptonomicon from Bookman’s, Tucson’s local used-book (or just about any kind of media) store and began reading. I rarely find books this amusing but I literally laughed out loud for a good few minutes after reading the bold section in that quote.

So I’m still convinced that my favorite laptop is my Dell Inspiron 700m¹. Granted I sold it in order to get my new Eee-PC 1000h which isn’t terrible, but isn’t especially good either.

I find that the size of my 700m was exactly the properly proportioned size, the resolution of the screen was decent enough for nearly any program//application I needed to run on it. Now compared to today’s laptops it is kind of a beast, 1.5 inches thick and 4.2lbs.

However I believe that given a little bit of modern tender loving care the 700m could be made into the absolute best laptop ever.

If Dell did decide to bring back the 700m I’d hope that it would have maybe 0.5-0.75 inches shaved off of the thickness and maybe… a pound shaved off it’s weight. Apart from putting it on a diet, I’d expect that it would have a nice magnesium case like the Latitude series have instead of the albeit super-sturdy composite² they’ve used in the past.

I think of all the features on the laptop the only one I feel like I’d want to stay exactly as it was is the display, it was and still is the brightest//sharpest laptop display I’ve ever used//seen. Also the resolution was perfect as well at 1280×800.

If I could get a new 700m with a make-over for the modern day I’d expect it to have support for a nVidia 9400M³. And with the new graphics card I’d be willing to ditch the VGA port for an HDMI port.

As well as the inclusion of the graphics card I’d probably want at least a Intel Core 2 Duo SL9600⁴ (ULV @ 2.13Ghz). Then throw in 3GB of DDR3, along with a 64GB SSD probably the the new Crucial SSD series⁵.

And of course the last requirement: $1100 or less. Haha, yes I’m aware that this is an awful lot to ask for but, it would be my perfect laptop.

1. Dell Inspiron 700m Review [↩]
2. Very much like Nikon composite, it’s nigh-indestructible. [↩]
3. NVIDIA® GeForce® 9400M: This motherboard GPU redefines the notebook architecture by combining a mainstream GPU, system memory controller, and system I/O into a single chip for the smallest, most power efficient visual computing experience ever available in notebooks. [↩]
4. Intel Core 2 Duo SL9600: 2133MHz, 6MB L2-Cache, 1066 MT/s, 1.050 – 1.150V, 17W, $316 [↩]
5. CT64M225: 64GB Crucial M225 2.5″ Solid-State Drive. [↩]