Samsung 226BW (to LCD for real!) April 24, 2007

I had the intention of writing about this LCD and all the research I did before, but bitching about service and attitude seemed to rule that day…

I’ve had the Samsung now for around three weeks and I’m very happy with it. So far none of my dead-pixel fears, light-bleed fears or whatever else there was to fear, came true. It just proves that doing a lot of research before you buy something really does pay off in the end.

Like I’ve mentioned, I did a lot of reading all over the internet, in my opinion the marketing babble that we get thrown really is just that, marketing. I had to find a site, or a forum or a chatroom or whatever it took where I could read the opinions of people that had hands-on experience with this product and who believed in revealing the truth. So instead of re-iterating everything these people did before me, I will just list a couple of links that can point you in the right direction.

1. hardforum.com – This was most definately the most useful and I can see that it will continue to be useful in the future. With regards to the 226BW, look at this post. Yes, you will have to read a lot…
2. behardware.com – A comparison between LCD’s. (I think this link is listed at hardforum also)
3. Google – need I say more.

Sit down and think about what you want from your LCD such as view angles, games, photo editing, etc and then go and read these articles. When you have made that decision, a little common sense and fair reasoning is all you need.

Gmail bandwidth usage April 19, 2007

I am blown away with the amount of traffic being consumed when using Google’s mail in standard view!

Background

My flatmate and I recently sold our souls to the devil, in this case a local cellphone service provider, and acquired a 3G internet contract. Unfortunately, in South-Africa the amount of data a person can transfer is still being capped. Severely. Call it bureaucracy, monopoly, call it bloody greed if you ask me; it’s sickening. Either way we’re stuck in this situation, and our contract allows us a measly 2Gb per month which we have to share that between the two of us.

The awakening

In just two days I noticed on the ISP’s site that I already whacked 200Mb of what I have, 25% damnit! I very quickly realized that I need to keep a watchful eye on my usage, and I thought it would be interesting to see where goes what. The best thing would be to use software that I could setup to monitor all the packets sneaking around.

I went all over the net and installed so many ‘must-have’ applications it could drive a Sahara forrest monkey crazy.

And then…

Enter BWMeter

I found this awesome traffic/bandwidth meter called BWMeter. All the others I have tried are “so called” bandwidth monitors but they’re too simple, way too simple. Trust me, forget about the other crap out there and just get this.

BWMeter allows you to define ‘Filters’ which could be any kind of connection you want to monitor. Source, Destination, Protocol, Port, Schedule and General option which has settings like ‘Include upload’ / ‘Include download’ / ‘Include IP protocol overhead’. You can also set it to block all traffic or limit the speed on the filter.

Once you’ve setup a filter you can set graph windows, view hourly/weekly/montly/yearly stats on it. It allows these to be exported to a .csv file, ie your favorite spreadsheet. You can also monitor and follow the exact requests that flows through each filter, which means that you can see IP:Port requests and the size in bytes.

Alerts allows to define an action to be followed whenever certain criteria is met. For example, when the Download+Upload reaches 500Mb during the current month, play a sound, run a program, display a message, send an email and/or throttle or block all traffic that applies to the filter. Versatile.

Google Talk + Google Mail
Right, the moment of truth has arrived. I know Google mail uses mail.google.com. For GTalk I just do a quick ‘netstat -a’ in the command window. This reveals a connection to *.google.com:5222. I’ve setup two separate filters, one that monitors mail.google.com, and the other for *google.com:5222 (google talk). Google talk runs through a couple of KB, but it all depends on how much you talk. About an hour of reasonable talk cost me 130Kb. I can live with that.

Google Mail!! Eish, this is scarey. Logging into the standard view mode consumed 350Kb just to get to the point where everything is loaded. Another 100Kb to be fully logged out. And I didn’t even open any mail… rough stuff. Changing to basic HTML (use http://gmail.google.com/gmail/h/) showed a usage of around 50Kb consumed when fully logged in. That’s a huge difference.

Conclusion
This clearly indicates that our wonderful Web2.0 technologies do consume a lot more traffic than what we may realize. I did expect it to be more, but the difference is huge, around 5x more. Taking into consideration the current state of this country’s internet options and the attitude that our government has taken we clearly need to be smart about the way we use what we have. Use Lynx!

*Note
For those that think of getting technical on me, yes, I did clear the cache and restarted the browser for each test. Now smile and go pick your nose if you need to pick on someone…

Why do you do it? (updated) April 10, 2007

This morning, trying to get back into the working mood after the long easter weekend, I got a good dose of ‘Coding Horror’. Keep in mind, in the back of my head I was completely confused, comtemplating which direction to take my life (very long story) and questioning the motives I had for the last 10years. It’s a little tough when you start to think that you may have gone off and spent a lot of time and effort in something you’re now not so sure about…

Anyhow, Jeff’s post SEOs: the New Pornographers of the Web (see the qoute in the grey box) kinda struck a cord with me where he tells the story of his cousin Steven. Steven wanted to be a musician; I reckon he saw a band one day and thought that it was way cool and that being on stage in front of thousands of people should be his dream. He ended up chasing this dream relentlessly, but he was chasing it the wrong way. He was going for the dough and not for the dream, he was hunting fame and fortune and not the passion that comes with a true love for music.

I sit with almost the same kind of problem. I’m so worried about my life and the things I want to achieve that I get impatient with the pace my career is going at. Instead I should focus on that which I love about development and enjoy that everyday. I hope this is just a phase that will blow over…

(…update – 16 April ‘07…)

Coincedentally, a few days later on the same blog, Jeff’s post again touches a subject I think is closely related. In “Is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk a Failure?”, Jeff questions whether the idea of paying people small amounts for small tasks, specifically Amazon, really is beneficial to their business. The reasoning is that reviews at Amazon and other sites are useful because people aren’t hunting a few dollars, they do it because they want to give something back to the community that’s been so helpful to them. Jeff calls this the intrinsic motivation: “The theory of intrinsic motivation goes a long way toward explaining why Amazon’s unpaid user reviews are so popular and effective, and yet the paid Mechanical Turk service appears to be withering on the vine.”

I’ve always had the belief that this intrinsic motivation is what makes any successful website really successful. slashdot.org, digg.com, distributed.net, seti@home, wikipedia.org, youtube.com etc to name just a few. It is true that there are people that will always try to exploit this intrinsic motivation for monetary gain, but the reason that the majority of the general public contribute, is this intrinsic motivation. It’s being part of a community and seeing your contribution being accepted by your peers (for example digging and your digg count).

At the end of Jeff’s post he quotes from Mary Poppendieck’s Team Compensation (pdf). It argues whether giving children allowances based on work they perform is such a good idea. I’ve been brough up this way, my dad argued that it would teach me that one needs to work to earn money. That it would show me that nothing in life comes without hard honest work. I agree with that to a certain extent and I can understand the concept now, back then of course it was a little more difficult  

The opposite is that children are not paid for doing household chores. At first I didn’t see the point, but after thinking about it for a while, it did start to make sense. In fact, it made more sense than the opposing theory. Remember the intrinsic motivation I mentioned earlier; that is the core of the second theory. Instead of being tought that every bit of work you do, you do it to earn money, you are now tought that maybe it’s (also?) about something else. You mow the lawn because you have to help your dad who is sick, or you wash the dishes because your mother made the food and your brother cleaned the garage. Whatever the reason, you learn that it’s not just about money.

Could this be part of the reason why so many people (it’s probably just me)  when you ask them about their work say: “…it’s not the greatest job in the world, but it pays the bills…”.

Regarding myself, I wonder why I did and still do many things. I feel that if you do something just because “…it pays the bills…” you will never be happy. Let’s face it, the average person spends between 8 and 9 hours a day at work, which accounts for atleast half your day. After chores and whatnot, the time left for personal endeavours isn’t much, all the more reason why a job that you atleast like a little bit can make you a happier person. I think you should find a balance between something that pays that bills and something that you love doing. I also believe that your job should not be the same as your hobby, it’s about balance and getting your mind to take a break.

What is it then that drives you?

Greenhouse ruling in US April 3, 2007

“In a stinging defeat for the Bush administration, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that U.S. environmental officials have the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that spur global warming.” reports Reuters

This is quite significant and could be the start of US regulations going in a better direction with regards to emission laws. Let’s hope…