Google App June 14, 2007

This morning Alex mentioned the Google App in their Diggnation podcast (Ep 61) and I thought I should take a look. You never know when you’re moonlighting on a random starry night what kind of tools might come in handy to spice up the already romantic atmosphere! Enough Geno! Leave the beautiful poetry for the girls…

Anyhow, at the part where you sign up (you know how it goes with these online internet thingies) I entered my phone number and added a + sign to indicate the international dial code. Actually, now that I mention that, what does the plus mean? It doesn’t matter, their website registration dude didn’t like it since he referred to me as null! Disgrace! His response looks like this:

Bear in mind that this podcast is from August 2006, so this platform has been out for a while. Somebody didn’t check their code! I just find it amusing. Maybe I should send this to Jeff…

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…

I’ve said it all along! March 25, 2007

This is probably very shortsighted of me, but I have believed from the start that Sony will fail with the PS3. After the whole rootkit DRM debacle a while ago, in my opinion the most pathetic show of crude greed, I have lost every bit of sympathy for this company. I believed from that moment on that whatever they do next, ie the PS3, they will screw it up. In my eyes atleast.

Blueray? Do we really care? In SA atleast HD TV is only _starting_ to catch on, and that is only with the upper part of the techno/audio phobes/philes (:)) WE DONT EVEN HAVE HD SIGNAL!!

So I truely don’t see the point. 99.999% of movies you could rent is just plain DVD. So just shows you how market babble can fool the uninformed masses enmasse…

So I was giggling like a little girl when I found this treasure of a picture (via digg.com of course

powered by performancing firefox

To LCD or not to LCD… March 21, 2007

…or rather, which LCD? I’ve been endlessly prowling around the internet, computer magazines, forums, chatrooms, you freakin’ name it (!) trying to find as much information as I can on which LCD would be worth my hard earned dollars (or in my case the less worthy Rand ).

I am not the kind of guy that goes with what the general media tries to sell, and with this I mean adverts, television and the worst of them all, magazines. They would review some brand spanking new product delivered to their door by the manufacturer, which of course they don’t want to bad-mouth or they’d lose getting new stuff to play with! Instead of writing an honest review you’d get something sort of okay that gets the pages filled up. Like the other day I read an review on a MP3 player that was released almost three years ago, and this magazine was going on how this would be a good buy for the people needing “a funky new player”. A funky NEW player?! Are you kidding me!

This could bring us back to the whole “why we need the press if we have the internet” debate, but I’d rather just shutup and leave it be. For me, you’d be a fool to think that whatever you see in the shiny gloss pages of the latest print is anything to go by for your next buy. I know of something better. You may have heard of this, it’s a technology that’s as old as the internet itself. It’s very simple. It’s called a forum. Smile

All it requires is a little patience, and a little time. The point is you want to get right down into the nitty gritty where some weird person named Rambo53 tells you about his gripes with his brand new (but not so shiny) player that was supposed to be the latest and the greatest. It’s right there where you realize, reading about real experiences of real people, exactly what that MP3 player is all about. It’s right there where you realize that this player you’ve been drooling over really is just a piece of crap and you might just as well stick to the 10yr old Sony walkman that you’ve always loved so much despite the schlepp with tapes… Or not. NO NO NO! Send a letter to that magazine that told you lies and make sure they damn well know how much you think they suck. And never listen to them again, atleast not until you’ve done proper research.

A magazine should have talented people that can put together articles about something interesting that required research and time. Something that you can read with curiosity and lose yourself in on a cool Sunday afternoon on the sofa without feeling confused about consumerism taking over your life…

Anyways, the story about my research will have to wait for another day. I did find the one that according to the people is the best for what I need for the money I want to spend. So I started shopping around and to my amusement found that Incredible Connection (a local computer hardware/software retailer, in my opinion mostly over-priced) had it priced lower than anywhere else! I queried Digital Planet, an online retailer and all they could responded with was:

“Unfortunately we are unable to beat that price and the best price that I can do is R x incl. VAT as advertised on the website.”

I could guess and understand their reasons for that, but sheesh, how do you expect to sell your stock if you cannot even beat the more expensive retailers with a physical store!?