Monthly Archives: December 2004

Geek Stuff, General

Under the Weather

I found several weather stations that are nearby . Between these sites you may get a feel for our weather. The main reason I can’t point to one and say “our weather is like theirs” is because we are about 1.5 km from the mountains, to the west, and all these sites are 4-8 km from the mountains and varying distances from the Palmer Divide, all of which affect our local weather. (Palmer Divide is about 9 km North of us)

So, for your consideration,

    AR549, about 7 km to the NE, (5 km to PD)
    C2088, about 7 km E, I think on the hill behind King Soopers (8 km to PD)
    KAFF, the AFA Airport, about 12 km to the SE, (17 km to PD)

Be sure to check out that Palmer Divide link (above) That guy put some work into his pages. (Elaine thinks my referring to the Palmer Divide link (above) is too obscure since I have several other links also noted above, so I am including the link here.)

Geek Stuff, General

HWAS Data

If you want to know what the weather is like at our house, try this link: HWAS20Data, even though they are a few miles south of us. The Airfield is 12 km SE; the stadium is about 7 km SE. I don’t know where the rest of them are. I suspect that most are on the south end of the Academy; North Ridge and Lewis Palmer might be on the North side. I wonder if Aardvark is Jack’s Valley. If it is, that’s only a quarter mile away.

The academy has a lot of gliders, parachutists and small planes in the air all over the base, so they need weather info from a number of sources, especially since the mountains will twist the air at one end of the academy and the other end will never notice. (Watch out for wind sheers!)

Politics

Brought to you by…

This news article brought a thought to mind. The New York Times > Washington > It’s Inauguration Time Again, and Access Still Has Its Price

Why bother with the $250,000 cap on donations. Just imagine the inauguration stand with its banners : “President Bush; brought to you by Exxon”, “Bush: sponsored by the House of Saud”, “4 more years, from your friends at Citibank”. After the ceremony they can put the banners on the fence around the White House. Add a bit of color to a dull city. And they won’t get in trouble with the ‘truth in advertising’ laws; or any other laws, for a while.

General

Still waving

I was at the Post Office the other morning and noticed that the flag was at half-staff and I was wondering about that as I continued on to work since I hadn’t heard of anyone dying recently. Or, at least not a death that would cause the flag to be at half-staff (grunts in Iraq don’t count). When I got to work I noticed our flag was at-full staff and I checked with the security guy when I went in but he hadn’t heard anything. We both thought it was probably Pearl Harbor Day. He said he would check it out. I looked into it a bit later and found that yes, indeed, there are four times a year when the flag is flown at half-staff, as a matter of course. Peace Officer’s Day, Korean Armistice Day, Patriot Day and Pearl Harbor Day. ( When and How to Display Our Flag)

I checked later in the day and they hadn’t bothered to lower the flag. I guess they had better things to do.

And just to note, a Mast is on a ship, a Staff is on land.

General, Politics, Reviews

Long May It Wave

I thought “West Wing” opened with a nice bit by Penn and Teller last night. As part of a magic trick they were performing at the White House, they folded up an American Flag (correctly), wrapped it up in the Bill of Rights, went ‘poof’- ‘flash’, and the flag disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving the Bill of Rights unscorched. And one of the on-going sub-plots for the rest of the show was getting the “White House” to condemn the ‘burning of the Flag’ in the White House, at a private birthday party.

It might have been more political to have had them fold up the Bill of Rights into the Flag, and then, ‘poof’-‘flash’, the Bill of Rights disappears, and the flag is left unsullied. But that might be getting too obscure and would have ruined the following sub-plot. Hard to imagine the press corps getting worked up about the alleged destruction of the Bill of Rights in the White House.

I thought the writers missed a good, cheap shot when the Josh Lyman character is trying to jump on Penn (he’s a pretty big dude) to announce that they did not burn the flag and to explain how the trick was done and Penn denies him with a stirring speech on just what the Bill of Rights is all about. Josh then asks if Penn went to law school and Penn replies, “No, clown school.” And, what Josh didn’t say was, “Pretty much the same thing” or something like that. A missed opportunity.

General

Colorado Springs, Colorado

This is where I live, and have lived for the past 12 years. Colorado Springs, Colorado – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Wikipedia is a nice little reference source. I never knew that Leeann Tweeden used to work at the Hooters here. (That would be the one down at the Citadel.) Of course, I have no idea who Leeann Tweeden is, but Wiki provides a link to follow.

And here is the Wiki link to the state of Colorado. Amazing what you can learn about a place you’ve lived in for years.

General, Reviews

GreenCine – Online DVD Rental, For People Who Like To Watch

GreenCine | main member – Online DVD Rental, For People Who Like To Watch I use the Greencine DVD rental service and I enjoy it quite a bit. They have a wide and eclectic selection of DVDs and for some reason I am focusing on anime and Asian fight movies.

They have a nice queueing setup to keep series in order so you don’t see the final episode before the previous episodes. Also, they don’t seem to have a limit on the number of titles you can have in the queue, so, everytime I see something by a director or actor I can say add all and they will put all the titles in the queue.

I have calculated that my queue is now 7 1/2 years long , and that’s after pruning it back a couple of years.

To many videos, not enough time.

Geek Stuff

Multicast

Say you need to distribute a large file to many people and you want to do it on the Internet. Today you would put the file on a server and tell people to download it. Then the targets would go and try to download the file from your host server. If you have 500 kbps connection to the internet and you have 1000 (1k) people trying to download it at the same time, each person will be downloading at 500 bits per second.

Let’s say the file is a large one, like a feature length movie. The movie would play at 10 Mbps for 8000 (8k) seconds (2 hours 13 minutes). That’s a total of 80 Gbits, or 10 GBytes. A 10 GB file is fairly large. And that’s with 8 bit bytes. What if they decide to go to 16 bit bytes to provide better color definition? That file just doubled in bit size. But I digress; we are going to stay with 8 bit bytes.

At 500 Kbps, it would take 45 hours to send the file. Just to one person. It is left to the reader to determine how long it would take at the 500 bits per second we postulated above.

There are many ways to reduce the download time, including reducing the size of the file with additional compression (at 10 mbps, the video is already compressed 150 times from an original 1.5 Gbps video signal. I’m talking HD quality here.) , reducing the frame size so it only fills a quarter of the screen, and other methods that reduce the over quality of the resulting image. Or you can increase the size of you network access trunks and hope that you ISP can handle your sized traffic on the other side of the router. A 50 Mbps OC1 should let 100 users have 500 kbps access to your server and it should only cost you an arm, a leg and a head every month.

Now, how about broadcasting a single 500 kbps stream into the internet? And let anyone who wants, to tap in to the stream as it passes by. If you send out your file in a continuous loop for a week or so, everyone who wants will have a chance to tap in. And the network isn’t being tied up with lots of repetitive streams.

This streaming technique is known as Multicasting. The source makes a multicast address available and lets others know what it is. The multicaster starts streaming and interested parties notify their local routers that they want to connect to the multicast address. The routers start querying other routers for the multicast address and when they find a router that has the multicast passing through, that router starts streaming the multicast to the requesting router. The requesting router doesn’t have to go back to the source router/server, just the nearest one with a stream. Now the requesting router can become the source for other requesting routers. And the stream can go around the world on a single thread.

If you think that some of your prospective users can’t access the net at 500 kbps, then cast a stream at 50 kbps and another at 5 kbps. As long as you have 555 kbps that should work. (If not, reduce the first stream to 445 kbps. We’re flexible. We’re not expecting people to use these streams to view real-time video.)

This multicast technique would work very well for online radio stations since it doesn’t matter when you tune in, you just listen to the music from the point you find it and not worry about what came before. For large file transfers, it is a little different. The user needs to capture all the information to have a useful file. If the file that is being distributed is broken into a lot of discreet packages and each package is labeled X of 100000, X+1 of 100000, etc. and the file is multicast in a loop for a week or so, the receiver just needs to collect all the packages to reconstruct the original file. So if a connection is lost, or goes down, for a while, the receiver can tune back in to the multicast and collect the missing packets.

There needs to be software that can parse the packages and another to recover the file. I think that already exists. All we need is a viable Multicasting network. It’s part of the IP protocol, it just hasn’t been activated on most routers because there are some overhead and network utilization problems. Probably the biggest problem will be the financial one. If a router is acting as a Multicast bridge, passing the stream on to other requesting routers, does the router owner get any money out of it? Tying up resources without recompense, what sort of world is this, anyway?

This may be argued for a long time, since the Internet is a network of networks and it is the responsibility of a network to pass traffic through even if that network is not a target with the understanding that other network will do the same with its traffic. But Multicasting hasn’t really taken off, for a variety of reasons.IPv6 should help get it rolling. It will be interesting to see what sort of business opportunities develop with the new IP.

Geek Stuff, General, Politics

Telecoms Winning the WiFi War (washingtonpost.com)

Telecoms Winning the WiFi War (washingtonpost.com) This article in the WP discusses how the Pennsylvania legislature is passing a bill that will prevent local municipalities from setting up Wi-fi networks and providing free or low-cost internet access to its citizens, in competition with the local Telco. If the muni wants to do this it needs to talk to the LEC (usually Verizon in PA). If the LEC can’t commit to delivering a local Wi-fi network in 14 months then the muni can deploy their own. Philadelphia has already got permission from Verizon to go ahead with its Wi-fi network that has been i the plannig stages for awhile. (evidently this is what sparked the legislation in the first place. )

So why wouldn’t every muni in PA immediately go to the LEC and make the request RIGHT NOW? Verizon hasn’t bothered to widely deploy broadband services for several years. Why should they start now. And then, in 14 months, the Muni’s that don’t have a Wi-fi network can build their own if they have the interest then, or the money. Just because they start the clock ticking now doesn’t mean they have to build anything in 14 months, but at least they have the option.