Archive for August, 2014
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The $1400 beast finally blanked out after 7 years. The power light came on, but it would no longer detect a signal. Another monitor died earlier in the year, failing to come on at all. It was attributed to a mane processor burnout. Components can now be optimized precisely enough to hit a minimum required lifespan.
Thus began a period of despair over a future of just laptops or losing $400.
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So after a week & 3 hours of a technician refurbishing the phone line, the empire came in at only 2.8 megabits down .4 megabits up. Either that's the actual throttling level of the 3 megabit plan or the phone line physically can't deliver anything higher, for any plan. DSL is still a science project, compared to DOCSIS. The phone line hadn't been used for 14 years. 3 presidents, many road repairs, & many remodelings happened.
So you wanted to move all the GPS logs from a corporate datacenter to a private datacenter on the phone. The phone has no downtime, it's a lot faster to access, it's not scanned by the government, it's always with you. It's the perfect cloud server.
It could be done in a few minutes with a hand coded Java web server & a custom protocol, but you wanted to parlay it into a profitable skill. The most current strategy is using node.js as the server, but there's no fully functional node.js which can run on Android & no interest. Cloud servers are supposed to be on corporate datacenters like amazon.com, not phones.
The best solutions have required a complete install of debian on a dedicated partition, with node run inside chroot. Node.js requires too many libraries not part of Android.
The honeymoon with node.js already seems to be over, only months after it began. Server side Go is the new thing if you want to be current.
Chasing these rapidly changing server side languages starts to seem irrelevant if you don't foresee ever getting a web development job. In the end, a simple hand coded Java web server could do all the required functionality. The only buzzwords used were a JSON query & some jquery commands.
It wasn't eye candy compliant, but it was the beginning of a phone cloud. All the workouts could be easily viewed.
In Android's current form, the phone screen has to be on for the web server to work.
Building this into a complete social network with accounts, sharing, permissions, advertizing, eye candy, & spam, would be a huge undertaking. It makes you appreciate what mapmywalk has done. A new version of such a thing would never be discovered in the sea of web apps.
It could be done in a few minutes with a hand coded Java web server & a custom protocol, but you wanted to parlay it into a profitable skill. The most current strategy is using node.js as the server, but there's no fully functional node.js which can run on Android & no interest. Cloud servers are supposed to be on corporate datacenters like amazon.com, not phones.
The best solutions have required a complete install of debian on a dedicated partition, with node run inside chroot. Node.js requires too many libraries not part of Android.
The honeymoon with node.js already seems to be over, only months after it began. Server side Go is the new thing if you want to be current.
Chasing these rapidly changing server side languages starts to seem irrelevant if you don't foresee ever getting a web development job. In the end, a simple hand coded Java web server could do all the required functionality. The only buzzwords used were a JSON query & some jquery commands.
It wasn't eye candy compliant, but it was the beginning of a phone cloud. All the workouts could be easily viewed.
In Android's current form, the phone screen has to be on for the web server to work.
Building this into a complete social network with accounts, sharing, permissions, advertizing, eye candy, & spam, would be a huge undertaking. It makes you appreciate what mapmywalk has done. A new version of such a thing would never be discovered in the sea of web apps.
The long sought after bluetooth GPS hack was finally tested.
It was a complete failure.
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So at 4am, after hitting 6.45GB & a stretch of 9 megabit downloading,
Bandwidth was finally cut down to 128kbit with an email saying 2.5GB was exceeded & the party was over until the next billing cycle. It was definitely strange timing.
The internet screams bloody murder whenever someone complains about unlimited plans not really being unlimited & how it's the corporation's right to cut you off for degrading the network performance, but look. Who's suffering from degraded network performance at 4am?
The solution to network performance is a priority queue. If the quota is exceeded, you put the user on the bottom of the queue. If the network is idle, they get the full bandwidth. If the network is full, they get reduced bandwidth. Voice calls have been prioritized higher than data for all time without requiring the data to be limited to 128kbit.
Bandwidth throttling has nothing to do with improving network performance, but is meant to force you to pay for a higher end plan. The idea makes sense in terms of profits, if you offer a higher end plan, but Virgin doesn't. They just offer 2.5GB plans.
The Goog shows Virgin trying many experiments in network management, from temporary throttling to upload throttling to peak hour throttling, but never the obvious priority queue. Maybe it's technologically unfeasible to achieve such prioritization, but Kiwipedia says it's a tried & true practice.
Virgin obviously can't figure out a solution or doesn't have any incentive to do the obvious. It's another time when easy solutions abound but easy money doesn't make them worth it, much like 20 years ago when IIS crashed constantly & no-one could bother with the easy solution of using apache & Linux.
Well, you're probably more productive in the current situation, but come the next interview or online course, it's going to be DSL.
It may seem strange to use a fragile optical fiber to move 1.4 megabits of data in this world of gigabit wireless, but it was cheaper than buying a new amplifier. Merely enable IEC958 on Mix2005 & the raw digital audio buffer goes straight to the amplifier. The amplifier automatically switches to its own DAC. There's no longer any level control on the computer, no more ground loop, & no more AC hum. The highs jump out a lot more. The amplifier seems to do the full 48khz.
It's probably the best sounding computer in the world, since no-one ever bothers connecting their computer to a decent speaker, let alone digitally. Computers were still supporting the 30 year old optical audio standard until 2010. There was never any need to bother with RCA cables, since the optical cable was $3. Nowadays, they all use bluetooth.
The next logical step was of course digital audio from the cp33 -> amplifier.
Time once again to open it up to flash a smaller fragment size. With the fragment sizes optimized as small as possible, the delay was estimated at 7ms. Unfortunately, it was a waste. The delay was noticeable. There was no difference in the amount of hiss. It probably wouldn't be robust enough to record anything. The experiment did reveal that Zone 1 changed amplitude in the digital stream, so all the recordings were overloaded. It still might be useful to eliminate ground loops.
Having never played with bluetooth audio besides the crappy old phone headsets, would assume bluetooth audio had the worst latency. USB standards compliant audio probably has the latency of a soundcard, with toslink still the only thing down to single sample latency.
For the 1st time in history, someone overlaid the supermoon on a previous photo of the moon, using the same lens & camera. The only previous photo was the last lunar eclipse. The supermoon actually was slightly bigger. No-one experiments anymore. They just photograph it with no interest in a science experiment to see for themselves a size difference with their own camera, from the same location.
After running out of IP addresses, Comca$t disabled all the old routers. After a few days without service, an upgraded router with private subnet appeared. The upgraded router was almost able to saturate the home network, but completely unaffordable. It was surprisingly the same speed as the $100 plan, but they charged only $88.
It was finally time to start experimenting with shutting down the cable guy.
3 megabit plan, for $73 instead of $88. It's manely a test to see if it can be done away with.
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