August 2008 Archives

I've been looking at online storage solutions to do my own backups for a while. I immediately ruled out various backup providers such as Mozy because I fundamentally don't trust anyone to do my backups for me. Every backup provider I've looked at has had some horror story and I have no intention of being the 1 in 100,000 customer whose backups were lost when s/he most needed them.

shattered hard disk thanks to Anigwei

I started off with a simple backup strategy - create a 80GB TrueCrypt drive, and using Cygwin and rsync I'd mirror my important data to this drive once a week. The problem then was finding an offsite location to store this sucker.

I used DreamHost's almost unlimited storage for some time before they informed me that storing backups on their service was not allowed. They're not the only ones of course - I looked at HostGator, Bluehost and a bunch of other budget hosts who offer ridiculous amounts of disk space only to find that all of them disallow storage of backups. I find this really lame and scam-like - basically they say "you have all this diskspace but don't you dare try to use it". If I were less scrupulous I might just take my 80GB file, chunk them into 128kB JPGs and say good luck to them in proving that they aren't legitimate web content.

Anyway I went searching for alternative webhosts and settled on a Budget VPS Hosting. I've got a VPS running CentOS with 100Mhz of CPU, 100MB of RAM, and 80GB of disk for $12/month. The CPU & RAM may seem slow/small by today's standards but I recall that just 13-14 years ago I would have been running Linux on a 386DX40, and then on a Pentium 90 which was more than capable of running XWindows. So really, 100Mhz of CPU on some quad core host is more than adequate for a bit of rsync.

As I'm a tightarse I continued thinking of cheaper solutions. One idea that sprang to mind was to use USENET. The larger USENET premium providers today have retention rates of 100-200 days. I wonder if its feasible to post my encrypted backup files to USENET every 30 days, and rely on their 100-200 day retention as an offsite backup mechanism. The gating factor here is upstream bandwidth - I only have 1Mbps upload from home so it would take me roughly 10 days to upload 80GB. This may not save any money since the typical USENET provider costs about $15/month but if you're on an ISP like Internode which provides free premium USENET, or already have a USENET subscription for intense discussion of Linux ISOs then the marginal cost of doing this is zero.

There's been a lot said about Seven's somewhat lame coverage of the games. This little snippet from IRC earlier today sums it up:

11:15 <@CaT[tm]> so when are the games ending?
11:18 < conio[au]> officially tonight, but we wont know because of channel 7 repeats

GG Seven Network.

I got my first modem in 1994, a 14.4k Amigo Communion internal modem dad bought for my birthday for the princely sum of $400. I didn't know it at the time but that turned out to be a really top notch modem. Being internal meant that it had an inbuit 16550 UART which allowed it to do MNP5 and v.42bis compression nicely.

14.4k modem thanks to djukami

I used said modem to get on the interwebs in 1995 via Macquarie University, thanks to my cousin who was a student there at the time. I didn't really understand what the internet was about at the time, viewing it as the world's largest BBS, where I could type in 'ftp', 'o ftp.wustl.edu' or 'o ftp.cdrom.com' to grab as much share/freeware as I possibly could. I say type because everything then was done over a serial terminal commanding shells on SunOS machines (hardy and laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au; I wonder what they're running today?).

My cousin introduced me to IRC as well, and there I discovered the warez scene. The XDCC that is still used by some today existed 13 years ago! Warez & porn has always driven the hunger for bandwidth and I remember at the time that cracking machines on T1s, T3s, and OC3s were all the rage. That's 1.5Mbps, 45Mbps, and 155Mbps respectively and T1 was considered monster at the time given that most end users had just 14.4k or 28.8k dialup connections. I never imagined that I would have 1.5Mbps to my home, ever.

Fast forward to today - I have a DSL2+ link at home syncing at 21Mbps downstream. That's more than 10x the "monster" T1 connection 13 years ago, albeit with a more limited 1Mbps upstream. And with my recent 3G modem purchase I can get between 3.6 and 7.2Mbps on the move.

On a recent trip to the snow I tested this out and sitting stationary in Jindabyne I was able to get about 30kB/sec (roughly 250kbps) up and down. Moving at 90km/h coming out of Queanbeyan it was still syncing at 7.2Mbps and possible to surf the web - that's how I learnt of Hackett's silver in the 1500m, and of Usain Bolt's 9.69s world record in the 100m sprint. It soon dropped to UMTS 3.6Mbps, and then to GPRS 56k.

GPRS is slow by today's standards but it struck me how far we've come when I'm able to get 5kB/sec moving at over 100km/h in country NSW, the same 5kB/sec that was the top speed achievable by most internet users 10 years ago.

Somewhat sick of the replays aired on Seven's coverage of the Beijing games I wandered out into the pastures of the interwebs to see what was on offer. Given the commercial realities of Olympics broadcasting (i.e. no one has the right to stream anything without forking over $10 gazillion dollars) the natural first stop was the grand puppet master of Olympic event scheduling - NBC. I went to nbc.com, found my way to the NBC Olympics website and was pleasantly surprised at what was on offer. So pleasantly surprised I'd go so far to say they've done a fantastic job.

Why does it kick so much arse?

For starters, LIVE STREAMS of almost everything. Now they are restricted to residents of the US who have a cable service but I'll come back to satisfying that requirement later. The only two sporting genres that I care about that aren't available are the Athletics and Swimming. I can understand that given the popularity of those events but despite that I still feel NBC has made a good compromise - everything else from Judo to Handball to Kayaking and hell even Synchronised Swimming is available.

But the fun doesn't stop there! Their player is Silverlight based and frankly, awesome. The default player screen is about the same size as your typical YouTube video but much higher quality, and you have the option of enlarging it to a 90+kB/sec stream (that's over 700kbps). Its superb for live streaming.

Standard Player: (cropped, click for full screencap)

Enlarged Player: (cropped, click for full screencap)

But I know you want more. They also have picture-in-picture! You have the option of viewing one stream in the regular large window, as well as having a smaller window within that watching a second stream. Or you can use a split pane view which lets you watch 1 main stream and 3 other streams in smaller windows. And, being the interwebs, there's nothing stopping you from popping up multiple windows each with their own full size player if you have the bandwidth. Its pretty handy if there's just one freaky athlete you want to watch out for in the women's weightlifting.

4 stream player: (cropped, click for full screencap)

Last night I checked out the live stream schedule and noticed that when a match is in play they update their schedule so instead of just saying "Water Polo - AUS v CAN" their equivalent of the TV guide for live streams says "Water Polo - AUS v CAN, Australia leads 3-0". So you don't even have to go into the stream to figure out whether it may or may not be interesting. This might not seem like such a big deal but to me it signals a real desire to make the site as useful as they possibly can.

Now the restriction on NBC's streams is that you need to provide them your ZIP code and the name of your cable provider. Once you're past that form the live streams are also restricted to US IPs. Now I don't want to suggest you lie to them but in the spirit of "for educational purposes only" made popular by warez and security groups throughout the world you may want to consider using the internationally acclaimed ZIP code for Beverly Hills - 90210. I heard DIRECTV services Los Angeles. As for the IP restriction, again, for educational purposes only, you may want to consider buying yourself an account on a shared webhost that provides SSH access. It might be in the US. You wouldn't want to pay more than $5/month for this.

Then grab yourself a copy of PuTTY (its free, and absolutely awesome), setup a Dynamic tunnel in its preferences, then ssh into your new webhost. Start Firefox (again, free, and awesome), point its SOCKS proxy setting at localhost:1080, and off you go to the wonderous land of live Olympics streaming. $5 for all the Olympics streaming you can handle. This is all just theoretical of course, you wouldn't want to violate NBC's Terms of Use.

So tonight instead of watching Seven's replays of Aussie medals through the day, using the above method, I might have opted to go to NBCOlympics.com to watch the women's 63kg & men's 81kg Judo. Where I might have seen some amazing throws by a French lady, and an equally amazing trip by a Brazilian dude. Citius, Fortius, Altius and all that. It would have been a nice change from the political & patriotic crap on Seven's coverage. But I would not have want of violating the great NBC's streaming rights so this whole post is just me dreaming. Even the screenshots I got off some random guy on IRC who listened to me lamenting Seven's shitty coverage.

A couple of weeks ago Lisa's mum baked a carrot cake which she brought into work. Yay Lisa's mum. However Stephen & Chin both expressed the view that carrot didn't belong in a cake. After some discussion it was revealed that Stephen quite liked broccoli, and after further deliberation it was decided that if I was to bake a cake containing a vegetable, it would be broccoli.

I couldn't think of any unique way to make a broccoli cake appealing so I thought I'd stick with a basic carrot cake recipe but substitute broccoli for the carrot. It seemed like a reasonable idea since broccoli is mildly sweet.

125g butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoon honey
1 cup self raising flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup grated broccoli

Since the grated broccoli stems was quite light coloured and I wanted to make sure that people noticed the broccoli I shaved the dark green tops off the broccoli and added that to the mix. :)

Baked for 30 minutes @ 200 C.

The result:

I can only describe the flavour as weird. There is a strong scent of broccoli, much stronger than I expected. That's serving to deeply confuse my mind as the taste of the cake is typically sweet but then there is broccoli. It does not make sense.

Reading Bid to have ISPs keelhaul the internet pirates I'm astounded at the rampant idiocy displayed by AFACT. I was going to rant about why their proposal is retarded but thankfully my thoughts have already been voiced by Michael Malone.

Michael Malone, chief executive of iiNet, described the three-strikes policy as "crazy", primarily because "ISPs aren't the ones who should decide what's legal or illegal, and neither should AFACT," he said.

"If they think someone is breaking the law then they should do the same as everyone else in this country does and report it to the police.

"They (AFACT) can keep on skirting around this and keep on trying all other things but ultimately … if you've got a class of people out there who are consistently breaking the law you don't sit around and bitch and moan about it — you go out and charge them."

Of course the reason AFACT are pursuing this track is that they know their fight is futile. They're fighting a losing battle against filesharing technology which changes from month to month and they hope to engage ISPs in their battle by making the process painful for ISPs. Let there be no doubt that their 3 strike system is all about raising the cost of handling complaints to the ISP such that they will eventually be forced to clamp down on this allegedly rampant illegal filesharing - and as mentioned in the article, ISPs are not police. So to be clear - organisations like AFACT are achieving nothing but increasing the cost of your internet service by hassling ISPs into a role they should not be performing.

Went for a surf today around noon thinking I'd head out for a couple of hours then settle into some chores (washing, cooking). Surf was small but fun nonetheless and as I paddled out again after one ride I saw this kid paddling into a wave. I figured he'd seen me and would steer clear by staying on my right as that was his present direction but lo and behold he changes course and turns right for me. My brain fails to comprehend that maybe he didn't see me, even though he appeared to be looking in my direction so I stay on my course thinking he will soon correct his (given that he's riding a wave its much easier for him to change course than it is for me). He doesn't. He ends up running right across me, with his fins slicing neatly into the webbing between my thumb and index finger. He apologised profusely afterwards and as I continued to feel stinging pain in my hand I figured it must have been cut (its hard to tell in the water as any blood is happily washed away).

I paddle in and once I realise the damage done I'm pretty pissed off as my surfing for the day is over (cuts & sea water = infection), and I wasn't sure if it was deep enough that I should get it stitched. I'm cursing the kid as I drive home dreading the giant line that's ever present at the GP. Fortunately, and the reason for the title of this post, as I walk up the stairs in my apartment block with my hand covered in blood now, I overhear a man leaving one of the flats saying something like "just take 2 of those antibiotics a day and you'll be fine". Light bulb - looks like one of my neighbours is home sick and called a GP for a home visit. I ask the obvious question "Excuse me, are you a doctor?". "Yes, I am.". I show him my bloody hand and he advises that it doesn't need a stitch but something like a steristrip. I thank him, shower, then mosey on down to the local shops.

Bought some steristrips, some lunch, and now back on track to start some cooking. :) I didn't get the doctor's name but whoever you are, thanks for saving me a visit to the dreaded medical centre!