June 2008 Archives

Companies like Comcast have been in the news quite a bit lately, admitting to tampering with peer to peer transfers that cross their network. If I can dig up the reference, I seem to remember reading that one major ISP was drastically wrong about how much p2p transferring was actually happening on their network. The father of packet data networks is now selling a device designed to detect and throttle peer to peer "flows".

This all seems to be a bit of an arms race. If one or more ISPs are throttling connections behind the scenes, just making more connections seems like it would be a decent solution. If bittorrent clients (for example) were to start making active connections with an order of magnitude more peers (very little more work at a peer level), I could easily imagine overwhelming the ability of a given piece of throttling hardware to track the connections. Or, if people were really serious about disliking their ISP capriciously throttling their traffic, it would not be terribly difficult to create a torrent-like client that just transferred hundreds of small junk files, expressly to overwhelm the throttling hardware.

I don't really have a point, here. I'm mostly just thinking out loud.

In the morning, a workman is coming to install new carpet in one room (we call it the blue room, because the old carpet was blue. The new carpet is beige.) and in the hallway of our house. I just finished cleaning up the floor (removing staples that held down the pad on the old carpet), so now it's ready to receive new carpeting.

It's very exciting. We've never had new carpet in a place we've lived before. I'm a bit afraid that the odor it gives off will give me headaches, but I'm still excited to be rid of the ratty, stinky carpet that was there before. Hopefully it will help the house sell more quickly.

Today was game six of summer league. We won! This year we're playing three games to seven points. My team actually won the first two games. This is our first win. We were quite happy.

In addition, I've been carpooling to get to and from the frisbee games. Since the games are at Eagle's Crest (part of Eagle Creek Park), it's quite a haul from where I work. Riding with Carl and Nolan will end up saving me a bit over a hundred dollars, so I'm pleased. (:

Melissa and I currently have our house up for sale. It's been interesting. We've had to do many repairs (lots of little things, mostly) to the house. We've been meaning to do them forever, but not gotten around to it. Putting the house up for sale has been an excellent impetus to actually accomplish those things.

The biggest help in getting them done has been help from family. My parents and siblings have come down on several occasions and worked quite hard to get things accomplished. Thanks guys!

Tomorrow, we get new carpet. Quite exciting! (:

Last weekend was gamefest. A good time was had by all. Well, that's not strictly true, but we'll be brainstorming over the coming year about how to address the concerns that some had over the weekend.

We played Team Fortress 2 almost exclusively. I got to visit with several out of town friends, and I got to meet Kotu, a friend from World of Warcraft.

I'm still wrestling with MT 4.1. It's still generating Error 500s in abundance. I've made fairly complete backups of everything. If I don't get it all repaired soon, I'm switching to Wordpress.

I've been puttering around in my spare time this week, getting a computer ready for Travis to borrow for gamefest (which is this coming weekend). The machine in question normally has linux on it, and gets used for various random tasks. I set that harddrive aside for the time being and put a spare [really noisy] one in place of it, then installed windows and whatnot.

Anyway, I'm turning this into a saga, when it shouldn't be. The power connector on the graphics card was broken. I ended up clipping it off and soldering in a new connector that I had lying around. Works fine now!

Before I got the blog working again, I was thinking of at least two or three topics a day that I wanted to blog about. Actual, reasonable topics that I wanted to discuss publically. Now that I actually have a working blog again, those and other topics have fled, leaving me with my normal blogger's block. :\

Melissa and I are in the process of getting our house ready to sell. This basically means de-cluttering and repairing all the little things that make the house seem like less than it is. We're planning to stay in the Indianapolis area, but move much closer to the city. Our hope is to reduce the amount of time we spend driving, reduce our fuel consumption, and take advantage of being nearer to friends. It would also be nice to have a real internet connection.

If I really have this blog thing nearly fixed (and I think I do) then I can start posting about my progress on getting the house ready to sell. (:

Last week I was sick. Had some sort of short-term flu. At first I thought it was food poisoning, but Melissa came down with it three days later, so some sort of flu is more likely. I got a bacterial infection in my throat on the tail of the flu, making it _really_ hard to get any solid or liquid into me, making recovery take longer than it should have. Feeling better now, at least.