Paul's Time Sink

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Hawking's Broadband Booster

Paul Westbrook | 30 June, 2005 14:34

Yesterday, I saw this post on Engadget about Hawking Technologies' HBB1 Broadband Booster. This is a device that is supposed to sit in-between your cable/dsl modem and your router. It is supposed to make sure that high priority traffic gets prioritized over low priority traffic.

I have a few of problems with this device:

There is only one lan port on it. This means that it will not be able to prioritize traffic within your local network.
This device is connected to the "Internet". This means that it probably does some NAT translation for all incoming traffic. This also means that this could block some incoming connections. This could be a problem if you run any servers.
You are not able to configure the QoS on this device. Without this, you are not able to say that your VoIP adapter has a higher priority than your PS@, for example. Also, I would think that since it has a table of different protocols that it has to go through for every packet, this could slow things down. If you were able to specify a select few protocols that you were interested in, less processing would need to be done.

(More)

How Satellite Radio Works

Paul Westbrook | 30 June, 2005 12:55

HowStuffWorks has an article on how satellite radio works. This is a good article that describes how XM, Sirius and WorldSpace satellite radios work.

The one thing that I want to know is how they transmit their data. For example, in my cars with XM, when I drive under an overpass, I don't hear a pause in the music. But if I sit long enough under the overpass, the music cuts off. So it appears that XM is transmitting the data at a higher bit-rate than the music requires. Then there must be a carousel system so that if the radio loses the signal it can get the data about to be played from the buffer.

[via Droxy]

NeoOffice/J

Paul Westbrook | 29 June, 2005 22:41

I am always open to finding a open source solution to commercial software. Tonight, I just tried NeoOffice/J 1.1, and I have to say that I am impressed.

NeoOffice/J is based on the OpenOffice.org suite, but the main reason that I like NeoOffice is because it is a true Mac OS X application, and not a X11 application. This means that it uses Mac OS X's printing architecture, clipboard and drag-and-drop support, and native support for Mac fonts.

Several years ago, I paid for Microsoft Office X, but now that there is a good quality open source alternative, I don't think I will pay for an upgrade.

Technorati Tags: Open Source

HTTP POST with curl

Paul Westbrook | 29 June, 2005 08:52

I keep forgetting how to perform a HTTP POST with curl, so I want to write this down so I don't forget.

Posting a string:

curl -d "String to post" "http://www.domain.com/file.php"

Posting the contents of a file

curl -d @file_to_post.txt "http://www.domain.com/file.php"

I love 10 months

Paul Westbrook | 27 June, 2005 21:04

Our daughter is almost 10 months old, and I love this age. She is at a age where she is happy to fall asleep in my arms. Before this age, she would only go to sleep after nursing. I remember when our son reached the same age and was able to fall asleep with me.

Using ecto

Paul Westbrook | 27 June, 2005 20:39

Adriaan, the author of ecto, has written a good article about all of the things that you can do with ecto. I really like using ecto as desktop blogging client, instead of using the web interface to post.

[via ecto blog]

Technorati Tags: ecto

DVD jammed in changer

Paul Westbrook | 27 June, 2005 20:21

This weekend, I put some DVDs that I got for Father's Day into our Sony DVP-CX875P DVD changer, and then I pressed the Load button. While it was going through the DVDs, loading the information off the discs two DVDs got stuck in the center where the discs are read. After this happened, when the carousel rotated, they rubbed on the stuck DVDs, and they were pushed off the carousel.

I decided to take the top of the changer, and remove all of the DVDs that had been knocked off of the carousel, and remove the two jammed discs. This seem worked, and now it is working again. But this made me think that if this dies, I may want to get one of the hard disk based video players.
(More)

Smart random playlist in iTunes

Paul Westbrook | 27 June, 2005 15:05

I just found this blog entry that describes a way to generate a smart playlist that will contain music that you like, but mix in music that you haven't heard in a while. Also this playlist prioritizes music that was just added to your library.

I actually like the results that the playlist returns. The only problem that I have is that my "Expert Playlist" only has about 170 tracks. But, that is probably caused because I haven't rated enough tracks.

(More)

Standalone iPod adapter

Paul Westbrook | 27 June, 2005 08:34

I haven't been impressed with most of the current iPod adapters that are out there. I don't like the fact that with most of these you can't see the track names on the head unit, and that you can't control the unit from the head unit.

Harman Kardon is coming out with a standalone auto iPod adapter. You plug your ipod into this unit, and the display will show your iPod's controls. To control the iPod you will use this unit's control, so you can put your iPod in your glove box.

This looks like the best solution for people who don't have a head unit that can control an iPod directly, like the Alpine units.

[via Engadget]

Fixed sitemap plugin problem

Paul Westbrook | 24 June, 2005 07:17

I fixed the problem that I was having with Google Sitemap. I added a rewrite rule to the base .htaccess file that makes these files appear to be in the root directory

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Point to the sitemap file that is local to the blog
RewriteRule ^sitemap([0-9]+).gz$ tmp/sitemap/$1/sitemap.gz [L,NC]

</IfModule>

Technorati Tags: pLog

Problem with Sitemap plugin

Paul Westbrook | 23 June, 2005 21:43

I just noticed a problem with the Sitemap plugin that I wrote. It looks like Google uses the location of the sitemap file to determine what urls are valid to index.

This causes a problem because pLog is a multi-user blogs software, where all of the urls are generated on the fly. For example all views of the blogs go through index.php. So if you only multiple blogs to use the sitemap plugin, they will have to be kept at the root of the web directory.
(More)

Plugin for Google Sitemaps

Paul Westbrook | 23 June, 2005 01:13

In this post, I mentioned Google Sitemaps. I have created a plugin for pLog that can automatically create the sitemap file, and optionally send the url directly to Google.

You can download the plugin here.

Technorati Tags: pLog

Updated Post Trackbacks

Paul Westbrook | 22 June, 2005 21:01

I have updated the Post Trackbacks AppleScript. It now handles https urls.

You can download it here.

Technorati Tags: ecto

Generating xml in php

Paul Westbrook | 22 June, 2005 20:21

I was looking for a way to generate xml from php, and I found three different ways.

XmlWriter class. It looks like Simon Willison re-implemented the python version of this class in php.
Simple output functions. This looks like the simplest way, without any external dependancies.
DOM XML extension of php. I am not sure how robust these are.

Google Sitemaps

Paul Westbrook | 22 June, 2005 20:11

I had this article from Geek News Central bookmarked for a while, but I haven't had a chance to read it until now. Google Sitemaps looks like a great way to tell Google or any search engine about the most relevent links on a web page.

I am thinking about writing a plugin for pLog that will automatically generate a sitemap file that contains all of the permalinks for the blog.

Paul's Time Sink

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Hawking's Broadband Booster

How Satellite Radio Works

NeoOffice/J

HTTP POST with curl

I love 10 months

Using ecto

DVD jammed in changer

Smart random playlist in iTunes

Standalone iPod adapter

Fixed sitemap plugin problem

Problem with Sitemap plugin

Plugin for Google Sitemaps

Updated Post Trackbacks

Generating xml in php

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