Hawking's Broadband Booster

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:

1. There is only one lan port on it.  This means that it will not be able to prioritize traffic within your local network.


2. 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.


3. 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.

How Satellite Radio Works

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

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

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

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

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

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.