Monthly Archives: February 2013

“Quality of service”

Posted by on 2013/02/15 No comments

Alternative title: what happens when you buy things that are licensed/run per TCP connection it can maintain.

hageshii% date; elegua; date
Fri Feb 15 22:08:41 SAST 2013
Linux elegua 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Sun May 6 04:00:17 UTC 2012 x86_64

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
No mail.
Last login: Fri Feb 15 20:44:49 2013 from 41.10.98.194
elegua% Write failed: Broken pipe
Shared connection to elegua.za.net closed.
Fri Feb 15 22:18:47 SAST 2013

10 minutes almost to the dot and my connection is forcefully severed, presumably for inactivity. I wonder how many inadvertent breakages this can cause. It’s certainly annoying. Thanks, Vodacom.

(Yes, I know I can VPN around this, or use mosh, or or or. Unfortunately none of those were quick to do because I hadn’t booted this box in quite a while, and Expensive-with-expiring-bytes-G connection is better used on other things than this)

And this is what the trace looks like:

 Host                                                Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. 192.168.43.1                                      0.0%   131    1.5   9.4   1.1 211.2  27.6
 2. 10.17.7.11                                        0.0%   131   54.6 327.0  38.5 5456. 844.4
 3. 10.242.249.2                                      0.8%   131   47.9 314.3  42.1 5400. 823.9
 4. 10.113.228.1                                      5.4%   131   48.8 309.2  42.4 5346. 832.0
 5. 41.192.248.18                                    12.3%   131   55.7 247.6  39.4 5290. 790.0
 6. vc-196-207-44-134.3g.vodacom.co.za                7.7%   131   52.8 294.0  39.4 5234. 815.3
 7. 41.0.4.1                                         10.0%   131   49.7 249.9  36.6 5178. 764.8
 8. 10.118.46.10                                      7.8%   130  423.0 474.4 210.7 5155. 851.3
 9. te-9-2.car5.London1.Level3.net                   34.1%   130  483.0 461.4 204.0 4123. 762.5
10. ae-52-52.csw2.London1.Level3.net                 24.0%   130  239.5 502.6 216.1 5009. 882.5
11. ae-57-222.ebr2.London1.Level3.net                24.0%   130  231.0 409.9 216.0 4010. 614.4
12. ae-22-22.ebr2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net              22.5%   130  237.8 473.7 216.9 5906. 897.6
13. ae-72-72.csw2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net              22.5%   130  250.2 445.7 219.9 5851. 793.7
    ae-92-92.csw4.Frankfurt1.Level3.net
14. ???
15. 195.16.162.254                                   32.6%   130  247.4 406.6 223.9 4726. 723.5
16. hos-bb2.juniper1.rz1.hetzner.de                  74.4%   130  233.1 740.9 225.0 5682. 1218.
17. hos-tr2.ex3k9.rz1.hetzner.de                     18.6%   130  339.2 491.0 221.3 5626. 841.9
18. elegua.za.net                                     1.6%   130  343.7 508.1 226.2 5571. 829.2

Hi-kwality packets.

Cellular data extortion(?)

Posted by on 2013/02/09 No comments

With my DSL and everything (switch, RB750, DSL modem, HP Microserver) being struck by lightning this week, I’m presently using my 3G for a bit of access. Just to ensure I don’t trigger any massive out-of-bundle charges, I checked my remaining cap quickly so that I can then run a rough mental allocation of it all for the next while. Then I saw this:

“Hang on a minute,” I thought as I read the first block’s data values, “that should be closer to 1.7GB remaining.”

Then I scrolled down, saw the ‘forfeited’ counter, and began wondering whether these companies could be forced to stop making forfeiting part of their contracts. It’s truly not like this is a technical problem. This is a business decision they’ve made to let bandwidth you’ve bought artificially expire.

A quick bit of math: assuming I use ~300MB a month (this appears to be the general level of data I use, based on a quick checking of my phone’s stats), and that I’ve had this contract for 22 months now, and at the R268.99 I’ve been paying for the bundle each month:

  • (268.99/800)*500*22 = 3698.61

So that’s R3700 of “forfeit”, for no reason other than someone decided it’d be a good way to make money. And, as far as I know, all the operators in this country do this. For the less technical readers: as I mentioned before, there’s no technical reason this happens. It’s just an entry in some database, and can be updated. If anything, maintaining an expiry time on data probably leads to more technical issues than they’d otherwise have.

To compare, this would be like anyone buying up a bunch of things (toilet paper, toothpaste, whatever), and the storekeeper then removing it from your home if you haven’t used in soon enough.

How MakingView works

Posted by on 2013/02/01 No comments

Found out about this (via a local news site) earlier, a product called MakingView. Their tagline:

Explore our unique and Award Winning 360° technologies, and the opportunities we offer in visual excellence.

Their pitch is that you can get the “real” experience. Pretty cool idea, so I thought I’d quickly take a look at how it works. First up, fire up a browser, grab the URLs.

Video: http://360content.redbull.com/2012/lofoten/medium.f4v
Player: http://360content.redbull.com/2012/lofoten/makingviewer.swf

Fire up VLC, and see the following (edit: apologies, it seems something somewhere is a bit screwed with the width of the content blocks, just open the pics in a new tab):

In the boat

In the boat

 

Boardwalk

Boardwalk

 

Next step: become disappointed that there isn’t really anything cool going on. Video is just a very long series of (admittedly probably well-tweaked) panoramic pictures, and the player maps that to a globe and points shows you wherever you’re watching. Sadpant.

Edit: to anyone wondering why I wrote this, I was really hoping there were some cool multi-stream video hax going on, but ended up not. And yup, first time I saw a thing like this.