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2007-12-29 why is my broadband slow
Recently I've been answering questions on yahoo answers. Who knows why? But there seems to be a repetitive style of the questions being asked. It also shows that the vast majority of "yahooligans" don't bother looking at the previously asked questions.
- why is my broadband slow
Could be a variety of things depending on the hardware. Could also be a variety of things depending on the software.
How are you connecting to the internet?
Are you plugging the connection from your provider's hardware directly into your computer? If so, does the providers hardware do any NAT? If so great. If not, is your computer firewalled?
Are there any programs sending a large amount of data to the internet? This could be malicious software. Right click on the task bar and go to task manager, then look at the network throughput.
Also note that not everything on the internet is able to respond instantly, some servers are over worked or they are on smaller network pipes, or just plain badly run.
If everything checks out ok, then perhaps your network provider is over worked? Or perhaps the connection between yourself and nearest side of the provider is shoddy.
Have you been to a bandwidth throughput page to rate your connections speed?
Also, do you have pages of connections (typically from torrent traffic!) when you look at the output of:
netstat -n - misc questions about ghosts or deities
- can you recommend something for a cold
paracetamol or decongestant - follow directions - why doesn't friend x like me.
who knows?
For some reason using yahoo answers makes me feel frustrated with people in general. Better stop using it then I guess.
training
Done two training runs this week. One two days ago and one today.
Thursdays was pretty tough going and was still using the orthotics that the physio recommended so that my feet roll how they should. The problem with these though is that it makes it much harder to run. Sometimes like running in sand because there is much more effort required to move the feet over the land.
So today I took them out and went back to the way that I'd normally train and it's much easier for me like this. I think though, looking forward to the next Reading half marathon, I'll carry on doing half my runs with the orthotics so that I have less chance of getting shin splints.
2007-12-28 quite a quiet month
In many ways this post is just a space filler as I have busied myself on some tasks that are just not worthy of a comment on here.
One of my Christmas presents this year was a voucher for my favorite online retailer - Amazon. A few UNIX or compiler books would soon blow the voucher so I'm determined to spend it on a greater number of pages from the science section. Perhaps some books on evolution or biology would make for some good reading.
Of late I've been reading a lot about species evolution and I think it'd be really cool to make a program that demonstrates some environmental effects in a simulation. This is partly the gameplay to the long awaited spores, but there seems to be so much room for maneuver and scope here.
2007-12-23 geographical location database
In my last post I wrote about mod_cidr which reads a cdb file for the inbound connecting IP address. Well, the whole idea was to use the database when an inbound connection is made and then provide that information to the web page so that different actions can occur based on the LIR network for the connection.
This file ipv4.cdb.bz2 contains the database itself, if you're interested in using it in your own programs. The code for mod_cidr shall be released very soon (whenever I can dedicate enough time to tidying it up).
From what I can tell, there should be no reason to use a proprietary system for this. It's not hard and I'm surprised that anyone is paying for this.
Have a merry Christmas Adam (Adam came before eve, it's Christmas Eve tomorrow).
2007-12-19 more apache
Have pretty much finished off a module apache that does a quick CIDR lookup of the client IP address and inserts four headers into the request headers.
This lookup works a lot like how a basic router applies subnet masks to the IP address until it finds a matching network.
The headers that are added to the request are CIDR_CC, CIDR_MASK, CIDR_RANGE, and CIDR_RIR. These allow the admin to do some basic operations based on where the source of the connection originates. I've already started to abuse the CC field so that search bots can get abbreviated content.
Once the configuration directives for this are final I can release this as a tarball under the GPL.