Thotzy insights

TraffiX 2.0 — Watch your Gigs. Better.

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 16:09:12 -0500

UPDATE:
TraffiX is now at version 2.0.1.
TraffiX now supports router-less users, road warriors, and folks with unusual configurations. Nearly all new features are automatic, requiring no user fiddling.
As a free service to Mac-using Thotzy readers, we offer TraffiX 2.0, an internet traffic rate monitor. If your ISP (like Comcast) is implementing or threatening usage caps on your internet service, you can use TraffiX to see if you are one of the “over-users” that they are bleating about.
TraffiX has only been tested with Airport Extreme base stations, but it uses industry standard SNMP techniques, and may work with other routers. If you try it with other routers, I’d be interested in the results, but I’m afraid I cannot offer any tech support.
TraffiX is a simple, one-window app. It presents a “level indicator” view of your estimated monthly usage, a total usage bar, and place to set the usage cap value.
Note that because TraffiX can only start gathering information when you first run it, the initial results may be wildly inaccurate. Just run TraffiX and then quit it and run it again in a few hours for a more realistic estimate. The more time you leave between runs of TraffiX, the more accurate its estimate is going to be. Read the helps for some caveats on this.
The Reset button simply starts TraffiX over as if you were running it for the first time.
TraffiX does not run anything in the background, or install anything on your Mac beyond the app itself. It doesn’t write anything to your router (just asks questions) and doesn’t save anything outside of its preferences file (in your Preferences folder, as usual).
There is a help window available that answers the most common questions about TraffiX, including whether you really need it at all.
TraffiX requires Leopard (10.5) or later.

QOS-Free Zones

Sun, 7 Sep 2008 09:18:11 -0500

QOS = “Quality Of Service”.
I am going to pick on Sprint PCS here, but it is worth noting that most cable companies and other wireless operators follow exactly the same brain-dead pattern.
I live a few hundred feet from a cell tower that serves (among others) Sprint PCS. This tower goes out of service about 4-5 times a year, and when it does it takes Sprint an average of a day or two to get it working again.
In the meantime, we have no wireless service. Like right now. For over 24 hours to this point.
A large part of the delay arises from Sprint’s unwillingness to accept the notion that the tower is actually inoperative — they insist on multiple customer reports before they will even mark the tower as suspect in their database and commence the lumbering repair process. Each reporting customer is dragged through an aggravating and time-consuming inquiry process that assumes that the customer is the root of all problems and that the tower can’t possibly actually be inoperative.
And note that they are waiting on customer reports to determine whether the tower is operating.
Pardon me?
Sprint can query the tower for all kinds of information, they can determine who is connected to it, what the call volume is, etc... but to determine whether it is actually working, they wait for their customers to be sufficiently aggravated that they will brave the SprintPCS customer service call queue. With this kind of mindset, is it any wonder that customer churn is one of the biggest problems in the wireless industry?
Never mind that there are companies with turnkey solutions to this problem, I can see why the cut-throat wireless industry isn’t keen on adding to their per-tower costs.
Most wireless companies don’t own their own towers any more -- they farm out tower building and maintenance to dedicated tower operators. This complicates the use of on-site solutions, but does not impede remote software based monitoring at all.
It is patently obvious that Sprint, et al could use the information that they already have to automatically detect towers that are not operating. All they have to do is periodically look at the number of phones associated with a given tower site -- when that number drops to zero for more than some interval, it is probably time to take a closer look at that tower, at least remotely.
This isn’t rocket science. It’s just common sense.
If Sprint wanted to do something to improve their customer service, they would:
• Add items to their customer service phone menu for reporting problems with the system.
• Train CS operators to not treat the customer like an idiot when the customer is trying to do Sprint’s job because Sprint isn’t.
• Have a dedicated on-line system using mapping to let users report no service in locations where they normally get service.
• Implement the remote, software-based monitoring described above, so that towers can be brought back online much more quickly.
Sprint could also pick a customer within range of troublesome towers (like ours) and give them a freebie (perhaps custom) femtocell widget that could “phone home” to Sprint the moment the local tower went south.

Air Sharks – Coming soon to your living room

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:29:59 -0500

Yep, Discovery is at it again – another tedious week of shark-themed video.
How about a little balance here?
How about Cockroach Week, Fly Week, Mosquito Week or Dust Mite Week?
Roaches and dust mites are a lot more significant to most people (whether they know it or not) than sharks could ever be, and flies and mosquitoes are vastly more lethal.
Mosquitoes kill over a million people (mostly children) every year (thanks to the boneheads that halted the eradication of malaria by erroneously demonizing DDT) and common flies and their biting cousins are responsible for much disease (ranging from typhoid and cholera to bird flu) and misery.
As for the common cockroach:
“Cockroaches have been found to be mechanical carriers of many diseases including staphylococcus, Escherichia coli (E. Coli), Salmonella food poisoning, and streptococcus. They carry bacteria around on their legs, and bodies. Pathogenic bacteria have also been identified in the feces of cockroaches.”
While dust mites don’t appear to be a significant disease vector, at least 10% of the population is allergic to them, resulting in 600 million people on the planet who get a substandard night’s sleep.
So enough of the sharks already.

"Fanboy"

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:19:41 -0500

With the exception of the gentleman in the photo, “fanboy” is invariably being used as an attempt to dismiss a position by demeaning its proponent -- a classic ad-hominem tactic.
Such tactics are derogated in venues more mature than the play-yard.
I have come to assume that anyone who applies “fanboy” to anyone else can safely be ignored.

History vs Tell-Me-A-Story

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:48:34 -0500

The History Channel is possibly the least annoying network, but they aren’t without flaw.
Not satisfied with their remarkably solid hold on the affluent, mature male demographic, History seems to have a fatal fascination with attempting to pursue a dopier market -- people who will watch nearly anything that smacks of a Story.
How else to explain the first and second season of Ice Road Truckers?
Certainly the original singleton show could be justified – it revealed a little known phenomenon and showed it in all pertinent detail. Current History, if you will.
But by padding that show out into two seasons of pointless drama, History has shown a fatal fascination for Story.
This is dopey pandering to dimwits, like History’s part-time preoccupation with the occult, paranormal and UFO themes. And, in all fairness, Discovery’s fascination with crab fishing, which they have frittered away 3 seasons of airtime on.
OK, we get it already – crab fishing is dangerous.
The problem is, of course, that History (and Discovery) live or die by ratings, and shows that pander to Story instead of Content appeal to a broader base of dolts.
But the History core viewer base is suspicious of Story, because it has seen too much truth-bending and outright fabrication for the sake of Story in modern media.
History risks alienating their core audience as they try to pander to the tell-me-a-story crowd.

If Good Search Was Easy, Microsoft Could Do it

Fri, 4 Jul 2008 08:27:11 -0500

As usual, CNN Money can’t catch a clue. In the article referenced above, David Kirkpatrick, Fortune senior editor, waxes enthusiastic about Microsoft’s attempt at Google-style search, live.com.

So I tried it. I searched for “Thotzy”, a challenging enough item, it appears.

Here is the “live.com” result followed by the Google result for exactly the same search:

Note that the results that “live” returns are the contents of an ad, not the site contents. Smooth move.

And then check out the “search tip” — “live” is so much as admitting that their search is too dim to recognize a stock symbol without prompting.

The funny thing is that it isn’t actually that dimwit — both “live” and Google returned comparable results with identical ticker-symbol searches.

And here are Google’s results for the same search:

Google’s results contain actual content, not ad text, and there are a lot more results.

Good fact-checking, CNN.

The article goes on to assert that all MS wants from Yahoo is the brand -- that MS would not use Yahoo search technology (which is mostly Google’s at this point). The intent is to acquire Yahoo’s customer base.

Sure – like that’s going to happen. The day MS takes over the Yahoo brand, most of Yahoo’s customers will start searching somewhere else, because MS’s search will suck. And even if it didn’t suck, most folks will sensibly assume that it will suck, because it is associated with Microsoft.

MS seems to still be mired in the “lock-in” mentality it has used on the desktop -- it is looking for a captive set of customers to milk. But the Web isn’t about captive customers, it’s about choice and competition.

That isn’t news, of course, except to MS and CNNMoney.

Comment From A Coder

Fri, 4 Jul 2008 08:08:32 -0500

“If Writing Good Software Was Easy, Microsoft™ Could Do it.”

- Hork Kesekes

Economics 101

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:10:28 -0500

So Nokia has looked at the Symbian OS vs the iPhone OS, and decided to price Symbian fairly... ($0).

The Votes Are In!

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:28:18 -0500

I thought the conventions didn’t start until August. Did I miss something?

The price of perfection

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:09:25 -0500

“Natures most perfect food”, bananas are doomed.
Enjoy them now, while you can.