October 2007 – woowoowoo

Bandwidth thief!

Last month I got ‘shaped’ – almost two weeks of excruciatingly slow internet – it was horrible. My ISP’s usage page only gives a total, not day by day, but I’ve never gone close before so it was a bit of a surprise. I got a daily report from the ISP and it didn’t tell me much – no pattern I could follow anyway.

October was a new month, I was going to keep a close eye on things. I installed the delightful Net Usage Item plugin for Firefox, but was dismayed as I watched 20% of my bandwidth disappear in 3 days. I could account for about 400Mb – a couple of downloads I’d been putting off until I got my speed back – but 700+Mb was still unaccounted for. I suspected all sorts of things, but none of it really added up, so tonight I sat down with a couple of tools to find out what I could.

The first shock was my network traffic – almost a constant 50 Kilobytes per second! – 180Mb per hour… yikes!

Quick, download Little Snitch and work this out. Obviously something that’s using that much bandwidth will also be using a fair chunk of CPU, so it wasn’t hard to narrow it down… actually, I got it first go… Google Desktop Agent. That’s right – quit the app and the network practically flatlines.

Bandwidth grab 1

Start it up and the network goes ballistic again!

Bandwidth grab 2

So, what’s going on here? I don’t care much, I’ve removed Google Desktop for a start! I’m guessing that disabling the ‘index Gmail’ option in the app would probably have had the same effect, but I’m in no position to mess with my bandwidth this month – I definitely don’t want to be shaped again!

hot or not?

This week, I had occasion to play for a few minutes with the latest toy of technolusters – the Apple iTouch. Definitely one of the ‘must haves’ of the decade, obviously, if I lived in a location where the iPhone was available, then I’d probably graduate to lusting after that instead, but for now let’s just say I am smitten.

One of my colleagues at work has a Nokia N95 which has all sorts of fantastic whistles and bells – certainly more bang than the iTouch, and with GPS, the sort of thing I usually get all frothy at the mouth over, but it just doesn’t do it for me. The whole ugly slidy silver box thing is a bit off-putting.

Seems I am not alone. I laughed out loud at the b3ta newsletter this week (not unusual in itself), but this time I wasn’t laughing at the content – it was the subscription links that cracked me up.

iPod Touch: b3ta-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Nokia n810: b3ta-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

In other words, Nokia users, nick off!

who do you trust?

With the Australian election underway, we are being bombarded by all the usual political ads, but one particularly puzzles me… The government keep going on about how 70% of the opposition front bench have come from a union background and that this is somehow supposed to be a bad thing.

Well, thanks to wikipedia and a little research, I found that 60% of the government front bench are solicitors and barristers. Is that supposed to make us feel any better?

Certainly not if you have a look around the web for ‘trusted profession’ surveys, where lawyers, insurance brokers, real estate agents and journalists seem to rate in the same 40-50% ‘trust’ strata as unionists. If you add in that Mark Vaile was a real estate agent and Tony Abbot was a journalist, then you’d find that more than 70% of them have belonged to professions with an image problem.

Of course, they’ve all taken a massive downward step since their earlier careers, because politicians are almost always judged the least trusted profession in surveys, only beaten into last place by used car salesmen. Would you buy a used government from this man?

Sony Bravia goes stop motion

the sony bravia ad When Sony released the now famous ad with the bouncy balls there was huge speculation about how they did it. Was it computer generated, was it faked – the discussion was quickly stopped as eye witness accounts told of the amazing photo shoot. The next ad was the exploding paint – again brilliant and memorable, but less of a mystery. Still interesting because of the logistics.

So, it must be a bit of a scary assignment coming up with the next ad. It’s a hard act to follow. Glad to report that they’ve done it again! The new Sony Bravia Play Doh ad is another masterpiece. I’ve just watched it again. Some of it looks like it’s been computer generated, but other parts look crisply real. The tradition of these ads is no computer special effects, so I’m inclined to think that’s been preserved.

Amazing work… can’t wait to hear how they pulled this off!

Didn’t have to wait long 🙂