Vass’ Hideout and Stuff

Github Gem

Ok so given that Dan recently ‘converted’ to using Git, I’ve been trying and trying to work out how to use it so I can keep up to date and know where he is with his developments. After much frustration I found the following method to get git to work, on windows, linking in with putty.

The Problem:

Partway into creating your ‘clone’, git asks if you want putty to cache the key (y/n) but does not allow for text input.

The Solution:

Before running git, putty into github.com where putty will automajikally cache it for you.

Hope that helps someone!

Where are We Now?

I’ve been pondering for a while now where I am now, in my life. I graduated highschool in 2006 after 13 years of long hard study. I set about taking the Christmas holidays to enjoy life, hung out with friend, most of whom I’ve never scene since. In the first semester in take of 2007 I started my studies into IT majoring in Network Sys Admin. First semester was great, I enjoyed working with both Linux and Windows and learned a heap, web server config, samba, used PHP to control iptabes from a remote location for firewall management. It was enjoyable and I could see myself doing it long term. Second semester came along, I learned a deal about intergrating what I’d learned the previous semester into larger networks, dealt with windows routers, multi domain networking, masqarading with iptables. I was managing work and study well but wasn’t enjoying the study as much, the corse work felt repeditive and the lecturer continuously set about to make himself look good by trying to prove he knew more than us, unlike the previous semester lecturers. I guess I felt cheated but I took the chance at more hours at work and dropped out.

The fun taken out of IT, my computer packed it in; I did very little if any computer work for the latter part of 07 and the beginning of 08 until I had saved up enough for a new tower. When I did finally get back to using a PC I did very little, I played a few games but my interests weren’t sparked. I tried to return to Star Trek PBeM but found myself to out of practice. I did a bit of web work for one of the TF17 in Bravo Fleet which was fun, but an up hill struggle and I abandoned that due to my ego.

I started assisting Dan Taylor with the Bravo Fleet dedicated server. He’s helped spark my want to go back to study, but my own ego has kept me from learning.

So here I am, a retail salesman… Not where I want to be, but trapped.

3G, The Future or the Fad?

After once again hitting my bandwidth cap on my home ADSL connection I figured it was time I look at alternate Internet sources out there in an attempt to find one that suited the ability to act as a viable and sustainable connection for a 20 year old who is an otherwise bandwidth whore. In Australia you are fairly limited bandwidth wise, frankly the ISPs suck and their plans suck harder. Another seeming buzz on the TV is the stupid amount of adds pushing Pre-Paid 3G (HSDPA) USB connections. These mobile connections are been blown out of proportion as the be all and end all, “No Plans or Contracts!” “The Freedom…!” a hype of it all seems to mask the fact that very few if any mobile telecommunication companies have the network coverage to provide the vast emptiness that is Australia with this so portrayed “Godly” connection that is “Mobile Broadband”. So I’m going to attempt to brain dump my views on 3 available connections that I have for myself here in sunny Queensland, Australia.

Home ADSL

My home ADSL is a 1500/256k connection supplied to me by Telstra Bigpond. Telstra is the main telecommunications company in Australia and is a partly government owned entity; basically, they hold the network, they hold the power, they are dominant. While there are a lot of other [better] ISPs out there, I’ve been with Bigpond since day dot. My account has been with them since back in the days of mighty dial-up! A basic run down of my plan is as follows:

• 25GB Per Month
• Uploads Counted
• Slowed to 64/64k after 25GB
• AUD$79.95 per month

My local exchange is about 2 suburbs away, all up as the road is laid, it’s about a 10 min drive from my house to outside the exchange. Saying that, there are a few minor hubs in between me and the exchange. The connection is solid, I’ve had almost a 99% uptime for the last two years running with the exception of when I moved house. Customer support is average and overseas however I can recieve some limited support from the Telstra Retail stores, note limited, and their [Bigpond's] billing support seems to be based in Australia, which is nice.

I got the following speed test results off of my ADSL connection, remember please that this connection suppies a network of 7 fixed devices and 4 mobile devices, however only 3 devices were active at the time of speed test:

BigPond ADSL Speed Test

A fairly solid download and upload rate, low ping to my local speedtest.net server. My download rate has gotten slightly better [60kbps] over the last few months, namely due to infrastructure changes in my local area. Download rate has been fairly much the same since I got the 1500/256k connection and for all things considered, I’ll suffer with it.

Mobile Broadband

Wow! I cn gets teh interbuts on da goes! Sorry, couldn’t help myself. My ‘Mobile Broadband’ account is with 3 Mobile or Hutchison Telecom who brought out Orange back in 2006. Their network isn’t that flash, it services MOST Metro areas but has almost no regional support and their network is littered with blackspots, but otherwise, they are good plan wise. Their customer support is great, there are a fair few 3 stores around, the 3 staff are able to help you with any questions and there is a repair center in Milton that can do onsite repairs for the mobile broadband sticks should that occur. My biggest concern with Mobile Broadband however isn’t so much the ISPs that give us the ‘power to be ourselves’ what ever the hell that means, but more the weather factor that plagues the overall performance of a HSDPA connection. I have in the past topped 1700kbs down-link however the following show a connection at 10 am, with slight overcast conditions from the same machine now connecting via the USB modem.

3 Mobile HSDPA Speed Test

And another test, only moments later:

3 Mobile HSDPA Speed Test

Amazing how a simple shift in cloud and minor wind can change performance to quickly. Overall for the mobility it’s great. I can be anywhere [in most metro areas] and get connected provided I have access to a laptop. If I go back to study, this will be a good thing in that I’m able to connect to the Internet with out campus restriction, as well as if I’m at a family members or guests house I don’t have to impose on their connection. A basic run down of the prepaid credit I’m running now is as follows:

• 4GB Data
• Uploads Counted
• AUD$49
• 30 Day expiry

Now, while I couldn’t see this as a viable main connection, for a secondary connection it’s pretty tops and the following credit option is why:

• 12GB Data
• Uploads Counted
• AUD$149
• 356 Day expiry

For a secondary connection getting little use, that’s a fairly solid option. Given that I’ll likely only use the USB when my main account runs out of credit or if I’ll be away from home for a lengthy period of time. Also I intend on lending it to my parents for if ever they need a connection, business meetings and such.

iPhone

Blah! Who needs copy and paste anyway when you can just retype your notes that you can’t get off the device and I mean, who seriously records videos on their phone, and so what, it’s only 1 application at a time, think of the extra concentration on the one thing your doing when your not multi-tasking. Ok, now that I’ve got that sarcastic sprint out of my system, it’s a great phone, I love it to bits and at the end of the day I can say I’ve got an iPhone in my pocket. I mean, you’re going to get nothing but strange looks if you say you have a storm in your pants of a blackberry in your pocket, hehe.

A new app to the App Store is the speedtest.net application. It’s a free application for all those who say that everything on the App Store costs money. This speed test was taken while the iPhone was sitting beside the HSDPA card:

iPhone Optus Speed Test

For a mobile device that’s nothing to sneeze at, ultimately the sort of performance your getting off of a mobile device is different to that of a desktop PC. A desktop PC is like a 3 year old chucking a fit in a supermarket screaming “I want candy!”, where as a phone is more like listening to an old person; your overall interest is jaded by your awareness of your surroundings and if anything happens while your distracted, so the much the better.

My iPhone cap is as follows:

• 500Mb Data Allowance per Month
• Uploads Capped
• Tied in with AUD$310 worth of local calls and local and international SMS
• AUD$59 per month

The iPhone will never be a primary connection, however it’s small compact nature and large touch screen make it great while in commute to and from work and it’s a handy tool to be able to grab at a moments notice.

Well that about wraps it up. At the end of the day, I’d still like to consider that there is a light at the end of the tunnel with Australian internet, but sadly for the moment we have to make do with overpriced, under data friendly plans that make us seem third world next to the rest of the world. A few details and links I’ve forgotten are at the end of this post.

Thanks all, have a good one

~Vass

ADSL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADSL
HSDPA - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSDPA
BigPond - http://www.bigpond.com
3 Mobile - http://www.three.com.au
Optus iPhone Caps - http://bit.ly/c9Tt
Huawei e106g - http://bit.ly/m8yi

Look UP and to the RIGHT

If you follow the title of this post you’ll see a banner which belongs to “The Open Consortium”. I’m proud to be a member and for more info see http://theopenconsortium.org/. In the mean time, here’s a word from our… No, no more words. </post>

21 Minutes @ $2

Ok, so I’m currently killing time at an Internet Kiosk waiting for some friends to arrive so we can go watch a movie… Oh did I mention the One friend with me who is intent on telling me how long I have left; 3 minutes folks! I don’t really have that long so I’ll cut to it. My 5 quick notes about shopping center internet kiosks:

1. Moldy Smell
2. Sticky Keyboard
3. Low Seats
4. No back support
5. Java interface, or flash I can’t tell

There we go… done with 1 minute to spare!

Found Aquarius?

Ok so first off, I have two Windows based workstations that I own in my house that attach to the growing network of 7 computers and 2 mobile devices and 2 games systems. I named my machines Aquarius (Laptop) and Bankstown (Desktop). Imagine my surprise today when Bankstown’s Media Player, which I don’t use, found Aquarius’ Media Player, which is equally as not used.

Windows Media Player at it

I would therefore officially like to congratulate Microsoft on the most USELESS feature of Windows Media Player ever created that has taken now over a week to find. Had I have been in dire need of this otherwise useless plugin I would have been tearing my hair out for weeks to eventually find the other mechine. I know where both machines are, RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER! And for those who hadn’t guessed my Sarcastic Gland went into overdrive last sentence. So what other random popups am I going to get? Will Bankstown find itself? Is Aquarius going to go on a expedition of self screen back’enlightenment? All this and more after I’ve had coffee!

Flash, just you me and the x86 OS

Since I started using Vista, life has been much prettier. I had for a short time, about a year, used XP and before that had used the only operating system to come close to Windows 98 as cool, Windows 2000 Professional. I, been the foolish young person that I am decided to get all 1337 on the world and use an x64 operating system, big mistake, the first rule of intelligence is to ‘never use a new operating system and expect it to work straight away without a hitch’, the second of these is as follows, ‘other than the first rule been god, never use x64 for personal desktop use… … …ever’. Well I broke that rule, I used Vista not long after it was first released, infact I even had a crack at in in BETA and I used x64 which is still running at the moment on my desktop computer. Now while we can all admit that behind the glory that is Aero, there are hungry hungry hipo set algorithms that want nothing more than to burn your ram for fried food, and they do this rather well. Well the x64 varents of these hate your very exsistance even more, they are the chuck norris of ram munchers and as a result any attempt to use the following words in a string, ‘windows vista’ ‘excellent proformance’ & ‘x64  (or 64bit)’, is beyond pointless. I noticed that under x64 Vista, FF3 would ‘hang’ sometimes when quiting, I had put this down to a development bug with Flash and FF3 intergration, but not only that, my webstreaming that I occationally do was also laggy. This became even more apparent, the webstream lag, when I switched on earlier today my webstream on my laptop, it was crystal clear and relativly smooth, not only that, playing back live streams seems to work better on the laptop than on my desktop. So I put it to you all, x64 Flash sucks. There, that’s as technical as I’m going to make my observation, but it honestly does. For what ever reason, be it the higher resource requirements to run x64 Vista, it just sucks and is buggy. I guess I’m just going to have to convert my Desktop to x86 then? I dunno…

~Vass

Tags: Flash, Operating Systems, OS Plugins, Web Development, Windows Vista x64, Windows Vista x86

So We Begin

Some 7 odd years ago I came up with a theme that quickly spread into my online alias when I had a computer assignment for school. This assignment required me to create website for a figurative company. Been only 13 at the time it was cool and certainly not the first website I’d had to make, but it would be the first one I didn’t self brand and would soon prove to not be the last. From then on I branded any work that I did do, under a small (c) copyright logo. LagPro or Lag Productions.  I had it in my mind from then on that I’d own LagPro.Net and finally, here it is, under my ownership. It’s rather a cool moment really and alittle more than that, it’s my first true online preasence.

Over the coming days, weeks, months, so on and so forth… …I intend to update this blog with the random goings on and finding of my life. Stay tuned for more details and random updates.

~Vass

Tags: General, Personal