Archives for April 2006
13 April
Slow/Dropped Internet Connections Lately
Over the past week or two I've noticed some abnormalities with the off-campus Internet connection. The main symptoms seem to be (1) web sites loading slowly or not at all (but working fine upon refresh), and (2) long-lived connections (VNC, IRC, instant messenger) being cut off.
Pings to the affected servers did not seem to be dropped (I ran "ping google.com" for roughly 20 minutes, with a 100% packet return rate). However, a simple analysis with Ethereal showed a higher proportion of TCP retransmission packets than I would have otherwise expected.
There's some discussion of this issue over at the Case Forum.
5 April
Energy
Yesterday I happened upon an interesting article at the European Tribune. Actually what really caught my attention was not the article itself, but the first comment, by De Clarke ("DeAnander").
Clarke applied the laws of thermodynamics to industrial civilization. Her conclusion should not be surprising to anyone with even a basic knowledge of those laws, or even to anyone aware of the statement "there's no such thing as a free lunch". Though the conclusion is not surprising, it's unsettling. Maybe that's why others don't talk about it much.