Adam’s Tech Blog

Endless technology ramblings

I know this is a blog about technical computer stuff but… What is going on with MTV? I have sat back over the last few years and noticed a disturbing trend. MTV is no longer music television! Why? MTV has given in to what’s popular rather than what they stand for. Now you can get pseudo-real music on MTV2 but why? Why can’t MTV make a station called “MTVC” for MTV-Crap?

If there was an MTV on demand here is what the selections would look like:

1. Whining teenage girls talking about how bad their life sucks and how they want to be popular.

2. Whining teenage girls talking about how much of a “slut” and “whore” members of their cohorts are.

3. Real-world scenarios that they “happened” to catch on tape with no planned scenarios or scenes.

4. Look at how much of a spoiled brat I am on my sixteenth birthday. I’m so rich and you’re not.

5. Find out who’s sleeping with who on “The Hills”.

I absolutely despise “Reality” tv as played on MTV. What has the world come to? When my better half watches MTV at home I promptly switch the channel to TRU TV. At least that shows some real TV. People getting shot, people going to jail and getting DUI’s is far more real than MTV.

Thank you MTV for turning the brains of millions who watch your nonsensical crap into mush. I’d rather slam my head into a brick wall repeatedly because its 100% more real than watching your poor excuse for a television show.

If someone out there could make a device that stabs people who watch MTV in the face over the Internet we would be millionaires. Unfortunately, people will keep watching MTV and we’ll never win.

In the words of Dire Straits: “I want my MTV”

Here is something odd I found with Google Chrome.

Open Chrome

Go to “google.com”

Middle click maps at the top and see the distorted map on the new tab.

What causes this? Google how well did you review your code. I know it’s a beta … but I expect better from Google It works fine when visiting the maps site directly or refreshing.

Video

Recently I was reading an article here which shows how an application called “Search Tracker” guided searchers to an autistic man named "Keith kennedy late Sunday in a wooded area.

The software calculates the possibility that someone would be lost in certain areas based on density of plant life and wooded areas.

More on this story at LinuxInsider.

Hey- Apparently Time Warner Cable doesn’t rate-limit UDP packets (as far as I can tell).

Here is the scenario:

Time Warner Turbo (15Mbit down / 1Mbit up) connected to OpenVPN (10mbit limit) at a local data center.

Here is what the connection path looks like:

Time Warner Cable –> OpenVPN –> Squid Proxy –> Website

At first I didn’t know what to think – I can normally achieve around 1Mbps up but I was getting over 2.8Mbit/sec upstream! I thought to myself “This has to be Squid caching the upload test data” so I altered the Squid configuration to explicitly NOT cache the data from SpeakEasy’s test site.

Here’s what I found:

Before

After (10Mbit limited by OpenVPN)

How can this be? Well it might have to do with the fact that Time Warner doesn’t monitor UDP traffic (at least to OpenVPN UDP 1194). After reading many documents, it’s evident that traffic shaping TCP is easy and TCP comes with traffic shaping mechanisms and UDP does not. My speculation is that Time Warner simply drops packets when rates are too high, causing TCP to (inherently) re-send data that is lost.

Quick HowTo

The first thing you should do is grab a copy of Untangle. It’s quick and easy to set up OpenVPN out of the box.

1. Obtain OpenVPN
2. Bring OpenVPN online at a Data Center or as a VM on your leased server at a Data Center.
3. Connect to OpenVPN from your Time Warner connection.
4. Start a VM with Squid caching proxy running. Make sure that you have access to this VM from your VPN client (configured in Untangle)
5. Start Squid
6. Open your favorite browser and point it to the squid proxy (private IP address via OpenVPN)
7. Access speed test sites (all OpenVPN traffic is UDP so you should be able to achieve speeds without using Squid)

Well now that Firefox 3 is out does IE7 have a chance? Personally I’ve used Firefox 3 quite a bit faster (even in its release candidate stages) than IE7.

Please vote below and show us who really is the winner.