Google Fiber, Hoping It Comes To Austin
I'm really hoping that Google Fiber will come to Austin, TX. It looks like we certainly had a lot of people contact Google to express their interest.
Bandwidth in Austin is disproportionately more expensive than Dallas and Houston which have some of the cheapest bandwidth in the country because they are very well connected cities.
I'd love to setup a new build office block here in Austin which offered bandwidth to small businesses at affordable prices. Lots of small companies like mine need to upload and download the occasional 5 gig file and it takes hours on the overpriced cable connection.
Switched Back To Vista From Ubuntu
Ubuntu is great for a free operating system, back in December 2009 I switched my home computer OS from Vista to Ubuntu 9.10 to see if I could get used to it enough to be able to switch to it on our work machines.
Unfortunately there is just too much that Windows makes much easier to do than Ubuntu, and needing to edit Adobe Flash files, etc means that I can't make the switch to Ubuntu until there is more supported software.
Hopefully in the next few years switching to a free OS will be a more realistic option.
Multi WAN Balancing Made Simple With ClearOS
I've been looking for a way to balance multiple WAN links easily for a while now and believe I've found the solution; ClearOS.
The recently released OS based on the works by ClarkConnect, appears to make WAN balancing a snap: http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/user_guide/clearos_enterprise_5.1/multi-wan.
Obviously WAN balancing two connections will not double the download speed for a single file transfer through a single connection, but by using a download manager which makes multiple connections, or by using P2P, you can effectively download a single file at 2*XYZmbit/sec by balancing two XYZmbit WAN connections.
I'll test it out and report back.
Ubuntu 64bit Flash Player
Since installing Ubuntu 9.10 64bit I've been having some problems with the flash player disappearing in Firefox.
I've just replaced the .so that was loaded, with the latest 64bit release from Adobe. Just follow the instructions here, but for me the folder was /usr/lib/firefox/plugins, not /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.
The flash player is showing again, hopefully this plugin resolves the problem I was having.
Switched To Ubuntu 9.10 From Vista
I upgraded my machine at work from Vista to Windows 7 a few weeks ago and whilst it is a nice OS, it simply isn't worth the $180 or so when I spend most of my time in a web browser.
With that in mind; I just switched my home machine from Vista to Ubuntu 9.10, now I can easily use tools like rsync, ffmpeg, etc. I'll give this a few months and if things go well then I'll switch the work machine over too. Right now I use Dreamweaver a lot for work, so I can't really jump right into Ubuntu yet.
I've experienced a couple of problems with the GUI freezing when I had the visual effects set to full (even with the Nvidia driver installed), but turning the visual effects off seems to have resolved the problem.
Below is a screenshot of me experimenting with ffmpeg/x.264 on my Core2 Quad:
Dell PowerConnect 5424 Photos, PDF Manual
Our Dell PowerConnect 5424 switch arrived at the office today, we're going to be testing the throughput capabilities for possible data center use. Below are some photos of the switch.
You can download the PowerConnect 5424 user manual here: 54xx_ug-dell-switch.pdf
Youtube High Quality Embeds, My Cichlid Tank
Whilst Youtube offers a "view this video in high quality" link below most videos on their site now, when you embed the videos they are still low quality. I have found a way to embed the high quality videos, detailed here: http://www.microscopics.co.uk/blog/2008/how-to-embed-high-quality-youtube-videos/
Although instead of using the fmt=18 as suggested in that article, I would suggest using fmt=6. Format 18 is a mp4 quality file at 512kbps, 128kbps stereo. And format 6 is a flv at 900kbps, 96kbps mono. As detailed here: http://blog.jimmyr.com/High_Quality_on_Youtube_11_2008.php
If you click play on both of the videos at the same time you should notice that the standard quality load progress bar loads more quickly than the high quality video bar. You will also be able to see the difference in quality by comparing the videos.
High quality:
Standard quality:
Putty Tunnel/Proxy, Enable AllowTcpForwarding
If you need to fake your geo-location on the web, and don't want to use a free/open/slow proxy that will probably steal your credit card info then you will need to have a server in the desired country.
Get Putty, set some basic tunnel settings within it, ensure that AllowTcpForwarding is set to yes in /etc/ssh/sshd_config on your server, and change your browser settings to use your new proxy/tunnel.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting to do this (encrypting your traffic across your ISP to your trusted server) aswell as plenty of questionable reasons, such as wanting to watch hulu.com content from outside of the USA.
Mini CDN For My Blog Videos
After posting an example of 720p resolution H.264 video I was annoyed that whilst viewing my own blog I was not receiving the best video load rates, as my blog is hosted on a server in the USA and I am located in the UK.
Regular encoded .flv videos would load perfectly well as I could download from the USA at 200kB/sec and these videos only require about 90kB/sec of bandwidth, but the H.264 video requires about 470kB/sec to load/play instantly.
So, I have coded a simple CDN solution and now videos for users from the Western hemisphere will load from a server in the USA and videos for users east of the Atlantic will load from my server in the UK. I now receive download speeds of 480kB/sec which is just enough for the H.264 video and only limited by my broadband connection.
I shall expand upon the CDN code in due course, but for now it is a perfect and fully automated solution requiring no maintenance.
If you experience any troubles with the videos on the site then please let me know by posting a comment below.
H.264 Video in Flash
Adobe announced last year that the beta flash player supported H.264 video, and since then the latest Flash Player 9 release version with H.264 has rolled out and most people seem to have it installed (thanks to MySpace and other large social networks often forcing flash player updates).
H.264 is a more processor intensive codec than previous codecs allowing for much higher quality video to be stored in smaller files. Apple has been making use of this technology for a while now within their .mov offering, but the ability to play H.264 video with the flash player means that web video can easily take advantage of this technology.
I just grabbed the Transformers movie trailer from Apple (in 720p .mov format, encoded with H.264) totalling 105MB, and have plugged it into the flash player below. Check out the full screen quality!
Previously even with ON2 VP6 such quality would of required around a 170MB file.
Update 29th May 2008: I have uploaded three copies of the IronMan movie trailer to demo the quality of H.264 at various bitrates and filesizes. Honestly I have a hard time telling the difference in quality even on a 24" monitor. The 480p seems like a perfect solution for full screen web video.
480p 56mB
720p 121mB
1080p 197mB