Fred's Random Thoughts Frederic Jean's Weblog

The Pains of Broadband Access

Broadband access is a wonderful thing.

You can watch movies, download web pages at blazing speed, download music in a snap. It's almost a necessity for anyone who spend anytime working from home. I really, really enjoy using it. Besides, it makes other things (such as VoIP through Vonage) possible.

There is a downside though. Uploading any sizable content is a pain and takes for ever.

This is due to the design of residential (and most commercial) broadband connections. The assumption is that most users spend a lot more time downloading content than uploading it. Even when the user uploads content, it is usually short and bursty in nature, such as an email or an IM message. This actually holds true for just about every uses.

Where the model breaks down is where one tries to upload a large file to a web site, deploy a web application or to commit a 4MB file to a CVS repository. Like I was doing while typing the bulk of this entry. There's really not much that I can do to resolve this short of getting a symmetrical service, such as SDSL. These services are costly.

So it comes down to either enjoying broadband the way it was designed to be used (mostly downloads, which works well 90% of the time for me) or shelling out a lot of money in order to satisfy the 10% of the time that I need the faster upstream. I guess that I'll stay with my Comcast Broadband connection.

After all, it gives me a good reason to go get some more coffee.

-- Fred

Boulder JUG Meeting

Yesterday evening, I took the time to drive down to the Boulder CU campus to attend a meeting of the Boulder Java User Group. The Boulder JUG meets once a month in the Flemming Law building of CU.

I really enjoyed both presentations. Scott Davis started the presentation with an overview of tools that can be used to do functional testing on a web application. He was followed by Mike Clark, who gave a presentation on project automation. Mike is the author of the Pragmatic Automation book that I mentionned earlier.

Over all, it was a pleasant and informative evening. I will probably go back. Beside, it's a great opportunity to network and meet other Java developers.

--Fred

Boulder JUG Meeting

Yesterday evening, I took the time to drive down to the Boulder CU campus to attend a meeting of the Boulder Java User Group. The Boulder JUG meets once a month in the Flemming Law building of CU.

I really enjoyed both presentations. Scott Davis started the presentation with an overview of tools that can be used to do functional testing on a web application. He was followed by Mike Clark, who gave a presentation on project automation. Mike is the author of the Pragmatic Automation book that I mentionned earlier.

Over all, it was a pleasant and informative evening. I will probably go back. Beside, it's a great opportunity to network and meet other Java developers.

--Fred

Trying New Blog Client

A few weeks ago, I posted about reading my RSS feeds through Thunderbird using the Forumzilla extention. It has been working great. The downside is that I can't quite convince Forumzilla to only show the summary for the postings.

As a result, I have decided to give NetNewsWire another try. I got the 2.0 beta version and I like it so far. I also got a hold of its blog editing client called MarsEdit. I'll keep playing with it and see what happens. I'm hoping that this will make it a lot easier for me to edit and maintain this blog.

One thing that I already enjoy in MarsEdit is the ability to insert HTML tags through shortcuts and through the HTML menu. It makes it so much easier and faster to do it in the editor rather than to do it through Roller's web based text editor.

--Fred

Don't Do It. Just Don't!

Reply to all that is.

It happened again today. Someone asked a question on the wrong internal mailing list. The majority of the members of the mailing list weren't aware that they were on the list since it is automatically generated.

It started pretty innocently. Someone pointed out to the original writer (and 7000 other Sun employees) that this was the wrong alias. Then someone else did it also, soon to be followed by trickle of other good samaritans.

Of course, there's always someone to ask the 7000 members of the list to remove them from the list. This usually ends up being the bulk of the traffic for a while. Followed by more good samaritans pointing out that the users should really go to the mailing list administration tool and unsubscribe themselves.

Since there's no stopping good samaritans telling 7000 people how to unsubscribe, or telling them not to reply to all, I'm going to add my tiny little voice to the mix and tell millions of Internet users not to reply to all.

So you have it. Do not reply to all!

Thank you.

-- Fred

PS: For the record, the best way to avoid a flood of these messages in your inbox is to:

• Do not reply to all.
• Setup a filter that temporarily moves all traffic to that alias to /dev/null