Link via Hack a day.

Sometimes, though, the pole-and-wire people get a little bit too creative. An old pole was removed yesterday near my house. Both old and new pole had been in place next to each other for quite a while – giving the utilities the chance to move the wires from the old pole to the new pole. I’m guessing one of the utilities did not get the memo. This is how they ’secured’ some of the wiring that was still on the old pole to the new pole.

That sharp drop is a reduction from 29,049,223 (May) to 21,898,527 (June) active sites. Netcraft explains the drop like this:

A reduction in activity at Microsoft Live Spaces was responsible for the large drop in the number of Microsoft-IIS sites detected.

This makes me wonder exactly how many of those IIS-hosted active sites are actually run by Microsoft (or its partners). The fact that just one of Microsoft’s services was responsible for over 7 million “active sites” – or 25% of the total number of active sites detected as running IIS in May 2009 – makes me wonder how valid the IIS numbers are in the webserver survey. I think this suggests IIS use is far less prominent outside the Microsoft campus than the ‘active sites’ numbers indicate.

SSH is entirely useable, latency between 100 and 300ms. The wireless is offered by GoGo, and apparently they use an EVDO uplink.

If you are so inclined you can pay to watch movies and TV (overpriced IMO, at $8/movie), but the games and music are free. Good music selection too, and you can build your own playlist. I couldn’t keep listening to it though, as the system fed a really annoying high-pitched hiss into my headphones. Also, the switch between PA announcements (of which there are very very few, thankfully) and back made one song just go super super quiet for me, and I couldn’t get normal volume again until I skipped to the next song.

I also saw some funky decoding artefacts on a neighbour’s screen, who was watching a movie. And there are quite a few features that are still to be implemented (the button is there but you just get a message stating .

The travel map is made with Google maps, and it has some nice features – it lets you zoom in/out and recenter the map. It also tells you how fast the plane is going and what the temperature is outside, but curiously an arrival estimate or even a display of the time at the place of arrival is missing. The system has a number of preferences that can be set, but it won’t allow you to switch to metric for the readouts, sadly.

So, all in all this flight has been very pleasant – and productive. I’ll hate to fly with a conventional carrier after this…

Click on a result, and you get this:

There goes my productivity…

Update at 10:18: they finally fixed it. Phew.

Update: here’s the official explanation from Google.

I’ve long wondered why we don’t have a centralized source of 12V or so in the average home. Electronics generally don’t require high voltage, and having each device do it’s own (inefficient) voltage-conversion is just wasteful.

The wiring would have to be thick enough to make sure that the transmission losses are negligible; at 12V that might otherwise be an issue even over short distances. I wonder if that would make such a system prohibitively expensive.