Author Archives: ward

ECN

Posted on January 20, 2007 by ward

Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN, RFC 3168) has been around for quite a while now, but there are still lots of devices and hosts out there that don’t support it properly. For instance, http://www.npr.org, and apparently all HP’s ILO and ILO2 … Continue reading →

Posted in Sysadmin | 3 Comments

MIT’s got a bit of bandwidth

Posted on January 19, 2007 by ward

Interesting interview with Jeff Schiller, MIT’s main network guy, in Network World. MIT is going to activate a direct link to New York city later this month – 72 10G waves. Yes. That’s 720Gbit/s. From Boston. To New York.

Posted in Sysadmin | Leave a comment

the problem with the iPhone

Posted on January 13, 2007 by ward

So Apple announced the iPhone on Tuesday. It looks beautiful with its big screen, and it sounds exciting – both from a user interface perspective (those multi-finger touchscreen commands sound fascinating) as from a technology perspective: it runs (a stripped … Continue reading →

Posted in Completely useless | 1 Comment

the dirty secret of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Posted on January 7, 2007 by ward

The LA Times exposes the Gates Foundation as an unethical investor. Read the article – it’s shocking. They are trying to do all this good in the world, and at the same time they have their enormous assets invested in … Continue reading →

Posted in Finance/SRI | Leave a comment

of IE and Firefox

Posted on January 5, 2007 by ward

Brian Krebs put up an excellent article at the Washington Post, analyzing how many days in 2006 IE was vulnerable because of critical, unpatched security problems for which documentation and/or exploit code was available online. IE’s record is abysmal: 284 … Continue reading →

Posted in Completely clueless, Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

petition: the council of the european union – lack of open standards

Posted on January 1, 2007 by ward

The Council of the European Union streams some of its meetings and press conferences online. Unfortunately, that streaming is done in Windows Media format. They barely support browsers other than IE, and then only on Windows and Mac OS X. … Continue reading →

Posted in Completely clueless, Open Standards | 1 Comment

the web 2.0 hype

Posted on December 16, 2006 by ward

This article on the Register’s development site is pretty interesting. To be honest I don’t really understand the whole web 2.0 hype – for me Ajax is just a tool to make web-based interfaces more user friendly. A future of … Continue reading →

Posted in Everything else | Leave a comment

Free Ryzom. It’s time.

Posted on December 13, 2006 by ward

Several other bloggers have written about the Free Ryzom campaign. In a nutshell, Nevrax, the French company that wrote Ryzom and is running the game is going bankrupt. Not because the game is not good – check out the free … Continue reading →

Posted in Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

the music industry

Posted on December 10, 2006 by ward

So, in one week the music industry has managed to get signatures from artists that are dead in support of a (retroactive!) copyright extension in the UK, and now the RIAA is trying to lower the royalties it pays to … Continue reading →

Posted in Completely clueless, Copyright, patents, and trademarks | Leave a comment

Linksys WRT54GL

Posted on December 8, 2006 by ward

I’ve been a fan of the Linksys WRT54 series of wireless routers for quite a while now. They are cheap, and you can replace the firmware with the excellent DD-WRT or Openwrt, which are both GPL’d GNU/Linux distributions for the … Continue reading →

Posted in Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment