Posts Tagged ‘network’

Social Diseases: Conditional Relationships


2009
01.24

Society is a disease. It poisons natural thought process, thus influencing the body pain and suffering more often than not. Its establishment of conventions and illusive rules hinder human’s natural instincts from execution. The feeling of being not able to act the way you want to is suffocating and demoralizing.

Society is simply a network running in a system. Obviously, that system is imperfect because a person like me exists (the anomaly). Did I just remind everyone of The Matrix? Slightly. It is indeed a movie splurged with massive amount of colliding philosophical ideas. Before I get off topic, conditional relationship is one way to interconnect each individual within the system.

Conditional relationship is a relationship created between two or more people. It is not inborn. It is famously known as romantic relationship. I categorize it to be conditional because a condition must pre-exist before the relationship is created and maintained. Once a condition is not met, the relationship is not created or if it is violated, the relationship is broken. Continuity in preserving the condition is the main goal for this relationship more than the relationship itself.

How is a conditional relationship developed? There are many ways to create such connection. Many have coined witty sentences to describe or relate a development of romance. The latest I’ve read (from Joanna’s YM status) was about colliding personalities creating a chemical reaction that eventually led to a formation of one (a connection of many is considerably singular) entity. Now that sounds scientifically cool, but a substance can still be broken up into its original state (into elements) in degraded quality.

In a romantic relationship, at least one side must work on preserving the relationship. That is not easy as well as ineffective. One must sacrifice to make the other happy. In my small little world, sacrifice is a no no. Thus, this relationship is a disease to mankind. Since it is not inborn, it can be avoided and can be severed. It is the easiest phase in man’s journey to complete detachment. This ad hoc connection is the easiest to disconnect.

Eee Box


2008
11.03

I had to wait a week before writing about the latest addition in my network — the ASUS Eee Box. If I may, I would say that the Eee Box is ASUS’ answer to Apple’s Mini PC; only smaller. The unit weighs 3lbs and is 1-inch thick (8.8×7x1) only. It comes with two mounts — one is for desktop mount and the other is a wall mount or like what ASUS advertises, the unit is mounted behind an LCD monitor to get the effect of “no box PC”. The box comes with wired keyboard and mouse. Of course if you chose the wireless route, you can do so because the machine already comes with wireless adapter (and antenna for range maximization). Knowing me, this featureis of course disabled. The machine is also very quiet and does not take up so much power consumption. The Box is also DVI ready so if your monitor has DVI, that would be great. For an average user, it won’t be a difficult computing because the Box is pre-installed with Windows XP Home Edition.

The Box!!!

The Box!!!

Why did I have to purchase this gadget? For one, I wanted to test it and it’s cheap enough to experiment with. I plan to install other *NIX flavored OS in it instead of Windows. I also needed a PC that can serve MySQL database and it shouldn’t take space in my workspace and won’t consume so much power. Eee Box is the perfect specimen. The Box has been running since I bought it an a few restarts were executed because of Windows’ unfailing releases of bug fixes (don’t they get tired of this why not release a less buggy software instead).

I only recommend the  Box to an average user. Average I mean a user who only does: web browsing, chat, email, music, photos, occasional videos, word processing. I don’t prefer this to a hardcore user who may wish to do audio-visual editing and multi-tasking applications although it’s hyper-threading. However, it’s enough for daily computing.

Get Dropbox


2008
10.15

It’s been a few years now that I’ve pondered how to share faxes with our office overseas. Before anyone criticizes the problem and offer a solution of CIF or Exchange routing, the problem is not as simple as that. Here’s the best simplification I can offer of the problem:

  1. Given 2 sites. Let HQ be the headquarter & XO be the offsite location.
  2. Given incoming faxes only.
  3. Faxes must be sorted according to its content. The sorting is manually done (drag & drop) into folders. Let’s say we have to sort into 3 folders, A, B, and C. These folders must be sorted by Day, Month, Year. That gives us 4-levels of heirarchy.
  4. HQ and XO may sort the faxes interchangeably.
  5. HQ must always have all files, thus it makes sense that files are hosted by HQ. XO does not need to have all files; only the files they need.
  6. Hierarchy must always be preserved.
  7. Both sites should be able to print faxes anytime they want.
  8. Low cost solution.
To satisfy my readers who are itching to recommend Goldmine or Exchange routing, how are you going to sort 300-500 faxes daily and easily access them when needed?
My solution was the use of Terminal Services. The disadvantages are:
  1. Expensive because of licensing, so I had to resort in limited users.
  2. Since the setup is minimal (click me), the resources are lacking which causes sluggish performance. That means, access is very slow. TS is already slow itself.
  3. Maintenance is too much of a hassle.
  4. It’s annoying to access RD in order to check faxes.
Experimental Solution
The latest solution I thought of is using Dropbox. The first 2GB is free and subscription is only $10/month @ 50GB. Therefore, I have 2GB of test space before implementing the logistics. Faxes will still be archived and hosted by HQ then XO will sync from it. XO must be restricted from deletion. Although Dropbox has the recovery feature that is a failsafe in case someone in XO’s end is trigger-happy (my instantaneous backup in HQ’s end will still remain of course; I’m paranoid).
With DP, the heirarchy is preserved, faxes can be easily accessed by both parties because the files will be locally (network scope) available to them. Since XO does not need the files, HQ will do deletion (folders have to be moved to reduce clutter in the workspace — imagine 30 folders when you only need the last 7 days.)

Smart Plug ‘N Talk


2008
09.03

I can finally come out of the shell and talk about Smart’s latest technology release — Plug ‘n Talk. I met with Smart representatives earlier today and I was able to witness a demonstration of this very cool gadget. It is a hybrid VoIP unit. In a nutshell, the unit which is essentially a thumbdrive accepts a Smart Buddy Simcard, plugged into a Windows computer with internet connection and can take outgoing and incoming voice calls and SMS/MMS messages incurring Philippine local rates. The hybrid nature of the technology is derived from the model whereas the party using the unit uses an over-IP technology which connects to Smart’s network in the Philippines and from there a circuit-switch communication occurs. The reciprocal applies when the unit becomes the receiver. In other words, it’s a VoIP-Circuit-switch technology.

Though I know the launch date, I will not provide that information as well as any pricing. I’m just to excited to post the technology’s overall concept. For more information, visit the hyperlinked site above.

During the demonstration, the call is quite loud and clear, however I won’t be too optimistic. There still is that VoIP characteristic. I’m only after the text messaging because it only costs P1/outgoing message to any Smart/TNT and P2 for Globe/TM/Sun and the MMS which costs the same as what they charge in the Philippines. I’ll have my dongle hooked into my PC and find TXTM8S.

Fios’ Actiontec As MoCA Bridge


2008
08.20

I have had Verizon FiOS for more than a year now and as the service areas continue to grow, with the technology’s excellent service, I’m sure a lot have signed up for it. If Verizon provides you with an Actiontec modem/router then let me advice you to purchase another router because Actiontec will drive you crazy in the long run. I have 10mbps/3mbps down/up throughput and I download a lot as in I average 1GB/day (that’s a modest number). They aren’t illegal downloads per sé because they are distributed openly (KDrama). If I have more than 3 huge files in my μTorrent (or any other bittorrent client), others in my network wouldn’t have Internet access. That’s because I have NAT running and the routing table in Actiontec is not enough to handle huge amount of traffic. Therefore, overloaded packets are dropped giving my users nil resource. (more…)

WiFi Mobile Carrier


2008
08.13

As I posted a few weeks back, I switched my mobile carrier from Sprint to T-Mobile. With the switch I purchased a Nokia 6301 unit. I spend most of the time in our basement because that’s my room. It’s an underground basement and network signal from any mobile carrier is very faint or nil. Most of the time, I had to go to a spot in order to get a signal. It’s frustrating especially if  I’m expecting an urgent call. Thanks to T-Mobile and Nokia, my problem is solved. (more…)

Rice Shortage


2008
07.14

Kalam is a public service documentary by a Philippine television network GMA. The episode discussed the rice shortage facing the world and especially the Philippines. The show was very thorough in discussing the causes and possible outcome of the crisis facing the world today. I will discuss and give my two cents on some of the issues. (more…)