Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Not All Packets Are Equal

The term Net Neutrality covers a lot of hotly debated topics but at its core is whether ISPs should be allowed to treat some traffic differently. In the midst of the discussion, one minor fact seems to have been lost: Not all packets are truly equal. Around 10 years ago, I had DSL with 768kbps down and 128kbps up. I quickly learned that if I did any upload at all, the download speeds suffered greatly.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, January 22, 2015

My Media Setup - Part 3

In my previous post I outlined the issues with using the GoogleTV for playback and I promised to outline my new client. The Hardware Since a list makes this easier, I’ll present the hardware that way: First the computer: I bought an Intel NUC (D54250WYKH) as the base machine. If you wish to get the same, be sure you get a version with the power cord as it is not a standard PC power cord.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, August 7, 2014

My Media Setup - Part 2

Since my last post on the topic, my client and server software have changed. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I now work part time for Plex, though all of my decisions outlined in this post were made before that time. Necessity for the change I started to get frustrated with some of the limitations of the GoogleTV: The platform seemed to become stagnate (and the pending AndroidTV hadn’t been announced yet).

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, August 2, 2014

Using Homebrew

I’ve been using the mac long enough that I’ve gone through several of the package management systems for installing additional open source tools. I started off with Fink which I really liked since it was based on dpkg. Then it became clear that the community had switched to using Mac Ports (formerly Darwin Ports). I was a bit disappointed with this because the package management wasn’t as good as it was with Fink, but it kept pace with the newer OSs better than Fink.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, July 12, 2014

Swift First Impressions

So, for those developers living under a rock for the past 2 weeks, Apple introduced their new programming language Swift. They stated that the language has been in development for 4 years, so it is safe to assume that the language’s definition is fairly stable. Since I wrote several posts on what Objective C can learn from java, such as this most recent one, along with what it has learned, I should at least look at Swift.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, June 14, 2014