Posted on: December 31st, 2011 by Famous Phil

It’s now time for the third(?) annual best/worst moments that I’ve made note of over the past year of my life.  Unlike previous years where I threw things together at the last minute, this year, some (limited) advanced planning was made for this blog.  Hopefully in future years, additional planning will make this traditional post actually worth reading.  For this year, nonetheless, you’re going to have to suffer with the traditional thrown together at the last minute effect…

This year started like many others that I’ve had, a new season of learning (at college) and a bunch of side projects that never seemed to take off the ground where they were conceived.  As the year progressed, I started looking into my future and applied to several top technology companies, got several callbacks, and turned down several offers.  I finally found an offer that I could live with in New York City in July and I quickly relocated, but not before I got my two college degrees in Computer Science (both an MS, and a BS).  If there is one major thing I learned about the job market, Computer Science is a very valuable degree to have, but you still have to be persistent to land the job that you want!

Over the past year in my current job, I’ve been working on two major projects, one which is a social clothing site, www.wearingsocial.com which was finished back in August with about 2 weeks of effort.  The other more potent project is www.unroll.me, which is currently in a limited beta testing stage, it has gotten press on life hacker among other sites.  Unroll.me is an email scanning engine that finds subscriptions in your email inbox and automatically clicks the unsubscribe link (or numerous other methods that can be used to unsubscribe).  At this point in time, as its primary algorithm developer, I’d say that it is very accurate(90%+) in detecting unsubscribe emails and links, and it is fairly good (70%+) at actually unsubscribing from those emails.  For the abilities of computers, and how many exceptions that I’ve written into the application, I’m personally very impressed at its abilities to find and unsubscribe from those nasty subscription emails!  Of course, this application is constantly being improved by myself and others to ensure that it becomes much better than it currently is!

Now for something that I’ve been very quiet about over the past 6 months: On my own, I’ve been working on a new application that basically wakes me up in the morning.  I find that my view of the outside world isn’t very good in the morning, and I always end up forgetting my umbrella, etc when leaving for work.  So I’ve been developing an application in my spare time that can call my phone (landline, cellphone, etc) and tell me what time it is and give me a quick overview of today’s weather so that I can realize I need to bring an umbrella, dress up, etc.  Once the initial version is released, I will consider adding abilities to connect to an email todo list, calendar, etc and read appointments off, similar to Apple’s Siri for iPhone.  Of course, other ideas will also be welcome to those who want to use this application.  The application is complete functionally, but is still waiting on its design which should be done within the next month, once it’s done; I will be releasing it here on FamousPhil.com and Matthouse.us.  Of course, you can always check the project’s website to see if it is released: http://www.personalwakeup.com.

Finally, unless it is raining after 8pm EST, I will be attending the NYC Times Square New Years celebration with friends.

So with not much more to say, now for my traditional videos highlighting the best/worst YouTube videos of the year 2011!  As always, thanks for reading, and here is to a very good new year!  Welcome to 2012!

Here is a list of memorable videos (unfortunately, embedding is disabled on most videos now so I’ve provided links):

Oh the places you’ll (Actually) go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIP8lFWa_mg
Rescue Japan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk7fBLuLj5I&NR=1&feature=fvwp
High School Sucks – The Musical: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWy_uauR-6k&hd=1
Homecoming Rally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GiaEs8Myfc&hd=1
The Stereotypes Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCgx8zM3woQ&feature=relmfu
Gabriel Iglaeseas- Krispy Kreme Doughnuts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a77Dw3tNv8o
Adele – Someone Like You – Piano By Ear: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8b4_kGuj7k&feature=related
I can’t remember if I posted this last year, but I really like it: Stand by Me | Playing for Change – Song around the world: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM&feature=relmfu

And who can forget the worst video of the year, it originally had millions of dislikes until it was taken down and moved to another account to soften the dislikes:
Rebecca Black – Friday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfVsfOSbJY0

Jibjab’s video this year was mediocre, but I’ll post the link anyways: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zls4Ao3GyM

Posted in My Site, Personal
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Posted on: September 30th, 2011 by Famous Phil

I typically don’t post more personal things on my website, but my college degree is one of the few exceptions that I was considering posting (depending on what information it gives away).  Surprisingly, my degree doesn’t reveal much of anything that you couldn’t find out about me by looking at my resume or just my website’s WHOIS information, so I decided that I’d post a picture of the two sheets of paper that cost oh so much money to buy. A lot of hard work went into these two sheets of paper, so I’m very proud of them and my accomplishments and pain that they represent I felt that they deserved their own blog post If you’re curious, my major is Computer Science, with a concentration in High Throughput Computing for my Masters.

Tags: Bachelors, computer science, degree, Masters, Phiip Matuskiewicz, science
Posted in My Site, Personal, Student Life
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Posted on: September 21st, 2011 by Famous Phil

Last week, I finally broke down and got an iPad.  I did this partially because I wanted a new toy, and partially because I wanted to find out what the hype is with this gadget.  I’ve had several recommendations saying that I should buy one from many friends in the past, so I finally took the advice and jumped head into a product that I probably wouldn’t have looked at without the positive encouragement.  The final piece that really motivated me to get this product was that I would like to learn to develop for it, and I’ve found that the only way to effectively develop for anything, denoted X, is to be an active user of X.

After a week with the device, it makes sense to finally make an unbiased review of it.  When I first got home with it, I was really impressed with the design of the packaging.  Only Apple would put the iPad into a backpack style bag that’s really durable to carry out of the store, in addition, the packaging for the iPad was also well thought out.  There were tabs that easily allowed it to be pulled out of the box (no turning the box upside down, etc to remove it).  So after the unpackaging of it, I plugged it in to find that I needed to install iTunes to set it up.  This has got to be one of the worst things about Apple products, because I cannot stand iTunes, it’s just so bloated, and I manage my music library through other means!  Anyways, I installed iTunes and accepted the license agreement.  I couldn’t do much else though because iTunes couldn’t connect to my AppleID account because I firewall my internal network very heavily (which is fine).  Accepting the license agreement was enough to get the device to work without a computer; I quickly enabled the 3g access through Verizon and signed into the Apple Store using the 3g connection.

My first impression of the 3g access on my iPad was a very positive one, I actually get a little signal on the Manhattan, NY Subway which most phones I’ve used don’t even get, and I think this is because the antenna on the iPad is bigger.  This signal is just enough to check email and such, nothing too demanding.  I also get roughly 1.7Mbps down, and .42Mbps up on the 3g connection which is quite good for a Verizon mobile connection (EvDO at least, LTE would be pretty crappy).  I also love the fact that 3g is built in… so there is no tethering or anything of that sort.  Unfortunately, there are a few downfalls to the 3g model.  The first is that it will cost more and there is no way to sign up for a long term contract to get a big discount on the device (unlike phones).  I was pleased to find that the 2GB mobile data plan was only $30/month, which is well within my price range and usage range.  There are several other plans as well that are just as great.  If I were to recommend an iPad to anyone, I would strongly suggest the 3g model, just because you can use it anywhere without having to worry about being within range of a wireless signal.

I bought the smart magnetic cover for my IPad because I figured it would adequately protect it.  Although it does that, it really helps make the unit more dirty, especially if you goto a restaurant and put it on the table, since the cover that touches the screen also touches the table unless you put it in that triangle stand arrangement.  For general movement, the cover does a good job at protecting the screen.  Looking back, I wouldn’t change the decision to get the smart cover, but I do need to look into a carrying case / solution for this iPad.  It is too big to carry in a pocket, but it’s too small to put into my laptop case, and that presents a problem.  I currently carry it around on my side everywhere, which isn’t awful, but does make me more of a target when annoying people ask for money on the streets (it is NYC after all).  I haven’t quite found the perfect solution to this yet, but I’m sure it will come with time and more exposure to my options.

Apple is known for their App Store, and I someday hope to make some apps that appear in it.  For now, I downloaded several apps that made sense for my particular usage of the iPad… I’m going to just briefly mention them now.  The first application I got was Outlook Mail Pro by Code Before Dawn, which was meant to give a very similar interface to Outlook.  It works well for mail because the interface is well thought out (perhaps a bit better than the default mail app’s interface), but I still prefer using the built in Mail Application support for Exchange when it comes to the calendar, contacts, and task list access.  I also bought the iTap RDP application for remote desktop; it saves passwords and allows several bookmarks to remote desktops.  I use this for connecting to my remote windows computer for Trillian instant messaging and handling other issues that only a true computer can do.  Over 3g, the speed is phenomenal for response times to clicks and such.  I also bought the Remoter VNC application which supports SSH, Telnet, VNC, and other remote access protocols.  Remoter uses Putty keys for authentication which is why I sprung for this application over its competitors, and so far I’m very happy with it.  Other free apps that I got were Facebook, speed test, Skype, yelp (restaurant ratings), and Sirus XM (online subscription required).  Remember that Skype and Sirius will use a lot of data, so I tend to use Wi-Fi when I use those apps.  I did try a video chat on the Skype application and I believe that it works better on my iPad than it does on my main computer!

I will now go onto usability of the iPad.  When I first got the iPad, I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get used to the keyboard.  Honestly, at first, it was difficult to get used to since there is no bump on the F and J keys (home keys), so you have to look down to place your hands.  It was also weird not being able to rest my hands on the keys.  Overall though, I did quickly adjust to it and even with big hands, I can type fairly well on the keyboard.  One thing I did notice is at first my hands would always drift away and hit the wrong keys, but somehow that has gotten far better, I’m not sure if Apple is doing error correction or if I’m just getting better at keeping my hands in a consistent position while typing.  The second usability issue was the limited nature of most Apple products; fortunately, I haven’t hit any of these limitations that I couldn’t work around (e.g. remote desktop).  So far, my iPad is quickly replacing most of my computers since I’m quite used to it now (I’m actually typing this up on my iPad).  The battery life on the iPad is great, I haven’t had a single issue with battery life, and the lowest I was able to get the percentage to was 65% remaining, and that was after a full day of using it while visiting several parts of Manhattan.  This segue takes us into a side topic about the maps application.  So far, the iPad tends to be more reliable than my phone when it comes to placing a dot on the built in map telling me exactly where I’m at.

Overall, I love how fast the iPad is to display anything.  Unlike other things I’ve used, I can usually click something on the iPad and it loads instantly with very little delay.  I really like this about most Apple products and I wish that other competitors (e.g. Android) could make similar advancements in speeds for embedded devices.  Oh well, I’m sure that Google and their partners are working on this, and all good things take time to perfect.

So there you have it!  Overall, I would recommend the iPad to anyone, but at the same time, I really do think that you have to take the plunge yourself to discover if it is right for you.  I took the chance (with a 14 day return policy), and I found out that I definitely have great uses for my iPad, and I’m quickly learning why others strongly recommend it.

As always, thanks for reading, and I hope to post more frequently now that things are settling down in my life and are starting to become the same old routine, just another day.  I have a few interesting blogs on business and high traffic hosting coming soon, I just need the time to thoroughly review what I’ve already written for them so that they’re as clean and concise as possible.

Also, in the near future, FamousPhil will be getting a new, professional design (mobile and full computer oriented!), so that is something that you can look forward to!

Tags: Apple, iPad, review
Posted in Mobile Technology, Personal, Technology
|| 2 Comments »

Posted on: August 6th, 2011 by Famous Phil

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been ignoring my website as of late (and for good reason).  I recently got a job in the big apple and things happened really quickly (actually too quickly for my liking, but I went along with it).  I thought that I’d take the time (now that I’m fully moved and things are finally settling down ever so slightly) to blog about my experience and give some pointers about my experiences that I have had so far so that others may learn from them (without actually going through them).

First, I suppose I should talk about how I found my job.  Ever since February, I knew that I wanted a job somewhere warm that dealt with Systems Administration.  I applied to several places all over California, Texas, and Florida (I’d say I sent at least 75 resumes to each state).  Unfortunately, I was living in New York with no experience, just a Masters Degree out of school.  Naturally, companies don’t want to take a chance on someone moving then getting homesick and things like that.  So I think I got a single private company callback, and Google also showed interest.  Unfortunately, none of those worked out.  With knowledge that my best friend (John) was going to find a job in NYC, I decided to open my job search to there (its cold, but maybe I could get a good paying System Admin job).

So I submitted about 200 resumes to NYC jobs in total.  Once again, the relocation bit was against me, but I decided to go ahead anyways and push.  I was fortunate to get several callbacks, interestingly enough, all from established start up companies in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Overpass) in Brooklyn.  I ended up interviewing for two of those companies (both paid for my flight out and a night), unfortunately neither company turned into an offer, I’m thinking that was because of my concerns about living expenses.  Then I sent out a few more resumes to more companies and this time I got involved in the interview process for 3 companies.  At the same time, my friend from UB came to me and asked me to talk to his boss.  After a 30 minute conversation one day with his boss, I had my first offer that I felt safe accepting, but it was in software development.  This proves my theory that it isn’t what you know, its who you know that gets you a job, so use your contacts wisely!  Furthermore, after you get in, it is what you know that will carry you far in a company, I’m already seeing this.  So moving on, that same day, I got two other offers (from the 3 companies I was currently interviewing with), one of which I felt that I might be able to accept too (it was less than the development position), but it was in System Administration.  This just goes to show that when it rains, it pours (if you’ve heard that saying).  So, without too much difficulty, I decided ultimately to take the Software Development position because it offered a lot of help relocating to the city (something i was very concerned about) and I felt that it might be wise to put my degree to work (after all, I did pay a lot for it!), also it was for 3 months, which I felt would be a reasonable amount of time to figure out what I really want to do in life (whether it be sticking with the job or moving to Systems Administration by finding a local job).

So after signing onto my programming job, I was given options for housing and I ended up with a broker (who is friends with my boss), and I got a decent studio apartment in Chelsea (perhaps a bit costly, but it is located next to everything just about and I’m not kidding).  Little did I know that apartments in the Lower to Mid Manhattan are hard to get, so I’m glad that my boss helped there.  I also feel very safe where I live, probably because there are so many people here all the time.  Its also very cool that I can walk to Times Square in about 20 minutes (if that), I live on the same avenue.  So now for some advice, if you don’t know much about living in the city, or you plan on moving, I strongly suggest using a broker, yes they typically charge 1 month’s rent, but they can get you something that isn’t too bad.  Looking back, I feel that I am paying a bit too much for rent and the upfront costs were enormous (basically 4 months rent), but in the end, I ended up with something decent.

So now onto some aspects about job contracts.  When I first started my job (its actually at a start up company), I thought that I would get about a 40 hour week and be able to come home at night to relax.  Unfortunately, I was completely wrong about that (although I’m not too upset about that), and now I will discuss my mistakes and assumptions.  My classification is an “independent contractor”, meaning that I’m assigned jobs (that I typically agree to doing by a deadline) and I have to get them done by that deadline, regardless of time commitment.  In my current experience, if you want a real 40 hour / week job, make sure that it is in your contract.  Furthermore, Independent contractors don’t get benefits (or many benefits) unlike employees, but in return, they make far more in the end.  Being an employee or independent contractor is definitely a personal choice that you should consider thoroughly before just signing to any job.  My second misunderstanding was that I wanted to work for a start up company.  Typically, start up companies require far more time commitment from employees, but in the long run, if they take off, those employees that put in all that time will never have to worry about their jobs or getting a good paycheck ever in the future.  I walked into this thinking that my 40 hour week was guaranteed, but I learned otherwise.  I’m giving you this information so that you might be able to make an informed decision without learning what your decision was unexpectedly.

In the end, I am actually very happy about accepting this development job, and I don’t really mind the time commitment because my commute to work is very short (although it is a very long work week).  I’m working with my employer to put in time at home and make reasonable deadlines, and so far its doing a lot of good, and they’re working with me to make me a part time System Administrator.  Keep in mind though that I’m still young and I still like the college model of working on different things all the time.  I’m guessing in a few more years, I will want to become an employee at a big company where I begin focusing on a few specific tasks with steady work hours and such, but for now, things really aren’t that bad.  Who knows, maybe within the next few months, I will interview at some bigger companies and see if I think I might fit better in that model, but for now, I’m still very satisfied and happy with the way things worked out.

So in conclusion, I know that my thoughts are usually scrambled, but I hope that anyone looking for a job learned some of the things you need to decide on before accepting a job and moving.  I recommend deciding whether you want to work for an established company or start up first, then only apply to one group or the other.  Start ups can be very rewarding, but definitely expect long hours.  In addition, my first thought was 80k/year was the bare minimum that I would need to live in the city and get by, but in reality, for my situation, this figure is more like 62k/year.  I also should mention that in my case (and most of my friends’ cases), it took about 2 months to find a job out of college, so if you’re looking, keep looking for a job and don’t give up hope.  Things always work out one way or another!

A few final notes, I posted some pictures of NYC on my pictures page, feel free to look through them  Also, since I now have a full time job, I don’t know how much time I will have for my blog.  I hope to at least post once / week, but it may drop to twice / month based on how busy I am.  I hate to neglect my blog so much, but my real job is a priority.

Tags: Company, Job, Moving, NYC, Start up
Posted in Personal
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Posted on: May 26th, 2011 by Famous Phil

On August 30, 2009, I made a blog post about my x10 home automation system, but I didn’t really cover it in depth enough to satisfy myself.  Therefore, I decided to revisit the topic from that blog (which is here).  This blog contains a video detailing the system that I ended up with during my University experience.  I expect that my future home will be much more automated than this video shows.  In order to appreciate the video, I decided to write some content to supplement what I talk about in the video, which is below.

In 2009, I came up with the first version of my light control system.  This consisted of a clapper, a set of cheap computer speakers, and an audio recording of my clapping.  My original system used a web interface to have the speakers (connected to the web server / site) clap when I wanted the lights to come on.  This quickly became unmanageable since I couldn’t monitor the states of the lights without a webcam monitoring my room (and I wasn’t thrilled about securing a webcam in my room that could be hacked into).  This lead into X10 which has done wonders for me over the course of the past two years.

Its funny remembering back to when I first got an x10 system, because the x10 website doesn’t look like your average store, it looks more like an adult site with lots of flashy banners (ha ha).  I do have to admit, with x10, the initial impression was very deceiving for me, since their products are really good!  Anyways, moving on, My x10 system consists of a USB transceiver module (CM15A located here) which connects to my windows server that runs a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP).  In addition, I have several lamp modules, appliance modules, and remote control wall switches (which wirelessly communicate to the CM15A).

As for the software, I installed the ActiveHome software onto my server (that came with the CM15A).  This software installs a few application libraries (dlls) which enabled programmatic access to the CM15A to send and receive x10 commands over the power lines ran in my apartment.  Using this api, I wrote a quick program that makes a command line based program that can run certain commands.  I have to note that ActiveHome includes a default command line executable, but this didn’t have all the functionality that I wanted, most notably output in HTML for my web interface.  With the executable I wrote, I simply have the apache web server run the command as a local user which sends the x10 signals over the power lines ran in my apartment.  I should note that I considered using ASP.net which could interface with the API directly, but at the time I wasn’t very familiar with ASP.net and I wanted to use PHP.  I didn’t use IIS because I didn’t have the time to go permissions hunting to figure out why PHP wasn’t allowed to run programs as a local user on the web server through IIS.  Luckily a standard WAMP install that included Apache and PHP worked out of the box with little configuration.  The WAMP that I used was Vertrigo.

For the IR receiver that controls my projector, I use a USB-UIRT that I found on Ebay (I didn’t feel like waiting the estimated 6 weeks at the time for a new one).  Fortunately, the executable program that was included could send and receive signals from the USB-UIRT that I required, so I wrote some PHP that invokes it for the commands I used.

In 2009, I mentioned that voice control would make its way into my system.  I have to admit that it did!  Unfortunately, it didn’t last long because of all the bugs that I ran into.  I used the Microsoft speech libraries with a program called SmartButler, which could listen for speech commands and run commands on my server.  I initially used a cheap computer microphone, but quickly found that the interference in the audio made commands very inaccurate, and furthermore, if I held a conversation in the room, my lights would act up!  I figured that a USB professional Condenser Microphone would fix the problem, so I quickly ordered one and integrated it into my system.  This did significantly improve the quality of my system, but normal conversations would still occasionally trigger some of my web control panel controls inaccurately.  The final straw that broke the camel’s back (and caused this system to get removed) was when my RA (resident advisor), Stephanie came into the room, said hello to me and my lights went out of control (since I didn’t train it for a higher pitched, female voice, I’d assume).  I’d like to approach this problem in the future when I get the time to do it properly, but until then, I’ve been satisfied with web control panels that both my smartphone and computer can access.

Finally, at the very end of my video, I took a moment to show my Linksys PAP Adapter (VoIP, Voice over IP).  This works through a service from voip.ms.  Voip.ms is a prepaid service for VoIP adapters that allows you to buy a phone number for a very reasonable price (even 800 numbers).  They also have really reasonable rates and really good control for those phone numbers.  I thought I’d provide a plug for them since they are really good.

I would like to add that the Linksys adapter required an unfirewalled IP address to work properly (for incoming calls) in my experience.  It does have a NAT mode for this situation, but the university firewall constantly crushed this mode.  To get around this problem (and allow my web server for x10 to work properly), I implemented OpenVPN on my network and pulled in several public IP addresses and left them unfirewalled.  This solution worked well for me at UB, and I documented it fairly well in my OpenVPN post.

With nothing more to mention on the topic, here is the video that details my light control system and some other stuff.

Of course, I made many bloopers in this video (I improvised a lot!), so I thought the bloopers video would be appropriate.  Warning, there is a little language in it and the audio isn’t exactly balanced.

Disclaimer: I was not paid to endorse any of the products above (and I’m never paid to do that!).  I like to think that when I make a recommendation, it carries a lot of weight with it, which it should!

Tags: apache, home automation, light control, linksys, php, smartbutler, usb-uirt, Voice Control, voip, wamp, x10, youtube
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site, Personal, Programming, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: May 13th, 2011 by Famous Phil

It has definitely been a long time since I last updated my blog.  Between research, classes, and finding time for sleep in between, I ended up neglecting this blog.  I decided that instead of doing a formal post, I would instead do a keep-alive post that will give you an idea of what to look forward to over the next couple of weeks as I continue to catch up on server maintenance and such.  I’d also like to take a moment to thank my reader base which recently surpassed 5,000 unique readers each month!  You are a huge inspiration for my continued blogging about problems that I come across and solve!

Upcoming Topics:

1. This blog will begin featuring youtube videos from random users across the world.  I’ve been spending a great deal of time lately on youtube learning about optimizations to live systems that serve websites and such and I find random videos off from those that are really cool.

2. A regular expression reference blog… regexps constantly annoy me and I still can’t remember them.  This blog is still on hold while I continue finding good references for them, so I’d expect this to come sometime in mid-late June.

3. Hadoop installation (pseudo-distributed, possibly distributed) on Ubuntu 11.04… I did a full installation and documented it somewhat.  I feel that this might benefit my readers a little bit.

4. Hadoop Mapreduce implementation of Dijkstra’s algorithm (shortest path, breadth first search on a graph).  I had to do this for a course I took last semester and since I had a lot of difficulty finding how to do it properly, I thought I’d blog about how its done.

5. A video summing up my experiences at UB.  Now that I’m done, I’ve been wanting to take some time to have a video produced so that I can remember what it was like to graduate.  I don’t want this video to be anything like my Numa dance that was posted ages ago, or any of the other videos I produced a long time ago, but at the same time I don’t want it to be boring either.  I’m still coming up with ideas, but its production is in the works and hopefully will happen sometime next week with nice weather and lots of help.  My new camcorder says it helps prevent shaky video, so I should be good there

6. Office web apps review – I’ve been looking into getting a private cloud set up with online applications to access my files with the help of sharepoint.  Given that I already run an Exchange 2010 server, I don’t foresee any issues adding a new server to my fleet of servers.  Unfortunately, I didn’t document the Exchange installation I did, but I hope to document my sharepoint experiences and post it to my blog here.

We will see how the above tasks materialize, but I feel that they will happen with more certainty now that I’ve made them public

As part of my Youtube series, I decided that I’d publicize the first of many videos that I’d like to share!  The following video was produced by UBC, and I must say, its awesome!

As always, thanks for reading!

Posted in Personal
|| 1 Comment »

Posted on: April 8th, 2011 by Famous Phil

This blog revisits my blog posts about Evdo and Satellite based internet.  You can view my original series here: My Internet Usage History : Using a 10′ satellite dish to obtain a cell phone signal :: Technically comparing Evdo, Satellite, and Dialup.  I’d especially recommend reading the comparison blog before continuing on with this post.

About a month ago now, I interviewed at Google in Mountain View, California (I can’t elaborate at this time), and I had the privilege of flying with Southwest who offers Wifi on their long flights across the US.  I thought I’d append to my original technical comparison blog with some additional speed tests.  Southwest uses Hughesnet for their in-air internet service, so I expect that these results would be very similar to Hughesnet on the ground.

I’d first like to draw your attention to some simple pings (a test that tells us the time it takes for an internet data packet to travel to and from a computer on the internet / network).  The pings took place somewhere over Nebraska.  Matthouse.us is located in Atlanta, and int.matthouse.us is located in Chicago.  Both of these servers are serviced by a mixture of Level 3, Cogent, and other smaller providers (redundant links).

PING matthouse.us (98.142.216.195): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 98.142.216.195: icmp_seq=0 ttl=44 time=835.283 ms
64 bytes from 98.142.216.195: icmp_seq=1 ttl=44 time=879.877 ms
64 bytes from 98.142.216.195: icmp_seq=2 ttl=44 time=924.125 ms
— matthouse.us ping statistics —
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 835.283/879.762/924.125/36.270 ms

PING int.matthouse.us (206.217.130.77): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 206.217.130.77: icmp_seq=0 ttl=40 time=835.422 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
64 bytes from 206.217.130.77: icmp_seq=1 ttl=40 time=1153.039 ms
64 bytes from 206.217.130.77: icmp_seq=2 ttl=40 time=923.749 ms
64 bytes from 206.217.130.77: icmp_seq=3 ttl=40 time=758.116 ms
— int.matthouse.us ping statistics —
5 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 20.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 758.116/917.582/1153.039/148.035 ms

The speed test on Southwest around the time I took the above pings:

Overall, this isn’t bad, considering that I was going at 500mph or so at about 37,000 feet.

Finally, I thought it would be cool to share a speed test directly from Google’s wireless network in Mountain View!  I was impressed by their network, although I wasn’t surprised.  Google invests a lot into their network since they have a lot of traffic that they have to deal with!

Tags: Google, internet, southwest, speed, speedtest, wifi
Posted in Personal, Technology
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Posted on: February 16th, 2011 by Famous Phil

It seems like I buy a new computer at least once or twice a year because I have a problem with using outdated technology.  Typically, I don’t throw money at a computer that “looks” good (unlike many of my friends).  In matter of fact, I truly hate the typical question, “what computer should I buy?”  The reason for this is because I first have to figure out what the computer will be tasked with, and then, I have to learn what the latest technology is and if it is worth the cost.  It typically takes me a few weeks to a month to have a solid answer for this question.

Last summer, I was looking for a new computer to replace a 12” HP tablet PC that I owned.  I wanted the new computer to be mobile, have suitable graphics; processing power and much better battery life (the hour I got out of the tablet was worthless).  I settled on a netbook from Dell.  It did exactly what I needed although it lacked a big enough screen for any real usability.  I typically use my mobile laptop as a dummy terminal that connects to remote systems via Remote Desktop or SSH.  I used the netbook for a few months and told myself that I need something that better fits my requirements.  After a long search, typical PCs turned up nothing particularly interesting, although I typically require Windows 7 since a majority of my licensed software requires Windows.

I remember meeting up with some friends who are “mac boys” as I like to nickname them last October.  They showed me how great the Mac OS is, and I have to admit that some of the features they showed were nice.  This along with the fact that I wasn’t really knowledgeable about Apple convinced me to look into an Apple brand computer.  I’d like to bring to mind that up until this point, I had very little experience with Macs so I felt that to help aid my extensive administration knowledge, a Mac wouldn’t be a bad investment.  The final push that got me over the hill was the fact that the cheapest MacBook pro had really good specs for the price and I didn’t find any PCs that could compare to the specs of the MacBook pro with a similar size.

So around Thanksgiving of 2010, I got a MacBook pro 13” model.  Honestly, my first words when it arrived were “this machine needs windows now!”, and I proceeded to configure bootcamp (a way to run Windows natively on the Mac hardware).  Bootcamp was an interesting experience because it was so simple that I overthought the problem and ended up having to reinstall the Mac OS.  I’m still not entirely sure how I managed that, but command line utilities definitely aided the problems.  It is at this point when I realized why people really like Macs. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Advantages, Apple, design, Flaws, Mac, MacBook, MacOS X, OS X
Posted in Mobile Technology, Personal, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: December 31st, 2010 by Famous Phil

I’ve decided to continue what I started last year (at the last minute no doubt ) and post some of the best and worst of 2010.

This year brought 4 hard drive failures, and this is my way to remind you that you should always make data backups.  I also no longer support Windows XP based computers since Windows 7 is awesome!  I also switched to Google Chrome for my browsing needs since AdBlock Plus finally works on Chrome!  Fortunately, no huge blunders this year happened hosting wise  The final bit of personal success this year was finally completing the formal portion of my master’s project which was included building a condor flock (type of supercomputer) and implementing a packing algorithm on it.

My favorite movie of the year was Starstruck (Disney Channel).  I have to admit that Avatar wasn’t bad but it deserved a mention since I remember a lot of chatter about it.  My favorite TV show this year was Glee (Fox), although I am following The Big Bang Theory (CBS) and Outsourced (NBC).  My favorite song for this year was by Timbaland titled “If we ever meet again”.

So now onto the most memorable videos that I initially saw this year (at least for me):

Here is to 2011!

EDIT (1/2/10)

Tags: Happy New Year
Posted in Personal
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Posted on: January 1st, 2010 by Famous Phil

At the time of beginning this post… it is 12:01am Eastern Time, January 1, 2010.  My first words are: Happy New Year! and Happy new decade!  Hopefully this decade will bring a lot more fortune than the last one   I just want to quickly look back on the last 10 years of my life and the funniest videos of the year that I’ve found.

Ten years ago from today, I did not know much about a computer.  I can assure you that I did not know how to turn one on, and I only had a slight clue about what the internet was.  At the time, I had high hopes of becoming an electrical engineer and I loved playing around with circuits.  I was also much younger and had a lot to learn (obviously).  I also wasn’t entirely sure about what all the Y2K stuff was all about, so it didn’t really affect me.  Finally, a last tiny tidbit… I have spent *every* new year of my life in my own bedroom here at home.  I might be a few feet off from the same position each year, but I’ve basically in the same spot.  This is only the third year of my life that I’ve been up to witness the new year come in.

So, how does it feel?  I doesn’t feel any different… its just another day.  For some people, its an iconic day I suppose, being a new year and all, but for me, nothing has really changed.  I will continue to live and will continue to do what I do every day.  The only difference is, I will have to get over the annoyance of not remembering to write 2010 on any documents I create for at least the next few weeks (probably about a month or two in reality).

2009 brought me 8 hard drive failures in various machines that I’ve worked on, 2 being my own.  It also brought some bad fortune with the passing of my grandmother.  On the brighter side, it brought Windows 7, Microsoft Exchange, XM Radio, 2 new Laptop computers, a new server, and the magic of Verizon wireless high speed internet here at home.  It also brought me a wonderful job at my college and lots of new knowledge about computers.  Overall, 2009 for me was a decent year, especially considering the killing I made on Ebay selling Michael Jackson dolls (I sold quite a few within the first day after his death).  Of all the stuff that 2009 brought, perhaps the biggest was a new and improved FamousPhil.com.  Within the next few weeks, FamousPhil.com will change slightly again to become more smooth in color transitions

In 2009, I watched a lot of amazing video.  I think its time to share some of the more memorable youtube links of the best videos I saw in 2010!  I’m also going to leave this blog post here.  I hope that your 2009 was as enjoyable as mine and that your 2010 brings good tidings   Enjoy!

Ancient Modem that still works (seen on Yahoo for several weeks back in June, 2009)

World’s Fastest Speed Reader reading the original Health Care Bill – Cavuto (Fox News)

Glen Beck – Turtles on TV (You may have to get half way through this partially edited clip)

Next up is from a movie that was hilarious (Monsters vs. Aliens).  I also liked High School Musical 3.

I discovered something about geiko!

And finally, the video that combines it all together perfectly!

To another great year!  Thanks for stopping in!

Tags: 2009, 2010, Happy New Year, New Year, video
Posted in My Site, Personal, Student Life, Technology
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