Tried my Treo from the office where I have a four or five bars of signal. The results are not spectacularly different, but encouraging. There’s one metric that is not displayed in the graphic below. The latency between my computer and the test host was over 500 ms when I ran the test from home and now it has dropped to < 200 ms. It’s still doesn’t compare to a landline connection via cable modem or DSL. But now, web browsing doesn’t seem to drag on forever.
I’ve been testing my Treo 700p bandwidth and it is not all that impressive. I’m currently testing it from home, which has one or two bars of reception. I’ll try again at work and see if it improves.
Note to self, migrating Wordpress to a new web host is not as simple and straightforward as it looks. Do not try upgrading and migrating at the same time. And most importantly, do not change the directory structure while migrating and upgrading. Sigh.
This may only be of interest to civil engineers and planners, but topographic maps generated by the U.S. Geological Service are public domain because tax payer monies are used to generate the maps. However, map services have charged for these maps because it costs money to print and distribute the physical copies.
This has changed somewhat recently when a collection was taken up by these guys to liberate these maps. The maps are now distributed by the Internet Archive and can be downloaded for free from this “temporary” directory. It is organized by state, and the maps are in TIF format. XML meta-data files area also available.
About six months ago I bought a 500 GB hard drive to store my ever growing podcast collection. At the time I wanted to see how full disk encryption would affect my system. I’ve been considering adding encryption to main file servers at work, when the time comes to upgrade/replace the hardware. Hopefully, that will be a year or more down the road, so the experimenting and testing has to be done now rather than later.
I chose to keep my C drive unencrypted and store only the OS and applications on it. All other data were stored on the new drive which was encrypted with Truecrypt. I chose to create a single Truecrypt file that took up essentially all of the space on the hard drive. A few months prior to this I had played with encrypting the entire partition on an external USB hard drive. Every time I plugged in that drive, Windows would think that the drive was unformatted and kept bugging me to format it. I figure it’s just a matter of time before I or someone else formats that drive accidentally. I keep a fair number of wiped hard drives around my desk, so it wouldn’t be too unusual to mistake an encrypted disk with a wiped disk. I figure this way, I could always identify an encrypted disk by the file name.
So I load up the drive and all goes well up to about two weeks ago. I’ve also been using removable disk trays to make swapping hard drives easier. I think the tray or the IDE ribbon decided to die on me and corrupt the hard drive for good measure. I tried everything I could think of to repair the drive without formatting it. Most of the data on the hard drive wasn’t critical, and my important data was safely backed up. So I gave up and formatted the hard drive. It works just fine now.
The whole experience made me think a bit more carefully about encryption. Although none of the problems were caused by encryption, it does limit troubleshooting options. I have a few data recovery software packages. None of them could really be put to use in this case because I couldn’t get the corrupted drive to mount correctly. Even if it did mount, I’m starting to think that they would not be useful anyway. Since the data would be fragmented all over the disk and encrypted, how could a data recovery tool figure out a way to reassemble the encrypted volume. Losing any part of that volume could and probably will mean losing the whole volume. So now I’m thinking of compartmentalizing the encrypted volumes somehow. Not sure how many or how large the volumes should be, but it’ll make a recovery somewhat more likely.
Marv
