Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Time Warner Cable Internet = FAIL

Tracing route to www.l.google.com [74.125.45.99]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 8 ms 9 ms * cpe-76-173-176-1.socal.res.rr.com [76.173.176.1]

2 8 ms * 8 ms 76.167.1.129
3 12 ms 12 ms * tge4-2-0.tustca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com [76.167.14.145]
4 15 ms * 15 ms ae-5-0.cr0.lax30.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.64]
5 * 43 ms * ae-1-0.pr0.lax10.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.131]
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * 15 ms 216.239.46.180
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * 145 ms 72.14.232.215
10 91 ms 89 ms 94 ms 209.85.253.137
11 86 ms 91 ms 84 ms yx-in-f99.google.com [74.125.45.99]

This is how bad my internet connection has been for the last few days. For those of you who don't understand what that stuff means, each row contains 3 attempts to contact each router along the way from my apartment to www.google.com. Each asterisk is lost data, each number is successfully sent data (how many milliseconds it took for the answer to come back). We've had such ridiculously high packet loss that either the connection is totally gone or it's in a minimally functional state like this for the vast majority of the time.

Time
Warner
Sucks.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Bionic Bullet Dodging Armor?

Straight out of science fiction, IBM filed a patent on body armor that will use electrical impulses to make a person get out of the way of bullets. It's a pretty crazy idea, but wow. It's hard for us to really understand how slow bullets are since they are typically used at fairly short range. The example of a 2.5 km shot taking 4 seconds to reach its target definitely shows that this could be possible if the armor could detect a tiny projectile at a long enough range.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Video Games Delivering Political Messages

Harpooned is a game about killing whales for scientific research.... It's great to see that video games are being used to deliver more meaningful messages than mindless entertainment.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Google Street View Art

It's amazing how art and technology go hand in hand. Google brought us the nifty street view technology on Google maps. So naturally, people have been using it as a medium for art.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Transformers 2 Video Game

Yay, the project I'm working on has finally been announced... and there's a teaser trailer for it!