SpaceX crashed and burned
By Gary R, in
Mindless Ramblings, posted: 29-Mar-2006 09:47
The promise of privately funded and developed space flight took a step backwards when the debut flight of the SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket failed. Good old unknown 'technical reasons' caused the rocket to disintegrate about 1 minute after lift off.
I have been watching this company with some interest for a while and was looking forward to a successful debut. What is interesting is that the company is owned and funded by Elon Musk who started and later sold Pay Pal to eBay for a billion odd dollars. Musk could have retired and spent the rest of his life playing golf instead he has backed himself on what can be described as an expensive and highly risky business venture.
One failure will not ruin SpaceX but 2 or 3 failures probably will. Good on him and I hope he does eventually succeed.
I have been watching this company with some interest for a while and was looking forward to a successful debut. What is interesting is that the company is owned and funded by Elon Musk who started and later sold Pay Pal to eBay for a billion odd dollars. Musk could have retired and spent the rest of his life playing golf instead he has backed himself on what can be described as an expensive and highly risky business venture.
One failure will not ruin SpaceX but 2 or 3 failures probably will. Good on him and I hope he does eventually succeed.
CDMA Application Development Part 3
The other week I talked about dormancy. If you use 1xRTT for telemetry applications you will notice that there a delay in receiving a reply to a data request from the CDMA device. This delay can be 5 seconds and sometimes as high as 8 seconds.
When a CDMA device is dormant its availability to reconnect (bring up radio) and respond to a data request is governed by a setting called Slot Cycle Index (SCI). Each shared network channel is divided into time slots, to conserve battery life phones/devices wake up and listen for network messages based on the phone/device assigned time slot. Generally the default SCI is to '2', which means the phone/device will wake up and check network messages every 5.12 seconds. This is the overhead and the reason why there is a delay to data requests. The good news is that the setting can be changed. Generally this can not be done by the user as it requires a software tool to change the phone/device. If you are on battery I don't recommend you change the setting at all, if you are on power (modem on mains) then there is no reason why you can not have the setting changed. For time critical data applications changing the SCI can have quite a dramatic effect. The recommended SCI settings are '0'- check network messages every 1.18 seconds or '1' - every 2.56 seconds.
Push to Talk is a example of a service that changes the SCI to suit the application. When PTT is initiated the phone changes the SCI from '2' to '0'. The reason for changing SCI is to improve response time, at SCI '2' a user would have to wait 5 seconds to reply on PTT - quite a lag.
First in
By Gary R, in
Mindless Ramblings, posted: 27-Mar-2006 12:45
An interesting web site run by Colin Brown ex PC Company. I had never heard of it before reading about it yesterday in the Sunday Star Times. The idea is to have a daily one off special - today's special is USB memory. I have booked marked it and will be checking it out daily.
First in
First in
ADSL2+
Its on its way - roll out starting in June and available before Christmas. Telecom are investing $150-170M on the upgrade regardless of what happens with the government review.
Now that is a huge investment. When you consider that iHug will invest $20M if the government unbundles the local loop. Hmmmm.... economics 101
Now that is a huge investment. When you consider that iHug will invest $20M if the government unbundles the local loop. Hmmmm.... economics 101
Vodafone roaming text charges
By Gary R, in
Mindless Ramblings, posted: 22-Mar-2006 09:44
Obviously not all one big happy family
Important notice
From 24 April 2006, New Zealand on account customers roaming on Vodafone Australia will again incur a roaming surcharge when sending TXT messages - a charge Vodafone has absorbed since 2000. Consistent with other roaming destinations, customers roaming on Vodafone Australia will incur a surcharge. Subject to exchange rates, a fee of 44 cents will be charged in addition to the flat rate of 20 cents (incl. GST) per txt.
That is .64 cents a text message to you and me. Subject to exchange rate as well. At approx 160 bytes max that prices text at about $4 p/1KB or $40 p/10KB or $400 p/100KB or $4000 p/meg
I am stunned is my Math out somewhere?
Important notice
From 24 April 2006, New Zealand on account customers roaming on Vodafone Australia will again incur a roaming surcharge when sending TXT messages - a charge Vodafone has absorbed since 2000. Consistent with other roaming destinations, customers roaming on Vodafone Australia will incur a surcharge. Subject to exchange rates, a fee of 44 cents will be charged in addition to the flat rate of 20 cents (incl. GST) per txt.
That is .64 cents a text message to you and me. Subject to exchange rate as well. At approx 160 bytes max that prices text at about $4 p/1KB or $40 p/10KB or $400 p/100KB or $4000 p/meg
I am stunned is my Math out somewhere?
Microsoft Stormtroopers
By Gary R, in
Mindless Ramblings, posted: 22-Mar-2006 08:56
So what do we all think of MS assisting Interpol to catch phishers and other cyber criminals. Is MS stepping over the boundary here? Are we going to see MS developing a global security force with arm bands and black uniforms? Seriously, it is like Ford or GM helping Police catch drunk or dangerous drivers and then Ford or GM filing a lawsuit against that driver.
My problem is that essentially a corporation is taking law enforcement into its own hands. There has to be checks and balances, who is policing MS? The old saying 'give an inch and they take a mile' becomes very relevant as MS could become very integral in 'making the internet a safer place' which is in itself a form of censorship and a violation of freedom.
If people are stupid enough to be caught out in a phishing scam maybe they deserve to be ripped off. After all there are plenty of dodgy investment schemes out there that people get sucked into, look at the Nigeria scams.
I question why the Internet should be any different to real world? It does give me warm fuzzies to think MS are going to create this utopian on-line society where everything is beautiful and all people love one another. While out in the real world an innocent person gets shot in the back of the head for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Watch out Linux users you may all be rounded up and sent to 'holiday camps'.
The Budgie Smuggler
By Gary R, in
Mindless Ramblings, posted: 17-Mar-2006 10:49
Application development part 2
2. Billing
This is one of the most misunderstood areas of packet data. Billing by time is an easy one to understand, where as billing by volume can be a bit more confusing.
Telecom have billing units, a unit size depends on the plan you are on. For standard mobile broadband plans the billing unit size is 10KB for telemetry plans the billing unit size is 100bytes.
Billing tickets are only generated when you disconnect. A disconnect is a session end - being dormant is not a disconnect. Once you disconnect the units are counted and rounded up - never rounded down. That is why you should stay connected and dormant rather than send data > disconnect.
There are network timers that also cause a session end and you can not alter these. The IP lease time is 4 hours, if you have not sent/received data for 4 hours the network will terminate your session. Regardless of data activity, the network will terminate your session 24 hours after session start (connect). The reason for this is that at some point the network needs to generate the billing tickets.
You can get around the forced network disconnects by building a routine into your application that terminates and reconnects the session periodically.
This is one of the most misunderstood areas of packet data. Billing by time is an easy one to understand, where as billing by volume can be a bit more confusing.
Telecom have billing units, a unit size depends on the plan you are on. For standard mobile broadband plans the billing unit size is 10KB for telemetry plans the billing unit size is 100bytes.
Billing tickets are only generated when you disconnect. A disconnect is a session end - being dormant is not a disconnect. Once you disconnect the units are counted and rounded up - never rounded down. That is why you should stay connected and dormant rather than send data > disconnect.
There are network timers that also cause a session end and you can not alter these. The IP lease time is 4 hours, if you have not sent/received data for 4 hours the network will terminate your session. Regardless of data activity, the network will terminate your session 24 hours after session start (connect). The reason for this is that at some point the network needs to generate the billing tickets.
You can get around the forced network disconnects by building a routine into your application that terminates and reconnects the session periodically.
What would you rather have?
I was interested to read the other week that 80% of NZ'ers earn less than $40,000 p/year. Obviously this means that after paying living expenses there is not a lot left for 'luxuries'.
If you have $100 p/month in spare cash what would you rather have Sky Digital with sports and movies or broadband?
If you have $100 p/month in spare cash what would you rather have Sky Digital with sports and movies or broadband?
Guidelines for CDMA Application Development
This is my first blog ever, anywhere. I thought I would start off slowly and hopefully gain some momentum over the next few week.
In this first installment I will cover the basics. These are generally the first questions asked when developing for the Telecom CDMA network.
1. Dormancy
Dormancy is a function of CDMA to reduce the loading on the radio network. After (currently) 1 minute (1xRTT) or 10 seconds (EVDO) of no data activity the network drops the radio link but maintains the PPP layer. Sending a packet to or from the mobile device IP brings the radio link back up. This is an efficient use of radio resource but it does add an overhead to reactivation of about 3 seconds (1xRTT) or 500ms (EVDO). You can override the network dormancy and reduce the timer to 10 seconds (1xRTT) by inserting at+cta=10 into the mobile device. The at+cta command accepts input from 0~255 - 0 or anything above 60 is ignored so network wins. You can query the dormancy timer via HyperTerm using at+cta?
In this first installment I will cover the basics. These are generally the first questions asked when developing for the Telecom CDMA network.
1. Dormancy
Dormancy is a function of CDMA to reduce the loading on the radio network. After (currently) 1 minute (1xRTT) or 10 seconds (EVDO) of no data activity the network drops the radio link but maintains the PPP layer. Sending a packet to or from the mobile device IP brings the radio link back up. This is an efficient use of radio resource but it does add an overhead to reactivation of about 3 seconds (1xRTT) or 500ms (EVDO). You can override the network dormancy and reduce the timer to 10 seconds (1xRTT) by inserting at+cta=10 into the mobile device. The at+cta command accepts input from 0~255 - 0 or anything above 60 is ignored so network wins. You can query the dormancy timer via HyperTerm using at+cta?
