Archive for March, 2008
[Update 2] We’ve known for a while now that major ISPs in Canada have been utilizing traffic shaping technology to throttle the transfer speeds of certain types of traffic. Rogers Hi-Speed and Bell Sympatico customers who use Bittorrent to transfer files know all too well. It’s for this reason that some consumers have been switching to smaller independent ISPs like TekSavvy. While it isn’t the main reason, I’d be lying if I told you it didn’t play a role in my decision to switch providers.
Well, if Bell is allowed to get away with it, looks like the honeymoon may be over. News broke yesterday in major news outlets, technology blogs and internet forums that Bell Canada has been traffic shaping the wholesale internet connections they provide to competing DSL ISPs who rely on Bell’s infrastructure to provide their service. That’s right, Bell is dictating their competitor’s terms of service. The worst part about it is Bell failed to notify any of their wholesale ISP customers that they were going to do it.
While some will say Bell has a right to manage their network to ensure all their customers enjoy good performance, it’s hard to see how this doesn’t run afoul of anti-competition laws. Bell sells a lot more than just internet service after all. They’re probably best knows as a telephone service provider, but are also the major satellite TV provider in Canada. When Bell started throttling traffic for their own Sympatico customers, it was already crossing the line since the services that were getting throttled, VoIP and P2P file-sharing are both upcoming competitors to traditional telephone and cable/satellite TV service.
By applying their traffic shaping to competing DSL provider’s wholesale lines however, Bell has stepped so far over that anti-competitive line that it’s not even a line anymore, it’s a tiny spec way off on the horizon. A deregulated DSL marketplace is supposed to promote healthy competition. One of the ways companies compete is by offering better service. But rather than compete fair and square, Bell is abusing their monopoly on the DSL backbone to force their competitors to reduce their quality of service to the same low level as Bell’s. So consumers are left with no choices if they want to deal with an ISP that doesn’t utilize traffic shaping, since the only other alternatives for most are the local Cable monopoly providers, most of which also throttle their customer’s connections.
If this is allowed to continue unchecked, how long before we see YouTube or iTunes downloads get speed throttled? With more and more of the world’s communication and media traveling over the internet, the internet monopolists will have more and more power to dictate how we use our internet connections. As a telecommunications and media competitor, Bell cannot be trusted to be impartial in choosing what protocols and services to apply traffic shaping to.
So what can we do about this? Get the word out. Stop doing business with Bell and let them know why. Write a letter to your local MP, the CTRC and the Competition Bureau of Canada, and let them know you think what Bell is doing is unacceptible, and that network neutrality is not only very important to you, but that you consider it essential to promoting open competition, innovation and free speech on the internet as well as Canada’s competitiveness in the global information economy.
Update 1 - 4/1/2008, 12:35 pm: There’s a petition up as well as related news articles at
neutrality.ca. If you support net neutrality, take a moment to
head on over and add your name to the growing list. They also have some
banner images in various sizes, perfect for promoting the cause and spreading the word to others via your forum signature, blog or in online comments:
Update 2 - 4/14/2008, 11:15 am: For those of you who would like to add your voice to the effort to get Bell to stop throttling their competitor’s internet traffic, a poster on DSLReports named “CanadianISP” has
posted simple and quick 4-step instructions that you can follow to notify the CRTC that you support CAIP’s (Canadian Association of Internet Providers) complaint against Bell’s throttling of third party ISP traffic. The whole process will take you at most 60 seconds of your time, so if you’re at all concerned with the direction Canadian internet access is going, I urge you to take the time to do it. To make it even easier, here are the instructions from the DSLReports topic:
If you would like to support CAIP in their efforts please file submissions with the Commission over the next week to show your support for the request for interim relief. These submissions don’t have to be very complicated.
All that you need to do is:
- Click on the following link:
http://support.crtc.gc.ca/crtcsubmissionmu/forms/Telecom.aspx?lang=e
- Select “Part VII / PN” from the list.
- Insert the CRTC file number (# 8622-C51-200805153) into the “Subject” Line.
- Insert the following suggested text into the “Description / Comments / Questions” box:
“I am writing to express my support for the application that CAIP has filed with the CRTC regarding Bell Canada’s throttling practices. I believe that these practices contravene Bell Canada’s duties as a common carrier and that the Commission should direct Bell to immediately cease and desist from throttling the traffic of independent ISPs.”
As someone once said, if you don’t do your part to try and stop this, then you forfeit your right to complain about it, ever.
March 26th, 2008
[Update 2] So I recently attempted to re-apply the Mac OS X 10.5.2 Combo update to my MacBook Pro in the hopes that it would fix an annoying little bug that is preventing the contents of my Desktop folder to get dynamically updated. To my surprise, when I went to select my boot volume to install on, the Installer wouldn’t let me continue stating:
“You cannot install Mac OS X Update Combined on this volume. This volume does not meet the requirements for this update.”
At first I thought my OS installation was corrupted, but before I reached for my Leopard install DVD to do a clean install I decided to investigate whether one of the recent Apple software updates may have caused the problem. Read on to see the results of my investigation.
Continue Reading March 25th, 2008
[Update 1] Well that couldn’t have gone any smoother. For those that have just tuned in, we switched Internet service providers this morning. I’m happy to report that the migration went smoothly and without issue. I’m actually quite pleasantly surprised that this is the case, since I haven’t had the best of luck in the past when it came to dealing with ISPs. They almost NEVER deliver what they promise. The fact that I was dealing with two ISPs in order to make it all happen borders on a miracle.
Bell was scheduled to suspend my Sympatico DSL service at midnight, so I decided I’d stay up and wait for it to happen so I could connect my new Thomson SpeedTouch 516 DSL modem up in preparation for my TekSavvy DSL service to be activated in the morning. So I figured I’d get some last minute email and websurfing in and then settled into playing Call of Duty 4 online on my PS3. In other words, what I do almost every night. My plan was to play until I lost connection, then install the new DSL modem, then go to bed and reconfigure my router to connect to Teksavvy in the morning. Midnight rolled by and I was still taking out tangos. One o’clock AM came and went and I was still defending democracy from terrorists. By around 2:15 am, I decided that my tour of duty might never end, and called it quits for the night, Sympatico Internet connection still operational. In the back of my mind, I worried that Bell’s delay in disconnecting me was going to delay the activation of the new TekSavvy connection.
Looks like those worries were unfounded since when I got up this morning at 7:00 am, I found my AirPort Extreme router’s connection light flashing amber, indicating a connection problem. I connected the SpeedTouch modem to the phone line and was happy to see the DSL and Internet status lights turn solid green. A few minutes later, I had my AirPort Extreme reconfigured with the TekSavvy settings and was connected to the Internet with our new static IP. A quick trip to my domain registrar’s self-serve website to reconfigure the artofgeek.com domain to point to our new IP and disable dynamic DNS and I was done. Then it was just a matter of waiting for the change to propagate to Internet DNS servers around the world and we were back in business. Total downtime was under 6 hours.
First impressions? My web surfing seems a bit faster, and my wife said the same thing when I asked her if she noticed a difference, but the difference isn’t immense from the limited amount of time I had to test it. There’s not much else to say at this point. It’s an internet connection, and it’s working. If you have any questions about our transition or the service, post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Update 1 - 3/18/2008, 9:41 am: For those interested in performance info, here’s my results from Speedtest.net on three seperate tests:
As you can see, the download speeds seem pretty consistent around 4,270kbps. The upload speeds vary more, but solidly between 500-600kbps. I only wish I had done these same tests with my Sympatico connection while I still had a chance. Keep in mind these speeds may vary depending on the time of day. I’m fairly impressed since right now is near peak hours for internet usage (between 9-10pm). I’ll run the tests again at different times of day to see if it stays consistently fast or not.
March 18th, 2008
Please note that Art Of Geek will be unavailable for a good part of Tuesday, March 18 due to an ISP migration. We’re migrating from Bell Sympatico to Teksavvy DSL. Unfortunately, there’s no way to be sure about how long the outage will be, but trust me when I say I’m going to try and make it as short as possible.
See you all when we’re back up and with a static IP address. No more short bouts of downtime because I have to reset my router. Yippee!
March 17th, 2008
Mention “Lode Runner” to any veteran computer user and chances are they’ll not only be familiar with it, but they’ll have fond memories of playing it. It’s been remade so many times and for so many platforms over the years that many younger gamers are probably familiar with it as well. It was after the topic came up with a friend and fellow computer veteran earlier today that I became determined to find a version of the game I could run on my Mac. While there are one or more Lode Runner-like shareware games for Mac OS X, it became clear to me after a bit of searching that if I wanted the original Lode Runner, I was going to have to run it under emulation.
The world of emulators on the Mac is very diverse. I had a lot of choices available to me of which version of Lode Runner I wanted to run, on which computing platform and using which emulator. I ended up choosing the original Lode Runner game running on the Apple II, and rather than using a traditional emulator, I decided to go with one that came packaged as a Dashboard widget, that way I could quickly jump into a game of Lode Runner no matter what I was in the middle of doing, and just as quickly put it away when I’ve had my fill. Following these step by step instructions, you’ll be able to get your Lode Runner on too.
- Download the AppleIIGo Dashboard widget from the developer’s website and then click “Install” and “Keep” when Mac OS X prompts you asking if you want to download and install the widget.
- Download the Apple IIe ROM image from here. Extract using Stuffit Expander.
- Download Lode Runner for the Apple II from here and unzip it.
- Call up Dashboard, and click the bottom right hand corner of the AppleIIGo widget where the little “i” is.
- On the backside of the AppleIIGo widget, click the “Disks” button, followed by the “ROMs” button. Two Finder windows will open. Click the “Done” button to flip the widget over.
- Drag the file APPLE2E.ROM file that you unstuffed in step 2 to the Finder window named “ROMs”.
- Drag the file named loderunner.dsk that you downloaded and unzipped in step 3 to the Finder window named “Disks”.
- Call up Dashboard again and click on the little “i” to bring up the AppleIIGo settings again.
- Select “loderunner.dsk” from the “Disk Drive 1:” popup menu, and then click the “Restart” button.
- Play Lode Runner.
Here are the controls:
| Action |
Key |
| Up, Down, Left, Right |
I, K, J, L |
| Dig left, Dig right |
U, O |
| Stop moving |
Space |
| Switch to keyboard controls |
Ctrl-K |
| Switch to joystick controls |
Ctrl-J |
| Suicide |
Ctrl-A |
| End game |
Ctrl-R |
| Pause game |
Esc or Stop or Ctrl-M |
| View High Scores |
Return |
A more complete list of controls and commands are available here, including editing commands for creating/modifying your own levels.
Hit any key to start a game. Collect all the barrels until the exit ladder appears, then climb up the ladder to move onto the next level, all while avoiding the bad guys chasing you. Remember that bad guys will pick up barrels they walk over, which they will drop sometimes on their own or when they fall into one of the holes you’ve dug.
The only two caveats with playing Lode Runner like this is that there is no sound (the AppleIIGo emulator doesn’t support sound), and the screen can be a bit small. Those shouldn’t really get in the way of some good old school fun though, since the sound isn’t important to gameplay, and the graphics are simple enough that you shouldn’t have a problem seeing all the detail you need. Of course, you can theoretically play any Apple II game using the AppleIIGo Dashboard widget. If you successfully get any other classics running, tell our readers about it in the comments!
Have fun, and let me know what level you manage to reach. So far, I’m up to level 5.
March 3rd, 2008