Checksum Arcanius

 Bad Comcast

 Good Comcast

Seen above are the same portion of two screen captures from two different games of Counterstrike. The info seen is the output of the function net_graph in the half life engine. As is normal, green means good, and red means bad. In fact, each red mark indicates a lost packet or a period of lost packets. Notice how many red marks there are in the Bad Comcast picture. Of course, that information is very anecdotal and doesn’t really isolate the problem – with just that information, you wouldn’t know if the problem were the counterstrike server, my router, my computer, the wireless link between them, or anything else. So I decided to roll in the big guns: the ping test.

I used the following command in four seperate command prompt windows:
ping -t -w 200 host
where
-t tells ping to ping until I tell it to stop
-w 200 tells ping to stop waiting at 200 ms and
host is either an IP adress or a hostname

Here are the results (grabbed by using control-break and copy/paste):

Ping statistics for 192.168.10.200: a computer on the same subnet, just one switch and two cat 5 cables away
Packets: Sent = 355, Received = 355, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

Ping statistics for 192.168.10.1: this is my router
Packets: Sent = 1239, Received = 1175, Lost = 64 (5% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 2ms, Maximum = 49ms, Average = 3ms

Ok, so 5% loss is not ideal and I will try to make that better. I think I could get this to 0% with a little tweaking, but 5% packet loss hardly affects real world performace.

Ping statistics for 192.168.100.1: this is my cable modem
Packets: Sent = 1017, Received = 947, Lost = 70 (6% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 4ms, Maximum = 31ms, Average = 5ms

This is on par with the 5% seen for the router, but the test started later and there are more lost packets, so there are definitely some packets lost between the router and the cable modem… how this is possible escapes me, since they are all of a foot apart with a nice cat5 cable in between. But still, 6% loss is not very noticeable in the real world.

Now it gets interesting:
Ping statistics for 24.18.144.1: this is my router’s default gateway
Packets: Sent = 1230, Received = 864, Lost = 366 (29% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 10ms, Maximum = 480ms, Average = 63ms

All of my packets have to go through the default gateway, as this is my only path to the internet. And from here to there and back again (without touching the internet along the way), I loose almost 30% of my packets. This is all after my router, mind you, I have no control over anything at this point.

Now, for the real world test:
Ping statistics for 216.239.57.99: this is google.com
Packets: Sent = 1480, Received = 872, Lost = 608 (41% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 31ms, Maximum = 489ms, Average = 84ms

Once we get out into the wild, nearly half of my packets never find their way home. And this is with no load whatsoever on the system.

“Pour sore misery down on me…” (I’m only happy when it rains)

Good comments on the last post.

Bob, of Colorless Green Ideas came up with the idea of using SSH along with ytalk as a method of secure chatting. We are using the system right now and it works very well. I suggest it to anyone who wants to carry on questionable, anti-government, or otherwise sketchy conversations.

If you are someone who wants to participate, IM me (AIM screenname is RyanMcE), and I can set you up an accoutn on silverfir.net. then all you have to do is download PuTTY, ssh into silverfir.net, and type ychat . I’m Ryan, btw. Type w to find out whos currenlty logged on.

Have fun!

The power went out at the house today so I had the pleasure of restarting silverfir.net again. Hey, that�s a double repetition (kinda like a double negative, but with doing something again instead… yeah�)

The day went fairly smoothly otherwise. I got up early to go to kinkos to make transparencies out of some prints I have, then I went to BCC and started doing my cyanotypes. After math and more cyanotypes, I went to work, and then I was off to Shai�s 21st birthday party. That went till 10, and then I came back here where I got a new Belkin 802.11g wireless Ethernet bridge working, and gave the wet11 to my brother. The speed should make file transfers from my laptop to the desktop without connecting in cat 5 more manageable.

Occasionally, I run into a blog like Ludicrous Speed!. I learned about this particular one from Bobby after we talked about how bad the new trailer made �I Robot� look. Basically, they have taken Asimov�s classic robotics series and turned it into a high-budget on everything except faithfulness to the original story tion knock off. Turns out that it is very well stated on the particular blog, here.

Just like Bernie�s Site, this is another one where the layout is impressive and the commentary seems sculpted to perfection. So, since I tend to give up on ventures in which I don�t excel (an unfortunate consequence of the way I am), why do I continue to plug away at this blog when clearly I�m not excelling, or een meeting the standard for goodness? Heck, that isn�t even a good word!

The reason for my persistence is that this isn�t about you guys (sorry!). Its about e and needing to say things. And even though I admittedly do edit it for content (not-so-sorry!) its one of the most candid windows to my life that anyone has. An d that does something good for me. And as strangely wonderful that it is that a lot of my friends read this, and that even people I don�t know read it (thanks Bernie!) I�m pretty sure it will continue to lean much more towards a stream-of-consciousness style than trying to present any particularly useful or thoughtful information (although occasionally you may see something useful, because I happened to be thinking about it at the time).

I actaully wrote this several hours earlier today, but somehow it didn’t get posted.

Good music lifts my mood. I’m glad I decided to pull out the iPod and listen to some of my good music – I’ve been missing my music since Davis still has my firewire cable. Now its back, and I’m glad. As the title of this post sugests, I have many projects going on right now. I thought I would give an update on them.

Tim’s Senior Porject Combat Robot
Today was my first real day working on the combat robot. For the first part of the session, we mostly just played with fire, because the robot’s main weapon is going to be a flamethrower. In order for it to be effective, we want to make it more like a blow torch, so after trying some venturis that Larry suggested, I drew on my paintball experience to create a positive pressure air feed system. The muffin fan we tried the first time didn’t work so well, and the compressed air was way too powerful, but the FIRST robot’s compressor with a tube into which the fuel was fed about 3/4 of the tube length away from the end seemed to work very well for a strong blow torch effect. Feeling successful but hungry, we went to eat, and then returned to think about and work on the drive train. Now much work got done, but Tim and I figured out the main chasis (just a 2″x4″ thick wall aluminum tube down the center, to which the drivetrain will be bolted). The details will come.

New Desktop Computer
I purchased from Tim an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, and now all I need to to is buy the rest of the computer to put around it. I wanted to go to Fry’s today, but it looks like that’ll be a trip for tomorrow after work.

Work
Work is going well. I go in early all week, so I have to get to bed real soon here. Going in early, of course, means getting out early as well, so I have lots of daylight to have fun by, for example, shopping at Fry’s. All the non-disclosure agreements I signed means I can’t yet tell you much about what I’m doing, since its all propreitary information not yet released to the public. But I should be writing up some troubleshooting guide for the Flic Wireless barcode scanner that will eventually become public, so maybe I can post that info at some point. But don’t hold your breath.

SilverFir.net
Moving over to oasis-as-server running Gentoo is more or less stalled right now. Its amazing how much something working well enough is an incentive to not change things. Despite being on the backburner, however, this one is still on the list. Currently, Apache, MySQL, and PHP are all installed. I still need to get the Apache logs parsed out to the proper domain directories, and set up secure email, ftp, and web servers, get web mail working, and set up a secure VPN with a Samba server for long-distance file sharing for windows (for my mp3 collection remotely, primarily). If you would like to help with the project, let me know.

DARPA Grand Challenge 2006
This is a very long-term goal right now. The first step is the SRA’s (Seattle Robotics Association, formerly SRSoceity) Mini Grand Challenge, which will involve navigating to orange cones located around the Seattle Center sometime later this year. In order to prove my concept of machine vision’s ability to find orange objects to naysaying Bob, we took some pictures of an Orange shirt of mine in various lighting conditions from way overexposed to way dark. In all cases except one (where the shirt was mostly black it was so underexposed), my machine vision technique (really just a photoshop action script) worked. I think using a regular digital camera and algorithms like photoshop’s, it should be fairly easy to navigate towards orange objects in a variety of lighting conditions.
Also, I got the names of people from Subaru, VW, and GMC from Mr. Chaplin, so now I need to put together a two-year plan that describes how the $1,000,000 I will be asking them for will be used to win the Grand Challenge with one of their vehicles (modified for drive by wire and for travelling in desert terrain, of course).

Laptop questions
I like my old laptop better than my current laptop. The only reason I use my current laptop is that its techincally faster. But I think I will be trading back. This laptop needs a reinstall from scratch anyway, so I will trade it for the one my mom is now using, which is the one I liked better anyway. And Mobius (the old laptop) has a serial port for programming robots as well. And 2400+ Athlon’s are still really fast, just not quite a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4. But I like how Mobius is lighter weight and better balanced and goes to sleep properly and… Well, I just like it better!

Those are all I can think of right now, but I bet there are more even!

Currently using Mozilla Powercat and Mozilla Waterjackalope.

Seen on oasis earlier today:

oasis plan # who
ryan pts/0 Feb 15 21:46 (192.168.10.100)
root pts/1 Feb 15 21:58 (192.168.10.100)
bob pts/2 Feb 16 00:09 (192.168.10.200)
ryan pts/3 Feb 16 00:53 (192.168.10.100)

Its symmetry is so beautiful I could almost cry.

Progress on oasis is going very well. Today, I finished up the install procedures, and then Bob and I got normal user accounts set up and starting making tweaks to our shell environments while we began emerging the programs that will make oasis the most capable and robot Silverfir.net server yet. It is considerably slower than the testing I was doing on Kleinoscope, but that�s what you get when you use a processor with less than one quarter of the clock speed. Nevertheless, oasis has RAM and to spare � 640 mb to be exact � and should be an excellent server machine. I am even experimenting with file system backups � I may yet be a legitimate sys-admin.

That comprised most of today, along with some reading and whatnot. Tomorrow is robotics; we�ll be test driving the robot in the closest thing we�ve encountered to the real field to date.