Beware the Browser

I tend to use my browser state (and plenty of tabs) as lightweight bookmarks.  This means leaving a couple of browser windows open perpetually.  Often my machine is configured to sleep after about 20mins, but in the case of my work laptop it doesn’t sleep if plugged into the wall (intentional on my part).  I don’t think my usage is atypical – I would not be surprised if several of my friends have similar usage patterns.

A picture tells a thousand words:

traffic1This graph is from DD-WRTv24.  You might think “Ah, Roo’s just been doing some torrents” – but the truth is that almost all of the traffic from June 10th-16th and then the June 21st spike are due to a couple of open browser windows on my laptop (overnight).  This was my conclusion last night at 2am when I closed 3 browser windows on my laptop and watch the bandwidth on my WAN port drop to zero bytes.

Let’s look back a bit to some more typical usage:

traffic2You might have noticed the scale is vastly different.  In fact, the usage for the entire month is basically the same as what I was pulling down in a single day.

Granted – I’m claiming it was the browser (some page auto-refreshing?) doing this.  Checking my web logs indicate that visitors to the websites hosted on lowtek hasn’t massively spiked this month.  It could have been something else as well, but the coincidence of my closing the browsers and seeing the traffic drop is good evidence. [Edit – I may have been wrong (yes, it happens) see comments]

Consider the possibilities here.  If you wanted to be evil, and you were say an ISP – you’d ensure that your customers default home page was a nice friendly AJAX enabled launchpad linked to webmail etc..  and you’d put something to cause a slow trickle download cost as long as the user has that page open.  This would likely cause a fair percentage of your customers to consume more of their bandwidth cap sooner.

JavaOne

JavaOne will be held next week (June 2-5th) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, the same location where Google I/O was held this past week – and the week after JavaOne has Apple’s WWDC in the same location.

I won’t be attending this year, but my friend and colleague Trent Gray-Donald will be there presenting a session titled “Under the Hood: Inside a High-Performance JVM™ Machine” on Friday June 5th, 10:50am – 11:50am.  While you won’t find him on the Rock Star Wall of Fame, he was did earn that title back in 2007 – his sessions are usually well attended so if you want to see him in action go early for a good seat.  This year his presentation discloses more details about the IBM JVM technology than have been previously made available, expect to see assembly code snippets on screen during the presentation along with lots of technical detail.  His presentation should be a reasonably good primer in what it takes to be a “state of the art” JVM in today’s competitive market – and it will be presented by someone who has hands on experience creating the technology.

If you can’t make it in person, JavaOne has a pretty good track record of making past sessions available online. Of course you can also follow along on Twitter, and there appear to be two hashtags (#JavaOne and #JavaOneConf) being used to help track tweets.

As for what to expect from JavaOne this year, I’ll shy away from trying to make any firm predictions – but it has been announced there will be more details on the Java App Store.  The Oracle/Sun deal will certainly be one of the topics that can’t be avoided.  Java7 should get some sort of announcement along with some benchmarking fun I’m sure.  One camp to keep an eye on is the Microsoft keynote – the 1st time they’ve done one for JavaOne.  Last, but not least – IBM is a general session cosponsor thus Craig Hayman will be giving a talk as well (Thursday, June 4th, 5:30 – 6:15 p.m), one I’d recommend people attend if they can.

Mounting a Wheelbarrow Wheel

We left our wheelbarrow out in a corner of the backyard all winter.  In the spring the tire had completely deflated, and as it is a tubeless tire (similar to car tires) it had come off the rim as well.  Simply sticking an airpump on the valve did nothing as the tire no longer touched the rim in a number of places letting all of the air out.

One solution img_1396would have been to simply buy a new tire.  I thought that being like a car tire, I could probably take it by a local garage and have them do it for me.  However, I had a nagging feeling there was some way to DIY so I finally got to searching for a solution.

It was very easy to find some good advice on the net (this is as you know, not always true).  So the value of this post is probably limited, but I learned something today so I thought I’d share.

Tools you need: rope, air pump, long screwdriver or sturdy stick, soapy water.

  1. Use the soapy water (1/2 water, 1/2 dish soap) to coat the beads of the tire (both sides) and the rim where it will mate up.
  2. Tie the rope snugly around the circumference of the tire.
  3. Stick the screwdriver through the rope and twist, causing the rope to tighten.  This should help you get the bead onto the rim on both sides [in my case, it was not quite there – but close enough to seal the gaps]
  4. Pump the tire.  This should cause the bead to set onto the rim.  Slowly release the twist while you pump.

That’s it – easy to fix with stuff you should be able to find around the workshop.