Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Does Youtube throttle Facebook?

I have noticed this more than once now. If I try to view a youtube video via Facebook, the stuff doesn't show up quickly. The same video if I get through youtube directly at the same time, streaming starts almost instantly. I finish my video on youtube and facebook is still trying to fetch it. Well, there are multiple questions here:
  1. Does Youtube throttle Facebook servers? They could well do it owing to a high traffic rate from Facebook servers.
  2. Is Facebook - Youtube network a bottleneck? This could be owing to the traffic that flows between the two websites. Facebooks hosted videos work fine, so facebooks servers are certainly not overloaded.
  3. What format is Facebook trying to fetch the video from Youtube in? Well, Youtube does content adaptation to match the rate of incoming connection. So if I view a video on a extremely high speed network, Youtube would show me HD. On my home network I get 360 by default and that streams slowly too. So I manually switch to 240. If Facebook tries to fetch video in a particular format from Youtube and tries to send that over on my slow connection at home, that explains where the problem is.
  4. Finally, is Facebook trying to throttle Youtube fetch from its own side? No idea.

I finished writing this post and Facebook is still fetching the Youtube hosted video as I write.

Cheers,
Manish.

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Saturday, October 30, 2010

A count of Installing Ubuntu 10.04

This was simple. It reminded of my college days when we had to do a lot more work while installing a linux version. Here are a few steps that me and my friends used to do then as I roughly recall (well, this was a decade ago) -
  1. Create the partitions on Hard Drive to accommodate both Linux and Windows.
  2. Get a bootable CD ROM. I had RedHat from my friend.
  3. Boot from CD.
  4. Install
  5. Try to locate missing drivers if some components don't work. After step 4, just pray that things would work else this step was more tedious.
Forward to now, I did this -
  1. Downloaded Ubuntu Installer for Windows from here. No HDD partitioning required. I already had Windows running. It is still just plain simple
  2. Install like any other Windows program
  3. Boot and you see Ubuntu alongside Windows. Done!
However, my wireless card wasn't working after install Ubuntu. Ubuntu just did not detect my wireless network. I thought I had to repeat my college step 5. However, I was lucky. After a lot of Googling, came across this post - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1490123

Just 3 commands fixed my wireless card issue with Ubuntu -
%sudo mkdir -p /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/
%sudo touch /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat
%sudo service network-manager restart

The steps worked fine because my wireless card provider was RaLink and this was a Ubuntu workaround for that.

Cheers,
Manish.

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Sunday, March 21, 2010

Missing the fun of Persistent System's IPO

My company Persistent is about to be listed at the stock market. The response to the IPO was phenomenal. IPO was subscribed 93.3 times and received the highest bid in 26 months! More on this story at - Moneycontrol.

During these exciting times for the company, I miss Pune. All my friends and relatives in Pune say that the IPO is the talk of the town. It would have been great to be there and experience the sheer thrill of one of the most important times of the company in its history. Would have loved to talk about it in the cafeteria, during coffee time, with colleagues and just feel it.

For now, being so long from Pune, I feel great satisfaction and pride (as always) to be a Persistent Employee.

Manish.

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Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Google playing with TV, for Real!

I suspected Google playing with TV in my previous post - here.

Google is now trying certain applications related to TV. Read more about it here.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Google on TV?

Recently I stumbled upon Chrome TV extension.

The 3rd party extension allows you to watch free online TV channels. I could see some, however, majority of them don't work. That's fine. This stuff is still nascent.

Then, Google has their TV ads product - http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads/

Now, what if Google starts to use this into the internet TV (or has it started doing it already, don't know). A TV content generator or a TV channel can offer free channels and have Google Ads giving them the ads plus revenue. However, the share has to benefit the channels to offset their content generation cost.

To summarize, we might see a free TV world with Google Ads and Google in this way will get another stream to add revenue to their already fat pocket.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Goodbye Opera

Opera, the fastest browser on earth! Yes, it indeed is, I felt so. I was a devoted Opera user for past 2 years. Finally, my association with Opera came to an end. I switched to Maxthon.

Maxthon is based on IE engine. So whatever opens in IE, has to open in Maxthon. Well, that's what the site claims and is their USP. And the very same was Opera's biggest drawback. Some sites just did not render correctly. Nothing to blame to Opera since Opera browsers are web compliant. However, site designers tweak sites to render them perfect in IE.

So why did I switch from Opera -

Maxthon gives me Opera's features with IE's rendering capability. It runs smooth and takes much less memory for its operations. It has everything from Tabbed Browsing, Mouse gestures and so on.

One feature that lacks in Maxthon though and I dearly miss is the vim type search from Opera. In Opera, if I type slash (/) and search keyword, it would start looking it up in the current page. I simply loved that feature over to doing a Ctrl-F and then entering a search string. It would be great if Maxthon folks add it. Another one is partial rendering that Opera does. Opera goes on rendering the webpage as it fetches it. So you don't have to wait to view the parts of page until entire is fetched.

All in all, the memory leak issue that causes Opera becoming unresponsive was the main reason I considered to switch. I would certainly not have switched otherwise.


Cheers,
Manish.

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Girl in the train...

I see her travelling through the train,
And feel that this girl is very sane.

See her daily in the train lobby,
But I still don't know what's her hobby.

Dusky female with an angelic face,
Haven't talked with her, such a big disgrace.

This thing can't happen I new from the start,
Some people are destined to be very apart.

Pray that she finds her Perfect soon,
The guy will be born with a silver spoon!

Manish.

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Friday, January 12, 2007

Train travel in India...

Found this site while browsing the internet - http://www.seat61.com/India.htm

Wanted to know about the different classes (First Class, Sleeper class) provided in trains of India. This site had covered them all with pictures of each.

The site also gives you details about ship and train travel across many countries - http://www.seat61.com

A wonderful source of information indeed!

Cheers,
Manish.

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