Ever wondered if you ISP is providing you the amount of bandwidth that they claim they do? Well recently I needed to upgrade my broadband plan to include more download and faster speeds. My ISP here in Oz is Telstra Bigpond… somewhere back in the archives I did say I was going to dump them but never did… Well the cable plan I’m on now boasts up to 30 Mbps, however there are a number of factors that Bigpond say may affect performance, like location, the bandwidth of the site you are downloading from etc, you get the general idea.
So I decided to test my bandwidth using Speedtest.net and on my iMac using the built in wireless and I got the following result. I managed to get up to 5131 kb/s out of a possible 30000 kb/s. Although the speed is pretty reasonable it’s not that good compared to what is available.
I figured that maybe the wireless connection on my iMac could be part of the problem. So I fired up another box I have that is wired directly to the router and got the following results.
Wow, just by plugging in directly to the router, I was able to manage another 4000 kb/s. So it seems that these factors claimed by Bigpond might just have some substance. In any case 5000 kb/s is still pretty good in my book and 30 Mbps is a good marketing strategy by Bigpond even though you may never ever see it.
How good is your ISP?
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Until today I have never really spent time customising this blog, so today spent quite a few hours playing with the WordPress plugins and I was very impressed with what what is available and can see why it is so popular as a blogging engine.
Well another open source Blog/CMS I’ve been playing with is Textpattern which was created by Dean Allen with the first stable release of of Textpattern being released in August 2005. That’s enough history but what I will say about Textpattern is it is at the very least, definitely worth considering for you next web project.
Anyway after adding social bookmarking to this wordpress blog I thought I’d try to do the same on one of my work in progress Textpattern sites. I found a suitable plugin called social_cab from the textpattern resources site and downloaded the plugin which was created by Dejan Čabrilo.
Once downloaded I then like WordPress just upload the files to the server however with Textpattern you need to paste the plugin code in the admin interface plugin tabs textfield and then hit upload. Then all you need to do is add the the txp tag in your form where you want the bookmarks to display and then activate the plugin.
Example code of how you add the txp tag to the article form
<ul class="sociallist">
<txp:cab_social tag="li" imgdir="/images/social" />
</ul>
And how it all looks in the post once it’s all up and running.
I’ll be writing more about my Textpattern experiences as I learn more about it.
Posted in Tips
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Tagged plugins, Wordpress
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Today I got my first taste of Google Docs which Google provides as an online word processor and spreadsheet which is most likely targeting Microsofts Office Suite of products. Microsoft practically built their empire with the Windows operating system and office suite of products over the last 10 years and have up until now, never really had competition that can really give them something to worry about.
Trying to tackle Microsoft head to head in their core business would almost be impossible as they are so strong in the desktop software market however Google have such a strangle hold in the online space that they are in the perfect position to launch a full scale attack from where they are strongest.
I recently read a book by Seth Godin where he talked about how Apple used a similar strategy which have made them the leader in online music downloads, portable music players and soon mobile phone market by using iTunes which then allowed them to tap into their current user base to push more of their products and services which is much easier than marketing to new market. Couple this with innovative products and Apple now dominates this market.
Google has many of us using their search engine daily. We have Google accounts which mean we can easily tap into the growing range on online services Google provides. This is the platform the Google is using to slowing lure Microsoft Office users away from their desktop software as well as providing a link in Adwords reporting offering to view your report in Google Docs instead of downloading it as a csv file which you could then open in excel.
You use it once today, another time in a few weeks and soon enough you’ll find yourself getting dependent on using it and it starts becoming your main choice for word processing or spreadsheet processing. You can’t help being drawn to using it, as you get to save your files online for easy access and also makes it easy to find later… just log in. It’s convenience and it’s FREE.
With Microsoft being such a huge company, it’s hard to imagine Google doing so much damage and it’s even somewhat concerning that Google has so much data domination.
Posted in News
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Tagged , Google, Microsoft
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