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Thu, May 31, 2007

tech Schrödinger's Download

Posted at 8:36 pm MDT to Technology

There is something flaky about either my wireless connection to the router or my DSL connection. or maybe Qwest is throttling the connection in some weird way. Or maybe I'm cursed.

I've been trying to do a very, very large download all week. It starts out chugging along nicely then gets slower and slower, then hangs so I have to restart it. (Fortunately, I now have things set up so it picks up where it left off when I restart it). Dial-up would probably be slower, but I wouldn't bet on it.

The weird thing is that it doesn't hang when I am doing other things on the same computer. It only dies when I am not looking at it... like just after I go to bed, so the overnight hours are wasted for downloading. It even seems to download faster when I am websurfing or doing other things on the same computer.

The download hasn't died completely in the past few hours (though it has slowed down a few times). That's partly because I've been busy on this machine, and partly because the next time it dies, I'm going to run a special setup program to try to get Flash running on Firefox. So of course it isn't hanging.

I need to get Flash running because the bozos at my credit union are installing a log-in tool for their on-line banking that requires Flash, which is not directly supported for AMD64 Linux, so I'm having to go the long way around. If worst comes to worst, I'll load a 32 bit Linux client in VMWare -- which will involve another long download.

Feh. I need to get cat5 working between my computer room and livingroom again. (I really don't trust the stability of the wireless connection.) Or I need to get my home server built, which will have a hard-wired net connection and a DVD burner. I've been using mostly laptops for so long, my desktop machines don't even have working USB ports.

Wired networking AND a server would be even better. Maybe after the septic system rebuild has been paid for.

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