Archive for the ‘humour’ Category

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The Fan Story

October 31, 2007

http://beale.best.vwh.net/measure/fan/fanspeed.html

A funny (and true) story involving some interesting calculations of air flow, velocity, thrust, etc.

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Make Your Own Beer Labels

October 13, 2007
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A Successful Halloween Dinner Party

August 12, 2007

http://bravo.imakeprojects.com/projects/halloween-supper/

Pictures and recipes for a multi-course, cannibal-themed meal!

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Effective bandwidth of a 32 hour roadtrip carrying a 500GB HDD

August 7, 2007

Trying to keep ourselves “could-get-hit-by-a-bus proof” has brought up a discussion of an unlikely scenario of Dan going to our data centre for a tour, and a bus running into a building, simultaneously taking out both our server and the unfortunate system administrator who keeps all the backup data. Ouch. Fortunately I will remain intact, yet frustrated about /blog’s downtime. Waterloo, Ontario.

University to University, Google says there are 1,476 kilometers of road in between us, suggesting a 16 hour drive. Assuming speed limit, caffeine pills, and having the 500 GB external hard drive be full of useful data (lets say backup files and personal media), it was interesting to figure out the effective bandwidth of such a road-trip. The math is disappointingly easy.

Given information:

  • 16 hour drive * 2 way trip = 32 hours on the road
  • 500 GB of data to loot
500 GB / 32 hours = 4,551 kilobytes per second

My broadband Internet peaks out at about 4,500 kilobits per second, making this ridiculous road-trip have an effective bandwidth 8 times higher than what my DSL modem could possibly pull in. Outrageous! I demand to have fiberoptics installed.

From: CompSci.ca/blog