Experiments with Technology

Each day, I get up, get ready and leave to the office with my ~5 kg laptop bag. This is the drill and I am not unique in this. Every time, when I pick up my bag I wonder to myself why I am carrying this? The biggest reason is, of course, the laptop. And then we have the charger, accessories,  diary and  a book perhaps, adding to the overall weight. While, book, diary etc. are all personal preferences for carry-ons, I hate it when I need to do this - just because of the laptop. I keep asking why? why?.   Add to that the fact that its also a data security risk - whether thats because you forgot it at the airport check-in or someone stole it from you. True in some of the cities in India (and perhaps elsewhere), you also need to carry your bag to the restaurant or shopping mall because you just can not leave it in the parking lot. So, frankly, I find it a big big pain and an unnecessary hassle. Look around you and you can easily say that this not short of a small menace ...

Today, I came across an interesting issue with cloud. Its called LFN aka E l e ph a n t. LFN refers to a TCP/IP issue called Long Fat Network . You can google for it and get the interesting technical details on this subject. What this means for a cloud user is simply that he or she is going to have to wait for ages before his or her fat file gets uploaded to the cloud server. It does not really matter if you have 2 Mbps or 20 Mbps. The latency in the network prevents the TCP from being able to transfer the files at the maximum available bandwidth.  And this is serious issue for all cloud users! I tested it across many cloud service providers -  Amazon, Rackspace and Opsource. Over my 4 Mbps, I could not get more than  100 kbps while transferring over scp.  This file has the relevant test info for copying speeds on various cloud operators. So, whats the Solution? Solution#1: Simple and Quick Split the files into smaller chunks. I used hjsplit - it has sof...