Author: Carl

The other day I was in the hallway outside of our firm’s office, standing at the top of a stepladder, stringing some fiber optic cable through the drop ceiling.  A passer-by (a nice fellow from Redpoint Global, a software house next door to our office) saw the fiber optic cable that was being installed, and asked (he sounded envious) if we were getting gigabit ethernet.  I had to disappoint him — we were merely running fiber from one part of our office to another, not to the Internet.

But it got me thinking.  What does it cost these days to get a gigabit connection to the Internet?  I was astonished to learn that it costs less these days than it used to cost.  For $110 per month, I now have gigabit internet in my home.  I’ll describe the process and the results. Continue reading “Gigabit Internet service”

You might wonder how fast your internet connection is.  A typical way to do this is to download a large data file from someplace on the Internet, and to see how long it takes.  You might wonder whether somewhere along the way, the data file is getting compressed.  The way to eliminate that possibility is to pick a data file that is incompressible.  To do this, you simply need to make sure the content of the data file is truly random.  With this in mind, I offer a couple of PNG image files that are truly random in content.  You can use them to test how fast your internet connection is.

Continue reading “How fast is your internet connection?”

Summary:  The savvy webmaster in 2018 should probably be using the free-of-charge and very convenient Let’s Encrypt system for “https://” certificates on web sites.  But this post mentions that for the webmaster who can’t or won’t learn how to use Let’s Encrypt, and who instead stubbornly carries out annual (and fiddly manual) certificate renewals using SSL certificates that cost money, there is a certificate authority that provides SSL certificates for a mere $8.88 per year instead of the $60 or $149 per year that the webmaster is paying now.

If you have a web site, you should probably forward this blog article to your webmaster.  Hopefully he or she will be able to tell you that either (a) you are already using Let’s Encrypt or (b) you are only paying $8.88 per year for your SSL certificate!

Continue reading “Can’t or won’t use Let’s Encrypt? Cheap SSL cert”

Our office, like most offices these days, is paperless.  (Well, not exactly paperless.  We go through many reams of paper per week.  But I digress.)  Being paperless, our important files are all maintained on file servers.  Imagine how one’s office would be brought to its knees, or worse, if a such electronic files were to be lost!  Which brings me to the concept of monthly disk health reports.

Continue reading “Monthly disk health reports”