Dear Journalists: Bits and Bytes

Dear Journalist type person,

There's something we must discuss. You see, you've been making a very basic mistake in many of your articles when it comes to writing about the Internet, and specifically Internet speeds. Let's take a look at a small quote:

...unless you have an internet connection of impossible speeds. (Mine is nominally 10MB, by the way, which in practice means maximum download speeds of 1.4 megabytes per second).

(source: Rock-Paper-Shotgun).

Can you spot the problem here? Internet speeds are measured in megabits per second. The symbol for 'bits' is a lower-case 'b', so an Internet connection that's 10 Megabits per second could be written as "10 Mbps". I guess if you're feeling lazy you could leave off the "ps", and end up with "10 Mb" (although it's a really sloppy thing to do), but NEVER "10 MB" - that means something else entirely.

Modern PCs use bytes that contain 8 bits. The correct symbol for a byte is an upper-case 'B'. so "10 MB" means "ten mega-bytes", not mega-bits, which is probably what you meant when you were describing the speed of your Internet connection.

Back to our Internet connection that runs at 10Mbps. It's unfortunate that speeds are measured in bits, because a much more useful measure is bytes per second, since that's how we deal with data sizes. We know that a CD ISO image is likely to be around 700 MB, an MP3 file around 3 MB, and an image from a digital camera to be around 1 MB. To convert our 10Mbps connection speed to megabytes per second, we divide by 8, and get 1.25MBps. However, this is the theoretical maximum speed, and there's a lot of overhead in any network connection, so in practise it's unlikely you will experience anything close to this maximum speed.

If your eyes glazed over, or perheps you felt light-headed reading that, here are a few take-home points to make it easier for you:

• Connection speeds are measured in megabits-per-second. The correct unit symbol for this is "Mbps".
• Files are measured in Megabytes.
• A Byte has 8 bits. So to turn your connection speed into something useful, divide the number by 8 and make the unit symbol "MBps".

I would be honoured if you'd consider this small point next time you go to write online. Some of us are acutely sensitive to these matters, and you really don't want to upset the geeks of this world.

Kind Regards,

Project Documentation

Why is it that most open source project pages are so terrible at documenting their own project?

I'm not talking about API or technical documentation - I'm talking about telling new visitors to your site what the hell your code is about.

Project authors, here are some handy tips:

1. On your project front page, right at the top, put a simple explanation of what your code does (or what you hope it will do someday). Remember that your audience may not have the same level of technical experience as you do. Examples (screenshots, code snippets) are a MUST. A picture speaks a thousand words and all that...
   
   
2. Make sure you include the development status of your project. I can't count the number of times I've spent 30 minutes looking at a project only to realize that it's not nearly complete enough to be usable to me. There's no shame in saying "this library is working, but not production ready. It is missing features X, Y, Z"
   
   
3. Inject some enthusiasm! How many boring, dull, dry project descriptions do I have to read through? Most sound like the authors aren't passionate about their product. Sell your project; inject some enthusiasm, and maybe your viewers will become more enthusiastic in the process!

Well, that's my rant for the day. Now I must go update my project documentation...

Life Update

Yes, It's been a while.

In the last few months I've been through the painful experience of trying to keep a company running despite the best efforts of the directors. Realising that the odds were stacked against me I decided to throw in the towel and relocate back to New Zealand.

So farewell England! I arrived as a graduate programmer, with a bit of open source hacking under my belt, and left with several years programming experience, a whole ton of knowledge that could not be leaned through any means but hard work, not to mention a few (emotional) scars. It's been a great experience, and one I encourage any graduate to do.

So now I'm back in Dunedin, what am I doing? Well, I've taken a 12 month contract to teach at Otago polytechnic; I'll be teaching third year programming and database papers. I've also completed a short stint programming for ARL and fixing the Survival Factor exhibits at Otago Museum. I'm hoping to set myself up as a contractor, so I can take on any odd jobs that I see.

My hope is that I will be able to return to more open source hacking now that I'm in a more flexible working environment. I'm not sure what project I'll end up helping - perhaps KDE, perhaps something new.

Will write more soon.

Live Forever!

Ray Kurzweil suggests that most, if not all technical development & evolution happens on an exponential scale, rather than a linear one. What does this mean? It means that, amongst other things, by the year 2020, we will have access to technologies far beyond anything we've thought about to date.

Makes sense to me!

Distractions

I've been very distracted lately - I haven't written any code outside work hours for several weeks now. What's kept me so busy? mainly it's been my guitar(s). I've just added a new guitar to the growing collection. If you're interested, you can see some pictures here.

Microsoft's unpaid testers

I just discovered this charming little quote in the winows 7 blog:

To date, with the wide usage of the Windows 7 Beta we have received a hundreds [sic] of Connect (the MSDN/Technet enrolled beta customers) bug reports and have fixes in the pipeline for the highest percentage of those reported bugs than in any previous Windows development cycle.

So you're publically advertising the fact that your product was very buggy when you launched the beta test phase, and you're scrambling to fix all the bugs at the last minute? Whatever happened to internal testing? Who will test all the bugs introduced with your bug fixes?


Bah, my dislike of the Microsoft software mill continues! Hooray for uninformed opinion!

The data: URL scheme

Here's something you may not already know: You can include data directly in an (x)html page, instead of referencing it externally.

For example, most of the time when you want to display an image you would write code like this:

<img src="http://www.blogger.com/some_image.png" alt="some random image" />


Web browsers downloading your HTML source will download the text first, then download any external references, including "some_image.png" (assuming the user has not turned off image downloading).However, there are a few cases where you want to distribute an HTML file with images, but don't want to distribute multiple files. In those cases, the 'data:' URL scheme is what you need.

The scheme is documented in the (very readable) RFC2339. Essentially, you can include the binary data straight into your HTML code. The example they give in the RFC looks like this:


<img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODdhMAAwAPAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAMAAw%20%20%20AAAC8IyPqcvt3wCcDkiLc7C0qwyGHhSWpjQu5yqmCYsapyuvUUlvONmOZtfzgFz%20%20%20ByTB10QgxOR0TqBQejhRNzOfkVJ+5YiUqrXF5Y5lKh/DeuNcP5yLWGsEbtLiOSp%20%20%20a/TPg7JpJHxyendzWTBfX0cxOnKPjgBzi4diinWGdkF8kjdfnycQZXZeYGejmJl%20%20%20ZeGl9i2icVqaNVailT6F5iJ90m6mvuTS4OK05M0vDk0Q4XUtwvKOzrcd3iq9uis%20%20%20F81M1OIcR7lEewwcLp7tuNNkM3uNna3F2JQFo97Vriy/Xl4/f1cf5VWzXyym7PH%20%20%20hhx4dbgYKAAA7" alt="Larry" />


Which equates to this image:



There are many reasons why you wouldn't want to do this - it increases the size of your HTML file, forcing users to download more before they can see whether your content is what they want (especially if the embedded data is near the beginning of the file). There are also some limitations on the size of data and those limitations vary depending on where this technique is used. Still, it's a useful technique that can be used when you need to embed small amounts of binary data within an HTML file and you don't want to distribute multiple files.

End of the world as we know it?

This is a short post - I am overcome with grief. I have been waiting for spore to arrive on the Wii, and now I hear it will never arrive.

So many years of anticipation; so much disappointment - DRM issues aside I was still looking forward to this. Now I won't have a chance to sample that sweet candy of gaming goodness.

Masters of the big buildup

The Foo Fighters are the masters of the big buildup. Listen to a track like "Let it Die" from their album "Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace" - Brilliant!