Showing posts with label Util. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Util. Show all posts

Tuesday, 2 November 2010

Running Series: Little Tweaks, Tips and Apps (Part 3)




I have had the luxury of working with multiple monitors for, well.... forever. The OS support for multiple monitors has come a long way over the last 15 years and even non-geeks can be found running dual-monitors these days. Regardless of whether your background is in graphics design, software development, day-trading, marketing there is a tick about a power user when they are setup with multiple monitors. Their secret is in their stash of shortcuts, tools and hacks. Keep in mind that although the focus for many of these tools is for multi-monitor setups, some of them apply even to single monitor users!

Thursday, 10 September 2009

Trillian Automation + Too much time on my hands...

Preface
While the majority of my friends and colleagues have reasonably reliable internet, there are a few that, for whatever reason, have a hard time maintaining their connections. While most of them know that their connections are unreliable at best (either due to their ISP, bandwidth usage, equipment failure or that they are wardriving) a few have no idea that their connections are stuttering.


A connection is said to be stuttering when the connection drops but for such a short period that, based on how they use their connection, there is no glaring indication of what just happened (I imagine most users don't run perpetual ping-tests). Microsoft's 'Live Messenger' (and the various other chatting services) is a major culprit here - particularly so with the advent of offline messaging.

MSN (and other chatting services) operate by having a user sign on. This sets the client's state as being 'connected' (this is independant from the user's actual status i.e., available, away, invisible etc). The client checks back with this central messaging server every so often to make sure that the user is still connected. With the official MSN client, (empirically), it looks like this check is made every eight seconds or so. This is just when the client is sitting there, doing nothing. During active conversations, I would estimate the check to be four seconds or so.

When the client software [successfully] checks in with the central server, the software is "reassured" that it is still connected. The software (and thus, the user) is only made aware of  a problem in the event that this check fails. What this means, is that if the user's connection drops and is subsequently restored during the 7.9 seconds window between checks (3.9 seconds for active chats), the user has no idea that they were, in fact, offline for a very small window. From the end user's (the one with the dodgy connection), there is no reason to care -- they aren't aware of the disconnect and thanks to the luxury of offline messages, most of the time, they don't miss anything from the conversation.

It is important to note that offline messaging is not bullet proof. I don't quite know how the various offline messaging system work but I from time to time, we've all recieved the "such and such message failed to be delivered" error message even when both users in the conversation might be using client software that supports offline messaging.