Run Down [26 Sep 2007|08:31am] [ mood | busy ] [ music | // Circa Survive - "Kicking Your Crosses Down" // ] I've been so incredibly busy this last week that I barely know what today is. The weekend is far to short, I think we need 3 day weekends because I am getting to be just to over-worked between school, work, house chores and whatever else comes along. Halo 3 came out on Tuesday at 12:01AM so I hung out for that "launch party". I had class that night, so I figured rather then drive up again I would just wait a few hours instead. I figured I'd be sitting there alone, ha, boy was I wrong. When I got there around 9, there was already about 50-75 people waiting. It was ridiculous. Of course previous to launch I had ready some stories about how the Limited Edition (which I pre-ordered) disks were getting scratched because of poor case contruction and design. Fortunately Microsoft will be replacing any of those disks until 12-31-2007 which is great. So if I should have any issues, I can just send it back to them. I also have to send them some form so I can get my racing wheel fixed. Apparently there's some overheating issue with that. So after the Halo 3 launch , I just came home and went to bed. Yesterday, work was okay, not to busy. I had a "presentation" to give about how we're going to have to follow some guidelines for product naming. It's need to be a lot more uniform and we have to standardize things. It went well, so I am happy about that. The rest of the day was useless. Today we have a farrier appointment but emilie didn't leave me a check to pay with, so I am not sure what we'll do about that. I am almost thinking about calling off work, but Keith is coming in today so I won't...I have a few things I could actually be doing too, and Greg will be online from like 12-3, so we can chat. I'm thinking about ordering that chatpad for my 360. It sure would make sending text messages a lot easier. I have become much better at typing them in manually though so that's cool, I suppose...Believe it or not I've not even opened Halo 3 to play it. I kinda opened it yesterday infront of makkintosshu just to show him and myself haha I did open it on launch night to see if the disk was scratched. I haven't done much more cause I haven't had time and Morgan hasn't gotten his copy yet. I hope Keith gets it too, cause 3-way co-op mode would be awesome. I got the new Bled album. It's pretty good, but I haven't listened to much of it. I only listened to about 3-4 songs cause I kept getting interrupted. I gotta remember to bring it home today.. Ok, I got shit to do, go away! post comment

Monitor Bandwidth on your Mac [26 Sep 2007|01:14pm] Have you ever wondered how much data you've sent or received from your computer? Maybe you have to track how much data comes in and out of your network for whatever reason. Fortunately there's a few Mac applications out there that can help you do this quite easily. I personally put some of these monitoring applications on my servers so I can see how much bandwidth they use, but they work on most any computer. A few of the applications that I use are vnstat, iStat menus, Surplus Meter and Activity Monitor. Activity Monitor comes with every OS X Macintosh computer so it's probably the first one you'd want to try out. You can find it in your Utilities folder. While it shows a lot of information about your computer in general it does have a network specific section. It has a nice graph that shows current incoming traffic and it displays how much data you sent and received. The downside to this is that when you reboot your computer all the statistics are reset. I'll only briefly cover vnstat because it's more of an advanced technique. It's a small process that runs in the background, there is no pretty user interface out of the box. It does keep a database of your hourly, daily, monthly stats though and because it uses a database the statistics aren't lost when you reboot the machine. Another upside is that it's not as bloated as any of the other applications and doesn't use as much resources. You can learn more about it on this website if you're interested. I tend to use this option on my servers over the other applications. iStat menus is probably one of my favorite bandwidth monitors for OS X. It looks great and does exactly what I want it to do (and then some). iStat menus is a little application that sits in your menubar and not only monitors your bandwidth usage and current speeds, it also monitors other aspects of your system like RAM, hard disk usage, temperatures, fans and your CPU loads. Fortunately you can choose which statistics to show, and aren't required to show them all which I like. I generally would stick to using this application on a workstation machine and not on a server. It is a free application and it can be downloaded from iSlayer. The last application I want to go over is called Surplus Meter. This application was specifically built for people who have monthly bandwidth limits. I think it's pretty rare around here to find any ISPs that have limits but they're definitely are some out there. This application mostly focuses on how much data you've downloaded. You tell the application which day of the month your cycle starts on and how much bandwidth you're allotted each month. It'll display how far along you are in the billing cycle, how many megabytes you've downloaded and uploaded. It will also calculate about how much bandwidth you should use per day so that you do not go over, an average of how much you are using per day and how much bandwidth you have left over. Surplus Meter is great for watching your bandwidth to make sure you don't go over but if you're just looking for something to monitor your bandwidth in general I would go with one of the other applications. You can grab a copy of this also free software from this website. Conclusion - There are many different way to monitor your bandwidth, I've only outlined a few of the possible way you can go about doing this. In general you should use command line utilities and things that run the background on servers but for workstation machines graphical tools are great. I really recommend the iStat menus, it looks great and can monitor much more then just your network stats. post comment

Technorati Post [26 Sep 2007|02:22pm] Technorati Profile post comment

navigation [ viewing | September 26th, 2007 ] [ go | previous day|next day ]