Snailing through the World Wide Web
LoopyByteloose
Posts: 12,537
I am sure that most of you don't have the problems I have with posting to the Parallax Forums. I suspect many of you think my typing is extremely bad, that I never learned to spell, and I must be a nervous mess from all the corrections I do.
I have been blaming myself, or my keyboard for all these problems, but I just did a posting to GMAIL that was letter perfect and see that the confirmation was full of typos. This is some kind of dropout in the interface with online editors. I experience the same with Parallax Forums due to the delays in data rates of being half way around the world.
It is NOT a local problem on my service provider as I have tested the speed of my ADSL and within Taiwan it is lightning quick. But the moment that I cross national boundaries, there is a slowdown from some sort of bottleneck.
So please don't think too poorly of me. I am not drinking heavily, drugged, or getting senile. If anything the Internet is showing signs of senility.
I have been blaming myself, or my keyboard for all these problems, but I just did a posting to GMAIL that was letter perfect and see that the confirmation was full of typos. This is some kind of dropout in the interface with online editors. I experience the same with Parallax Forums due to the delays in data rates of being half way around the world.
It is NOT a local problem on my service provider as I have tested the speed of my ADSL and within Taiwan it is lightning quick. But the moment that I cross national boundaries, there is a slowdown from some sort of bottleneck.
So please don't think too poorly of me. I am not drinking heavily, drugged, or getting senile. If anything the Internet is showing signs of senility.
Comments
Seriously, I've never noticed anything amiss in your many fine posts, and I'm fairly snobby about gud spellin'.
"Never trust a man who spells the same word twice the same way" Mark Twain
"There are two times that one should never speculate - when one can afford to and when one cannot afford to." Mark Twain
These can all be corrected, you know.
Tried, but only the liver suffered some residual damage.
The main point is writing is rather serious business for me as I have been teaching English now for over 18 years. Writing is rather painstaking work that I thought the computer would magically make easier - but it doesn't. You still have to have something to say and a great willingness to reread and rewrite.
I was working on a masters degree in TESOL from the University of Edinburg, but I had to abandon it as the burden of writing was just too much for me. I injured my neck at 23 and extended intensive work sessions of writing at a keyboard become seriously painful. It is easy enough to jump in and out of the Forum, but working on larger projects - including programming - are not fun.
It is just disappointing to see that latency in the World Wide Web adds to the problem. My ISPN was once very good, but as the internet matures, they are trying to squeeze more profit out of the original capital investment. At times, I have to reboot the computer and the ADSL modem two or three times to get on to the internet and I am paying for premium service from the national phone company.
Sure I could use a VPN server, but I am not sure what that implies for that person who provides it for me. Homeland Security and all the nasty concerns of provide a backdoor for someone in Taiwan might just not be worth it. My landlady provides me a second internet link that is supposed to be fiber optic, but the router that goes to 24 rooms is blocking some services. I can't use GMAIL or Yahoo Mail with that. Still, I suspect that link also gets much slower when I go beyond Taiwan.
This does not make any sense to me. I have yet to see an email or forum text edit box that is "online" in the sense that characters typed go up to a server and echoed back to the screen (like good old green screens on unix boxes, say). So there cannot be any character drop out due to that.
Now, if you are really sure that you have entered perfect text into a box, then hit SUBMIT, and then it has come back full of errors there is something very weird going on. As you know, all that data goes up to the server and back again in TCP/IP packets which are very well error protected.
I can belive that. But having a slow down orlong latency would just mean the text takes longer to get back to your browser. It should still be in tact. Put's tim foild hat on, is there someone in the middle, at the border, intercepting your traffic reading it as they like to do and passing it on damaged?
Ha, sometimes I think it has gone crazy but I can't see how your symptoms would occur and have never seen such.
Are the errors consistent? e's always become g's, c's to q's, etc. - I could see packet inspection somewhere along the line for the more paranoid countries (like any of them) which would cause a latency/response time issue but if they are sniffing packets, they should be able to inspect and move to a new packet/buffer without messing things up unless crazy character sets are involved and then it should just be bit for bit copies. (hint to any paranoid countries, be careful so you don't get caught!)
Like Heater said, it's local to your PC until you send the entire thing in TCP/IP packets unless you are using Telnet with host echo or something like that.
Is it only from your home network or does it seem the Starbucks and other places you frequent have the same issues?
You could always put incriminating information in a message and wait for a knock on the door but that's a rather extreme troubleshooting practice! (KIDDING!!!)
If they see continued Forth activity from you, you will be ignored because Forth Nuts are harmless and can't agree on anything long enough to form any organized groups.
Ahh, now I understand why I don't see any errors from Loopy. If it's Forth I would not be able to tell if there were errors or not:)
But I also have certain periods where the posting process just goes haywire. Either my computer will hang waiting for a confirmation from Parallax that never comes or delays for longer than usual. I could blame some of that on using wifi at home, but not all of it. I gave up on Starbucks wifi months ago because it was even less stable than my own and I had to pay for that one.
Then there are times when I write that the keyboard input is delayed to the screen rather substantially. I am not sure if that is all internal to my computer or a product of handshaking with Parallax about what I am writing.
Overall, I think that I have some of the longest latencies on the internet when I try to reach Europe. Usually to American they are much better, but they still are present. I have a feeling that the USA connection has periods where it is swamped with traffic and that is when I get my worse problems. That makes sense to me as these periods are usually during middle of the day hours for continental USA.
Long delays when posting are really annoying and happen a lot to me when posting from a phone. Often leading to posts that vanish. My error rate goes up dramatically when using a phone as reading the whole text and correcting spelling mistakes is so cumbersome.
OTOH, I have a friend in Manila who calls me via Skype Out on a regular basis, and he could be next door for all I'd know from the connection quality.
-Phil
Anyway, today's experiences appear to be strange. I was just shut out of my log on to Parallax. The screen frozen once again after I hit save and there is no recovery method that works. I had to reboot the computer and go through Parallax.com to get back into the Forums as a nobody. I did that only after downing Firefox about six times to try to get back in to the Forums.
And then I wanted to add a name to the contest for the Quick Start accessory and I decided to enter in all capital letters for the sake of emphasis in a large type and an underline. I tried to do so 3 times, but the upper case letters were consistently converted to lower case when I entered the original and the two corrections.
Something is afoot.
we all can understand rwgast just fine, i for one just got used to it. now that i reply from a phone, i embrass text-speak.
proper english is only for old english teachers anyway, we still have to talk to regular people sometimes.
Horse flies know their ...um, stuff!
No, no ... that is grammar, not grammer!
FYI, I started this thread with the realization that I have been blaming myself and that I really didn't have to. What the Parallax Forums do, there are many more latencies involved and some very odd events occur.
But now I am willing to just settle for 50% senility and 50% gemlins in the world wide web. There is evidence that both are contributing factors.
Still, the English teaching professional in me keeps telling me that I have to try to write better than the average person - lead by example and all that. The rest of you can talk about grammer.