Random Neurons Firing

Thoughts about Software, Networking, and Life

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  • Dave Täht for Postel Service Award

    I posted this nomination for the John B. Postel Service Award today…

    I strongly recommend Dave Täht for the Postel Service Award. Regrettably, this must be posthumous.

    I first learned about Dave when I stumbled on his post talking about experiments with the CeroWRT software to decrease latency in home routers. This must have been in late 2011. At the time I had 7mbps/768kbps DSL connection. I was happy to have that connection since it was much better than dialup.

    But I had also noticed that it would sometimes get REALLY SLOW when multiple people at my house were using the connection. This phenomenon came to be known as Bufferbloat. Since I was already familiar with flashing home routers, I tried CeroWRT and worked with Dave to test it. When fq_codel arrived in May 2012, it provided the first solid fix to the problem.

    Over the years, I worked with Dave and others on the Bufferbloat team to refine the instructions and other content on the original Redmine site and later the bufferbloat.net site. As a side result, Dave crowned me the "Chief Doc Guy", a title I proudly accepted.

    Dave worked tirelessly over the years, first to identify the problem of latency, to make improvements, and then collaborate with anyone who was willing to help address it. His impatience with the pace of its rollout helped him goad many people into finding ways to incorporate the solution into a wider and wider set of implementations.

    Dave Täht is truly an Internet Hero, and deserves the Postel award.

  • In addition to using ChatGPT for the Wifi-heatmapper project, I have also been having fun reading Simon Willison's blog, especially his Here's how I use LLMs to help me write code post.

  • More on wifi-heatmapper

    I posted before about the wifi-heatmapper project. I have been working on it to tune up the user interface and make its display a bit easier to understand. My PR is at: https://github.com/hnykda/wifi-heatmapper/pull/24

  • Trouble uploading images to Wordland

    I am delighted with Wordland – it makes it very easy to post to my various blogs. I encountered a problem uploading an image to one of my sites. I reported it here.

    SOLUTION: This was a Jetpack problem. It turns out that I did have Jetpack installed, but the JSON API was not enabled.

    Why was troubleshooting this so hard? There were a couple confounding factors:

    • It's an atypical configuration – Jetpack was installed but without (today's) default use of the JSON API. This site – RandomNeuronsFiring.com – has been continually updated since, I think, 2013. I am unsure when I first installed Jetpack, but it could well have been before the JSON API arrived, so perhaps it was never turned on by default. Enabling the JSON API made images work flawlessly.
    • Posting text worked fine (see recent posts on this site). It was confusing when posting images to my blog did not work.
    • Posting images to another (more recently created) blog worked fine. Since it's a newer installation, I assume that the Jetpack defaulted the JSON API to be enabled when this site was created.

    I found the answer by searching some of the other Issues, and saw someone mention Jetpack settings. I then checked the Docs and noticed the Jetpack JSON API requirement.

    I hope the following advice – a) ensure Jetpack is installed; b) ensure the JSON API is turned on – can make it into a Troubleshooting section of the documentation in the future.

    Update: I am not really sure what I did to "enable the JSON API" in my WordPress site that made it work. I went back to the site, checked the Jetpack -> Settings, and clicked the "Modules" link at the bottom. This shows a whole list of modules, and JSON API was active. I clicked Deactivate, and, sure enough, I was unable to make edits – I saw an appropriate error message. Re-activating it left it working fine.

  • Switching to Wordland for posts…

    I am switching my blogging to use Wordland.social. I formerly used the standard WordPress editor (Classic, then Block), but they always felt klunky and slightly overwhelming. The process of logging into WordPress, then editing with those tools was enough of a drag that I didn't bother to post as much as I could.

    Instead, I now just go to the Wordland.social page (it remembers my WordPress.com credentials), type a quick note (like this one) and send it to any of my several WordPress sites. It gets posted immediately, no fuss, no muss.

    Wordland satisfies most of my blogging needs – text, highlighting, links. If I do need to do more involved edits, the full power of the WordPress Block Editor is always available because Wordland uses the same API so the posts are compatible.

    Best of all, Wordland enables my (bad?) habit of re-editing posts. It lets me select an earlier post, tweak the wording, and repost. Thanks, Scripting!

  • Making Local Speed Tests

    There are lots of good Internet speed tests, such as Waveform, Cloudflare, or Speedtest.net. Unfortunately, these mix your ISP's performance with your local router/network so it's hard to tease out whether problems are local or remote.

    The Crusader network speed and latency test does a remarkably good job of measuring the performance of your local network – transfer rates and latency – both for Ethernet and Wi-Fi.

    To use Crusader, you'll need two computers – one acting as a server, the other as a client. To run a test, download the pre-built binary onto two computers (it runs on Windows, macOS, or Linux). Connect the first computer to one of your router's LAN Ethernet ports, and start it as a Server. Connect the other computer via WiFi and start the Client, enter the server's address, and start the test.

    Read about how to interpret the Crusader results or more about running local tests in the Crusader docs. NB: These documents are waiting to be incorporated into to the main Crusader repo.

  • Another Wordland test

    Inserting an image in a post: Image appears below…

    Image appears above.

    Can I update this?

  • VSee Network Stability Test

    A while back, I saw a project called zoomready that I thought might be a useful tool for watching a network connection (even though it was Win-only, and I'm a Mac fan), but I now see it's deprecated.

    I'm not disappointed – I have found a web-based tool that seems to do a similar thing: the VSee Network Stability Test. It was developed by VSee, a telehealth company. I am guessing they created it as a tech support tool so that they can request troubleshooting information when customers call in and say, "Everything stinks!"

    To use it, go to the page and start it prior to your video call. Leave it running in a separate web page for the duration. VSee displays three continually updating graphs: "MOS" (Mean Operating Score, a 1..5 measure of voice quality), packet loss, latency and jitter. These indicate the quality of the network connection, while only consuming 4-5kbps while it's running.

    I peeked at the Javascript, it's pretty clever. It starts an RTC client in the browser, talking to an RTC server on the VSee side. Since an RTC session continually chit-chats with the other end (normally sending audio or video) there's a continuing (many per second) stream of requests/responses. I haven't verified, but I bet they instead time stamps in the stream to gather statistics.

    I asked the VSee tech support folks if they minded if we publicized the test page to a wide audience – they said OK.

    This post created with wordland.social, a slick “writer’s interface” to WordPress

  • Second Wordland post

    Find the GUI on wordland.social

  • Playing with WiFi heatmaps

    I’m often called upon by my neighbors to troubleshoot their crummy network connections. I already have good advice for solving bad latency caused by bufferbloat but I also hear, “My network connection is weak”, and I would like a nice tool to give me a visual sense of the facts on the ground.

    I looked around for tools that will do this. There’s an NetSpot for Android that has a free tier, but I wanted a free version. I found python-wifi-survey-heatmap, but it only runs on Linux.

    Then I found wifi-heatmapper that is a Javascript app, and has been customized for macOS, Windows, and Linux. I’m horsing around with it to see what it’ll do.