Fancy lighting can be very ineffecient

I blogged yesterday about the amount of electricity I might need to make myself a cup of coffee in the morning. In these bright summer mornings there is normally enough natural light to allow me to see what I am doing. However, in the winter I expect that a considerable amount of electricity would go towards providing lights in the house so today I decided to measure the power consumption of my lights.

My kitchen is fairly large and so I need two bulbs to provide adequate light. However, since these lights are used a lot I was sure to ensure that I installed CFL bulbs in these lights. I was pleasantly surprised to measure that both lights beking switched on only consumed 30 watts (i.e. 15 watts each).

As well as the main lights, I also have a strip light under the presses. This light does not really provide enough light to do any work in the kitchen and its real purpose is to provide a nice ambiance in the kitchen while eating a romantic dinner. Therefore I was shocked to measure that it consumed 50 watts which is more than the two main lights.

In most of the rooms I have CFL bulbs which consume less than 20 watts each. In fact their power consumption was so low that it was hard for me to measure accurately. I was also pleasantly suprised to see that the two incandescent bulbs I had were consuming less power than they are supposed to. A 75w bulb which I have in a small utility room was only consuming about 60 watts and a 40w bulb in a Hot-press was actually only consuming 30 watts.

In the upstairs bathroom we have Halogen light fittings mainly because the female members of my family assure me that they look very stylish. I always knew that they were not very efficient, but I was shocked when I measured that they consumed 260 watts (i.e. more than 8 times as much energy as the kitchen lights which light a much larger room).

I suppose the lesson to learn is that it is expensive to be stylish!

How much energy am I using in the kitchen

I recently purchased an ENVIr energy monitor system from Current Cost to track my electricity usage at home. I am still waiting for delivery of the bridge device which will allow me to publish my data to the Internet in real time, but I thought I would share some initial data that I manually recorded.

It seems that the energy consumption in the house never goes much below 200 watts (probably due to things like networking equipment and other electronic devices that I have at home). Unfortunately they are out of stock on the Individual Appliance Monitors which would allow me to track the usage of individual devices but I was able to estimate the consumption of various appliances in the kitchen by switching them on and off and looking at how much this changed my total electric power consumption.

The first thing I measured was my cappuccino maker (which is often the first device switched on in the morning). This actually consists of three different devices, a milk warmer which consumed about 615 watts, an espresso maker which consumed about 730 watts and a frother for the milk which only consumed about 5 watts. This meant that the total consumption was 1.35 Kilowatts. For comparison I measured the filter coffee maker and it only consumed 950 watts so I could trim about 30% off my power consumption (as well as trimming a few inches from my waistline) by switching to filter coffee. However, I was surprised to learn that the kettle was consuming about 2.94 kilowatts - so if I went back to instant coffee my power consumption would more than double.

I will post more data over the next few days as I make more measurements.

Sometimes Computers get stuff very wrong

There is an old joke "To err is human, but to really mess things up you need a computer".

I don't run very often, but when I do I normally use the My Tracks application on my Android phone to track my progress. This allows me to keep a training record which is usually very accurate. However, the other day I went on a training run that was more or less following the route of the Streets of Galway race. I had to run a little bit extra to get to and from the race route so I reckoned I would have clocked up slightly more than 8km. Imagine my surprise when I looked at the route that my phone thought I took. Instead of running roughly 10km per hour on the streets of Galway, it thought I was swimming at over 100km  per hour around the Irish Sea!!!

View Galway in a larger map

How to avoid being ripped off by exorbitant mobile data roaming charges

I (like many other people) have become very reliant upon my Smartphone. Luckily the market is quite competitive both for phones and for service providers so that in general you can get very good value when either buying a new phone or when subscribing to a mobile data service to allow you get the most out of it.

One big exception to this is when you leave your home country. The roaming data rates charged by most operators when you bring your Smartphone abroad are nothing short of outrageous. For example, my provider charges €10 per MByte for data access when I am outside of Ireland so naturally I turn of 3G on my phone and try to survive without connectivity when I am travelling.

In recent years the European Union has done a great service to the public by putting pressure on the  carriers to reduce their roaming charges for phone calls within the EU. They have recently turned their attention to also reducing data roaming charges, but this initiative is likely to take some time to bear fruit.

I recently came across and the TEP Wireless service which seems like a really cool idea whereby you can rent a pocket wifi from them for the country that you are travelling to. Then you can configure your Smartphone to use this wifi service and you are able to use your Smartphone abroad as much as you want without having to worry about running up large bills. The rates seem quite reasonable, presumably because they buy the devices and sign up for contracts in the country you are visiting so they are paying local rates rather than visitor rates.

I can't wait to try out this service (it was only launched a few weeks ago). Unfortunately they don't offer service in South Africa yet, so I won't be able to use it on my upcoming vacation, but I definitely will try it out soon.

Is the era of Windows dominance coming to an end?

Whenever possible I like to use Linux software on all of my PCs. Many of my colleagues also have a similar preference and so I would consider it quite normal for people to choose Linux as a desktop operating system in preference to Windows. However, I do realise that my world view might be slightly skewed and Windows might still be the overwhelming favourite operating system in the real world.

I wrote before , that Google Analytics tells me that roughly a quarter of the readers of my blog are using Linux, but this is a small and unrepresentative sample. I recently received a newsletter from the Google Analytics team where they analyse data from hundreds of thousands of sites (including mine) which have enabled anonymous data sharing.

The following table summarises their statistics about the relative popularity of various operating systems at the start of this year as compared with the year before. I assume it is probably typical of the Internet as a whole.

% Visits from OS	Nov/09 - Feb/10	Nov/10 - Feb/11	Difference
Windows	89.9%	84.8%	-5.1%
Macintosh	4.5%	5.2%	+0.7%
Linux	0.6%	0.7%	+0.1%
Other	5%	9.3%	+4.3%

You can see that the percentage of people using Windows is indeed going down (even if it is still the lions share of the market at about 85%). What is interesting is that most people are not moving to Linux or Macintosh, but are moving to "Other". I suspect that this is mainly a reflection in the increasing number of people using various mobile devices to access the Internet.

I think that this is great news, because variety is very important for the health of the Internet.

I will be going to the London Olympics in 2012

I was very excited to hear that I will be going to the London Olympics next year. Recently my friend Ross jokingly commented that I should be able to qualify for the olympics because I had accidentally uploaded GPS data from a cycling trip with tags indicating that it was a run. However, this is not the reason I am going to the Olympics - the real reason is because I was lucky enough to be allocated tickets for Hockey and Canoe sprint heats in the recent lottery based application procedure. I have been allocated 6 tickets so I will be bringing my parents as well as my wife and two daughters. It should truly be the experience of a lifetime and none of us are likely to get to the olympics ever again (unless the girls have sporting skills that they have not yet revealled). My daughters are actively involved in both sports so I know that they will like to see top class athletes competing in sports that they understand.

Many people who did not get the tickets that they were seeking, have been critical of the lottery process. I know my opinion is coloured by the fact that it worked out for me, but I think that the allocation process is as fair as it could be. Whenever the demand outstrips the supply by such a huge amount, it is inevitable that people will be disappointed.

The one thing that I thought was unfair, was the fact that tickets could only be purchased with a Visa credit card, but I can't say I am surprised because they are a major sponsor. The way that the process works is that you needed to supply details of all of the events that you would like to go to by a dealiner in May. This is a tricky process because you need to have enough money/credit available to buy all of the tickets you have applied for eventhough it was obvious that applicants were unlikely to get most of the tickets that they applied for. I chose to apply for a large selection of low profile events rather than going for some of the high profile events which I thought would be way oversubscribed. Since these events were cheaper, I was able to afford to apply for a wider range. It seems that this was a sensible choice because I applied for just short of 2,000 pounds worth of tickets and was allocated over 200 pounds worth which seems to be higher than the normal "rate of return".

I have not yet made any travel or accomodation arrangements. I know demand will be very high during the busy Olympic period, but I have more than a year to sort this out surely it will be possible too arrange something.

P.S. What is really cool is the fact that I was able to write up this blog post while on a plane thanks to the cool tablet PC I got for father's day.

A fathers day present that really brings a smile

Last Sunday was father's day in Ireland.  The ladies in my life know that I always love getting a new gadget and so they decided to club together to by me a tablet PC. I had been considering purchasing a tablet PC for some time but I was put off by the high prices and also since I have both a Laptop and a SmartPhone, I was not really convinced that I need a device that fitted in between. They must have spent a lot of time researching the purchase because, they really made an excellent choice. The model they bought be was a miScroll. which is an Android 2.3 based tablet so I was able to leverage my experience of using an Android phone to know which applications to install.

What really makes this present useful is the fact that they also bought be a cover/case to protect it which includes a built in keyboard. This means that I don't need to frustrate myself (and make loads of  typing mistakes) by trying to use the in built touch screen keyboard. As you can see in the picture, when in the case, it looks more like a small netbook than a tablet (and I still have the option of removing it from the case if I really want)

Although the keyboard is quite small, I have not had nay problems when typing long documents with it. I have even started use Lotus Traveler on this device because it is much easier to type a complex password on this keyboard and hence my earlier objections to using it on my phone won't apply.

It always takes a little while to determine if a new computer is something that I will really use. I have only been using this device for a few days so far, but I am convinced that this will be a long term love affair rather than a brief fling.

Is it possible for someone in their 50s to remain cool?

When I was in college (many years ago), I was in a rock band called UllSkull with my brother and a few other friends. When I tell my kids about this, they look very skeptical and doubt if I am telling them the truth. Any band formed these days would probably have lots of videos on YouTube and elsewhere to prove that the band really did exist. Unfortunately recording equipment was not as readily available back then and so there is no record of  what we sounded like. I think a few photographs might have been taken, but although we thought we looked really cool back in the 70s, we would probably look ridiculous to the modern generation so I am not going to search too hard for them.

I grew up and matured so my music career is only a distant memory, but my brother is determined to remain young at hard and so he joined with a few friends to form a new band recently. His new band is called Diamonds in the Rough and here is a video of them in action. They actually sound not unlike what I remember of UllSkull (not sure which band members will be more insulted by that comparison) but thankfully they don't look at all similar.



If you are based in North Carolina and are looking for a band, I am sure they would accept bookings. In fact I am sure that they would be happy to travel even further away from home if the fee was right :-)

Our team for the Cycling Challenge is called "re-cycling crew"

IBM and a number of other companies have teamed up with the Smarter Travel site, to organize a 10 minute cycle challenge which will be held from the 1st to 22nd of June. This is a fun event aimed at encouraging people to cycle more. Teams are awarded points for every time one of the team members goes on a cycle that lasts 10 minutes or more. There are bonus points for journeys that are to and from work and novice cyclists (i.e. people who haven't cycled in the last 6 months before the challenge) get bonus points.

As I normally cycle to and from work, I think this is a great idea. I have recruited 5 colleagues (including one novice cyclist) to join me in a team which we have chosen to call th ere-cycling crew. I am sure you will wish me luck, although this is clearly an event where the taking part is more important that the winning. Hopefully there won't be too much rain during the month. You will be able to follow how we are doing on the leaderboard which will be updated weekly.

With broadband speed you don't necessarily know what you will be getting

Since I live in an urban area, I am luck enough to now have a choice of Internet service providers vying for my business. Competition is definitely a good thing from the customer's point of view, but one of the problems is that many consumers don't know if they can believe the claims of the competing service providers about the speed of their Internet services.

Recently, I was delighted to receive the following text from my broadband provider: "UPC has increased your broadband speed from 15Mb to 20Mb Unplug your modem from the power supply, plug it back in and you'll have even faster broadband. Enjoy." Clearly, this was good news, but since I am sceptical I decided to use a SpeedTest.net testing service to test my Internet service both before and after the upgrade to see if the speed I experience really was as high as claimed.

If you read to the end, you can see the full details of the testing I did of my connection speed before and after the upgrade, but if you want a quick summary here are the conclusions:

• The download speed achieved on my download link did indeed increase as promised by my ISP, however in most cases it would not have any noticeable effect upon the overall experience of using the Internet because download speeds from many sites was way slower than the maximum capacity of the link from my ISP.  Therefore, although any increase is welcome, it is probably not worth my while to spend more money on a further increase in download speed.
• The upload speed of my connection was much slower than the download speed. This did not change noticeably after the upgrade which is a pity because this would be a factor that would impact my experience of the Internet. Upload speed should become an important factor when comparing different Internet providers, but very few publicize their upload speed.
• Some of the sites which were giving me the fastest download speed also had considerable ping delays. In some applications (e.g. VOIP calls) the ping delays I measured would be likely to have a noticeable impact upon performance. 

When considering the speed of your internet connection, one of the first things that you need to realize is that the internet is not a single unified entity. The speed of the connection from your house to one particular server on the internet might be quite slow, but your connection to other servers might be fast. In order to account for this, the Speedtest site has a wide range of test servers all over the world and you can choose which one you can use for testing your speed.

Before I present the actual test results, I think I should briefly explain the parameters that SpeedTest measures about the link. It measures three factors:

1. Download Speed: This is metric shows how quickly it is possible to download a large file from the test site. It is measured by downloading test files of various sizes and then measuring how the time to download varies with the size of the file i.e. they ignore the overhead delay which would be required to start any download. This is the metric most commonly quoted by ISPs in their advertisements because one of the most common uses of the Internet when it first became popular was to download large software kits. However, the things that people do on the Internet has changed significantly in recent years so this is not necessarily the most relevant metric for current users of popular sites like Facebook etc..
2. Upload Speed: This is a measure of how quickly you can upload a large file to the internet. It is essentially the same measurement as the download speed except that the data is going in the reverse direction. This would be the metric that would affect how quickly you could upload some pictures to your favorite photo sharing service. Many Internet links provide significantly less upload speed than the download speed because they assume that you will spend the bulk of your time accessing information that other people have uploaded rather than uploading your own information. However, since many people spend a lot of their time online using social network sites it is not clear to me that this assumption is still valid.
3. Ping Time: This is a simple measure of how long a single packet of information takes to travel from your computer to the chosen Internet server and back again. This measure is important in any application which involves real-time interaction over the network because this will set the minimum on the communications lag. For example, many people will have seen remote correspondents being interviewed on the TV news where it is clear that their is a noticeable lag between the interviewer asking a question and the question being heard by the interviewee. As you know packets are not sent directly from your computer to the Internet server, instead they pass through several intermediate nodes with each hop adding to the delay in delivery time.

These are not the only factors that need to be measured to judge the quality of the line. Other factors include the percentage of packets lost and the jitter (i.e. how much does the ping time vary from one packet to another), but to make my life easy I only considered the parameters that Speedtest gave me.

I ran the first test utility before I rebooted my network router so this would be a measure of the performance of my existing network link. By default, the site assigned me to use a server in Limerick for testing, but the performance of my link to this server was surprisingly poor so I repeated the tests with 3 other servers in more distant parts of the planet. I took each measurement twice to get a quick feel about how repeatable the test result might be.


By default, the speedtest site selected a server in Limerick, Ireland to test my connection. Although Limerick is not very far from my home (roughly 200km) I found that the results from this server were quite poor (perhaps the server is overloaded or else it might be in a data center without fast connections to other parts of the Internet). I chose a few other servers in different cities to repeat my test and as you can see below the tests varied quite a bit depending upon which server I selected.

The speed of my link to Oslo and San Jose was reasonably good, but the link to Philadelphia was not as good and the link to Limerick was worst of all.  It is surprising that it took longer for my network packets to reach Limerick (which is roughly 200 km from my house in Dublin) than they took to reach San Jose (which is over 8,000 km away) - but of course the packets destined for Limerick could very well be routed through intermediate servers on the far side of the Atlantic.

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
0.97/1.97	0.94/1.03	215/220	Limerick
10.27/9.23	0.99/0.95	115/120	Oslo
2.25/1.99	1.08/0.99	123/124	Philadephia
9.07/6.75	0.84/0.82	176/182	San Jose

I repeated the same test immediately after I rebooted the network to see if there was a noticeable difference. When I ran the pre-upgrade tests I did not realize that there was a test server available in Dublin. I ran tests with this server and I was pleased to see that the speed achieved to this server was over 15 Mb/s so the link from my house must indeed have been upgraded beyond 15Mb/s. The ping time to the server in Dublin was dramatically better than any of the others which probably means that there were very few networks hops between my home and this server.

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
0.98/1.39	0.80/0.84	217/231	Limerick
10.38/11.18	1.05/1.03	122/110	Oslo
1.70/2.10	1.15/1.06	121/124	Philadelphia
10.18/10.88	1.23/1.10	178/178	San Jose
15.98/15.36	0.94/1.02	31/30	Dublin

In general there was not a noticeable difference in the speed of the link to any of the servers I had used before. Of course the speed of an overall network link is determined by the speed of the slowest link along the path. Looking at download speed, there is a dramatic difference between the speed when using different sites. This seems to suggest that the so the link from my house to the ISP's data center is not the bottleneck and the bottleneck must be somewhere else along the path to the slower sites. Therefore speeding up the capability of the link between my house and the ISP is not likely to affect the overall download speed achieved from most of the hosts.

However, the upload speed tells a very different story. The upload speed was around 1 Mb/s for any of the servers tested which is much less than the download speed. This means that the upload speed was probably limited by the link between my house and the ISP's data center.

Using a VOIP tool like Skype, the same amount of data would be transferred in both directions. In most cases it is the upload speed of each parties Internet link rather than the download speed that would determine the overall quality of the connection achieved. Therefore someone who is unhappy with the quality of their Skype link would be wasting their time and money in switching to an alternative service provider who promised higher download speeds.

Of course network performance will vary depending upon congestion so I did the following tests the next morning. It seems that the download speed from Limerick had improved from the day before, but the download speed from the server in Dublin was worse. The upload speed was still remarkably similar for both servers although it was about 20% faster than the night before.

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
3.05/2.93	1.27/1.1.6	216/214	Limerick
12.93/12.72	1.29/1.33	27/24	Dublin

This asymmetry between the upload and download speeds is mainly a feature of the domestic broadband market. Commercial services are more likely to provide matched upload and download speeds. To see how a commercial service would perform I repeated the tests from the office where I work.

Although I the office is physically in Dublin, my employer has an internet connection provided by a UK based company. Therefore the SpeedTest.net service defaulted to using a server in London which it was able to reach faster than the one in Dublin. Luckily my employers has a very good internet link, but the download speed was 14-15Mb/s which is only slightly better than the speed I was getting at home. Looking at the upload speed however, the connection in the office was about 10 times faster than my home link

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
14.38/14.23	12.90/13.82	56/77	Dublin
15.10/14.09	10.68/13.10	24/24	London

I mentioned before that part of the reason limiting the speedtest results are the fact that my packets were competing with packets from other network users (this is called network contention). Therefore I decided to test the speed of the link again early on a Sunday morning when I guessed that there would be relatively little traffic congestion on the network. As you can see from the results below the download speed was indeed much faster, but the upload speed was virtually unchanged.

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
19.52/19.16	1.25/1.24	26/25	Dublin
2.75/2.10	1.26/1.28	215/215	Limerick
12.38/12.90	1.37/1.38	110/109	Oslo