From the official site:

I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of NZB Drop 1.3. This release offers significant performance improvements, bug fixes, and several highly requested new features.

This is a free upgrade. All registered users running Leopard are encouraged to upgrade to this new version.

Significant changes include:

- Reduced cpu usage and disk activity
- Watch folder for auto-loading nzb files
- Bandwidth limit scheduling
- Separate pref to auto-queue par checksum files
- New command to sort file list
- New “manual only” server setting
- Many other minor changes and bug fixes
- Requires X.5 Leopard

The reduced CPU activity is definitely a plus. Before 1.3 all versions would pretty much use 100% CPU while having 1 or 2 connections open. The auto-watch folder for NZBs is also good (when it works). The only bugs I have found so far:

And it still has multiple windows, wtf? I guess i’ll be sticking with SABnzbd for now. Maybe the altbinz guys could port that app over to OSX.

While going through the drive through at McDonald’s the other day I noticed a sign that said “Free Wi-Fi”. Figuring that mcDonald’s must’ve finished their deal with Telstra I decided to do some googling and found out a bit more information. It seems McDonald’s free wifi has some limits, including:

One other obvious downside is that since it’s free, you really can’t complain if it doesnt work.

From CNET UK:

Be warned: your account information is stored in every file
Although iTunes Plus files feature no copy protection, files downloaded still contain the email address you have registered with iTunes. So although files can physically be shared with, and played by, friends and family, any of your purchases that end up on file-sharing networks, for example, can be traced back to you.

If you’re interested in an easy way to check your own files, find an iTunes Plus file on your computer. Then choose to open it with a text editor (Windows Notepad works fine). It’ll take a while to open and will appear to be full of nonsense text, but if you choose the ‘Find’ option and type in the email address you have registered with the iTunes Store, you’ll find that your DRM-free music is not personal information-free.

That’s probably the most interesting part of the article. I was quite shocked to actually find out that your details are kept in the music files now.

I recently changed ISPs to a cheaper plan (not by much) which provides more quota (about 40gb) per month than what I was getting from my previous provider. Along with this, I went to the 8Mb DSL plan where as previously I was on the 1.5Mb. When you start getting higher speeds, alot of other factors come into how stable your connection is.  Before I made any changes, my atm0/0/0 interface was looking like:

Speed (kbps): 7300
Noise Margin: 6.0 dB

A noise margin of 6.0 dB turns out to be the bare minimum you would want to have as it’s the borderline for a stable connection and the connection from hell. As I have been having connection issues lately, I decided to do some googling. On a few sites I came across some undocumented cisco commands, one of which was “service internal”. Normally on an ATM interface you will see something like:

adsl-gw(config)#int atm0/0/0
adsl-gw(config-if)#dsl ?
enable-training-log enable the fw training log for Showtime and failure cases
lom Loss Of Margin watch counter for line retrain
operating-mode auto or specific ADSL mode

After going into config mode:
adsl-gw(config)#service internal
adsl-gw(config)#int atm0/0/0
adsl-gw(config-if)#dsl ?
enable-training-log enable the fw training log for Showtime and failure cases
gain-setting ADSL programmable gain setting
lom Loss Of Margin watch counter for line retrain
max-tone-bits set maximum bits per tone limit
noise-margin set noise margin offset
operating-mode auto or specific ADSL mode
power-cutback Noise Threshold for Power CutBack

Voila. The setting I wanted to play with was the noise-margin. After setting the noise margin with “dsl noise-margin 2″ (settings between -3 and 3 accepted, the higher (3) the better) my DSL stats now say:

Noise Margin: 7.5 dB
Speed (kbps): 6592

The noise-margin seems to go between 7.5 and 9 which is optimal. The other setting I can try is increasing the noise-margin to 3, however I will sync at around 6200 once that’s done.

More undocumented Cisco commands here, here and here.

From the link:

Cisco is considering introducing a verbal interview portion to its CCIE lab exams across the world. Cisco confirmed that it is running a pilot in its exam lab in Beijing, China that involves candidates taking a 10-minute verbal interview as part of their lab exam. Cisco said that if the pilot is successful, the interview could be introduced as a requirement for CCIE Routing & Switching candidates worldwide. The company has been running the pilot since August.

After obtaining my CCSP and then seeing other people I know braindump the exams, I am all for this as part of the CCIE. I would even like to see this brought down to the professional level exams (CCxP) to weed out the people using braindump sites to get the cert.

[ Link ]

Checking out the Windows team blog it appears Microsoft have made the decision to extend the Windows 7 beta until Jan. 24th and in the process removing the 2.5m download limit. From the site:

I know many of you have had issues with the Windows 7 Beta site over the last 24 hours. As you may have noticed the download site has been up and running smoothly since this morning. That said, we apologize for the inconvenience that it caused some of you.

Due to an enormous surge in demand, the download experience was not ideal so we listened and took the necessary steps to ensure a good experience. We have clearly heard that many of you want to check out the Windows 7 Beta and, as a result, we have decided remove the initial 2.5 million limit on the public beta for the next two weeks (thru January 24th). During that time you will have access to the beta even if the download number exceeds the 2.5 million unit limit.

Thank you for your enthusiasm, interest and willingness to beta test. It has been great to see the positive early reviews and feedback. As you know, this is a beta product. We are working hard to get Windows 7 ready and right. Your input is a critical part of that process. Thank you!

So there you have it! Looking at a few web sites it appears Windows 7 is “alot snappier”, although after you install 20 apps and remove 10 it should start functioning like Windows 98/2k/XP/Vista and slow to a crawl. Either way, let’s see.

After my last rant on a good NNTP/NZB client for OSX (which can be read here) I came across a new client called NNTPGrab. The client is developed using GTK and is cross-platform between Win32/Linux/OSX. From its official site, the features include:

Possibility to run the GUI on a different computer than where the downloads are happening

Right now the client is really only lacking one main feature (bandwidth limiting, planned for v0.6) and even though NNTPGrab is coded in GTK, it still appears to be better than NZBDrop and Usenet, which both are severely lacking in terms of the development lifecycle (Unison released Feb 08, NZBDrop released Sept 08). While I won’t be using this until the bandwidth limiting feature is implemented, this application is showing alot of promise and will be something to keep an eye on.

Microsoft’s server capacity is up to scratch (according to them) and they have now released the Windows 7 beta for download. Head on over to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/ and click the ‘Get the Beta’ link down the bottom of the page.

You’ll need to sign in with your live ID/hotmail/passport, but after answering a few questions you’ll be provided with a product key while letting your download complete in the background. At 2.5gb, it might take a while.

Yesterday we were greeted with a nice error message, today we see: “The Windows 7 Beta is now available for download. Thanks for your interest and help with the Beta”. Hopefully the servers don’t crash again before my download completes.