I haven’t really mentioned it here on the weblog or anything, but over the course of the past three months or so, the Cody household has really bought into the Apple product brand.

Bit of a backstory: Back in October, we got Jenny a new 14 inch iBook which was a big hit. Then we discovered the world of wireless network access by purchasing an Airport Extreme wireless connection point. For Christmas, I got her an iPod mini, and we’re now living the digital lifestyle just like Apple sells on TV!

Anyways, one of the problems with the Airport Extreme was that it wouldn’t work when Chuck or Russ would bring over their Windows based laptops. Their laptops would show a signal from our Airport Extreme device, but they couldn’t connect to the Internet through the base station. I chalked it up to a mixture of me not knowing a whole lot about wireless and Windows being Windows.

However, last week in an effort to clean up some of the clutter of ethernet cables around the house, I got a wireless NIC for Jenny’s Windows PC. After I installed it, configured it, and connected it to our Airport Extreme base station, I couldn’t get to the Internet, just like Chuck and Russ couldn’t before then. Again, it showed an active solid signal to our wireless network, but wouldn’t connect to the Internet.

So, in an effort to save anyone else who has the same problem time and effort, I’d like to share the solution that allowed me use wireless Windows PCs with our Airport Express base station:

Turn off WEP on the base station and the Windows computer and reconnect.

Once you do, the Windows PC will be able to connect to the base station and through it to the Internet. It’s not the best or most secure solution, but for the time being it works. I’m going to try to figure out a way to get Windows PCs and Airport Express base stations to work with WEP turned on in the future, and will post any updates here.

Long time readers will remember my old pal Dave Winer, a self-appointed technology ‘expert’ who likes to shoot his mouth off by making grand statements about his important role in the technology world, and how if it weren’t for him, Y wouldn’t exist. Replace the ‘Y’ variable there with anything ranging from weblogs to iPods to programming languages. He’s the kind of guy that takes credit for everything under the sun, and it annoys the hell out of lots of people like me.

Anyways, from time to time I point out that he really is an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and casually just makes shit up to inflate his sense of self-importance.

Today’s example of that is Winer claiming that recent server problems he’s been having are the result of his weblog being so busy because everyone on the Internet wants to know what he’s saying (spot his tendency to overinflate himself yet?) that it crashed under the weight.

Good/bad news — this weblog crossed a bandwidth threshold in the last few weeks, it’s now serving more than 10 megabits per second, which happened to be the limit of the server it’s running on. Access gets flaky as it bounces off the limit, and for the last couple of hours its been pegged at the limit, making it largely inaccessible. I just upgraded the server, if you can read this it means we’re back on the air. link

The bullshit here of course is that there is no way his weblog/server/whatever is serving anywhere near 10 megabits of data a second, and it bugs me when people like him just make shit up to portray themselves as someone (other than the people who like to bring them back down to earth, like me) that is ‘important’ and should be listened to. 10 megabits per second of data transfer is a lot. Your average website with a picture or two that gets visited a few times by friends and family hardly generates 10 megabits (think of a floppy disk) of data per week, must less per second. Think of downloading an mp3 file in one second from the Internet, and that’ll give you a rough idea of how much 10 megabits/second is. So, I decided to do some digging.

The total size of his website (scripting.com) is 77538 bytes, or about 75 kilobytes, 0.07 megabytes. But some of the images that make up that total come from other servers, so we’ll say 70000 bytes for the sake of argument.

Eight bytes is one bit, so 70000 bytes = 0.53 megabits (million bits). If he was filling up a 10 megabit network connection, that would mean people would be loading his website about 20 times per second throughout the day. 20 times/second * 60 seconds would be 1200 page views to his website per minute, 72000 page views per hour, and 1,782,000 page views per day.

I don’t think I have to point it out, but if you have 1.75 million people loading your site per day, you have a busy web site. But is Winers website that busy as he claims? Busy enough that he’s filling up a 10 megabit line because his site is so popular, or is he just full of BS as I’ve pointed out numerous times over the years?

1.75 page views/day would mean 52.5 million page views per month. By comparison, the well known site whitehouse.gov gets about 50 million page views a week, and that’s the White House! Is Winer more popular than the President?

So that’s about what you’d need to max out a 10 megabit line. Clearly Winer is trying to hype himself up here by trying to get people to think that all the world is reading about him and cares about what he thinks, so you should too.

However, it appears that his weblog itself keeps track of how many people visit it per day, and it says that as of 12pm today (2/1/05) there have been a whopping 18 page views for his site. While I’m not one to judge the importance of what is said by how many people hear it, 18 page views today is a far cry from the 1.75 million Winer needs to back up the claim that his weblog has maxed out a 10 megabit network connection. Finally, on the same page, his site is listed as getting 5 million page views total over the course of the past 3+ years. Never mind 50 million page views a month, according to his own web site, he isn’t even on track to get 50 million page views this decade!

So there you have it. Once again, we’ve caught Winer over exaggerating his sense of self importance. So does any of this matter? Of course not. I just caught a lie, and when time permits I like to point out bullshit when I see it. Especially from people who are well known for the amount of BS which they spout forth, all the while claiming that they are people who’s advice and ‘commentary’ should be taken seriously.

Once again Winer someone has pointed out that you’re as full of it as you claim your network connection is.