Trying to work

The first time I went on a Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise, our hackers spent the first several days working to bypass the lame Windows-only Internet setup. They found a router, jacked a wi-fi access point into the thing, and provided much-needed wireless laptop service. Of course, they also pissed off the folks who ran the Internet cafe (which consisted of several dedicated Windows workstations with 800x600 displays, as I recall). These days the public areas of cruise ships (especially ones as immense and modern as the Carnival Miracle, on which the latest Lunacy takes place) are thick with wi-fi. But the connectivity isn't much better. Yesterday at sea it took me an hour to download this IT Conversation, which I needed to write my next column for Linux Journal. I watched the download rate vary from zero to 19Kbps in harmony with the horizon slowly moving up and down out the window. Latency times ranged from a half second to two seconds. Packet losses ranged from 15% to 100%. The file took an hour. At a rate that's hardly cheap.

Here at port the latency holds at half a second, which is fine for satellite connectivity. Upstream speed is 60Kbps. Downstream is 122Kbps. Could be worse.

And now we need to muster for shore. More later.

[Later...] Now we're back (from swimming with stingrays on a sandbar in Grand Cayman -- a weird but fun experience that looked, from above, like a deepwater Baptist gathering), and connectivity is still variable at best. When I checked with the nice young Slovakian woman who runs the Internet cafe, my guess was right: at least some of the problem was caused by the geosynchronous satellite transiting the Sun.

The Geek Cruise itself (or small subset of the larger population, which includes concentrations of "the newly married and the nearly dead") is terrific. Right now Andrew Morton is talking deep kernel trash right now, as I type. Fascinating stuff (trust me).