Monthly Archives: April 2008

Foldershare

Posted by Dustin on April 9, 2008 2 comments

A while back I saw a post on digg.com that talked about some new software that was currently in an invite only beta test called Dropbox. Dropbox allows you to synchronize folders between computers and if you watch the video over at their site I think you’ll be impressed.

But as I said, it’s invite only. So what is a guy to do right now? Well believe it or not Microsoft actually has something very similar and it too works with both Windows and Mac. Now if we’re to believe everything the the Dropbox video shows us, Foldershare isn’t quite as robust but it is free and and more importantly it is available now. Check it out at http://www.foldershare.com/

Mac wireless is cool

Posted by Dustin on April 4, 2008 None comments

In my previous entry I mention my Super Smash Bros. Brawl testing and one of the other tests I wanted to do involved determining how much data is required to play a four way game. My home network setup is a bit involved yet I couldn’t find a way to route the Wii through a device that I could measure network usage with.

To make a long story short, I found that you can configure your Mac’s wireless to “create network” and unlike a Windows PC that would setup an adhoc network, the Mac will act like a normal wireless access point or wireless router. This was fantastic because the Wii will not join an adhoc network. With my Mac set to create a new network I was able to join my Wii to it and determine that a four way game in Brawl requires at least 10KB/s of network traffic in both directions.

The Wii’s wireless is junk

Posted by Dustin on April 4, 2008 2 comments

Whenever I can I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl. This game has sucked me in more than I ever thought it would. In fact, I even once was the game looked retarded and chaotic, something that I wouldn’t like.

Well one of Brawl’s major components is online play and all to often I find myself playing with someone and there is a lot of lag. While I wanted to blame Nintendo completely at first I thought I should at least verify that the issue isn’t on my end first.

I set out doing this by getting my Wii connected to the internet through my usual wireless setup and thing sending a ping request to it from my Linux box. My wireless router is less than five feet from my console and yet I’d see at minimum a 2ms delay. 2ms doesn’t seem like much until you ping my laptop and get .600 ms over the same wireless connection.

I kept pinging the Wii while playing a round of Brawl online and I found that at times, the delay *just on my network* would go as high as 111ms! Now, the Wii might be doing packet prioritization but I doubt it. Anyway, 111ms is quite a bit higher than I would typically get to any other web site I usually visit. The round trip time to yahoo.com is around 64ms. If I’m seeing typical times to Nintendo’s servers and then I add in that my Wii’s wireless is contributing between 2-30ms (take out m y worse case) it’s easy to see why some Brawl games suffer from a lot of lag.

To combat this issue, I picked up a LAN adapter from Best Buy. When using the lan adapter the delay still isn’t great, but it is at least rock solid at 2-3ms no matter what is going on. This is a huge improvement in my eyes and if a person is at all serious about online play with the Wii, a lan adapter is key.