More technical mumbo-jumbo

Sometimes in life, you wonder why something is done the way it is but you don't have the skills or resources to fix it yourself.
One such thought came to mind when dealing with satellite data. (I know I sound like a broken record, but I think this is the end of it)

Today's lesson children is a quick lesson on OSI layers. Click on the image above to enlarge it.
When you send an email, you use all layers of the OSI model to send/receive the email. Each layer adds more and more data. Almost like Babushka dolls. By the time you go to send just a single word of data, you've needed to transmit many many bits.
One word 'test' at layer 7 should be 4 bytes.
Send this in an email (Layer5/4), it's a kilobyte (just because of all the headers, like the addresses, time/date)
At layer 3, it's split it up into roughly 500bytes per packet (so, that's three packets because it's 1024 bytes)
Most of the time each sent packet needs to be acknowledged by the receiver.(Layer 2) Because it is approximately 1-2 seconds round trip for this data, lots of time is spent waiting, and if an error is detected, it needs to be resent - more and more precious time.
Perhaps the biggest problem with computers these days, is every application expects to be connected to the Internet. If your computer has been offline, as soon as it comes online, everything gets excited and demands data instantly. On your broadband connection at home, you might notice it's a tiny bit slow for the first minute or so. Typically this is because all these applications use all your connection doing whatever it is they need (Such as checking for Windows Updates, Anti-Virus updates, and of course your 'anonymous usage statistics'). All this data adds up - on broadband its a tiny inconvenience - on satellite dial up, it saturates the connection making it not able to transfer any of the actual data you wanted - like that email!

This is the problem I had, so I wondered why isn't there an application that just directly connects, reducing OSI layers and not allowing other applications to saturate the link. Well, such a program does exist - and I simply stumbled across it. The application is called UUPlus (Personal Edition) UUPlus Website


See below how it negates most of the OSI layers - or for those graphical people, 2 Babushka dolls, not 7.

It's a fantastic app which does exactly what I imagined an app like this should do.

It's got an inbuilt text based mail client (so you don't have to deal with annoying email proxies - although that is an option if you just must use your favourite mail application or have some legacy application)

Not only can it automatically insert your GPS location in your emails (and blog posts in our case), it's got a signal strength indicator, and some clever dialing tricks where you can configure it to only connect once it has enough strength.
These people GET what it is to work on super low bandwidth, high latency connection. Would you believe, it can even work offline... or SneakerNet - a word I have not heard since year 8 computer studies!
SneakerNet is offline networking where you use portable media to transport documents, emails etc to other PC's or the Internet. Imagine living in a cave where you have a PC, love writing and reading emails, but you only have Internet access in town. You take write all your emails, 'send' them to disk and go into town. At town, you load the disk, the application sends and receives, saving back onto the disk so when you go home and download, you have new emails. Amazing! Seems far-out, but the more I think about it, I bet this is more common then you would think.

These guys have been so helpful it's been amazing - I've been the most annoying, free support customer I'm sure -but they still won't let me pay for support. We've gone back and forth testing numerous configurations due to an odd dialing string that Telstra needs to call an international number. I figured out that Telstra will only accept the number if it's dialed +111800... not 00111800. Might not seem like a big deal, but when the computer won't dial a plus, I sure as hell was not getting connected. The + and the 00 SHOULD be interchangeable, but for some reason it makes a difference! Through some clever trickery I changed the dial command to include the plus and it worked a treat. Even the developer was impressed!
Huge thanks go to John & Jeremy at UUPlus!