Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on February 17, 2011 by CyberNet.

I’ve helped all kinds of people troubleshoot “slow” Internet connections, and more often than not it has something to do with the twenty toolbars they have installed in their browser. Sometimes, however, there has been a legitimate concern with their ISP. You might be able to identify the problem using the traceroute command, but as any experienced geek knows you can’t just rely on a single traceroute to pinpoint the issue. You have to run it several times to make sure the problem consistently appears. Let me introduce you to PingPlotter Freeware.

PingPlotter comes in a variety of flavors, and while the paid versions have some useful features my focus is going to be on the free version. With the free version you can specify the URL you want to trace, the duration between traces, and the number of “samples to include” in a set. The number of samples can be confusing, but it is important because it’s what the PL% and averages are based on (we’ll explain those later). So when you set the sample “samples to include” to “10″ it will include the last 10 traces when calculating those numbers, and you can see in the status bar (like in the screenshot above) how far along in the traces it currently is. Since I have the sample size set to 10 only samples 117 through 126 are actually used in the calculations. If my sample size was 150 it would have been using all of the samples in the calculations and graph.

What does all the different information mean? Here’s a breakdown of the columns and how the graph works:

• Hop – You’ll notice that as you go down the Trace Graph from top to bottom, the Hop number increments. What the Hop number shows you is that, for instance, data from you to the target hits the device at Hop 1 first, and then goes to Hop 2, etc. al. Those hops you see are most likely network routers or servers, but they really could be anything that will forward the ping requests.
• PL% – The percentage number of data packets that have been lost in the current sample set. So if you have your “Samples to Include” set to 10, and five of the last ten traces PingPlotter sent to that hop didn’t even make it back to PingPlotter, your PL% for that hop will be 50. So PL%, or packet loss percent, gives you a number at a glance for that hop of how many packets have made it out and should have made it back. Obviously a high packet loss percentage here isn’t a good thing.
• IP – The IP address for that hop.
• DNSName – The DNS name for that hop. If you’re seeing “————” instead of a name, PingPlotter wasn’t able to get DNS information for that device.
• Avg – The average response time in milliseconds for the number of samples in that sample set.
• Cur – The roundtrip time (the ping time) in milliseconds for data to make it to that hop and back again. Another term for this roundtrip time is latency.
• The Graph
  • Red line – represents the average response time for each host for the currently selected samples.
  • Blue X – represents the response time for the current packet.
  • Black horizontal lines – represent the minimum and maximum response times.
  • Red horizontal bar (not pictured in my screenshot above) – shows the packet loss for that hop (same as the PL% column, but there for readability).

If you’ve ever dealt with traceroutes before you’ll likely already know of some situations where PingPlotter could have been valuable. I’d love for this to be packaged as a portable app, but you’ll unfortunately have to install it.

PingPlotter Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on November 23, 2011 by CyberNet.

There are some great tools out there for testing a website’s performance including Web Page Test, Stella, and WatchMouse. Those are the three that I regularly find myself using, but the website monitoring service Pingdom recently updated their Full Page Test tool blowing many others out of the water.

The new interface they have is beautifully designed, which helps in understanding the data they are presenting to you. When you begin navigating through the various sections you’ll find a full waterfall view that lets you know how long each individual request on the site took, and you can even see a page analysis to help serve as an overview of all those requests.

Then you can flip over to the performance grade to get an idea of which areas on your site could use the most improvement. Expanding any of the sections will list out the requests that go against that particular rule, and towards the bottom they provide a link referencing what you can do to resolve the issues.

There are also some settings you can choose from before you initiate a test. One setting lets you decide whether the results of the test should be saved and made public, and the other is the location of the server running the test (Netherlands, New York, or Texas).

Pingdom Full Page Test Homepage

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

I don’t know about you, but how fun is your email account these days? Seriously, do you open up your inbox with a sense of anticipation, or rather, dread? It really depends, if you are in love and cannot wait to hit the refresh button on your inbox in order to see whether your other half has sent you an email, then email is more than fun – but if you are working in a high pressure environment where every single email alert in your inbox gives you a heart attack, then you would wish there were moments or days when you could just disconnect from it all. The Ping app was developed in order to make email fun again, where it will be launched later this month to function as a hybrid of sorts between email and messaging apps.

Ping is said to represent a reimagination of the traditional email experience, where it will transform it into a manner which popular messaging apps such as MessageMe and WhatsApp deliver. Ping will play nice with a range of major email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and iCloud, but it also doubles up as a dedicated messaging app. All your messages within Ping will be organized into a people-centric feed, that are further consolidated into individual people or groups. All streams will be continuous, and voice and video calling are also supported. Do you think you would find Ping fun to use?

Ping App Intends To Make Email Fun Again original content from Ubergizmo.

Mark down September 30th on your calendars, boys and girls, as the music social network from Apple will arrive at the end of the proverbial road then. This is in line with rumors that made its rounds earlier this May that Apple is looking to kill of Ping, and considering the lack of updates since Ping was announced a couple of years ago, it makes perfect sense not to flog a dead horse any longer.

Those who paid a visit to Ping’s home in iTunes will realize that from September 30th onwards, no more new members will be accepted no matter how much you beg, cry or wail. I guess there might be just some third party developers out there who could come up with an app of sorts to help you know what you are playing as well as what your mates are enjoying on their playlist. Are you happy or sad that Ping has reached the end of the road, or do you remain indifferent?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Verizon enables cellular FaceTime use regardless of data plan, AT&T outs iPhone 5 this September 21st,