John and I spent a bunch of hours over the last few days improving the club's connectivity. It turns out that our wifi network is good enough now that a room full of people with iPhones were able to completely swamp our T1, and because we were never able to get traffic shaping to work properly under OpenBSD PF, that was killing the webcasts. So, we got a DSL line in addition to the T1 and shunted all of the wifi traffic off to that. Now phones can get 5mbps down, 1.7mbps up, which is pretty sweet.

Maybe we can ditch the T1 entirely and just use DSL for everything, but the last time I tried that (eleven years ago!) DSL was incapable of keeping up with a 24/7 video stream. Perhaps things are better now?

While testing our network changes, I was aghast to discover that the Justin.TV iPhone app, which used to be free, is now ten bucks! You must be kidding.

I guess it's time to find a different free video host. I know there are a bunch of them out there; which is your favorite? What I would like is: portable, embeddable Flash-based player; ability to watch the video for free on iPhone/Android; and the ability to feed it video from Flash Media Live Encoder 3.2 rather than from some Flash app running in a browser window (because without that, it can't be made to run unattended.)

Our espresso machine still doesn't work. To no one's great surprise, when the repair guy says, "Should be Friday, or Monday at the latest", what he really means is, "Or, you know, two weeks longer than that, maybe three." Apparently in a city where literally thousands of these machines are in daily use, he has to order springs and gauges from halfway across the country.

"Don't tell me when it should be done, tell me when it will be done" is something we say a lot around here.