Living at the EDGE

Some time ago it turned out that my wired network went completely down. The issue was so serious, that wires between my house and provider’s endpoint must have been replaced. And job like this usually takes time. For that time I had to live with the EDGE. I have really poor mobile coverage here, in a place where I live. 3G? Forget about it. Thank you Orange! The fact is, that Orange consultants who call me to offer even more free minutes and much more free gigs of data transfer have so much trouble reaching me that I am bound to my good, old plan for almost two years already. Anyway, when you have to reduce your connection speed from, let’s say, almost 10Mb/s to something around 10Kb/s it can get quite painful. I know it sounds like a complete disaster, but hey there are always solutions for every issue. I have grown up on MUDs and I have spent loots of time in front of simple, old school terminals. I mean in the past, of course. Today, I really prefer to play Star Craft 2 over some lousy MUDs. Today, I am simply not a terminal orthodox anymore. However, in case like this, when you get back in time with your connection speed, you have to get back in time with your tools as well. You have to replace this and that with something not very well known to current IT newcomers. Well, basically, I had to verify my requirements and replace few of my tools of choice with some other tools … of choice. Lucky me, I am working with terminal sessions on day to day basis, even though I am Apple addict. Yes, there are still some OS X users who know vi very well. Anyway, eventually it turned out that slow connection can be used almost the same way as regular 10Mb/s wire :).

Here comes the list of my replacements:

Thunderbird -> alpine – server side mail checking
Text Mate -> vi – server side text editing
ssh -> it’s always the best regardless of how much speed do you have :)
NX -> I was amazed how well this toll performed with 2-10KB/s transferrs
Safari -> lynx – the best web browser, ever :)

Anyway. With this cool tools and very slow connection I was able to solve issues that I regularly deal with link ~10Mb/s. Of course, not everything can be done this way. That’s for sure. However, if you develop stuff, if you code, you’d have survived as well.

As for me, here is the lesson learned – change provider or buy another means of Internet connection so you can become more secured. And I thought that wired internet should be bullet prof. Silly me.