I’m Mike

Yesterday, Comcast came by to install their digital voice package at my apartment. Comcast has a special deal going on now: $24.95/month for 6 months, unlimited long distance. Skype’s even cheaper — $3/month for outgoing calls and $5/month for incoming (when they’re up). But here’s what I’m wondering: why’s it so cheap? Why is VoIP cheaper than a traditional plain old telephone service (POTS) line? Or, put another way, why is a POTS line more expensive than a VoIP line? Read the rest of this entry »

I do a lot of web development work, which usually doesn’t require a lot of knowledge of low-level networking details. But from time to time it becomes necessary to work below the HTTP protocol, to debug a broken remote procedure call, or reverse engineer a third party ajax app. These tools make many low-level networking tasks a breeze. These are all command line utilities, by the way, since that’s where I’m most comfortable.
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