Week 4, Day 5 Posted January 30, 2004 at 12:00 am

Classes went well. I took a short listening quiz in Japanese. It amounted to recognizing sounds and phrases and understanding what they mean. We grabbed Zaxby’s on the way home and watched more fansubs.

I have become an avid user of BitTorrent since it’s inception. It’s usage is demanding on both the upstream and downstream connections as downloaders must also partake in active distribution of files. As such, I have become well aware of the phenomenon documented here and here where the asymmetry of a Cable or DSL connection can cause the downstream connection to drop dramatically during upstream saturation. While I now understand the problem, I cannot find a fix, at least not for Windows. Both of the aforementioned pages document steps to configure a Linux system to use Quality of Service packet management to get around the problem. Recent versions of Windows also support QoS. So how does one configure QoS for a Windows system? Nobody knows; but, they are quick to tell you how to uninstall it. How useless.