OT: More 14.4 adventures--but a cool fix!

[Fairlight]

This is actually rather hilarious.  I had to share, especially since I
groused so much about being stuck on the 14.4 modem on this laptop a few
weeks back (a month?  time's a blur...).

So remember it took like 90-140 seconds to load in a web page depending
what was all on it?  Well, I'm also saddled with IE 4.0 on this thing
(non-upgradeable...obsolete laptop, win95a, hardly any free disk space).

So I'm working on a little GUI extentions for someone for a filePro-based
Kiosk.  (OB: fP - They're using fP on a SCO system and have tied into
Windows touchscreen with MultiView 2000, and needed something to talk to
the Windows serial printer and find its status so they know if they should
print or not.  If there's an error, we need to get an attendant to service
the printer.)

I had the port comms down last week and tested with my modem at home.  They
finally got to testing it on their own equipment today and it works like a
gem with their printer.  The next thing, of course, is that they want a GUI
window to pop up saying the kiosk needs attention and then log out after
60 seconds of displaying that.  They want it to be more self-sufficient
than having fP handle the check--especially since fP is on the SCO side.  I
said, "Sure, no problem."  Of course, there's no perl and Tk on the laptop,
and surely no room for it even if I wanted to install it.

So I get the bright idea that VNC would work on the laptop to my home
system, take forever to bring up even the firewall rules on the router from
my static IP dialup (the only remote box allowed to access my firewall
config from the outside), add the rule, save.  I think it took longer
to add the firewall rule via the browser than it did to download all of
vncviewer, actually.

Then I fire up VNC.  :)  This is where it gets good...it's actually not too
unbearable even on a 14.4 modem.  I've been dinking between a local putty
session and a VNC to my desktop to run the GUI application I'm writing.

The funny part?  It's actually faster to start Firefox (a superior browser
anyway), load up www.microlite.com, and use it over VNC than it is to use
the web site locally on the laptop.  I'm not kidding--the raster drew in
about 1/3 of the time that it takes to get all that data from the web site!

I really find that amusing, though it makes sense when you think about it.
It doesn't matter how much cruft is on the other side at the website level.
If I disable Flash (you can in Firefox), I won't have that issue anywhere,
and the flat raster of any web site will load at a uniform speed for any
site--and faster than most sites out there of a modern vintage.  It's all
one raster size to update as far as VNC is concerned, as opposed to a
variable larger size coming over the same pipe.  So let the broadband
handle the actual data retrieval and give it to you as quickly as possible
is what I figured.  And it works well, considering the equipment involved.
Far better than native browsing.  Plus all those nasty script errors go
straight away because the version of Java on this thing is just decrepit.

Necessity is a mother--er, of invention.  :)

mark->
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