Tweaking my blog layout

If you are regular visitor to this blog , you can see that this blog has been transformed from 2-column (Blogger Minima Template) into a 3-column Minima Template.

If you visited this blog yesterday and last Saturday , I'm very sorry if you happened to see the right side of the blog contents was shifted to the right-bottom after the Post body, I'm trying to understand the coding of the blog layout.

I got the tip to tweak the blog layout from here.

I don't really know which layout is best, but tweaking the layout and play around with the code are fun enough!

Poll Closed

I sent a poll in this blog for two weeks. The poll closed at 22nd April 2008. Below is the summary:

Poll Title : I'm using NS2 for :

Response:

Phd	2 (12%)
Master	7 (43%)
Undergraduate	4 (25%)
Just for Fun	0 (0%)
others	0 (0%)
I dont use NS2	3 (18%)

It seems most of the viewer are using NS2 for their Postgraduate.
Me with my friend Husna conducted some simulation works in 2004/2005 (does not exactly remember) using NS2 (for wired network) to compare Diffserv policers.

HSDPA Modem

Wednesday, last week, I bought an HSDPA modem so that I can go mobile within Klang Valley, Kuala Lumpur,Malaysia. The brand is U-Mobile, for information about U-Mobile please visit http://www.u.com.my.
The modem is connected to the PC through USB port. The speed is up to 3.6Mbps depends on the coverage, however the dealer said that the company is now in the process of upgrading the network, the speed is expected to be 7.2Mbps. The company also plan to expand the network. Hopefully it will be implemented as soon as possible. So that my mobility is not just in Klang Valley.

From 2 -3 days experience, the speed is acceptable, however when I uses it home , most of the time the signal strength is quite low but enough to update the blog , email , google around, and play turn base chess at http://www.itsyourturn.com .

Any Malaysian using HSDPA modem ? which service provider?

Just have a look on Wikipedia about HSDPA :

"High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is a 3G (third generation) mobile telephony communications protocol in the High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) family, which allows networks based on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity. Current HSDPA deployments support down-link speeds of 1.8, 3.6, 7.2 and 14.4 Mbit/s. Further speed increases are planned for the near future. The networks are then to be upgraded to Evolved HSPA, which provides speeds of 42 Mbit/s downlink in its first release. "

NS2 Trace File is too large!

One of the main problem in using NS2 is it output (trace file) can be very large.
It depends on the simulation time , the number of nodes in the network, the number of transport agents etc. The larger the trace file , more time will be required to extract the trace file for visualization and performance analysis.

There are few ways to reduce the trace file , but most important part is know which part to be evaluated from the network layout. Is it at all nodes and links? or just at a destination nodes? specific link? or at a specific queue?


The (usual) solution is to use specific monitoring/trace command instead of trace-all command. Trace-all command give complete simulation result for each links and nodes. Some command/technique are trace-queue, Loss Monitor and queue monitoring. For the case of mannasim (if using Script Generator Tool) , it gives 3 options of trace. Test it one by one and compare the size of the trace file. Ooh.. don't forget to try the "specific monitoring/trace" command. Compare it withthe trace file created by trace-all command.

Poll!

My friend suggests to put a poll in this blog. "If you don't want to write at least put a poll ", he said.
Please feel free , since from my observation most of the user are interested in NS2 and mannasim, I put a poll related to NS2. Feel free to vote!

Occupied Mind!

My last post to this blog is on 18th Feb , and now it is 8th April.

Quite a long break.

I also realized that there are also questions (comments/email) from the visitors regarding mannasim and NS2.
I did reply some of it and feel really sorry for not replying some of the message. I'm away from NS2 and mannasim so I'm not very sure to answer certain questions.

It is not that I'm busy. It is just my mind is occupied with a lot of things other than NS2 and Mannasim.

Hopefully i can get a hand on NS2 and mannasim after 2 weeks from today. The sooner the better.