Can You Hear Me Now?

Well, it’s 9:30PM here in Kathmandu. I just got home from the party we had with all of Muni’s relatives, which was a lot of fun. I met eight year old Ashish for the second time, as well as his young cousin — well actually, all of his cousins. And parents, and aunts, and uncles, and brothers and sisters. Before the party started, I was watching over some of the kids and wondering what we could do as dinner was being prepared. I set up a GMail account for Ashish so that he can be pen pals with some family friends in Vermont. One of the things I hope comes out of this project is leaving behind a number of web-connected computers which kids can use to communicate with other children in neighboring towns, cities, countries, continents: having a school of Nepalese children talking to students in Vermont or Montana or Hong Kong would be a great experience: it will teach kids in both areas about what people are like around the world (hopefully teaching kids that people have a lot in common no matter where they are from), and it can be a great way for the local students to practice conversational English. One example of what I’m talking about comes from Ashish: all summer long in America, Ashish’s new pen pal was talking about the Cartoon Network show Ben Ten Alien Force. He had clothing, toys, he knew all the lines from the show, all the power-ups Ben Ten uses. I was afraid that Ashish would have nothing to email him about, but then he suddenly said, “I want to show you a fun game online”. He went to the Indian Cartoon Network website, and loaded a game based on Ben Ten Alien Force. I was shocked! I told Ashish, “send your new friend an email! He likes Ben Ten also!”. Ashish was incredulous: “they have Ben Ten in America?”

Ashish loves online games; I showed him Canabalt, which is one of my favorites.

A quick word on Canabalt: It is a simple game with no end. There is only one key, the “jump” key. The game scrolls to the side at a fast pace, and you have to jump over obstructions and from building to building seeing how far you can get. Ashish’s record was 1999m. I think a modified version would make a great way to teach touch typing for kids: rather than having one key mapped to jump (in this case, the space bar), the game tells you which key you need to press on a QWERTY keyboard to jump, so that you can learn the key placement of each letter. Rather than pressing spacebar each time, you’d have to press y, then j, then o, and so on. Hit the wrong key, and you don’t jump over the obstacle: the game ends. I had this idea while watching Ashish play, because when he types he needs to look at the keys, but with a fast-moving free runner dodging obstacles, there is no time to look at the keyboard. Also, while the game itself wouldn’t be considered super-violent in today’s terms, there are some parts which are questionable: hitting a wall says “Game Over; You ran x distance before hitting a wall and tumbling to your death”. Another end scenario is that bombs get dropped, and if you hit them, it says “Game Over; you ran x distance before turning into a fine red mist”. Stylistically it fits the game, but its not really appropriate for kids…a version of the game where falling only means you get back up and start from zero at that area would be much better, in my opinion. Think Pokémon: your Pokémon never died, they only fainted, and could be revived in a clinic.

In other news, we leaped another hurdle in internet communications today, or at least it seems we did (more on that later). Bishwa and I were wondering if there were any programs similar to Skype that would also allow voice communication or video conferencing over a local area network, or if we’d have to ask Sunij or Yogesh to help us develop one. While the internet speeds here are relatively slow, Hi Tech Pioneer’s clients can all appear to be on the same LAN if we put a bit of work in down in the server room. The problem with Skype and other VOIP programs is in the name: VOIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol, meaning that the data — even though it is P2P (peer-to-peer) has to be compressed (and often encrypted), sent over the internet, authenticated through Skype’s servers, and then sent to the destination. Or so we thought. I was on the internet reading up on VOIP technology and in particular Skype, where I learned that the only data which goes to Skype’s central servers is the authentication: when placing a Skype call, you are signed in using your username and password, and you connect to another person connected with their username and password. Skype needs to authenticate this data before the call is placed: are both ends registered Skype users? That authentication process takes place over port 80, the standard port for internet communications. We wondered what would happen if we set voice / webcam data to be received over port 8001 from one computer, with another computer receiving on port 8002, while forcing our router to send all data destined for port 8001 / 8002 to the respective IP addresses for each computer.

The setup went like this: Bishwa went to his “Advanced / Networking” settings in Skype and set his Skype to manually receive connections through port 8001. His computer was connected via Ethernet cable to the router with the IP address 192.168.112.55. We setup Port Forwarding on the router to send ALL data bound for port 8001 straight to 192.168.112.55. We set Skype on my computer to receive on port 8002. My computer was connected over WiFi on IP address 192.168.112.34. We set Port Forwarding to send all data for port 8002 straight to 192.168.112.34. This was telling the router that whenever it saw a connection bound for port 8002, it would send it straight to 192.168.112.34:8002, rather than ever sending it to Nepal Telecom and back. To test it, he sent two 1GB files to me over Skype, and I sent two 1GB files to him. With all this bandwidth, we were hitting speeds of 600KB/s each, meaning a total download (and upload) speed of 1.2MB/s (big B for Bytes), which translates 9.6Mb/s (little b for bits). Considering our internet connection is 256Kb/s down and around 64Kb/s up, Skype was transferring data at a speed 37.5 (down) / 150 (up)  times faster than ADSL — we had successfully configured Skype to run on a Local Area Network*. Skype still authenticates the username / password over the main server on port 80, but when actual data is being sent, the router (with DD-WRT firmware installed) sees that they are destined for port 8001 / 8002 and reroutes the packets over LAN. The best part of this is that the router will still correctly route calls, chat and files coming from outside to the proper Skype address: as I type this, I am on Skype chat with friends in Hong Kong (hopefully now everyone on my list understands why I’ve been starting each conversation with, “hey are you getting this?”).

*I have to reiterate: while it seems that this is the case, Skype may have been incorrectly reporting the speeds, it’s hard to tell. Tomorrow, we will check the network usage of the ADSL router while sending and receiving files over LAN. If there is a correlation between usage on the ADSL router and when we are trying to send files, it could be that we actually haven’t set it up properly, and that data was still being sent over the Internet, albeit at an unusually fast speed.

Read this far? Good. One last communication-related anecdote. Muni had told all of the guests that I didn’t speak any / very little Nepalese. Thankfully, the first guest to arrive asked me if this was true, so I had access to vital information: I knew that nobody knew I knew they thought I didn’t know Nepalese. The whole time, I tried my hardest to use every single word and phrase I…knew. By the end of the party, I had asked for all my food and drinks in Nepalese, talked to the kids while babysitting, told one toddler not to go up the stairs, as well as saying my now-trademarked phrase bola keta (crazy boy, or the “crazy girl” variant, bola keti) roughly 250,000 times. By the time I left, one of the guests said to me with a smile, “your Nepalese is very good”. YESSS! Success! All my hard work has paid off! My Nepalese is now officially very good. I can leave Nepal a happy man.

That’s all for now.
Charles