waving android

I am currently a software engineer at Google, where as a member of the Android platform team I build frameworks and user interfaces.

The blog here at is mostly historical; you can find more recent posts on .

Freaky AirPort.

January 4th, 2006

Anyone had an AirPort card die on them before?

For the last couple of months, E’s been getting weird packet loss events on her iBook (translucent white G3, “16 VRAM” model). At first I thought it was our Linksys 802.11 base station (which is a model not known for its sturdiness), or perhaps portable phone interference, but my PowerBook and iMac (both also on wireless) seemed to be fine.

Finally I tried swapping the iMac’s AirPort card for the one in the iBook (which we bought new with the computer). I have a process on the iMac that pings google.com (a lot, actually—sorry, Google) and graphs the results; it’s there mostly so I can argue competently with RoadRunner when the service sucks or dies entirely. Here’s how the graph looked this morning after switching the cards around:

Before the switch, this graph was pretty flat (except for the occasional 10% loss event). I guess we’ve found the culprit.

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