IrDA

Classes were great today, as always. We learned a lot about blowing things up in chemistry, which, if you ask me, is always a good thing. It was funny, we were talking about valence electrons and chemical bonding when all of the sudden, my professor said, “Enough of this, lets blow some stuff up!!” To which the class erupted into uproarious cheering. Does she know how to command the teenage mind or what? I was experimenting with a friend on this mysterious IrDA port that comes on the side of a lot of laptops. Neither he nor I could come up with a valid reason they are still included on modern laptops. Maybe they are there for synchronization of handhelds or in case you lose your remote. At any rate, we had a 100MB test file that we were going to transfer a distance of about three feet. After establishing a network and fiddling with that, we began the test. For anyone who uses IrDA, I am sorry. We quickly realized that a 100Mb test file would try the patience of all those involved, so we dropped that idea for a 10 MB test file and began the process again. The total time to transfer 10MB: (Keep in mind that over an 802.11b wireless connection, the slowest 802.11 standard, this file would take approximately 1.3 seconds) 12.458 seconds. That is an average of about 80.27KB a second. Why, oh why would anyone use this as a standard? So, in spite of the fact that it keeps nerd occupied for about five minutes, we cannot find a valid excuse to keep it on the laptop standard package.