[SGVLUG] Insane message bloat & "hobbyist" routers

[Christopher Smith]

Emerson, Tom (*IC) wrote:
> The other day when I was at Fry's, I saw a netgear router with a "price
> reduced" tag on it (usually returned merchandise) -- what really caught
> my attention, though, was the actual "name" of the router:
> "Open-source Wireless-G router for hobbyists" -- is this the famous
> "NLSU2" or whatever it was that was presented earlier this month?  There
> wasn't any specific product number on the package, so I decided to take
> a picture of the box to post to the list - I *did* cut down the photo
> size to something I felt "reasonable", but got caught by the insane
> amount of "message bloat" that comes from Microsoft's outlook
Outlook or outlook express?
>  -- the
> photo has an on-disk size of 32k bytes.  The message itself wasn't much
> longer than what I'm writing now, but per the "outbox", the message
> ended up being over 70k.  When it got to the mailserver, however, it got
> "bounced" because it was over the message limit of about 40k -- what was
> strange, however, was that by then, the message had grown to over 90k!
>   
Okay, if you had a 40k limit and a 32k attachment, you were already 
hosed. Base64 encoding ensures the attachment will grow by 1/3 (which 
would put the message size at just over 42k) before Outlook has a chance 
to impose any harm. This message I'm replying to now was 5k in size, and 
if it had employed multi-part MIME encoding with one part plain text + 
another part HTML, I'd guess it'd at least have been 15k in size (HTML 
is *not* known for its brevity). So all that adds up to 57k. It is 
impressive that Outlook could push it to 90k, but not beyond the realm 
of possibility.
> I suspect that because I didn't reset the original to "plain text", the
> message automatically doubled in size as outlook would have posted both
> a "plain" and a "rich" version of the message [and don't get me started
> on plain-vs-allthatothercrap -- in truth I prefer it as well, but I
> received an "ultimatum" from my boss along the lines of "plain text
> looks ugly, and it's hard for me to reply -- please use rich text or
> else" -- so I do, and set my "rich text" format default to 12pt courier,
> bold...]
>   
I think even Outlook will let you control whether stuff gets sent rich 
text or not based on recipients, although I must confess it has been so 
long since I've so much as looked at that monster I have little certainly.
> Tom
>
> Hmm... Looking at the photo, and "zooming in", I think I found a product
> number: KWGR614 -- Also, there was "one left" priced at $66.49
> (actually, it was the ONLY one I saw in the first place, so I don't know
> what the original retail price was supposed to be, but I suspect it was
> likely 69.99)
>   
Yeah, it's this one: 
http://www.netgear.com/Products/RoutersandGateways/GWirelessRouters/WGR614.aspx


After the WRT54G's became so successful in the Linux community, spawning 
OpenWRT and all that goodness (indeed, so successful that when the 
switched to VxWorks so they could use cheaper hardware, they had to 
reintroduce the Linux version of the router as the WRT54GL), Netgear 
figured out that there was gold in them thar hills and started releasing 
their own Linux routers. The 614 is one of them.

--Chris