Cats as damage
March 16th, 2010
The internet1 treats sleeping cats as damage, and routes around them. Just ask Tim Bray, enjoying an evening pottering around writing an application for his phone:
Eventually, Ant built my Android app out of 14 lines of Duby, and I needed the USB cable so I could ship it to the phone. The phone was handy but the USB cable was across the room, and my elderly female cat has earned a few evenings of undisturbed lap time.
Then I remembered that my laptop has a Web server and my phone was on the same home LAN, so I copied the .apk over to /Library/WebServer/Documents/whatever.apk and did an ifconfig -a | grep 192 to find my address and then pointed the phone's browser at http://192.168.1.57/whatever.apk. The phone installed the app, I proved to myself that it worked, and did some further enjoyable tinkering, all while routing round the cat.
Alternatively, as per a comment on that post, this may have been just one more manifestation of the Cat Gravity theory.
- Pedants will note that Tim Bray was slinging files around on his home network, not on the internet proper. They'd be right, but 'Tim Bray's home intranet treats sleeping cats as damage' didn't fit the original quotation as neatly so I fudged it. Sue me! ↩
March 17th, 2010 at 04:52
Woah! Amazing! you can transfer files across a home wifi network as easily as over a USB connection!
This is huge news.. Someone call CNN!
(Brought to you from the department of DUH)
March 17th, 2010 at 06:41
I thought the cat and the pun on the Gilmore quotation were the focus of the story, but perhaps that's just me…