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Speedcabling - Untangling For Fun and Profit
ibnsuleiman writes "A new competitive sport is emerging amongst IT professionals and hobbyists. Speedcabling tests the ability to untangle the rat's nests that grow inside and outside of the beige boxes that pervade todays homes and workplaces. The first public competition was held in an LA gallery for a $50 gift certificate to a local Italian restaurant. The winner, LA web developer Matthew Howell, had to untangle a dozen ethernet cables in record time leaving them in working order to win."
finally a sport where steroids wont help you!
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
Apologies to my Scottish and Canadian friends. But, really??
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
ESPN 8 the ocho!
The trouble is, the techniques that help you disentangle a bundle of cables not attached to any equipment are not applicable when some of the cables are plugged in and need to stay plugged in, as usually in real life. They need a variant of the sport where there are thirty cables, some plugged into various patch panels at both ends, some at one end only, and some free; your task is to extract the loose and dangling cables and leave the working ones.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Geeks untangling ethernet cables is not new.
Where was this contest when I worked in web hosting. We had one cabnet with over 1000 cables comming into it. It was a mess. I dont think there was a way to fix it...
On another note... do we think that this will make the summer olympics??
From the blurb: The winner, LA web developer Matthew Howell, had to untangle a dozen ethernet cables in record time leaving them in working order to win.
Working order? Man, there's a catch to everything. I guess I can put my weed whacker with it's steel blades back...
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
My normal failure mode with a cable jumble, that reassuring crack as it breaks off ensuring a lurking connectivity problem when its used in the future. I suppose those tabs need to be maintained in the contest FTW no?
I'll bet the national championships will end up on ESPN2 during the middle of the night... just like those tweens stacking cups.
Another sport that deserves a WTF? award.
And in case anyone is wondering, yes, those are punchdown boxes you see. It would be horrible to run the cable directly to the switch without having boxes and patch cables on each end.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
But how can it be fair if somebody gets a worse ball of clutter than another? Or do they do best x out of y?
Throw in power cables, phone lines, and mice to make it more realistic.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I mean, is this legal?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The Japanese still have us beat on wacky game shows.
Bearded Dragon
I like the way that they set them up for the competitors - shove them in a clothes dryer for 3 minutes and let them tangle naturally. That explains my girlfriends socks and stuff after each wash around my house.
More like, people with too much time on their hands.
I hear he spent a lot of time training with this.
meow!
Stick to chess, four-eyes.
You should have to untangle the cables with a minimum of down time.
Supplies!
When you unplug the cable to untangle it in the game, you unplug it IN REAL LIFE!
...since this is precisely what I do in my sleep, after all the MCSE weenies who weren't allowed to touch the cables in class have left for the day.
Now, a hunt for the loose terminator in a Thinnet network, or the forced-duplex port in your Cisco stack, or the one Linksys VPN router with different firmware out among the 50+ telecommuters, or even the splitters over the ceilings in your Localtalk network at the elementary school, or any number of real-world-ish scenarios.
Bah. Like playing pool for money. Too much like real work. And playing for beer makes you pee too much.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It's changed its logo.. it's no longer 'news for nerds' and the look of the entire story has changed. Just seemed to happen with this story - previous ones come up normal.
It's not speed cabling, it's wireball.
Speed cabling (hooking the wires up) would be round two of the geek triathlon.
Round three: ???
One of the first things you learn on a sailboat is any line left unattended will soon tie itself into a knot - usually at the worst possible time.
I've noticed the same thing with networking and power cabling both at home and at work.
What?
A contest based on cables and speed would have to be held in the Valley.
The winners of Geek Triathalons never bother with round 1 or 2. They compete only in round 3. In round 3, the competitors hack into the result tracking database and alter the results in their favor.
that there is finally a story where my following formalization of the process of wire entanglement is on-topic.
Kevin's First Law: For any number of wires, strings or similar objects, the probability of complex entanglement between them increases exponentially with the inverse of distance. Time required to entangle is also affected in a similar fashion. This phenomenon can be observed in consequence, but not in action.
Also, for those who are interested, my second law is formalized thusly:
Kevin's Second Law: There exists no robot that cannot be improved in form or function by the addition of a flamethrower.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I prefer Alexander the Great's solution to a difficult knot, cut it.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
hey, i bet nobody thought of this......
in soviet russia, cables untangle you!
FallenSword, a free MMO you can play at work!
In my younger days, before they finally figured out what the issue was, I would spend hours untangling knotted balls of string. I got very good at it and still derive a certain pride from turning a tangled mess of cabling into a cleanly laid-out network system.
The focus required to see which cables are tangled up where and to identify the loops that, once pulled out, will free up a myriad of other cables is just the type of ability you see in Asperger's and other high-order autistics.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Some of the cables will be live and have shorts in the insulation.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Hard drives, eh? So your ethernet cables are inside the case, or what?
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Ever been on a fishing trip where you had to wait a couple of hours of sailing with nothing to do and no tech to distract yourself with? Try and tie a knot in a rope that your mate can't untie. This ethernet cable game is just a newer version of the same old thing.
And it doesn't even really matter which kind of mouse, I've seen both. . .
You are not the customer.
What the hell are 'ethernet cables,' anyway? Ethernet is a protocol. Back in the good ol' days I set up Ethernet LANs with 10BASE-2 coax cable.
As much as I love a good round of detangling the ether.. I'm not exactly doing that everyday. Every sound gig resembles the following: Find the boxen/buckets of mic/power/adapter cables, untangle the mess left by the wank the night before, make a bad band sound good then untangle all those same cables from their gear and the beverages they have spilled throughout the night and just early enough that it has begun to congeal and stick and properly wrap to try to be nice the next shmoe unlike said wank from the night before.
Add to that a mix of christmas lights that some band thought would look cool and the raw wiring that's frays grab each other like teeny-boppers at a rave and you have a whole pile of fun on your hands 8}
Not to mention that it should be done under a poorly lit desk with insufficient room for more than one arm at a time while someone tries to do work around you during the contest.
lol, we used to dye rolls of stockinette for a customer. Do you have any idea what happens when you put a 75ft long sock in the washing machine? in the dryer? you really have to see the knot it makes to believe it
I like the idea of having some live and having to remove the free ones tho
I assume this was because the restaurant owner needed help untangling spaghetti?
Anyone know why this one particular article's layout is completely fubar?
We just installed a new POP in Elbonia. It was either thinnet or a very sad-looking donkey.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Not just spilled beverages either. I had a cable heap (containing mic, speaker, lighting and god knows what else) to untangle which had been polluted by both beverages and the inevitable result of massive overconsumption of beverages... Good thing I was able to raid some surgical gloves fro the first aid kit.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
A tech at one of my previous companies would win this. We had a bad cable end on a major uplink line. He recrimped it in 43s. I this most tcpsessions even stayed up. Cable was good for years after.
A common ice-breaker game we play with youth is to form a circle and then reach across and hold hands. But with each of your hands, you must hold the hand from 2 different people. (Looking down from the top it looks like a team huddle / cheer) Now without letting go, unravel yourself into 1 or more circles that may or may not be interlocked.
I have also witnessed a friend untangle a large / long single wire that was quite a "rat's nest", not be starting from one end, but by starting in the middle and simply expanding the 'loops'.
My point is - it's amazing how well this actually works (when the group cooperates) and it makes me wonder if anyone has attempted any formal theorems on whether or not it is possible to untangle a collection of strings.
(The cosmology jokes should abound...)
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
The fact that the cables are randomly jumbled gives some players an unfair advantage. It would be better if they had to unplug the correct piece of equipment from the jumble. Fastest time wins. If you unplug the wrong device you are disqualified. That way everyone can use the same setup and it will be fair.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Hey Taco - CAN'T YOU TAKE A FUCKING HINT?!? I'm not the only one who can't stand the fucking changes.
This computer game (gPlanarity) is a good for training oneself to speedcabling.
About a year and a half ago we rented a small terrace house, at which we discovered the owner used to run a software company from. We opened the cupboard under the stairs, and were greeted with more CAT5 than I've ever seen in a domestic dwelling in my life. Some of it was colour coded in some strange system using electrical tape, which must have made some sense to someone at some point, and lots of the connectors were connected some ancient-looking patch box, with the patchings between each plug hand-wired on the underside. It took me some time to figure out what this was all about - the TELEPHONE extensions had also been wired up using CAT5, hence the strange patch box thing. So not only did I have to figure out which socket in which room they all went to (there were at least two network sockets per room), I also had to work out which one ended in a network socket and which one went to a phone. But even once I'd figured out where every phone and networks socket in the house went to in this cupboard, I'd still only identified approx 60% of the cables. So whether he'd wired up the loft, the basement, or had some wires going into the neighbouring buildings I never did find out. In amongst all this, there was also about a dozen TV aerial co-axial leads going to different rooms of the house, also labelled using electrical tape which only made sense once I'd deciphered the network cables. Yet in spite of there being such a comprehensive system of aerial cabling throughout the house, the actual TV aerial on the roof was broken and incapable of receiving any TV channels at all. After about a week of trial and error, I eventually wrote up my findings onto a couple of sides of paper, stuck them on the inside door of the cupboard, for the benefit of future tenants.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Rubber bands ftw
easier to get off
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
And the following night the next shmoe does the exact same routine, starting with untangling the mess left by the wank the night before.
Somehow the properly wrapped cables manage to turn themselves into a tangled mess when left alone overnight.
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).