Ping
July 1st, 2008
Computers today travel equal to if not more than their owners. In their journeys they experience tumbles, battery losses and gains and many hundreds of different IP addresses. Just like humans who track their diabetes, and life’s many stories in journals, Ping would be the journal of a computer. Intermittently Ping would connect to a fixed server to log its journey since the last update. In the life of the computer all of its myriad of hotel IP addresses, battery charges and workloads would be recorded as a historical record of one of computer science’s most loyal companion, the laptop.
Developed primarily for the OSX, Ping was a small deamon like tool which began as soon as the computer started. In fixed (custumizable) intervals if an internet connection was available a “ping” to the server was performed. If no internet was found the “ping” would be saved and sent a later time. The actual journal for the computer was stored online, so that its timelessness would be independent of the machine. No computer crash nor OS reinstallation would risk the loss of the records.