Monkeys Everywhere; Darwin Is Smiling

The Netflix Tech Blog. Netflix is one of my favorite subscription services; for a measly $8 a month, I have instant access to thousands of movies on my Den's big screen, using Google TV, and on several of my mobile devices. Just yesterday, the HTC Thunderbolt got compatible, and I annoyed She Who Must Be Obeyed with my testing it over dinner. I have found new British crime dramas that, previously, we had no access to in the States. For a serious mystery/crime addict, however, it is like Christmas in July. As you might imagine, almost half of all bandwidth usage is now comprised of streaming video over the net. And, Netflix is a big part of that. It is an engineering marvel that anything gets through at all. This post from the Netflix blog explains how Netflix is using monkeys to control the flow. (Caveat: no real monkeys were injured in the writing of this blog - it's a construct!) The whole idea is that this army of virtual monkeys roams the Netflix universe, looking for latency problems, abnormal conditions, and technical failures, while not affecting download speed or safety. Now, I have to figure out how I am going to resist the temptation to watch an episode of the Inspector Lynley mysteries on my phone at work today.