Category: Uncategorized

Happy Canada Day from here at the Consulate in Marlborough, MA!
Hope you aren’t on a BC Ferry!

Technorati: BC Ferries, Canada Day, Canada

Tried to set up Verizon DSL last night. Didn’t work; rotating IP addresses; a variety of line related issues. Cancelled the service this morning.
Sorry for any interruptions you may have encountered last night.

Uncle Vernon, Uncle Vernon, independent as a hog on ice
HeÂ’s a big shot down there at the slaughterhouse
Plays accordion for Mr. Weiss
— Cemetary Polka From Rain Dogs

Geek News Central is reporting that their server is getting crushed with all the new iTunes 4.9 users. You had to know this would happen. People have heard the buzz and want to hear what it’s all about.
From a Web performance perspective, podcasts are hellish: large, uncompressible binary files. At least they are able to come along a single TCP connection. But at 10MB+ per file, iTunes is going to fill a lot of pipes, and max a number of bandwith caps.
Multicast streaming was supposed to alleviate this issue; podcasting is just going to make Web performance worse…or at least more noisy.
Now, how will the content distribution networks react? They are likely the only source that can help people relieve their load. The CORAL CDN Project is one source for open-source content distribution.
All in all, Web 2.0 is shaping up to be a bandwidth hog.

Technorati: web performance, podcasting, iTunes 4.9, iTunes

Some great unsolicited positive feedback on the services my employer provides. [here]
Would love to answer any questions the author has about some of the inside-the-firewall services we provide.
Technorati: Gomez Performance Network, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, Web Performance, HTTP

Shelby Foote, the the primary narrator of Ken Burns’ Civil War mini-series, died Monday night at age 88. [here]
His voice was like butter melting in a hot frying pan. I loved listening to him speak. I will miss him.
Technorati: Shelby Foote, Civil War, Ken Burns

Apparently, in my infinite wisdom, I threw up the following iptables rule:

/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 200.128.0.0/9 -j DROP

Guess what? This is the exact range that the LACNIC servers are hosted in! No wonder no LACNIC data had been coming into the GrabIP database lately!
This has been fixed.

Technorati: LACNIC, iptables

Mukhtar Mai/Mukktaran Bibi (I have seen both names in print, not sure which one she uses), is going to have her appeal against the acquittal of the men who gang-raped her heard by Pakistan’s Supreme Court. [here]
Her courage serves as a model for common decency trying to fight back against “cultural” norms.

Technorati: Mukhtaran Bibi, Mukhtar Mai, Pakistan

After 4.5 years of customer loyalty, I have decided that I have had enough of Comcast’s outrageous prices. I will be switching to Verizon DSL as soon as the install kit arrives.
Due to the way that my DNS is managed, you may encounter issues connecting to the server during the couple of days that it takes for the DNS to migrate and propagate.
Comcast has lost another customer. Does that surprise anyone?