I’ve just uploaded mod_epp 1.7 to sourceforge.net.
Thanks to CentralNIC for funding the debugging effort.
(And no, there will no picture of me with a brown paper bag over my head on this blog. But yes, that bug was stupid.)
Categories
c’t magazine runs a biweekly column shining some light on the most egregious customer experiences with IT companies. To no-one’s surprise, thing start to get resolved if the company is facing public outrage and public shaming.
So, in the same spirtit: paypal is worst company in the world.
Further opportunities at Naming and Shaming are the Big Brother Awards.
Categories
A very cold Hotfix
I recently upgraded from the old Nokia Suite to the Ovi-branded version. In other word, I replaced one piece of sh***y bloatware with another.
But one thing is interesting: When using USB-based tethering, I get the following notice:
Well, if they think it makes the bloatware work better, ok. Then I took a closer look:
Article ID: 925681 – Last Review: December 8, 2009 – Revision: 3.0
When you try to download a file from the Internet by using Windows Internet Explorer in a Windows operating system, the download stops responding and then times out. The problem occurs when you use a USB modem that has a data transfer speed that is faster than or equal to 240 kilobits per second (Kbps).
Just look at that date. Microsoft found a problem that affects a good part of their customers (USB-based 3G modems are quite common these days), managed to cook up a solution, and seven months later it still wasn’t folded into the monthly updates and is still sold as a “hotfix”.
Sorry, this fix isn’t “hot” any more. It’s cold and very much over-due.
After a long break, Clemens and I finally built a decent set of tracks today.
We had lots of fun pushing trains and playing the “can you push the train to this spot?” and the “oh no, wrong turn!” – game.
Just a quick remark: a “aptitude install ddd” showed that this package depended on lesstif2 which is an Open Source re-implementation of the Motif GUI library.
Most of the reader here will never have heard about Motif.
Back when I started working with X, there were two competing GUI standards: OpenLook and Motif. Free Software (the term Open Source wasn’t invented yet) stuck to the basic Athena Widgets or (later) used Tk. Despite the strict licensing scheme of Motif some projects (e.g. the original Mosaic Browser) went with Motif nevertheless — motivating the Lesstif project.
It could have owned the Unix GUI market, but it wasn’t compatible with free software, so it lost the battle for developer mindshare and fell into obscurity. Qt almost made the same mistake, but they were a bit more liberal in the beginning and as GTK took off, they had to open up even more to stay relevant.
In other words, the decision not to support free software with Motif killed it.
Categories
Da hat wer was falsch verstanden
Laut FuZo baut die Türkei ein Zentrum für IP-Verfolgung. Gut für sie.
Aber könnten die bitte statt Zensur für die eigene Bevölkerung was zum Schutz des restlichen Internets vor Spam und script-kiddies mit Testosteron-Überproduktion aus dem türkischen Internet tun?
Danke.
Categories
/dev/otmar is now IPv6-enabled
At work, we’ve been running IPv6 for a while and back home I’ve also got v6 on my DSL connection (not native, though, silverserver implemented that with a tunnel). My root-server also got v6 connectivity via a Tunnel from the nic.at network (easy enough to do if you’re the router-admin :-), but I never used that for serious stuff.
Now that Hetzner finally provides native IPv6 connectivity, I made the necessary changes to the configuration of my server and now this blog is reachable via IPv6, too.
Next task: Get cacti to graph how many visitors use v4 versus v6.
Categories
The effect of soccer on the IXPs
This years soccer Word Cup seems to be the first one for which streaming video is widely available on the Internet. The Austrian public TV (ORF) is offering a decent livestream (or in the case of parallel games, two streams). So what do the public traffic statistics of the Internet Exchange Points show?
This graph is from the Vienna Internet Exchange. Some notable points:
- Gametime means traffic-peaks. The World Cup schedule is clearly visible in the graphs. Up to the 21th, there were three games per day, two close after each other, then a two hour break and then another game. Starting with the 22nd, there were four games a day, with two running in parallel. (the times in the graph are UTC!)
- Weekend have smaller spikes than workdays: On the 19th and 20th, the games are less visible than on the other days. It looks like watching the stream over the Internet is more popular in offices than at home. This makes sense as at home the TV screen is most likely the better place to watch soccer.
- Regarding traffic levels: from looking at the graphs, the biggest spikes seem to be around 8 Gbit/s. Assuming that this is mostly ORF streams for the Austrian public, one can assume that ORF/APA is pushing more than 10 Gbit/s during Word Cup games.
Categories
Tracks: Jonas edition
This weekend I was babysitting at my sister’s place. They have quite an impressing collection of wooden tracks, so I built the following with Jonas, her 5yr old son.
