Agylen

Kent Newsome: “TDavid says you need at least 75 posts a month to be in growth mode. Historically, I would have disagreed with that, but I come from an old media perspective, having written for newspapers and trade journals for years (where a coveted monthly column became burdensome to the point of impossibility). But having been involved in the blogosphere for a few years, I think he’s probably right. If not for the content itself, for the content and the embedded links to draw other writers to your site, and to seed the reciprocal links which are, for better or worse, one of the established measuring sticks for blog readership.”

75 posts a month? I made just 35 posts in all of 2007 (36 with this one). I only came near that in March 2005, with 73 posts.

Actually, what TDavid says is:

The sweet spot for a blog is 75-150 quality posts per month. That should be the goal number of posts for most (but not every) blogger wanting to grow their traffic. Notice I threw the word “quality” in there.

It would be easy for me to say that I’m happy with my readership levels (around 260 visitors a day, on average) but who am I kidding?. Of course I, like everybody else who keeps a blog, would like to have a thousand daily visitors, and then 2000, and then more. If that takes 3 to 5 quality posts a day, there’s no way I can make it, but at least I can try raising my pathetic average of 7-8 posts a month.

You can take this very post as the first step towards that goal.

It all started when my iMac started turning itself off randomly and in the end it decided that it didn’t want to tun itself on anymore. I suspect a problem with the power supply, so right before Easter I brought it in for check and possibly repair. Haven’t heard anything about it, since then.

Then, right after Easter, my DSL connection suddenly became much slower. More like crawling, actually. Slow like a 56k modem that was losing a good deal of packets, which translates to being basically unusable.

Since I have three computers at home and they all have the same problem, I immediately excluded the possibility that all of them had started going mad at once. I also excluded the WiFi base station from the loop, to no avail. I replaced all cables, still no luck. I even got a new modem/router, since the one I had was left over from the previous provider and I couldn’t rule out the possibility that it had started malfunctioning during the Easter break. Same problem.

Calling technical support, of course, entails being kept on hold for 15 minutes on average, listening to an endless loop of Lily Allen’s LDN (I hate that song), then, if you’re lucky enough to be able to talk to someone, they will tell you that, for slowness problems, you have to execute an online speed test from their website (which I did but could not complete, since it times out at around 5%, when the average speed was measured in the vicinity of 0.1kbps) and report the results.

Incidentally, this is the same company that left me out in the cold for a week when switching providers. I’m tempted to switch again, but I’m afraid no company is actually able to provide a decent service.

Having ruled out computers, cabling, the router and the WiFi network as possible culprits, I’m starting to suspect some sort of TCP-related problem. A couple clues:

• Speed seems to be extremely low only when downloading. Uploading is generally blazingly fast.
• Downloads seem to start normally but then crawl to a halt after a few seconds or fractions of a second.
• Some applications are apparently unaffected by the problem. Most notably, I can conduct a Skype convestation without interruptions. I even tried Joost and, even though it doesn’t play anything and times out and disconnects after a while, it is almost able to sustain an inbound stream of a few hundred KB/s for half a minute or so.
• Ping times are absolutely normal.

This behavior makes me think that it’s not a line noise problem either, otherwise all types of traffic would be similarly affected, I think. It looks like what’s mostly affected is long running TCP connections, and only in the downstream direction. P2P applications, which probably use something different, I don’t know, are much less affected. ICMP stuff (ping) is not affected at all.

So I suspected some TCP fragmentation problem, and indeed, after mucking around with the MTU and MRU parameters of the router’s WAN (DSL) interface, I got somewhere: with MTU and MRU set at a value of 1000 (they were 1400 and 1492, respectively, before) my DLS line still feels like a 56k analog modem, but without packet loss. This means that I can at least navigate most “lightweight” websites and read email. Big deal!

Now, if anyone is reading this and has some clues about how to diagnose TCP problems and how to determine the optimal values of MTU, MRU and maybe some of the other, more obscure, configurable parameters in my router (D-Link DSL-G624T), I’ll be eternally grateful.

Last but not the least, last Friday the domain of this website disappeared completely from its DNS provider and I couldn’t get someone to resolve the situation until yesterday in the afternoon.

All in all, a very frustrating period.

This post is in Italian, because it involves an Italian company that operates in the Italian market, so I’m warning my Italian readers: Wind sucks. Short version: I’ve been without phone service for more than a week and without DSL service for more than five days.

Update: They either saw this post, or it was just chance, but today I was visited by a technician that corrected the problem, which apparently was one of cabling, so now I’m back online again.

Qualche tempo fa decisi di abbandonare la cara vecchia Telecom e di passare armi e bagagli a Wind/Infostrada come fornitore unico sia per la voce sia per l’ADSL. Dopo un po’ di tempo, mi comunicarono che il giorno 11 Gennaio 2007 avrebbero effettuato il passaggio alla loro rete e da quel giorno non avrei più dovuto pagare il canone Telecom.

Da quel giorno, sette giorni fa, il servizio Telecom è stato interrotto, ma di quello Wind nemmeno l’ombra. Il telefono è muto e la ADSL non ha segnale. Ripetuti tentativi di contattare l’assistenza tecnica non hanno ottenuto altra risposta che non fosse: “La pratica è in lavorazione, abbia pazienza.”

Data questa esperienza, che mi sta creando innumerevoli problemi, non mi sento di consigliare a nessuno di affidare le proprie capacità di comunicare a Wind/Infostrada.

Aggiornamento: non so se è perchè hanno letto questo post o se è solo fortuna, ma oggi ho ricevuto la visita di un tecnico che ha corretto il problema (apparentemente una questione di cablaggio errato), quindi sono nuovamente online.

Since I’ve been prodded by Gianugo, I cannot avoid taking part in the latest meme: list five things about you that most people don’t know, then link to other five people and ask them to do the same.

Here’s my list:

1. I met the first girl I started dating with a certain frequency when I sold her my C64. Before then, I was too busy playing with the C64 to date girls.
2. I got a Ph.D but never bothered to deposit the dissertation, so I have no piece of paper to prove it.
3. The only movie that almost made me shed a tear in adult age was Nankyoku monogatari (Antarctica).
4. I never broke a single bone of my body. The only thought of distortions and fractures makes me shiver.
5. I’d like to visit every single country in the world in my lifetime. Having visited just 19 of them so far, I don’t think it’s likely I’ll be able to visit them all.

Now on to you: Duncan, Philipp, Ted, Steve and Tim, but please post something interesting, even slightly embarrassing, not things like “I can play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the piano while blindfolded.”

If you see this website not responding from time to time, it’s because it’s currently being targeted by a network of spambots that try to post with such violence that they manage to bring the system to its knees.

The problem is not so much identifying spam—Akismet does that perfectly well 99.99% of the time. The problem is that, precisely because of Akismet, each post will tie up an Apache child process for a significant interval of time and those bots are posting so quickly that they will make the server reach the configured limit on the number of server processes in a matter of seconds.

I could raise that number, but this system hasn’t got a whole lot of memory, and I would hate shelling out more money just to keep those bots at bay. Barring a reconfiguration of Apache to use a different multiprocessing model or anything that would cost me a significant amount of time—after all, one of the reasons for using WordPress on Apache is just because it simply works, most of the time, and requires very little maintenance— one option left to me is harvesting the IP addresses of those bots and block them using iptables.

Of course, it’s an uphill battle, and I’m afraid I will quickly reach a point where the kernel will start sweating just to check every packed against a huge list of source addresses (I have more than 700 right now in this file, which you are free to reuse if you have the same problem). Probably most of those PCs (fuck Microsoft and its idea of security, by the way) have dynamic IP addresses, which just makes the problem bigger.

Anyway, this strategy seems to be working for now, so I’ll stick to it. If you’re curious, all the bots in this recent wave exhibit the following User-Agent string:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Maxthon)

And in the end the mystery was revealed. The super-secret project a bunch of people have been working on for the last months, sometimes obliquely hinting at it in mails and blog posts (here, here and here for example), finally came out of stealth mode and opened its public website.

But what it’s all about? Well, nothing more and nothing less than bringing television to the internet using P2P technology, coming from the same people who started Kazaa and then Skype. A very ambitious project, but given the success history of its founders and the amount of brainpower they managed to collect under their umbrella, success is a very probable outcome.

I am amazed at the amount of work that has been accomplished in less than six months. What we have now is a product that—while still of alpha quality and that will be initially delivered to a very restricted set of tech-savvy users, before going to a public beta and then to general availability—is already very promising.

The defining characteristics of The Venice Project are:

• P2P technology to stream videos without having to wait for download to complete.
• High-quality content from mainstream providers, not lots of crappy homemade videos like you can find on YouTube.
• Later on, user-generated content also, but always with an eye towards quality.
• Social aspects like reviews, ratings, IM, tagging, and other similar stuff.

Working on this project, for me, has been at times a blast and at times stressful, like every highly innovative project with tight deadlines is. But this is the kind of stress that we are well accustomed with. What’s been really great has been working together with a number of incredibly smart people, from whom I’ve learned a number of things and hope to continue learning.

There is a small problem with the product, though: there isn’t yet a Mac version, so in order to use it at home, I’ve been forced to install Windows XP on top of BootCamp. I’ve been told that a Mac version is in the works and will follow on the heels of the Windows version, but I can happily report that the Windows beta works perfectly on BootCamp A Linux version is also very probable.

Technorati Tags: television, iptv, the venice project, p2p.

The casoeula (or cassoeula) is a traditional, winter Lombard dish made from cabbage and pork. Not exactly light on the stomach

Created using Google Docs .

For the second time in less than two months, my Transavia flight back from Amsterdam is heavily delayed, this time by 2:40 hours, at the least. Add to that the discomfort of having to drive to and from Bergamo (I left home yesterday with enough advance that I could have almost got to Amsterdam by car) and it really makes you want to just say no and tell the customer that next time they’ll have to pay the price of a KLM flight, no matter how high.

The problem is that KLM prices flights into Amsterdam with only a night out and reserved on short notice at levels that would be appropriate for a transcontinental flight. And we’re talking coach class here; I don’t even have the stomach to check what business class would cost. Alitalia, belonging to the same group as KLM, is no better in this respect.

Technorati Tags: traveling, transavia, klm, schiphol, amsterdam, alitalia, flying.

Ah! Those wonderful 80s, padded shoulders and all, they come back to haunt you when you expect it the least. This time it’s with a collection of some of the best (and not so best) TV spots from 1981 to 1993. Italian spots, that is, so if you weren’t watching Italian TV in those years, don’t bother.

But if you were, you should jump there now and see if you can remember some memorable taglines like “Cuore di panna”, “Milano da bere”, and “Far bene all’amore fa bene all’amore”. I have to admit my eyes started feeling wet after watching the Barilla ad with the little girl and the kitten.

Kudos to the people behind this website, but they should really hire a decent web designer. And publish a video podcast: I would certainly subscribe to it!

Technorati Tags: tv, ads, spots, 80s, italy.