Latest Entry
Jun 30, 2009 Internet
This site has been on the new hosting for a few months now so I thought it was about time to post an updated response time chart from the Google Webmaster console.
Google have updated their webmaster interface since the last chart but you can see there has been a huge improvement in response time since I moved the server. Some of the other charts show that the rate of URLs fetched per day has also improved.
The move has gone very smoothly, largely due to Wordpress having a simple interface for exporting the DB from the old server and uploading it to the new one. Hooray for Wordpress!
Recent Entries
Jun 29, 2009 Spam, Telco
I recently got my first foreign SMS spam to my mobile. It said:
“You won $123,000 USD,send your email address by sms text message to(+856207349489)so we shall send you an email with more information on how to claim your money”
Obviously this is some sort of scam, and a quick web search reveals quite a few people have received exactly the same message. Usually these sort of scams are sent via email because it cost the sender practically nothing and is very difficult to trace back to the individual responsible. SMS on the other hand almost always costs has a financial cost to the sender and is far easier to trace. The sender in this case has likely hacked or socially engineered they way into another party’s phone account in order to send out these messages. There is probably a fairly small window of time in which you could reply to the message before the SMS service is cut off by the telco who provides it.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much SMS spam in the future.
Edit: The Age have published an article on this type of activity which they are calling Smishing (SMS phishing).
May 7, 2009 Uncategorized
I moved the site over to the new hosting on the weekend and updated the site theme at the same time. So far things are running much faster than they were before. I’ll post an updated speed graph from the Google webmaster console in a few weeks when it has updated.
I’m still in the process of clearing out the link rot but I have cut down the number of broken links to around half as many as when I started.
That’s all for now.
Apr 30, 2009 Australia, Enviroment, Internet, Telco
According to The Australian, shadow communications minister Nick Minchin has been quoted as saying: “Senator Conroy is claiming this all singing, all dancing NBN is also going to save the planet.” I’m taking his quote out of context, but it goes to show how petty and soundbite-driven politics can be at times.
The article I am linking to (well, until it link-rots away) actually raises some of the advantages the proposed NBN could bring to the country. I think once the network is built people will come up with all sorts of amazing high-bandwidth applications to use on it. Many of these will reduce the need to travel, bringing convenience and environmental benefits for most of us, but could be of huge importance for people with mobility challenges.
Apr 26, 2009 Internet, Media & Advertising
In this blog I often make reference to current events in the news and include a link to the source of the story. Sadly it seems that many of these news stories have a very short shelf life on the publisher’s website and have vanished leaving nothing but a 404 error in their place. I found a useful plugin to help with the link rot problem which has revealed around 80% of my broken links point to newspaper publisher’s websites.
Recently the print media have been complaining that Google is stealing their content (one example if many such articles), however they are never able to cite any specific examples of this behavior by Google. Personally I think they are just scared and confused about new technologies like RSS and Google News. It seems to me the print media are missing a huge opportunity to place their archives online and collect advertising revenue. Some of these newspapers have archives that go back hundreds of years. Imagine how much of a valuable resources these would be to people conducting research of our recent history? This open approach to use of the newspaper archives would certainly earn the publishers more revenue than they get from serving up 404 errors.
Apr 7, 2009 Misc
For the last 4 or so years this site has been hosted at home over my DSL line. In that time period I’ve been through several ISPs and physical addresses and numerous versions of Wordpress.
Recently my provider had an outage that dragged on for well over 24 hours and resulted in me churning my DSL service to a new ISP. It took a while to update the routing following the move so this site was down for the better part of a week. I think it is finally time to move this site over to dedicated hosting where it is less prone to these sorts of problems.
I have some issues with most my current hosting provider not allowing me to have SRV records in my zonefile (needed for jabberd) but moving the web side of things over shouldn’t be much of an issue. I’m also going to take the opportunity to go back through the old posts and clean out ones with link rot.
Here are my current response time stats from the Google webmaster console:
Let’s see how they look after the move.
Mar 1, 2009 Misc
Kylie requested an update for the blog, so here it is!
Looks like I have accidentally fallen into an annual update schedule. It might be time to tidy up some of the old content and return to more frequent updates.
Feb 6, 2008 Internet
ICANN has just added IPv6 connectivity to six of the root DNS servers (A, F, H, J, K, M). This is a good step forward for IPv6 deployment which has been fairly slow to date.
More info in the ICANN IPv6 announcement.
Feb 14, 2007 Misc
Back in the 1800s the Tates Watch Company of Massachusetts wanted to produce other products and, since they already made the cases for watches,they used them to produce compasses. The new compasses were so bad that people often ended up in Canada or Mexico rather than California.
This, of course, is the origin of the expression, “He who has a Tates is lost!”
Aug 22, 2006 Uncategorized
Peak now lasts for three hours ( Herald Sun / Liam Houlihan )
From the article: “The images from VicRoads cameras show the sudden congestion that happens every afternoon on the Monash Freeway, dragging the average speed from 90km/h to 30km/h.”
I have only been driving a car since 2002 and in that time the traffic on the Monash has become noticably worse every year. The government has plans to widen the freeway to 4 lanes in some areas but I don’t think that is the solution. They may instead want to look at expanding the rail network into some of the south east suburbs which don’t have access to trains presently. I’m sure a lot of people would prefer to take the train to work if they had the option.