Recent Articles
Cleaning up the link rot
Apr 26, 2009 Internet, Media & Advertising 1 Comment
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.
Time to get some hosting
Apr 7, 2009 Misc Comments Off
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.
Annual updates
Mar 1, 2009 Misc Comments Off
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.
ICANN adds IPv6 for root zone DNS servers
Feb 6, 2008 Internet Comments Off
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.
An old saying..
Feb 14, 2007 Misc Comments Off
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!”
Peak now lasts for three hours
Aug 22, 2006 Melbourne Comments Off
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 noticeably 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.
The business side of TV
Jun 24, 2006 Australia, Current Events, IPTV, Music & Entertainment Comments Off
Do adjust your mindset ( The Age / Alan Kohler )
In this article Alan Kohler takes a look at some of the challenges facing the free to air TV stations in Australia. Audiences are in decline, costs are on the rise, and there are increasing challenges from other forms of entertainment. What does this mean for the industry, and what impact will technology like IPTV have?
Young FrankenSteve
Jun 13, 2006 Internet, Music & Entertainment 3 Comments
This needs no further comment:
IPTV on the way
Jun 3, 2006 IPTV, Internet, Media & Advertising, Telco Comments Off
IPTV is here … but don’t hold your breath ( The Age / Louisa Hearn )
From the article: “While telecommunication companies in many other developed countries have been investing heavily in improving broadband services, Telstra has been accused within the industry of lagging behind – something that Optus and other smaller telcos and ISPs say they are working hard to reverse by building up their own broadband infrastructures.”
With residential VoIP slowly making its way into households providers are starting to look towards the next step in the so called ‘triple play’ – IPTV. IPTV is simply the delivery of TV programming over the internet, although more specifically realtime or on-demand programming. This is in contrast to existing video distribution over the internet which requires the user to wait while the video file downloads before they are able to start watching it.
There is nothing magic or mystical about IPTV, but it does require a lot of bandwidth between the provider and the subscriber. ADSL2+ is going a long way towards solving this problem, but many households are not close enough to their exchange to be able to get a reliable high-speed connection. With Telstra’s FTTN rollout in doubt consumers may have to wait a little longer before IPTV becomes a reality.
Sorry for the downtime
May 26, 2006 Current Events Comments Off
There has been some drama at the ISP that was hosting my websites which resulted in them being offline for a few days. I’ve moved on to some temporary hosting which may be a little slow but it will keep the site going until I get something else set up.
Remember folks – offsite backups are essential!