Category Archives: Internet

What’s wrong with MSN weather

MSN Weather: MelbourneScoble pointed to weather.msn.com. He reckons the only problem with it is lack of RSS.

There’s a bigger problem. It’s Fahrenheit-centric. You know Fahrenheit, that antiquated temperature system used exclusively in the USA, that the rest of the world has abandoned?

Okay, so you can get some stuff in Celsius. The current conditions and brief forecast — that’s all good. Okay so it defaults into F, even for non-US cities, but you can change it to C very easily. It even automatically gives me time local to that city — very nice.

But scroll down a little way, and you’ll find a map, with Fahrenheit all over it. Yeah, they mention it’s only in Fahrenheit, okay, and that seems to be how they got it from the Weather Channel.

So while MSN are hassling the Weather Channel for maps in C or F depending on user preference, maybe they can ask them what the hell happened with the map of Australia and friends? It’s got Hobart, Sydney, Darwin, Perth, Adelaide. Wait a sec, no Melbourne (Australia’s second-biggest city), no Brisbane (Australia’s third-biggest city), no Canberra (Australia’s capital city). They’ve highlighted what might be Cairns, Broome, perhaps Mackay and … oh, somewhere near the Gulf of Carpentaria; perhaps Mt Isa.

Worse, the detailed forecast has half C and half F, and wind speeds in mph. That is not very helpful. To most of us, it might as well be in Swahili.

I might also point out that in the smallprint of the Melbourne current conditions, it mentions the observations are from the Coldstream AWS. That explains why there are currently 37kmh winds outside. Coldstream is not actually in Melbourne, but beyond the urban fringe. Of all the Melbourne AWS locations, it’s probably the worst to try and measure Melbourne’s weather conditions. The one in the city centre probably would have been the best.

I can only hope MSN weather is at least accurate and useful for US users, because it would appear to be next to useless for anybody elsewhere.

Looking for Quicktime Pro

I really don’t appreciate nag screens. Quicktime nags me to buy Quicktime Pro, but when I click the Why Go Pro button to let Apple put their case for handing over the readies, all they’ll tell me is that it’s available for Mac, when I’m using Windows.

I also like the bit where they ask me not to steal movies, or “in ten years, it will cost $50(2) to see a movie in the theater”, with (2) being a footnote saying “(2) Exaggerated estimate.” Oh, very helpful. Not much of an estimate then, if it’s exaggerated, surely.

Apple storeSo anyway I found the link to buy Quicktime Pro for Windows, even though version 7 is still in beta. It then asks me which country I’m in, and when I choose Australia, throws me onto an Australian Apple shop page, with no hint of where to find Quicktime to buy it. I eventually had to use a search box within the shop site to find it again.

Sigh.

(Not that I’m buying it at the moment, you understand. Just looking for ranting ammunition.)

Pirates! Spammers! Gyroscopes! Bandwidth thieves!

This is officially getting ridiculous. Not only are my blogs getting a lot of comment spam, but my personal blog site is burning huge amounts of bandwidth, as particular (I assume zombie) hosts hit the site.

Below are the top ten bandwidth users of danielbowen.com for June:

Top 10 of 15312 Total Sites By KBytes
# Hits Files KBytes Visits Hostname
1 14380 4.10% 3801 1.77% 111235 2.22% 159 0.24% host-148-244-150-58.block.alestra.net.mx
2 17558 5.01% 3191 1.48% 99441 1.98% 157 0.24% host-207-248-240-119.block.alestra.net.mx
3 3927 1.12% 3640 1.69% 75989 1.51% 3 0.00% csr010.goo.ne.jp
4 3062 0.87% 2797 1.30% 74881 1.49% 171 0.26% rrcs-24-97-174-130.nys.biz.rr.com
5 3057 0.87% 2200 1.02% 62547 1.25% 392 0.60% msnbot.msn.com
6 2691 0.77% 2248 1.04% 60684 1.21% 153 0.23% 64.124.85.78.become.com
7 2256 0.64% 2082 0.97% 56383 1.12% 124 0.19% 98-101-196-200.linkexpress.com.br
8 2146 0.61% 2033 0.94% 51665 1.03% 279 0.43% dsl-250-198.monet.no
9 2001 0.57% 1755 0.82% 47605 0.95% 23 0.04% host133.sprintnetops.net
10 1686 0.48% 1571 0.73% 35979 0.72% 325 0.50% corporativos

It’s not like this site is hosting pr0n or something — there’s just no reason why any single host would need to grab 110Mb of traffic in a single month. In total traffic topped 4Gb for the month, which is ludicrous for a diary site with a few photos on it. 4Gb is actually my monthly limit — thankfully my web ISP isn’t too strict about charging extra for hitting that, but there’s always the risk if this is consistent that it’ll be costing me real money.

As a result I’ve started a list of bandwidth hogs’ IP addresses, which I’m putting in the .htaccess file. Anything with lots of hits and grabbing above about 5Mb per month is going onto the list, and the list is being duplicated (manually unfortunately) across to the other WordPress sites that I run.

Inspection of the access_log is particularly enlightening, with at present a staggering number of requests coming in with a referer at poker-related sites. Of the 6665 hits in the file for today (covering about 13 hours) there are 674 from texasholdemcenteral.com (note the wonky spelling) and 1212 from sportscribe.com. All of these too are now being blocked with a 403 (forbidden) via .htaccess.

Sigh. I suppose it’s just too much to expect people to place nice?

.htaccess extract – Feel free to copy for your own site to block miscreants.
Continue reading →

A buncha stuff

I don’t normally link to the excellent DailyWTF, because it’s full of good stuff, I’d be linking every day. But yesterday’s picture of the server room with a fishbowl to catch the airconditioner water outlet is an absolute classic. (Make sure you read the article as well as look at the picture.)

Classical music labels have criticised the BBC for offering Beethoven’s symphonies as a free download. This strikes me as a tad narrowminded. I’d imagine there’d be a number of people out there who might otherwise not be interested in classical music who might listen to these then go out looking for more to buy. (via Dave Winer)

Microsoft are now offering free evaluation sessions in their products, making use of their Virtual PC technology so you just try things out on a remote session via your browser and Citrix Java client.

New version of Firefox (1.0.5) is available, fixing some vulnerabilities.

System capacity planning for major incidents

Transport for London web siteThe terrible events in London overnight do have some relevance to us as humble IT workers. While there are many critical jobs performed in such situations by the emergency services, communications and other systems are also important.

Obviously top of the pile in this respect are the systems dealing with the emergency services themselves: their communications and despatch systems — and we know that mobile phone networks were affected by the chaos. A few notches down, but growing more significant, are the web sites (and background systems that feed them) to inform the public.

While the BBC News web site seemed to generally cope as events unfolded (I’m sure they’re well-versed at this kind of incident), their live video and audio streams were swamped. Likewise CNN responded okay, though ITN was sluggish. The Transport For London site didn’t respond for some time, before they switched to a plainer, less server-intensive basic information page.

Last week Connex in Melbourne suffered a shutdown, and similarly, their web site didn’t cope. While most disruptions are also communicated to SMS subscribers, the shutdown itself was caused by problems with the same systems used for sending out the alerts. Melbourne’s public transport umbrella site Metlink was responding, but the problem there was a lack of updates.

As the web becomes more pervasive, and media outlets also use it to gather information, capacity planning for peak demand becomes important. Obviously no organisation wants to spend up big on servers that never get used, but for mass communication of detailed information, the web is cheaper than employing operators or even installing masses of phone lines, and will play an increasing role in keeping the general public informed of events.

Primus – not with-it, hoopy froods

Primus are hopeless. They make Telstra look like really with-it, hoopy froods. I had no problems at all for about 4 years while I had just one phone line connected and didn’t try to change anything.

We signed up for another line. They connected the new line, and cut off the old one. Ring, complain, apologies. Disconnect the new line, reconnect the old. Ring, complain, apologies. The fun continued for a while.

Remember I said iPrimus had a great deal on ADSL? Not long after we signed up for ADSL, our line went dead. “Completely unrelated” says Primus. “Telstra line fault”. Sure. Have you tried reporting a dud phone line when the phone line’s dud? Doesn’t work so good.

Then there was a massive delay with the modem. Eventually we rung up and asked where it was. “We tried delivering it two weeks ago. No one was home. We left a card.” Searching high and low produced no card. However, we found the card the following weekend – they tried to deliver the modem to our old address. Which is not our billing address, or the address where the ADSL line was being set up. I have no idea why they’d want to deliver to that address.

They rung up last night about a missing payment. I didn’t get that bill. Somehow they sent it to 457/457 St Kilda St so I don’t know what would have happened to it. Probably lost in that great postal delivery hole in the sky. Much apologies later, late payment fee waived, all that stuff.

These guys seem to have a lot of bugs in their computer system. Being a telco in Australia only requires that you bill the customers and pay Telstra’s bills. So all primus needs to do is run a billing system. How hard could it be?

But their customer service after these stuff-ups is always really good. Once you get through to a human which can sometimes take a while. At least their call centre isn’t in India. That would be the last straw.

Dead USB port

So, in building the broadband access machine I’ve found a gift computer (twice as powerful as anything else I owned) that was ‘not working’. After loading XP onto and futzing with it for a while, I figured out that doing anything with the USB port locked up the computer… after a while. I tested the theory by running up a memory/CPU intensive game and letting it run for a few hours. It was happy until I transfered some files off the USB stick. Fault identified. If I want to transfer stuff off the machine, I’ll need to get a USB card, or hook up a network. And I think I’ll do the later.

With fault identification complete, I hooked up the broadband modem (Netcomm NB5) via the ethernet connection (given the USB connection wasn’t going to be working on this machine). Entered the IP of the modem into the browser, and got the modem’s login screen. Everything was good, and I shut down all access other than web via port 80 using the modem’s built-in firewall. Connection to the ISP was established, proxies entered into Firefox (not IE – CERT says there are no secure versions), and Google was available. Connectivity proven.

The web browsing machine got Fedora Core 3 loaded on (a simple process), and the proxy setup was repeated with the same results. FC3 comes with a pre-release version of Firefox, so I loaded up the CD with the .gz for 1.0.4 and loaded that onto the desktop. Then I spent a couple of hours figuring out that I needed to be root to install the browser, and where to install it. Having done that, I still haven’t got it as the default browser – that’s still the prerelease Firefox. But I can run up 1.0.4 from the command line, so at least it’s available, and adBlocker is installed, so well and good.

I figure that I’m going to lock the modem down to a single IP address it’s going to talk to, the FC3 machine. Anything else that wants data from the net is going to have to transfer it from the FC3 machine and won’t be exposed to the big bad internet, because I’m not ready to migrate our entire PC collection over to Linux just yet.

Which means I need to buy a switch.

YahooGroups getting paranoid

I use YahooGroups a fair bit. Is it my imagination, or is YG asking for way too much authentication of my logon? Increasingly it seems to show me the old logon screen (logon name/password) even though I keep turning on the option to remember me (and yes, my cookies are enabled).

Old-style Yahoo sign-in

…then straight after that it will ask me again, with a captcha displayed as well.

New-style Yahoo sign-in

In fact, trying to edit my account password today, I got the old, the new, then I changed my password (which involved re-entering the original password and the new one twice), then got the old and new sign-in screens again. Too much!

ADSL breaks even

Well, iPrimus are selling 200Mb/mo ADSL for $13/mo, so that was cheap enough to drag me in. But it’s been weeks and the ADSL modem still hasn’t turned up. Should I buy my own and tell them to sod off? It’s meant to be ADSL2 capable…

Now all I need is a bulletproof OS that can hook up to the net at 256Mb/s without turning into a zombie. I’m thinking that Multimedia PC I’m building has to be turned on all the time, so perhaps to hang the modem off it and have it act as a secondary firewall and NAT. Yet another reason to use Fedora.

Fedora Core 4 is out now – do you think I should go there?

Green sites, dead pixels and Remote Desktop

Keep your web site green by hosting it in an environmentally sustainable data centre.

Unstick your dead pixels by flashing rapid colour changes through them. 60% success rate, apparently. What have you got to lose?

These guys claim to have got round the limitation of Windows XP Remote Desktop of only one user at a time, by replacing one of the Terminal Server DLLs with that from an older build of SP2.

Open right here please

Oi you browser writers, this is what I want: When I right-click a link, I can open in a new window or a new tab. Please give me an option to open in the window/tab I’m already in (overriding the web site’s wish to open in a new one).