- Analysis of PIN Numbers – What are the most and least common 4-digit PIN numbers?
- General Failure – Does the US military no longer punish or demote bad generals? “A culture of mediocrity has taken hold within the Army’s leadership rank—if it is not uprooted, the country’s next war is unlikely to unfold any better than the last two.”
- Why American Eggs Would Be Illegal In A British Supermarket, And Vice Versa – Different approaches to food safety in the US and Britain.
- An Overview of the Web – What happens when your browser requests a web pagewebpage. A step by step though the various layers or computers, protocols and programs. Understandable buy someone a little technical.
Author: simon
Sysadmin Miniconf proposals close in 2 days for linux.conf.au 2013
Once again I’m helping to organise the Sysadmin Miniconf at Linux.conf.au . This time we’ll be in Canberra in the last week of January 2013.
This is a big reminder that proposals for presentations at the Miniconf close at the End of October. If you have a proposal you need to submit it now.
Even if you’ve not 100% finalised your idea let us know now and we can work with you. If we don’t know about it then it is very hard for us to accept it.
We have several proposals that have already been accepted but are very keen to get more.
Links: Mars!, The cdbaby model, Robots, the rest of the world on the web
- Comparison – Mars Curiosity Descent – Ultra HD 30fps Smooth-Motion (YouTube) – Comparison of the original and a greatly improved version.
- If newspapers were run like CDBaby.com – An alternative business/operating model for online news.
- New Wave of Deft Robots Is Changing Global Industry – Robots move beyond the traditional car-assemble type jobs.
- 10 lessons for uncultured web developers – A few little things that trip up web developers, especially those who think the valley is the world.
Links: Weather Prediction, Advertising, 3rd world mobile web and Database failover
- Handling Database Failover at Craigslist – Jeremy Zawodny links to a few recent articles on automated database failover and outlines what he does at craigslist. The consensus seems to be the the added complexity of automating failover results in less reliability than improving the process of doing it manually.
- The Weatherman is not a Moron – An overview on modern weather prediction and how it is improved. In just 25 years the 3 day estimate for landfalls for Gulf of Mexico hurricane has dropped from 350 to 100 miles.
- Stop Advertising in Photo Magazines – Head West to the Web – Is magazine advertising a waste of time? In this article the results are mixed but mostly “No” .
- See your site like the rest of the world does. On the Nokia X2-01 – Fascinating survey of the mobile web browser stats in the BRIC and Next 11 countries.
Squatters hit .kiwi.nz
A couple of days ago the .kiwi.nz second level domain was opened up. Within a day over 1000 domains were registered.
But I was wondering who is registering the domains, I though I’d have a quick look though some top brands and domains:
- telecom.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- vodafone.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- 2degrees.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- google.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- yahoo.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- bing.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- youtube.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- facebook.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- trademe.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- stuff.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- nzherald.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- msn.kiwi.nz – Available
- wikipedia.kiwi.nz – Available
- asb.kwi.nz – Squatter
- bnz.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- westpac.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- kiwibank.kiwi.nz – Available
- nationalbank.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- tv3.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- tvnz.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- sky.kiwi.nz – Legit Owner
- airnz.kiwi.nz – Legit Owner
- skykiwi.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- coke.kiwi.nz – Squatter
- pepsi.kiwi.nz – Squatter
Several in the list above (and I assume other domains) have been registered by the same few people. Overall not a good look but I assume things will calm down after a few lawyers letters and dollars are exchanged.
Where the NZ eyeballs are
So I was wondering what is the market share of New Zealand ISPs these days, do Telecom and TelstraClear still completely dominate the market? or have the smaller ISPs caught up?
Earlier this week I grabbed a sample of the weblogs from a large New Zealand website and checked to see which networks the readers came from.
Using the tools at Team Cymru I checked looked up the origin ASN ( roughly ISP ) for that network, this enabled me to work out which percentage of the traffic came from which ISPs.
- I’ve included the data from 2 times below, a daytime one for the “business traffic” and an evening sample for “home traffic”
- Data during both periods is over 20Mb/s and from a general interest New Zealand website (anonymous as condition of releasing the data)
- Only requests that originate from New Zealand are included.
- There may be a bias of traffic towards Auckland
- Note that only the largest sites will own their own networks, AS and run BGP . Thus sometimes very large companies and other organisations will be included as part of their ISP’s total.
- Stats below are sorted by bandwidth used
I was interested to see how much Telecom (including the Netgate brand which is probably Chorus) still dominates. I was actually surprised to see that Telecom dominates the home market much more than the business market whereas I would have expected the other way around.
Between Noon and 1pm on Thursday the 6th of Sept.
Percent ASN ASN Description 36.82 4771 Telecom New Zealand Ltd. 15.10 4768 TelstraClear Ltd 7.41 4648 Netgate 5.60 17746 Orcon Internet 3.03 7657 Vodafone NZ Ltd. 2.69 9889 Maxnet / Vocus 2.33 9503 FX Networks Limited 1.91 38793 NZCOMMS. Mobile phone Company. New Zealand 1.90 9790 CallPlus Services Limited 1.73 10022 Internet access for Datacom Systems Auckland 1.41 23655 Snap Internet Limited 1.36 9431 The University of Auckland 1.28 9325 Telecom XTRA, Auckland 1.05 4770 ICONZ Ltd 0.92 17492 Vector Communications LTD., 0.88 24183 DTS LTD 0.79 17435 WorldxChange Communications LTD 0.73 18353 Revera NZ Limited 0.71 9245 COMPASS NZ 0.66 18021 Unisys NZ, IT Outsourcer, 0.56 55454 Orcon Internet Ltd 0.48 9872 ITNet Ltd 0.41 17412 Woosh Wireless 0.39 45946 Air New Zealand Limited 0.36 9432 University of Canterbury 0.36 38305 The University of Otago 0.34 2570 Telecom New Zealand Ltd 0.32 9303 KC Computer Service Ltd., 0.30 24324 Kordia Limited 0.29 17649 DMZGlobal Ltd 0.28 55872 BayCity Communications Limited 0.26 9345 Paradise Net 0.25 23838 Solarix Networks Limited 0.25 17705 InSPire Net Ltd 0.25 10200 Web hosting provider and ISP connectivity. 0.24 9876 Airnet 0.23 24318 Ministry of Education 0.23 17663 Housing New Zealand Corporation Internet 0.21 2687 AT&T Global Network Services - AP
Between 8pm and 10pm on Wednesday the 5th of Sept.
Percent ASN ASN Description 62.71 4771 Telecom New Zealand Ltd. 12.97 4768 TelstraClear Ltd 6.34 17746 Orcon Internet 2.89 7657 Vodafone NZ Ltd. 2.74 9790 CallPlus Services Limited 1.47 17435 WorldxChange Communications LTD 1.26 17412 Woosh Wireless 0.96 38793 NZCOMMS. Mobile phone Company. New Zealand 0.92 23655 Snap Internet Limited 0.81 4648 Netgate 0.63 9889 Maxnet / Vocus 0.49 55872 BayCity Communications Limited 0.46 4770 ICONZ Ltd 0.42 17705 InSPire Net Ltd 0.38 17994 Appserv Limited 0.37 9872 ITNet Ltd 0.35 45267 Lightwire LTD 0.32 9325 Telecom XTRA, Auckland 0.27 9245 COMPASS NZ 0.25 45946 Air New Zealand Limited 0.20 10200 Web hosting provider and ISP connectivity. 0.17 9303 KC Computer Service Ltd., 0.16 9345 Paradise Net 0.16 45177 Layer2.co.nz 0.16 38305 The University of Otago 0.15 23735 Enternet Online Ltd 0.13 9431 The University of Auckland 0.13 24324 Kordia Limited 0.11 17492 Vector Communications LTD., 0.10 9876 Airnet 0.10 55853 Megatel
Links: Density done well, schizophrenia, Olympics and Socialist networks
- Density done well (youtube 15min) – Brent Toderian former Chief Planner for the City of Vancouver talks how you can do urban density well to enhance a city.
- Edge of the abyss – A parent talks about his daughter’s child-onset schizophrenia
- “Keeping the Torch Burning” – editing an Olympics book for the Guardian – Martin Belam gives some highlights from a book he has recently edit on terror, protest and dissent at the Olympics
- What If Social Networks Just Aren’t Profitable? – A social networks such that attempts to make them profitable will eventually destroy them?
Links: 8bit T2, IQ, Baby names, Low Power computers
- How low (power) can you go? – Charlie Stross looks into the future (as Sci-Fi authors often do) and predicts what 2032 could look like with one square millimetre computers everywhere.
- American Baby Names Are Somehow Getting Even Worse – Bastian, Sincere, Copelia, Luxx
- Race, IQ, and Wealth – Is IQ just a function of GDP/Wealth ?
- Terminator 2 – 20 years ( July 3 1991 – July 3 2011) (Youtube) – You may remember “8-bit trip” by Rymdreglage a couple of years ago. Here is their stop-motion tribute to T2 ( which I’ve seen 5 times in the theatre).
Links: CGI Screwups, Being in the band, How many servers does google have?
- 10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America – A list of stuff that Americans don’t know about how the rest of the world perceives them or how it is compared to them
- The 7 Most Common CGI Screw-Ups (Explained) – I know cracked.com is just a content farm but it has really good articles. In this case a bit more informative and technical than usual.
- How to play in someone else’s band – The subtitle is “gain twenty years of road experience with a five minute read” and it is really good. The main point to remember is your number one job above all else is to make the leader sound good, look good and feel good.
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Fun with Energy Consumption Data – The “Fun” bit is estimating how many servers Google and Facebook have.
Links: The Ritz, Startup myths, 78 sqft apartments, screenwriting
- A Legend as Big as the Ritz – The history of the Paris Ritz Hotel
- Don’t waste your time in crappy startup jobs – Recommended reading, 7 misconceptions about startups
- Manhattan shoebox apartment: a 78-square-foot mini studio – A really tiny apartment, from a series ( 7 minute youtube video )
- I was an A-list writer on B-list production – Writer Stephen Harrigan on his career and screenplays.