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Category: Technology

Social Networking Creating DNS Performance Issues

10/03/2007

An interesting, non-obvious look at how social networking sites, and to a lesser extent web 2.0 websites are affecting Internet performance.

CircleID: A typical MySpace profile page is a rich assortment of images and blogs posted from friends. Users can post videos and flash-based content, as well as links to favorite songs in MP3 files. In most cases, each of these content pieces is stored in a separate DNS domain. For example, each image belonging to a friend is retrieved from a distinct URI. This means that retrieving and displaying a profile page may require hundreds of DNS lookups in the background—compared to ten or so lookups for a ‘standard’ B-to-C web page.

MySpace is one of the most visited sites on the Internet. Each of those page downloads may account for ten times or more the amount of DNS traffic of a typical web page visit. Here is an important clue to the recent, unusually high increase in DNS traffic. And, alas, there is more to the story than meets the eye.

Because DNS queries are very small and generally very efficient, I don’t think this is a major problem, but it should lead to innovation in the space.

Trinity switches to Gmail

08/03/2007

A college that can’t manage their own email? Next you’ll be telling me about a college that can’t develop their own website!

ENN: Trinity College, Dublin has become the first European university to adopt Google’s Gmail application as its standard e-mail system. The college’s 15,000 students will change over to the system in October, and will retain their @tcd.ie e-mail suffix on the Google system for life. Welcoming the announcement, Google’s European sales and operations director John Herlihy said: “We are very excited to be partnering with an august and progressive college such as Trinity on this project. Their vision of how technology can enhance student life and build a long term relationship with college alumni is shared by Google”.

EDIT: Peter asked me to point out that UCC does manage their own website. In fairness though, I never suggested they didn’t — development is about design and implementation, and configuring a third-party CMS is hardly implementation. If configuration of the CMS takes up more than half the work, why bother with it in the first place?

Peter also remarks that UCC doesn’t employ any full-time designers of it’s own, but I’d bet that out of the thousands of students in UCC, there are more than a few that would produce far better than the frankly quite drab end-result. They’d appreciate the money a hell of a lot more too, no doubt a ridiculous amount?

ENN Journalism

07/03/2007

I don’t know why ENN is even still in my reader. Here’s an article about a new SIMI website that apparently lets you grep the history of a car. 200 words in the article, and not one of them is linked to the website, despite plenty of opportunities. Click on the author link to report it, and you get an empty mailto. I despair, so I do.

The website is here by the way. It took me five seconds to Google SIMI to find it, and paste it into this post. The site is a turd, but that’s a whole other post.

I met Twenty!

05/03/2007

Big ups to Twenty Major for winning the Most Humourous Post category in Saturday’s Blog Awards. I was well chuffed to be sponsoring a category again this year, so being the first to present an award to the elusive Twenty was a big bonus. :)

Recommend a Dell rep?

15/02/2007

Can anyone out there recommend a small business Dell rep that won’t piss me off by basically not giving a flying fuck at the moon about their customers?

I need to buy a server asap and thus far I’ve been lobbed from one rep to another, and treated with the kind of attitude I expect from an Eircom biddy, not a customer that’s likely to bring in quite a lot of server business in the next few years. At the moment it’s low margin business, but surely that’s their problem for selling low margin, not mine?

Failing that, can anyone recommend a supplier for low-end 1U rack-mounted servers in Ireland? By low-end I mean less than a grand fully-configured. So far I only have dabs4work, and I’m not mad about the idea of buying something relatively important to the network outside the country. Encom is too expensive.

YouTube as a forum? Ewwww! But…

20/12/2006

Apparently the deaf (is that PC?) are using YouTube as a public forum, in much the same way most of us use threaded and flat forums like vBulletin and phpBB. What a brilliant use of technology, and a perfect example of one of those things that seems utterly obvious when you think about it. But you didn’t think of it. :)

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