The Real Deal Podcast

While reading the webware.com news feed I saw mention of a podcast about cloud computing produced by The Real Deal for the CNet.com network.

Cloud computing seems to be the latest buzzword/technology, I heard mention of it in the BBC Digital Planet podcast only yesterday. It is fairly amusing to hear some people referring to the similarity between this 'virtual/shared technology' and the old time-sharing mainframe systems of the 1970s. Further proof that things come in cycles, be it that they are slightly metamorphosed on each iteration.

But I digress, this podcast is a fresh of breath air and I've listened to a couple of other episodes and what strikes me is the simple, layman like explanations and enlightening discussions of all these new buzzwords and technologies. The presenters are Tom Merritt and Rafe Needleman, Rafe is also the editor of webware.com which is a pretty good synopsis of all that is new in the Web2.0 world.

The Web2.0 Bloat!

Back in the early days of the interweb, when people used dial up modems, bloated large websites were frowned upon and the main criteria in their design was size and therefore speed.

Computers at that time were underpowered and would often fall over when confronted with graphic heavy sites and on-line video was often the preserve of the very wealthy who could afford the CPU, graphic card, memory and time for it to load!

Unfortunately as computers became more powerful, modems got quicker, telephone calls and ISP costs got cheaper there was a natural tendency for the page sizes to creep upward as graphics and multimedia were introduced. I am sure this was sometimes aggravated by spoiled designers with powerful machines at the end of leased lines or ISDN connection. The worst case of this was the completely unnecessary obligatory Adobe Flash 'please click to enter site' page which often took minutes to load.

Now as broadband becomes more prevalent the bloat has continued fuelled by the Web2.0 explosion. This bloat is often offset by the connection speed and the power of the computer. However I have noticed that on some of my older computers ( 1GHz of less, with modest memory and Windows 2000) that some sites now cause similar problems to the bad old days, unstable browsers, constant disk thrashing as the virtual memory systems struggles to cope leading to sluggish performance and navigation. I am sure that people still on dial-up have become increasingly disadvantaged.

Now research by WebsiteOptimization.com has put a figure on the flab as modern websites feed on their diet of Web2.0 lard.

The report states that the mean size of a web page has more than trebled since 2003 from 97.3KB to more than 312KB. The mean number of objects per page has meanwhile near-doubled from 25.7 to 49.9. The authors blame external objects for the majority of delays experienced by web browsers.

Last year saw websites really pack on the data poundage with widgets, gadgets, embedded video and other mashtastic tinsel (thanks to theregister report for that particular phrase). The average page swelled by more than 60KB to 312KB by the end of December and projections put next new year's figure at 385KB.

There's plenty of evidence in the report for the views of ISPs and other industry insiders claiming that the online video boom risks breaking the internet and net neutrality. The authors of the report claim that ten per cent of YouTube videos account for 80 per cent of streaming traffic, and use it to suggest that cached content delivery networks (as being considered by the BBC for iPlayer) are becoming an increasingly appealing proposition to improve performance.

Another interesting fact is that the increase in mean length of web video means more users are experiencing frustrations with re-buffering. According to the report, 87 % of web video streaming sessions are abandoned in the first ten seconds, but how much is due to that, or the fact that 87% of on-line video isn't worth watching?

Talking of the old days, I fondly remember getting a 14.4 modem running on Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which involved installing a third party WinSock (a TCP/IP protocol stack) Trumpet Winsock in my case!

When one blog isn't enough!

I registered a Livejournal account a long time ago, but never used it and then blogger came along and was much more user friendly. But I reactivated it and have found a way of merging my other blogs in to it! More later, once I've discovered how the Facebook application BlogIT works!

Doing my duty - Malicious activity detection

For several years I have been using a Linksys WRT54G V1.1 wireless router with the official firmware attached to my cable modem. It has a built in firewall but lacked any proper network intrusion detection system it did have a rudimentary log which could be accessed via the web-page interface but that was pretty much useless when trying to look for malicious activity such as denial of service attacks, port scans and attempts to crack into the network via vulnerabilities.

It always worried me as to what attempts were being made to get past the firewall on to my network. Some of my network PCs have software firewalls as a backup and alerts have been almost non-existent but it still nagged away. Last year I toyed with taking an old PC and creating a Smoothwall firewall, because of the logging and ability to install Snort but I really could justify the space and expensive of having another PC on 24/7.

As I posted yesterday I finally got the nerve up to install one of the numerous third party replacement firmwares for the router. Plumping for the Tomato variety!

One of the first things I noticed was the improved logging, which can be sent to an external PC running a monitoring/analysis program. In the wikibooks page it mentioned the WallWatcher software for Windows so I downloaded and installed it, configured the router and lo and behold I was getting information about all those Chinese TCP/IP packets bombarding my router!

I have now signed up and have installed the necessary client software to upload the logs to the SANS Institute Internet Storm Centre DShield system and myNetWatchman systems. These organisations use volunteers who submit their data to help detect problems and analyse threats, creating technical information and alerts to the general public.

The system works by having a network of hundreds or thousands of people from all over the world submitting information from their firewalls and intrusion detection systems about unwanted traffic arriving from the Internet. This data feeds the appropriate database where analysis is made looking for abnormal trends and behaviour. In the case of DShield the resulting analysis is posted to the ISC's main web page where it can be automatically retrieved by simple scripts or can be viewed in near real time by any Internet user.

I really feel like I am doing something good, and of course it is fairly geeky! These are the 'attacked' ports from today!

Tomato Firmware installed on my WRT54G

Well I took the plunge and just installed it - will report as I discover any benefits/bugs.

I am hoping it will improve the reliability of my wireless connection to my XBox/XBMC setup, it's been a bit flaky lately.

Speeding up the NSLU2

In my home network I have a small NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution consisting of a Linksys NSLU2 (Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives) and a number of attached external USB hard disks.

The NSLU2 or "SLUG" as it is often called runs Linux, as per the terms of the GNU General Public License Linksys were required to release their source code. Due to the availability of this code and the relatively low cost of the device, there are several community projects centered around it. Including a number of replacement firmware images available for the device. I have been tempted to use Unslung which is based on the official Linksys firmware with some improvements and features added, but have been wary about bricking it.

Despite it running the official firmware it has proved a reliable device and the attached drives are full of my music and video collection. However it has never been the speediest device, sometimes being sluggish(sic) to transfer across the network and the web-interface sometimes being painful slow to respond.

The device has two USB 2.0 ports for connecting hard disks and uses an ARM-compatible Intel XScale IXP420 CPU. The device includes 32 MB of SDRAM, and 8 MB of Flash memory. It also has a 100 megabit Ethernet network connection.

I have discovered that models manufactured prior to around April 2006, Linksys had, for an unknown reason, under-clocked the processor to 133MHz, though a simple hardware modification to remove this restriction is possible. Later models (circa. May 2006) are clocked at the rated speed of 266MHz.

Today I took the plunge and opened up the unit and removed the appropriate resistor. Full details on this page.



I can confirm that the device is indeed much speedier and responsive. Maybe I might just get around to trying out Unslung and installing Tomato firmware on my WRT54G.

BBC News - They broke my favourite website

"Change for change sake", "If it ain't broke, then don't fix it" are all comments I've read about the new look BBC News website. The site adopted a new look at the start of the month and at first sight I hated it, and so did many others judging by the comments on the BBC Editors Blog. The old site design, which won awards and almost universal praise was a clean compact design and reminded me of reading a newspaper column. The new design was all spaced out had now had more white space than text and I found it difficult and almost unreadable.

To their credit and responding to comments the BBC have made minor tweaks to improve the look and feel. However one gripe I still have is many pages seem to render incorrectly in Firefox.

This is an example of a 'broken' page - it looks fine in Microsoft Internet Explorer



However in Firefox, odd things happen to the font sizes and alignment of text and pictures



While it may be something unique to my machine and/or is probably a simple fix I have seen it quite often on numerous pages.

One of the strengths of the old design was it seemed no matter what platform or browser you used (with the possible exception of lynx) it's compact size and simple design meant it always looked the same.