Recently in Internet Category

Sigh. Here I am at work on Tuesday morning. List of jobs to do being interrupted by our web server triggering over load alarms. Actually, it's been doing it for quite a while, but I've never sat down to analyse the logs to find what's happening to trigger the alarm (our gandi.net virtual server is more than powerful enough to cope, so fault finding has been low on my to do list). This morning as I walked to work I saw an overload message arrive in my email. The sun is up, the sky is blue, it's 8am. It feels a good day to fault find...

It didn't take long to find the problem. I used grep to pull out todays log entries from the apache log and put them into a temporary file

me@server4:/path_to_logs/rkbb.co.uk$ grep '06/Apr/2010' apache-log > check.txt

The bot causing the problem has a user agent of "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Purebot/1.1; +http://www.puritysearch.net/)", going to puritysearch.net I find a 'search engine' that doesn't appear to do anything but display adverts disguised as search results.

So, how to stop this bot. Nice bots read a file called robots.txt which tells them where they're allowed to go. Purebot didn't read the robots.txt so I couldn't excluded it there.

My next thought was to use apache to exclude the user agent. After an hour or so of trying I gave up with that (it is possible, I just didn't figure it out and took the easy for me approach). The site is running Coldfusion (actually BlueDragon) so in the Application.cfm I can check the user agent and stop processing requests from Purebot there.

<cfset useragenttest = find("Purebot",#cgi.http_user_agent#)>

<cfif useragenttest GT 0 >
  <p>Purebot banned</p>
  <cfabort>
</cfif>

The code isn't my most elegant but it works. Next time I come across a badbot (or Purebot changes it's name) I'll just updated this piece of code to ignore their requests.

This is so I don't forget, it took me a while to not find the answer via google, guess the solution successfully, and then read the solution by chance while looking at something else.

I use googlemail (actually, google apps but let's not get pedantic).
I have a friend with several email addresses, (work, other, home, other, other).
Recently she asked for emails not to go her work address (unless they're really urgent).

When I use gmail to write an email just to her, it's easy to choose which address it's going too (and I know roughly which address is most appropriate at the time), but I have a contact group set up with her in it and those emails were always going to her work address.

There was no option when creating the group to choose which of her email addresses should be used by default. The address being used (work) was also the address that came up first when composing a message and including her specifically.

I guessed that this apparent default email address was the first contact address I'd entered for her and when I checked it was showing on the top of the gmail list of addresses for her contact record. I replaced the top of list email address with the prefered 'other' address, added the work address to the bottom of the contact list. Created a new email and using the contact group and gmail used the 'other' address' instead of her work address.

I later read 'googlemail defaults to using the first email address of a contact....'

Googlemail is down :( Looks like they think they'll be an hour. At times like this I think 'if only there wasn't so much spam I'd still have my email on my own server, that's working fine". Then I remember, I'm pretty sure the googlemail server uptime is higher than my server, and seeing as I haven't had to spend any time updating this, that and t'other software to make gmail work, I should be patient and wait for my gmail to return to service.

For many, many years (well, since 2004 which is a long time for internet things) my web server has been at Rackspace. Well, I say 'my' web server but in reality it's their web server, dedicated to just my use and fully managed by them.

They've been great. Small amounts of downtime, answering the phone at 2am to help me fix things I've broken, swapping out faulty hard disks, power supplies (twice). They are however very expensive and as my server needs haven't grown as fast as computing power, I can now save some money moving onto a virtual server. The theory is that the hardware down time wont happen on the Virtual Server. My rackspace server has a single disk, single power supply. Multiple disks and power supplies cost a lot of money so the chance of failure was worth taking. Now though, servers are powerful enough for the resources to be shared across multiple users so we all benefit from RAID 60, multiple power supplies. If my needs change (EG a lot more visitors than currently stop by) then the Virtual Server can be moved to another physical server without any noticeable down time, where it can have more resources (bandwith/processor/disk space etc).

So, this week I've signed up for 8 shares on a server with 'gandi.net'. They're a web host based in France so close enough to the UK to retain network speed (all the other good virtual hosts seem to be in America). I was a little concerned about not having my trusty 24hour phone number but I've just had my first email support call answered very quickly. I couldn't get a piece of software to install (IP tables) and it appeared to be an issue with the Xen Vitual host setup. I emailed and the resolution came back within 2 hours. I decided to install the latest Ubuntu 9 server which they only released last week, so I was no doubt the first to come across the problem. After emailing me, they posted the solution in their forum and wiki. Great!

I might write some more on the move later but as you might be able to tell from the lack of posting lately, I'm really busy with other things. At the moment at least, Gandi looks great.

For some time I've had trouble installing Ubuntu Server to test things. Affecting 7.10 & 8.04, but only at work and not at home. Strange. Now though, I've just figured out what the problem was, at least, I thought I had.

At work, we have a gateway/DHCP box (say: 192.168.55.254). When handing out IP addresses, it gives a nameserver IP of 192.168.55.225 first, and should that not be working 208.67.222.222 second (www.opendns.com)

When booting, the Ubuntu box created it's /etc/resolve.conf with:
nameserver 192.168.55.225
nameserver 208.67.222.222

I edited and saved that file to read:
nameserver 192.168.55.254
nameserver 192.168.55.225
nameserver 208.67.222.222

so adding the gateway as the namesever (our gateway can be the name server but I had a particular reason for not having it that way).

Rebooted, tried my 'sudo apt-get install ...' again, everything resolved and the essential updates happened. However, when looking to write this post for when I next have the same problem, I've noticed the /etc/resolve.conf file has returned to it's earlier two entries.

I'd assumed that the Ubuntu server install expects the gateway to be at the same IP as the nameserver. This is true for my home (which is why it worked at home without trouble but at work it didn't). I'm not so sure now, maybe it was just rebooting a second time after the install that fixed it. At least it works.

You might imagine that the Eurocon is a group of 40 grown ups playing computer games and drinking beer. Well, that's only part of what's going on. This morning 4 of us went to the local indoor snow ski slope. At about 500m long and kept at a steady minus 7 degrees, it made a nice change from the heat of all the computers in the con room. It appears that after 8 years of no skiing, I still remember enough to be comfortable zipping down the slope.

I'd write more, but I'm quite tired now. Before you ask, I didn't stay up until 3am unlike many others. I was too exahusted from the journey so went to be around 11pm. Maybe I'll add to this when I get the photo's off the camera.

My French prof runs an email list of... well, a mixture of humour, observations and such, the sort that many people forward to your email. The good thing for me is that a lot of it is in French and try as I might, I often have to really work at reading it.

If I don't understand a word, I'll open google and translate it. If I still don't understand it, I'll translate a sentence. One word in the last email was "entuber". Google didn't know the english translation so I search the web. Entuber = to con, apparently commonly used though colloquial. The web site I found the answer on had an advert to "Learn French in 10 days". Well, clearly I've not been trying hard enough. I followed the link to find out more (always looking to improve, to think I've spent years trying, on an off, to `parler en plus francais` [Sic]*) so I had to find out more.

The course contains a very comprehensive 'More than 200 hours learning'.... Well, I've learn't enough maths to know that 200 hours / 10 days = 20 hours per day of learning. Clearly I've been limiting myself by requiring more than 4 hours per day for sleep, eating, washing and such.

*[sic] because I know the grammar is wrong, the spelling is wrong, but that's how I'd say it. Full marks for effort, 'nil point' for grace :-)

My first web browser was Netscape 1.1

I remember sitting in the training rooms of GEC Marconi Avionics sometime in the late 90's, going through the self study 'How to use the internet' course. They were good courses, I spent many evenings learning better driving skills (spotting the hazards) and the most time consuming course of all - how to type. Still, now I can type almost as fast I think. The downside of which is my ramblings tend to digress very quickly, so getting back on track, I used Netscape 1.1 to search for 'porsche', because that was the suggested search using Altavista. We're in pre-google days here, Internet explorer may have been around but wasn't on the work computers.

Then we move to today and the browser of choice is..... well, I can't make up my mind. I once preferred Netscape, eventually moved onto Internet Explorer. Then Firefox became my friend until the last year or so where it seemed to keep crashing every time I closed it. Now we have google Chrome. So, time to try them all and see what I think.

Start with.... Internet Explorer.
Always there, installed on my laptop. It does the job but I've never quite got used to the new layout of IE7. Tabs were a great improvement, it was those that attracted me to firefox a few years ago. I always have more than one window open, and I much prefer to have them all grouped into one program on my task bar.

Firefox
Firefox is great. I prefer the open source angle. I found it easier to use and faster than IE6 (but that could just be perception). I liked the tabs and it was my browser of choice for a few years. Unfortunately it started crashing on exit. Solution was probably just to uninstall then reinstall from scratch but I never got round to it. Still on my list of things to do.

Google Chrome.
Google should stick to making money from searches. The browser is rubbish. OK, a little harsh. The launch marketing was very clever. The design principles are great (single bar for search or URL input was ever so easy to use). The automatic home page creation of most visited sites and recently closed tabs made usability a breeze. Being able to drag a tab into it's own window even had it's uses. Unfortunately there are a few bugs to iron out. Like the "view source" command that should show you the source HTML of the page but actually requests the page again so you get a different source. I haven't got all the plugins working correctly either, both flash and quicktime seem to have issues. Still, for the basic web browsing tasks it's OK. Comparable to firefox I'd say. It does win the battle on leaving the largest viewable page area, with it's ultra minimalist interface. When/if they fix issues like the 'view source' command it may well become my browser of choice, although by then the other players will no doubt improve too.

Safari.
Mac lovers are taking over the PC world it seems. Apple pushed the download through an iTunes update (only got iTunes for wining an iPod). I'm using Safari this afternoon for this blog post. I find the page a little more blurry than all the others. I think there is some ClearText Font Smoothing (insert correct term here if you know it!) but I haven't found the setting to reduce it's smoothing. Coming from the land of Mac, this also has a few things done a little differently to the PC way. Not right or wrong, just different. Like the close button being to the left of the name instead of the right. I'm not a fan of the grey shading style of the browser either, but it's something I'll get used to.

So, when it comes to desktop browsers which will I settle on?
None of them. I like things from each so will be keeping them all around for different reasons. Use them all for their strengths and switch between them to avoid their weaknesses.

I spent the afternoon of my day off going for a walk. From my house in Faversham I walked to canterbury via some woodland, old villages and the North Downs way. As my PDA has a GPS receiver built in I thought I'd try logging it's output to see exactly how fast I'm walking nowdays. Last time I checked, walking without a rucksack on clear footpaths and not too hilly, I walked an average speed of 6km per hour.

Well, my first fast analysis of the log file shows I'm going a little faster. It also shows I need to improve my map reading, I certainly don't remember passing through customs on my way to Canterbury via South Africa and Germany.... hmmm, perhaps there's something wrong with those logs.

For completeness, I'll add my PDA is a Windows Mobile 6 HTC Touch Cruise. The GPS logging software is called Sunset from Kharsim.net. The GPX log file sunset created was uploaded first to http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/ and the analysed view came via http://www.everytrail.com/.

I'll try and spend a little time finding the flawed data from the log then finding a better way of creating route paths and analysis. Everytrail does look reasonably complete from a fleeting first impression and has the facility of hosting the maps so you can zoom in and out. Now, how to find the error lines in that GPS Log and remove them.

To finish on a high, my average walking speed according to my GPS is 3,758 miles per hour. Must dash, I fancy visiting nipping down to the south of France before tea time, should only take me 20 minutes from here :-)

Two weeks in, the "Sunday European Campaign" is going well. The SEC, as it's been shortened to, is an event within the game of Aces High 2 where players from all over the world virtually fly world war 2 aircarft and virtually kill each other. The irony is that this (and many other online games like it) are bringing people together from all over the world. The group of online friends I fly with are mostly German and it's great to know we're at peace now when playing a game recreating a war just 60 years ago.

Anyway, when our squad moved to this new game from warbirds a year ago, we missed a regular event on Sunday nights where we flew historically based missions over 2 hours. Different to the "main arena" style of game play, these events would encourage a foundation in history, tactics and planning, and very careful flying, given only 1 life per hour.

After some encourage among the players, I had a list of 80 or so players who were interested in the idea and the support of the game creators. Some players volunteered to run the event (on the server setup side), some for future event design too. The big question was would they actually turn up to play?

I've just finished playing the 2nd frame of the first event (3 frames = 3 Sunday nights per event) where 100 players from all over the world joined in! Last week we also had just over 100 players, so it looks like there is a genuine interest for the events to continue.

The picture on this post is what's left of my Hurricane during the first frame. You'll notice (ok, you'll notice because I'm telling you not because you're looking closely) that it's missing both ailerons. For those with a love of flying, you'll know the ailerons are the important bit that lets the plane roll and therefore turn. You might also know of the "secondary effects of control", where using the rudder will roll the plane. That and a little use of elevator meant I landed safely, just, with a fuel leak and other damage too. The screen shot was taken by Odee, a player from Virginia USA. The game has a recording facility and he replayed from my view point to get the shot. Thanks Odee <S>

If you know me, you probably know I play a flight sim from time to time called Aces High 2. Some of the players (me included) have been working a new series of events to run on Sunday evenings in the Euro Time Zone.

The first event will be Sunday the 21st September. If you're here looking for more information, you need to be looking here for the original show your interest page or here for the official launch forum pages on the game creators site

Firstly, I should point out once again that the Eurocon is held in the Netherlands so local time while we were there (I'm home now) was 1 hour ahead of UK time. My server is set to publish times based on the UK so while that last comment said it was 3am when 'Flower' kicked us out of the con room it was actually 4am and there were still around 15 of us talking in groups.

After that I chatted with Shuzon before sleeping, fellow Parrot and cage-mate for the weekend (poor him). Another interesting hour as he told me about how to make beer (though I still couldn't do it). Shuzon is our 'Brewer from Bavaria' having studied it at university and then having his own 'micro-brewery' making mostly pilsner. Now days he is retraining to be a waiter. Now, at this point you may be thinking like me "how hard can it be to be a waiter?". Well, it takes 3 years of training but you wont find him just pulling pints (erm, ok, based on previous photos from this Eurocon it's clearly VERY hard for me to pull pints). His course covers a wide range of things from the back office paper work, food preparation, cooking the perfect meal at a customers table (flambee without burning the customers). It also covers the most difficult of all waiters tasks, correctly taking an order when 5 people order at once, speaking a language that for you is not your first, second or third language. So pretty much a degree then.

Anyway, back to the title. Remember the old arcade games where if you got so far you'd get "Extended Play"? Well, I had a plan. I was only at the Eurocon because of a sick parrot; Flubby. Now, it turns out flubby lives about 2 hours south of where the Con was held so by checking my driving times I worked out I could get to his house and still drive another 4 hours back to reach the ferry in time. The plan was set, I checked with the other parrots to make sure it wouldn't likely be a problem to just turn up on his door step. Kculon was staying with Flubby after the con - he's from America and combined Eurocon with part a European tour with his wife. Gath was driving KC to Flubby's house on his way home. So with everyone agreed it would be good, the plan was set - "Operation Flubby", or "let's have a Parrot Con", because Shuzon then decided he could change his route home if I could drop him off at the nearest station after our surprise visit. I thought I was being nice by visiting, on the drive down to Flubby's house Shuzon casually mentioned that from Flubby's house the train will take 4 hours longer but he wouldn't get another chance to say hello for another year at least so it was worthwhile.

On arrival I made the mistake of trying to speak German. Not good. "Ich bin Kanga und ich haben dienen Meditzen". I'm sure the grammar as well as the spelling is wrong - please fix it flubby like I get to fix your English spellings. Anyway, when he eventually realised it was kanga he appeared more than surprised enough to make it worthwhile. Especially since Gath and Kculon had been there for a while already and hadn't let it slip that I was coming too. Meditzen referred to the Spitfire Beer I had brought for him (a small thank you for letting me go in his place while he was ill), along with a little book of funny adverts for the beer. Meeting flubby reminded me of that song "Isn't it Ironic", i forget who by. Not because meeting him was ironic but because of the words of the song that go "It's like meeting the man of your dreams, then meeting his beautiful wife", Flubby being only a voice to me in all the time I've known him and Suzanna, being his wife.

So, we had a mini parrot con, Kanga, Flubby, Kculon, Gath, Shuzon, Suzanna (Flubby's wife), Arianne (Gath's girlfriend), Pam (Kculon's wife, apparently a mean guitar player so maybe we'll have a parrot theme tune soon!), and Flubby's children, Alexander and .... , sheesh, 28 hours later and I can't remember, was it Felix?

This should really be my last post on the Eurocon so I'll try to remember the other great moments and answer some earlier questions I wrote.

Another good time we had; All of us flying together a big mission. All of us means over 30 players. We took B24 bombers from a field and flew a long mission to bomb a target on the far side of the map. Each bomber has 2 wingmen, so that was 90 or so bombers taking off and flying together. One of the problems of having so many players up together is that the computers have to work so much harder generating the graphics. I hear that Krod had a frame rate of 2 frames per second. Normally a monitor should display 60 frames per second! My PC will normally make 50 to 60 frames per second but you can see from the screenshot my rate dropped to 22FPS.

You may remember earlier I pondered over the power usage and data rate to the internet for so many players is one small room, or large room in this case. -bijl-, one of the organisers enlightened me just before I left. The internet connection was a regular ADSL line, 3mb down, 512kb up. To me that's impressive! 40 players were using that 512kb up for Teamspeak (a radio channel we can all talk to each other over), the game connections, any other uploading/downloading, everything. Consider that UK ADSL providers suggest their connections are suitable for 'up to 5 PC's' in an office, and we had 40 doing very internet intensive stuff. It shows to me how well the games are written to transfer all the information they need over such a small line.

Onto power. The reason the event was limited to 40 players is they did some calculations on how many watts are used by a PC, monitor and worked out that the safe maximum was 40 - even though the hotel had more rooms, it didn't have any more power points that could handle more load. I asked how many power points they had us all connected to via extension leads. The answer. 3. 40 PC's, 40 screens, 1 local server , 1 huge network switch, 1 not so huge network switch, 1 ADSL router, that's at least 80 devices not counting some joysticks that need power, the projector, the fridges (for the drinks of course), all running off 3 connections to the hotel power. Don't try this at home folks!

The hotel was actually a converted monastry from what I could work out. The rooms were small but did have a shower and toilet. The monastry bit comes from some black and white pictures in one coridor showing photos of monks in front of the building, and statue of jesus on the cross in the courtyard. The food was very good, a selection of foods provided for dinner and no one went hungry.

We weren't the only ones in the hotel. There were a group of singers practicing in a nearby room as well as several large families. It looked like a great base for a family holiday, the large garden was full of climbing frames and slides and there was also a large field. Next year (if I get to go) I'll take some bats and balls for a game of rounders.

This time last week I didn't know I'd be going to the Eurocon. The first Eurocon photo was taken on a ferry. Book, Coffee, Laptop. Let's play spot the difference with a return photo; Book, Coffee, Laptop, ahh, I can see the difference, an original Eurocon 2008 'Dead Parrot Con' ID badge :-).

This is not something I expected to be writing last week. It's not even something I expected to write two days ago but life moves in mysterious ways, so here I am, Laptop, Book, Coffee, sitting on the SeaFrance Rodin Dover – Calais Ferry, writing for my blog offline because I don't have internet access. Well, I do if I use my phone but that's much slower to write in, expensive and it's easier to save and post later when I return to civilisation.

So, What's Eurocon and Why am I going?
Eurocon is a big meeting of like minded players of flight sims. Predominantly Warbirds, and for our squadron (>>>PARROTS<<<) at least, AcesHigh2. It's held at a place in the Netherlands (that's about all I can say for now, I'm trusting TomTom SatNav to guide me safely – for an old map hand like myself that's not a comfortable thing to do but needs must and all).
“like minded players” is essentially middle aged men from all over the world, you'll meet them later if you're not bored of reading already. At the meeting we will
play on the flight sim (fairly normal, we do that from home),
make friendly conversation
visit an aviation museum
learn some things
drink a little....

Why am I going?
Firstly, it looks like fun. However, I wasn't planning to go and hadn't booked a ticket. Wednesday morning all our >>>PARROTS<<< squadron got a message that one of our members was ill (Flubby – perhaps it was bird flu?) and he could not take his already paid for place. If one of us would like to take it, all we had to do was get to the hotel. Did you know it's only 3 hours from Calais?
The big question was whether I'd get permission from my wife Rhonda. I asked Wednesday night when I got home and the answer was no. However, 11am Thursday morning she changed her mind (Perhaps that very large bar of Galaxy chocolate left in the fridge had something to do with it). So, Here I am, sitting on a ferry, Home PC loaded in the car, laptop rolling from side to side as I try to type, sailing away from the white cliffs of Dover.

Grown men, playing flight sims sound strange?
Perhaps, but stranger still is the international nature of my group of friends within the >>>PARROTS<<<. We may all fly a World War 2 style flight sim, trying to shoot each other out of the virtual skies, but we are all children of the modern age. We all detest war, we are all grateful we are not going to war ourselves. We all appreciate the sacrifice of our forefathers in the wars of our past. 'Strange' is that it's quite likely My grandfather was fighting my friends grandfathers while retreating to Dunkirk and landing landing on the Normandie beaches. Yes, every other >>>PARROT<<< comes from a country Britain has been at war with, yet fortunately now we are friends. Germany, France, USA, Argentina, Spain, Italy, are all represented by my friends.

Anyway, for the rest of the crossing I'll enjoy my book (review to be posted after a dozen others I haven't got round to posting) and look forward to posting more about EuroCon, with pictures, from the EuroCon itself.

Interesting, I just tried to report spam to a company who I assume ran the campaign in good faith. The report got an unexpected response:

: host lonvs07.kinexus.net[212.113.24.167] said: 554

    Service unavailable; Client host [89.234.3.158] blocked using

    relays.ordb.org; ordb.org was shut down on December 18, 2006. Please remove

    from your mailserver. (in reply to RCPT TO command)

Panic! One of our server IP's got blacklisted as a spam source!..... phew, not the case (thank you slashdot), emailiq are filtering their email for spam using a blacklist database that shut down over a year ago. The blacklist have decided they gave enough notice to people filtering against their list, so from now on they are reporting every email checked as being spam. If you're not getting email today, better check with your mail provider.

This company may not have meant to send spam, but because of spam they now have no email until the reconfigure their servers. Events like this show just how much spam is really costing everyone.

I've just come across an interesting article on boingboing (a web site with blog like posts related to computer things), it appears the BBC are trialling the iPlayer service to work to iPhones. BoingBoing noticed (or at least someone noticed and boingboing re-reported it) that they identify an iPhone by accepting the browsers name. They then send an MP4 video stream for your viewing pleasure.

There's a couple of interesting things there:
1) There's no "DRM" - the software technology that prevents you copying and sharing the file with others. I guess the thoughts are you'll not be copying it because you'll be 'streaming' the file and wont get to save it. You can download the file though, the article on boingboing explains how. I also imagine they've changed the screen size to suit an iPhone which is quite low quality for TV so it may not be too pleasant to watch on other screens anyway.
2) MP4's can be played by my windows mobile 6 PDA/Phone. I'm not sure I can persuade my windows mobile browser to tell the BBC it's an iPhone but the effort the BBC have gone to in trying this on an iPhone means that they may extend that to other platforms later.