EGOPOLY

So, the answers to my BitTorrent questions lie in the BitTornado package. It has completely clear, step by step documentation on how to set up a torrent, tracker and seed(s).

drop.io is a very tidy upload site, like dropsend.

Google launched their iphone-optimized site today. Wow, holy crap. It looks nice, of course, as do most of the iphone optimized sites. (Facebook is a really good one.) But the amazing thing is how freaking fast it is.

First, they have links for the four services I use on google on my iPhone: search (of course), gmail, calendar and reader. It’s like they are reading my mind. (But I know they aren’t because I actually use Reader more often mobile than anything else.) Then, you click on a link and it’s, like, KABOOM! the reader page instantly appears. INSTANTLY. Same for gmail and calendar. It’s like they installed their servers in AT&T’s EDGE access points.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/apache/2000/04/21/wrangler.html

Of particular interest to me:

Acc
The first number in this trio is the number of accesses or requests using this connection. For non-KeepAlive connections, this will be 0 since each request makes its own connection and so is always the first (and last). The second is the number of requests handled thus far by this child. The third is the number of requests handled by this slot; the child may have come and gone, its slot taken by another.

CPU SS Req Conn Child Slot

CPU: The child's CPU usage in number of seconds.
SS: Seconds elapsed since the beginning of the request.
Req: Milliseconds taken to process the request.
Conn: Kilobytes transferred across this connection.
Child: Megabytes transferred by this child process.
Slot: Megabytes transferred by this slot, across children.

The Fairmont, San Jose hotel lobby wifi has what appears to be 10 Mbit symmetric internet connection. Talk about luxury!

In postfix config (from derek).

http://www.postfix.org/SMTPD_POLICY_README.html#frequent

and

http://www.gasmi.net/gld.html

This is a very interesting post by Jeff Atwood about Facebook as a walled garden.

What is the open and public equivalent of social networks? It seems like it’s some kind of future where everybody has their own “site,” or network address or place that comprises blog, photos, email, IM and (most important) identity and relationship to other’s identities. It would be purely peer-to-peer, and not branded by any one company, though it would certainly be hosted by a few big companies.

In a way, we have a lot of that today, but it’s limited to the real geeks (like me), and the authenticated connections just really aren’t there. Very few people I know have OpenID, and I most of the people I know are big time geeks like me.

It’s clear to me that the walled gardens are necessary to launch new ideas, like social networking, since the complexity of creating the end game open system is too much for the norms to handle. But it’s not clear if a relatively open walled garden, with a good dose of humility, can be easily dislodged. Look at AOL; they are still around, still generating a lot of cash, still serving millions of people. Facebook is at the very early stage of hegemony, will have quite a long reign.

A few weeks ago, I started a silly experiment in SEO (search engine optimization.) If you google for “greatest programmer of all time” (don’t forget the quotes) I have a page that declares me as such, in the number 1 result. If the Google believes, it must be true!

The image results are even better:

You too can be the greatest [whatever you want] of ALL TIME!

1. Get a web site that has some level of page rank. Mine is only 4, so it doesn’t need to be big.

2. Make an HTML file, name it the-greatest-whatever-of-all-time.html

3. Put title, H1 and meta tags like I did in my version.

4. Wait for the google to work it’s magic, and crown you the King.

Of course, if somebody else with a bigger pagerank comes along, or has more friends to link to them, then you will be unseated. Sorry. It’s dog-eat-dog out there.

This seems like such an obviously, stupendously bad idea, that there must be something more to it. Redmond must have some insight that spins it around to a pure genius move.

The big sticking point for me is this: Yahoo is built on all open source: LAMP, etc. (Though I believe they are BSD rather than Linux, but that might be old. Same diff.) All Microsoft’s web services are (natch) IIS, .NET, ASP, etc. When then have to do new projects, or major new initiatives, or integrations, what do they do? I would expect any Yahoo! worth his or her salary to flatly refuse to work with Microsoft server tech. Do they just move on, leaving stuff that was historically LAMP as LAMP, and stuff that was MSFT as MSFT? And whatever team thinks up new stuff, they pick? Sounds like a complete nightmare.

Of course, to me, working in a company with more than 75 employees is a complete nightmare anyway.

I was using the excellent FireBug add-on on my own site here. It really shows the crap you can quickly build up. I noticed that the meebo widget and MyBlogLog tracking were both eating up over 80% of page load time. Since I hardly ever use that stuff, I turned them off.

Quantcast and Google analytics were allowed to stay, since they use a very modest amount of load time.