Saturday, November 27, 2010

Blogger Comments not appearing

A client had an issue: he put up a post, like any other, and the link for comments wouldn't appear. SEE BELOW:


It is supposed to look like the following:




The first thought was that somehow the embedded youtube video was causing a problem. It was commented out and, lo and behold, the comment link reappeared. But what could be wrong? The youtube video was the same as any other. The coding was the same, no closing tags were missing.

Blogger puts in the following code whenever one uploads a graphic.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
</div>

I put it around the video and now the comment link worked.

Why you need this div around some videos and not around others I haven't figured out yet.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Was Internet traffic hijacked to China?

If you were at all interested in China hijacking the world's internet traffic take a look at this report from renesys.com

Did China's government really divert 15% of the Internet's traffic for eighteen minutes in April, effortlessly intercepting sensitive traffic in flight, and generally creating a massively embarrassing man-in-the-middle attack on vulnerable global communications?

Well, yes and no. Mostly no.

Yes, this event really happened. No, it probably wasn't a deliberate attack, or if it was, it wasn't a very effective one, compared to what might have happened, but that's where the story tends to bog down in technical detail and lose most readers.


It's far better information than what CNN and other major networks provided.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Netflix is Swallowing all of America's Bandwidth

It's not just Canada. Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth, too, and it probably won't be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That's one of the headlines from Sandvine's Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That's an amazing share—it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent, which accounts for a mere 8 percent of bandwidth during peak hours. It wasn't long ago that pundits wondered if the movie industry would be sunk by the same problems that submarined the music industry a decade ago—would we all turn away from legal content in favor of downloading pirated movies and TV shows? Three or four years ago, as BitTorrent traffic surged, that seemed likely. Today, though, Netflix is far bigger than BitTorrent, and it seems sure to keep growing.
Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?

Every so often a new subsection of the market "takes over" and dominates the market. ISPs complain as it puts "too much" demand on their infrastructure, the inevitable clamoring for tiered markets arise and there are new fears regarding net neutrality.

Currently video "hogs" bandwidth in today's market but it won't in tomorrows. This discussion will continue for the rest of this decade and on. Until we have enough bandwidth for both business and personal uses; until we have enough for live HD sport broadcasts, gaming and Netflix to run concurrently with business applications such as HD conference calls; where remote location engineers and architects are able to look at problems at a construction site; and doctors at a remote location are able to assist in a surgery - until we have the bandwith for that (and more) this debate will continue.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Tatoeba



If you've ever been interested in languages - this is a site for you. It's unique concept is linking sentences together, not in the usual table format, but in a form of a neural net (their FAQ calls it a graph structure). People add sentences in one language: "It's a beautiful day." And people who are bi-lingual, or polyglots, translate it into other languages. One person may translate it into French and Russian; and another from French to Vietnamese; and yet another from Russian to Tagalog. Presto - you have the beginning of an English-Tagalog dictionary.