March 2009 Archives

As I work from home full-time nowadays one of the habits I've gotten in to is to go for a run or surf every day. I figure I should do at least this much exercise since the walk to the bus/train stop has now been replaced with a 5 meter route between my bed and desk.

Today I ran a few lengths of the beach then paused up one end to stretch, as normal. A sea gull perched on a nearby rock starts screeching. I look around and nothing unusual catches my eye so I wonder what its screeching about. It appears to be screeching intently at me. Another sea gull arrives, apparently in response to the noise of the first. I figure I should move away now since I'm annoying it in some unknown way.

photo thanks to nicvder1

It flies after me, screeching away and attempting to "bomb" me. As I keep turning to ensure that I am facing it as it does its dive it swerves to avoid actually hitting me but lets one go on the nearby sand. Sea-gull 0, sand 0, goosmurf 1.

It chases me around for the few minutes it takes me to carefully step out of its "zone". I've never had to fight a sea gull before but I figure if it came to it I'd be a pretty quick study. Anyways, I pondered some more about why it wanted to attack me and recalled an incident crazdewd once shared.

crazdewd, being craz, existed on a diet of 2 bacon & egg McMuffins each day. He would buy two in the morning from Circular Quay Maccas, eat one on the way to work, and keep the other for lunch. One morning a sea gull attacked him during breakfast, causing him to drop his muffin. crazdewd became angrydewd and he lashed out at a nearby flock of gulls, kicking at least one of them.

Putting 2 and 2 together to get 317 I realise now that my adversary today must have been the bird that crazdewd kicked. It confused crazdewd & I since we all look same.

For a while now there have been signs of Google rolling out some form of local network presence in Australia. Rumours were that they were trying to buy up large amounts of colo space in Sydney a while ago but I dunno what they ended up doing.

I'm on an iiNet connection and yesterday I noticed that code.google.com resolved to an IP hosted somewhere in Sydney, judging by the traceroute and RTT.

$ traceroute code.google.com
traceroute: Warning: code.google.com has multiple addresses; using 66.102.11.100
traceroute to code.l.google.com (66.102.11.100), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  nexthop.nsw.ii.net (203.55.231.88)  17.399 ms
 2  gi3-10.syd-stl-bdr2.ii.net (203.215.2.55)  15.512 ms
 3  te1-4.syd-stl-bdr1.ii.net (203.215.20.142)  14.622 ms
 4  gi0-15-1-5.syd-ult-core1.ii.net (203.215.20.20)  16.438 ms
 5  AS42.sydney.pipenetworks.com (218.100.2.98)  14.986 ms
 6  66.249.95.224 (66.249.95.224)  15.337 ms
 7  64.233.174.242 (64.233.174.242)  26.729 ms
 8  kr-in-f100.google.com (66.102.11.100)  18.969 ms

Today I was watching a YouTube clip and pondering why it was loading so slowly. I thought initially it might've just been my PC as I was running backups at the time but I noticed in Firefox' status bar that it was "stuck" on v15.cache.googlevideo.com. A quick mtr to that showed that it also resolved to the same kr-in-fXX.google.com as above.

As I wrote this post, I checked that v15.cache.googlevideo.com, and it is now resolving to an iiNet IP. :)

$ host v15.cache.googlevideo.com
v15.cache.googlevideo.com is an alias for
        v15.cache.l.google.com.
v15.cache.l.google.com has address 203.217.23.24
$ host 203.217.23.24
24.23.217.203.in-addr.arpa domain
        name pointer 203-217-23-24.gc-syd.iinet.net.au.

I'm guessing that the first instance was either a mistake, or became overloaded. But the iiNet hostname in the second instance is interesting. gc-syd = Google Cache, Sydney?

Finally, www.google.com also resolves to the kr-in-fXX.google.com names.

I'd say all of these are caching proxies as I don't really believe that there is sufficient datacentre space in Sydney for Google to roll out entire farms of their web search clusters, nor YouTube/Google Video farms.

UPDATE: As pointed out on Whirlpool such a setup has existed in Perth since December.

One of the current items under investigation for Nomitor is an appropriate CDN. Obviously as a startup we're not going to be doing massive traffic from day one so finding a suitable CDN partner who will let us start small and scale with us over the long term is a tricky task.

As evidenced by cdnlist.com there is a very large list of CDNs out there. Besides the obvious price considerations the other key criteria is geographical distribution. Evaluating that is a little tricky but with some coding we're using various open recursive resolvers to get a rough picture of a CDN's network.

So when I heard of Cotendo today I thought I'd give it a whirl. Their site says they have locations throughout the US and Europe, and from the list of IPs I was able to gather for www.cotendo.com, I'd say I agree. :)

7.137.93.208.in-addr.arpa => LB01.SANJ.COTENDO.NET.
7.139.93.208.in-addr.arpa => LB01.CHIC.COTENDO.NET.
7.140.93.208.in-addr.arpa => LB01.ASHB.COTENDO.NET.
7.141.93.208.in-addr.arpa => LB01.LSAG.COTENDO.NET.
7.142.93.208.in-addr.arpa => LB01.DALL.COTENDO.NET.
7.143.93.208.in-addr.arpa => LB01.NYNY.COTENDO.NET.
7.72.127.94.in-addr.arpa => LB01.AMST.COTENDO.NET.
7.74.127.94.in-addr.arpa => LB01.LOND.COTENDO.NET.

Not all the CDNs setup their PTRs so nicely. Big ups to Cotendo for having well maintained DNS.

Reading Seven leading in race to deliver movie downloads got me thinking. Always a dangerous activity.

It quotes Robbee Minicola, CEO of Hybrid TV, the licensee of Tivo in Australia:

"One in three broadband customers is a pirate and half of all BitTorrent downloads are TV shows," she said. "We have to think about the immediacy, the instant gratification -- of how to get the consumer what they want when they want it."

kids these days. thanks to Emmy G.

The problem is that no one wants to see the same old crap on Tivo as they see on free to air TV. Content breadth and timing is the key.

You can go to USENET or Bit Torrent today and find almost every TV show broadcast anywhere on the planet, and immediately after its local broadcast.

The "scene" works hard on quality - so much so that there are defined standards that are so well known they're even on Wikipedia. Additionally, they remove the ads. I don't really agree with the last part since someone needs to pay producers, actors and other entertainment industry participants but its obviously a bonus for pirates.

So back to the title. What consumers really want -- given that Tivo is partnering with Internode -- is for Tivo to provide a in-built USENET client. Internode already offers free (without cost, but metered) access to Astraweb and Giganews, two of the largest premium USENET providers.

What consumers really want is for that content to be easily available (via their shiny new Tivo box), and unmetered. Hybrid could even insert advertising back into those downloaded shows - the convenience of being able to watch any TV show in the world via a simple browseable & searchable interface far outweighs the inconvenience of a few ads.

Logging this on the interwebs to hopefully save others some headaches.

Installing FreeBSD 7.1 amd64 under VMware Server 2.0 (build 122956, 2008/10/29) on a Vista 32-bit host, and get "BTX Halted".

Solution is to enable Intel Virtualization in BIOS. However if your BIOS also has Intel VT-d (Direct I/O), do not enable this.