Kirrus’ Blog

Cycle Photo

5 miles 30 minutes. Drink. Photo. Breathe. 5 miles 20 minutes.

Click on each photo for a full-size version. There are some stunning ones (in my biased opinion) a little way below.

Hidden spiders web, didn't see it till I opened the image at home

The fallacy of bandwidth limits

Currently, according to mainstream media, bandwidth is defined as the quantity of data you download or upload to the internet over a month. So, for example, your ISP will tell you the maximum bandwidth limit is 100GB. Or whatever.

That, however, is not it’s true definition. It’s true definition is:
a data transmission rate; the maximum amount of information (bits/second) that can be transmitted along a channel ¹

This is the secret thing about bandwidth. ISPs don’t care about how much you upload to the web over a given period. We care about how fast you upload it.

When you pay for a high-level connection to the internet, that you use to connect houses to, or web-serving computers, you do not pay in quantity over time. You pay in speed. So, for example, 1 gigabit per second. If you go over that speed, longer than a allowed ‘burst’ period, you pay an overage charge, always assuming that your network is even capable of going over that speed.

Think of bandwidth like gas going through a pipe. (Terrible, terrible analogy, I know. But it’s the easiest way to explain.) That gas can only flow so fast, and only so much can be fit in the pipe at any one time. We don’t particularly care if you use 100GB by taking a trickle out of the system at any one time. We do care if you take a torrent.

Realistically though, customers never notice bandwidth. They’re too busy playing with computer-resource hungry things, like wordpress, to even be able to consume all of their allocated bandwidth. Only very, very rarely do we actually start thinking about bandwidth rather than computing resources. Normally, it’s podcasts. Static file. Almost no server-resources required to send it out onto the internet. But it eats bandwidth. Most are ~50-80Megabytes per episode. You get enough people downloading that simultaneously, and we’re going to start noticing…

As long as the current trend continues, i.e. the more computing power we have available to provide you with your shiny websites, the more the people creating the shiny websites waste computing power, the mainstream will never notice this secret.

More often than not, the reason we ask people to upgrade off our shared servers, is not because they’ve reached any arbitrary bandwidth limit, although we may use this as a guide to identify them. It’s because they’re using too much CPU time.

Charity shop thievery

I know that someone stole from the charity shop today. Found the remnants of a plastic tag broken by teeth on the floor in the changing room. Thought there was someone doing something suspicious in there earlier, but got distracted by people paying.

Not the first time either, we had a set of known thieves three weeks ago, think they probably suceeded, someone found a destroyed tag outside the shop.

I wonder, do they steal from need, from dependence on stealing, or for the excitement, the thrill of the crime?
Having never stolen anything physical, to knowledge, I don’t know.

Guess this will be one area of curiosity never sated. I just have to keep an eye out for them.

Photo below, Gerald the Giraffe enjoying a glass of coke, having just been rescued from the kidnapping admin team at one of our offices

I hate book study.

I really hate studying from a book. My learning style is much more practial hands on. My mind just does not want to read and make notes on this boring technical book, and I can’t keep myself from getting side tracked.

Case in point, Page 235 of my LPCI 1 text book (awful by the way, don’t get LPIC-1 in depth by Michael Jang, its useless, honestly), I decide to browse through my photo archive after I pulled that shot out yesterday. And this is what I came up with:

Click to see full size image

Right, mind. Back to shell scripting. (While loops.)

To the Oxfordshire Police Force

I was impressed by the tobogganing policemen, for having a sense of humour, and getting involved with the local community. As a UK tax payer I whole heartedly endorse this use of my money.

I as not impressed by them being told off.

Have fun (or not, as the case is much more likely to be).

Ref: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/14/sledging_coppers/

Help firefox wget and ssh shell script

I’m trying to create a script to allow me to command a remote server to download a file from firefox.

There are various reasons for this, mainly todo with connection speed.

What I have at the moment is:
#/bin/sh
terminator -x ssh user@site.com wget -qc -t 3 -o ~/wget_testlog ftp://anothersite.com/file.ext \\& \& &


I want it to kick off, ask for a password to login via ssh and then go away…
I would like to be able to set the location for the download to ~/www/files/

I was planning to place this script in /usr/bin and install it in firefox using the code/link provided on this blog: Wget from firefox

Can anyone complete my solution with the correct syntax, or provide a better solution (preferably KISS)?
I’m more of hacker than an expert IMO and I know when I’m out of my depth!

Cheers,
Garreth

People are strange

We have a lot of customers. A few, whilst emailing us at tech-support can be rude. It’s interesting, visiting their sites, and seeing whether that is just because they’re stressed, under the effects of caffeine, or are just naturally rude.

Take one example… one person just kept ignoring what I said, treating it as if I didn’t know what I was writing about. Turns out, I did, and I fixed the immediate problem (if not the whole one, but that’s something different altogether). He still insists on treating me as if I’m not worth listening to.

Surprise surprise, if I am given the choice (and at the end of the day, when I’m just doing support tickets to stop them needing to be done tomorrow, I often am,) I will delay answering the tickets of those who have been rude. They’ll get done at some point, but I won’t prioritize them; what’s the point? I’d rather help someone who will be grateful! I will go all out in my own time on a problem that interests me, or a customer who is kind. I will go all out if you are rude, but you are stressed and have an excuse. I may force myself to go all out if you pay us a lot of money (but it won’t be on my own time )

I’ve stayed in the office till 10pm, on a ‘I’m not getting paid right now’ problem, because it interested me, and I liked the people running the website involved. I will gladly spend my free time trying to help them.

If you talk to tech support, be nice! Say thank you, treat us with respect, and you’ll find we’ll be inclined to help you a lot more. Ignore what we say, treat us rudely or as if we don’t know what we’re talking about, and we’ll get dispirited. The last thing you want is dispirited sysadmins. They tend to go home on the dot, and they won’t go out of their way to help you.

If you’re angry, worried, stressed, take a deep breath and a calming moment before speaking to us. We, like anyone else, don’t like people shouting at us for something we can’t help. If your website goes down, because the server it’s on has blown up, and you didn’t pay for a fail-over system, we can’t help you any faster by you shouting at us, and you shouting at us will not make us like you

In the end, just remember, we’re human too! That person you call up because your email is broken has emotions, and they’re likely busy fixing problems, or helping others already. Don’t let the frustration of the problem blow into anger at the people who try to fix it for you

How a website Works

This is just a quick guide on how a website stays online. It’ll probably be common knowledge to most reading this blog, but good to put up anyway.

You may think when you visit, for example, bbc.co.uk that it’s just “there”, and not worry about how, but my job is dependent on the how. The error messages you see when a website isn’t working are also very descriptive, but quite cryptic if you’re not in the know.

All websites are hosted on servers. A server is just a computer which we use to serve others, so in this case, serve a website, or provide email services. Normally, a server is a rackserver, designed to fit in a small space with a lot of other computers in a datacentre, far, far removed from that big beige box that allows you to browse the internet.

When you visit a website, a lot of different things are happening in the background. Firstly, your computer looks up the computer address with the domain name you just visited. Say you just hit my site, “kirrus.co.uk”. Well, the internet addressing system, that tells your computer where to look for the website is based in numbers. So, your computer asks special servers on the internet, we call “Domain Name Servers”, what the address is for that website. In this case, they’ll reply “80.87.131.49″. Your web-browser, firefox, will then ask for “kirrus.co.uk” from my server “80.87…”). Everyone has one of these IP addresses, even you. Go to http://itempeter.com to see yours

Once my server has the request, it then sends the web-page back to your computer.

What is a webpage?

A webpage, as your computer sees it, is a collection of a couple of languages. The most basic is “HTML”, or “HyperText Markup Language”. This was designed to allow you to quickly put together a webpage – all you do is wrap (or mark up) the text you want with the flags you want. For example <b>word</b> tells your computer to make word bold, so, you see: word

You can see the HTML that makes up this page by clicking on “View” and then “View Source” in your web-browser.

That’s the most basic level. It gets a lot more complex than that under the skin, with extra languages running on your computer (JavaScript, CSS [Cascading Style Sheet]), and on the server (PHP – PreHypertextProcessor, ASP, perl, python, MySQL) but they’re all too complex to go into unless you want to create dynamic websites. A good place to go if you want to create webpages is w3schools.com, where they have lots of tutorials on all the major web languages.

UK Surveillance Plan to go ahead

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8350660.stm

Can I just say.. bad bad bad bad bad bad bad?

That and they have no idea how much this will cost to implement. £2bn is too little imho. Technically, implementing this will not be easy, and will cost a lot

Fail.

Example one – forgetful screenshots

A couple of screenshots. Firstly, every now and then, people send us screenshots. They do this by sending them in word documents, which is bad enough. (Please, just send us an image file!) This example though, is quite fun.

Make sure you actually copy the screenshot in, instead of just linking it

Example 2 – Infect yourself, and pay money for the privilege

My second example, is of a website trying to extort money, by making you think your computer has been infected with a virus. These are nasty sites, and I hate them with a passion. They feed off of people’s fear of computers. The interesting thing here is, this computer can’t be infected in this way… it’s running ubuntu, their silly antivirus software looks very, very out-of-place!

(See my first post this month if you’re afraid of computers.)

Click on the image for the full screenshot. It is quite large. As you can see from the timestamp, I’ve been meaning to post this one for a while

p.s. Does anyone know how to force formatting in wordpress? This post took about 10 minutes of fiddling to get the images to go some-where near where I wanted them :/ If you do, please comment! If you don’t please comment. In fact, please comment, comments make my day!