The Net

I have amarok configured to submit tracks played to last.fm. If you go there you can see what I've recently listened to.

I get frequent errors in the amarok status bar such as

Failed to submit 'Mining for Gold' and 8 other tracks

and

Failed to submit several tracks to last.fm

I Googled the messages and found many reports of the problem, such as this thread. Most people pointed their fingers at a server problem. I was skeptical.

When, however, I tried to log into last.fm through the web interface and saw it intermittently fail, that confirmed for me that the flakiness lives in last.fm servers.

I saw this thread that suggested resetting the password--even to the same password--cleared the problem. I tried that and it worked. Before, I had dozens of songs pending to be posted. After, they all went through.

Here's hoping that last.fm eventually fixes their infrastructure problems.

I'm getting weary of community sites like Digg and reddit. I wish the dark Illuminati forces that are suppressing Ron Paul from the mainstream media would only find their way onto the net. (Oh wait! They have.)

A recent post on the NY Times site had a quote from Slashdot founder Rob Malda that nailed it:

“A lot of these community news sites are all about Ron Paul,” he said. “Ron Paul may be a valid candidate. But what that is really demonstrating is that you are seeing 1 or 2 percent of a community shaping where the whole community is going. A small dedicated group of people can manipulate these sites very easily.”

A lot of the community content sites have categories: programming, politics, etc. You can view the posts in any single category.

Maybe what we need are anti-categories, so I can read a digg with all the presidential politics suppressed. That way I can get just what I want: significant current events, technology stories, and cute lolpuppy photos.

How quaint! I haven't seen a good Google bombing in a while.

The current target is "dangerous cult".

I'm having increasing problems with poor network performance at public wi-fi hotspots.

I'm particularly susceptible to bandwidth problems, because I do a lot of interactive work on the net. Most people use the net in batch mode: fetch a web page, download an email, and the like. I'm often logged into a remote server, transmitting small packets of information a keystroke at a time.

I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of times I observe network performance problems, that's because somebody is being a bandwidth hog. They may be doing something like connecting to a streaming music server, which uses a continual and significant part of the network bandwidth.

I have no hard data to support or disprove my theory. So, this afternoon, I did a little research. What I want is a network analysis tool that puts my wireless interface into promiscuous mode (that's a mode where an application can see what everybody is doing on the network), and then accumulates network usage by the various devices on the net.

I'm posting this blog entry from the Denny's at Burnet and Anderson—simply because I can. Isn't free wifi great?

I haven't been here in a long time. I was surprised to find they recently added free wifi service.

That's timely, because we needed a late night wifi option in the neighborhood. Many months back, the Jim's at Burnet and Research used to have wi-fi. Then, at some point, there was a signal but no connectivity to the net. Then it just went away.

I'm probably going to eat at Jim's less and Denny's more because of this.

Business owners take note. I just spent $8 on a chef salad. An AT&T business class DSL line can be had for under $50/month. It doesn't take very many chef salad sales to pay for this amenity.

The Austin Bloggers web site recently was attacked by a scraper site. The scraper was grabbing our RSS feed and republishing it on their own web site, pretending it was their own content. We received no attribution and the scraper put their own copyright on the page. The scraper also plastered ads all over the stolen content, which, of course, is the whole purpose of the scam.

Remember that terrible, awful time three years ago when Verisign broke the Internet? Well, looks like Earthlink has gone and done the same thing. Earthlink has started intercepting Internet host name lookups. When a lookup fails (host does not exist), they are replacing the failure response with one that points to their own web site.

The funny thing is that when Verisign did it, Earthlink didn't much like it. As I noted back then, Earthlink took steps to neutralize the Verisign redirects. It appears, however, they seem to have changed their mind on the matter. It's still a bad idea technically, but they seem to be willing to do it now that the money for advertisements served goes into their pocket.

The good news is that I just chatted with Earthlink support and found that there is a workaround available. I was told to use the DNS servers at 207.69.188.171 and 207.69.188.172. I will have to reconfigure my router to do so, at least as an interim measure.

Although there is a workaround, I'm not pleased. This is information that the network should set automatically. It's a hassle to override the automatic settings. Also, this makes my connection more susceptible to network changes. So, long term, I'm seriously considering whether we should switch our service to another broadband provider.

I'm pleased to report that Blogger has finally figured out how to say, "Ooops!"

When you request a web page from a server and the web server cannot provide that page, it is supposed to return an error. And by error, I don't just mean serving up a web page that says, "Whups! So sorry!" When the user requests a document that does not exist, the server is supposed to respond with a specific protocol handshake called a 404 error.

The two biggest broadband Internet providers in Austin have had major, stupidity-induced service outages this week.

First, SBC changed their DNS servers (for user client queries) without telling anybody. They probably figured they didn't need to, because their clients would pick up the change automatically when the next DHCP update occurs.

Has anybody noticed problems with Bloglines not updating feeds? I haven't seen anything from Burnt Orange Report in over a week. Cinematical (where Austin-area blogger jette has just started posting) hasn't seen an update since the weekend.

I filed a problem report yesterday, but I haven't received a response yet. Anybody else noticing problems?

I needs my RSS!

Update: Burnt Orange broke because they changed RSS URL. Still don't understand why Cinematical isn't working. Since this appears to be a single-site issue rather than a wider problem, I retract the assertion that Bloglines is busted.

Aug 26 update: Bloglines responded today saying, "We are aware of the problem you reported and hope to have it corrected shortly. We appreciate your patience and regret any inconvenience this may have caused."