Jacques Marneweck's Blog

I did some google searches on domains I own over a two day period and it seems that google has problems with their results. Not only is PageRank broken or rather not working properly seeing that alexa tells me that google finds 67 links to one domain of mine yet going directly to google's site it tells you a completely different story.

According to Jeremy Zawodny's blog entry there are various things with blogs that causes issues with the PageRank technology.

Normally I never use Internet Exterminator to do any webbrowsing, but I was interested to see what the pagerank values for several domains are, and I've noticed that they were not what I was expecting.

Anyways check out the article for more information and loads of comments about this story.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 2:28 PM | Permalink

Noticed tonight that my download speeds are at 0.4Kbit/s from international, so I decided to do some traceroutes:

root@shell:/home/pure-ftpd-users/vansven/www.smsworld.co.za# traceroute 12.165.50.194
traceroute to 12.165.50.194 (12.165.50.194), 64 hops max, 44 byte packets
1 phantom (196.7.5.209) 0.625 ms 0.538 ms 0.442 ms
2 vlan547.hr1.cpt1.alter.net (196.7.150.129) 0.621 ms 1.333 ms 0.651 ms
3 fe11-0-0.gw1.cpt1.alter.net (196.30.176.33) 1.010 ms 0.815 ms 0.886 ms
4 * * atm8-0-0sub100.ir2.mia16.alter.net (196.30.229.170) 2066.500 ms
5 * POS0-1-0.IH4.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.86.145) 2047.250 ms *
6 302.at-5-1-0.XR2.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.7.182) 2048.167 ms 2078.327 ms 2059.909 ms
7 0.so-4-2-0.XL2.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.101.46) 2049.253 ms^C

Notice the high latency once I've hit UUnet's Miami node.

Good 'ole Mercedes Benz site is hectically slow so I decide to phone UUnet's CSC, who aren't aware of the problem so I then end up on a conference call to their NOC

And another traceroute:
root@shell:/home/pure-ftpd-users/vansven/www.smsworld.co.za# !trace
traceroute 12.165.50.194
traceroute to 12.165.50.194 (12.165.50.194), 64 hops max, 44 byte packets
1 phantom (196.7.5.209) 0.692 ms 0.665 ms 0.453 ms
2 vlan547.hr1.cpt1.alter.net (196.7.150.129) 0.766 ms 0.907 ms 0.754 ms
3 fe11-0-0.gw1.cpt1.alter.net (196.30.176.33) 1.380 ms 1.765 ms 1.337 ms
4 * * atm8-0-0sub100.ir2.mia16.alter.net (196.30.229.170) 2054.234 ms
5 POS0-1-0.IH4.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.86.145) 2074.051 ms 2093.423 ms 2076.875 ms
6 302.at-5-1-0.XR2.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.7.182) 2082.630 ms 2077.745 ms 2067.346 ms
7 0.so-4-2-0.XL2.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.101.46) 2089.611 ms 2085.831 ms *
8 0.so-4-2-0.XL2.ATL5.ALTER.NET (152.63.81.81) 2097.521 ms * 2060.879 ms
9 POS7-0.BR4.ATL5.ALTER.NET (152.63.84.153) 2098.070 ms * *
10 204.255.174.182 (204.255.174.182) 2087.292 ms ^C

During the conference call latency drops but there is no clue what's happened.

root@shell:/home/pure-ftpd-users/vansven/www.smsworld.co.za# traceroute 12.165.50.194
traceroute to 12.165.50.194 (12.165.50.194), 64 hops max, 44 byte packets
1 phantom (196.7.5.209) 0.578 ms 0.497 ms 0.427 ms
2 vlan547.hr1.cpt1.alter.net (196.7.150.129) 0.631 ms 0.943 ms 0.592 ms
3 fe11-0-0.gw1.cpt1.alter.net (196.30.176.33) 1.482 ms 0.849 ms 0.825 ms
4 atm8-0-0sub100.ir2.mia16.alter.net (196.30.229.170) 431.726 ms 420.844 ms 421.718 ms
5 POS0-1-0.IH4.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.86.145) 422.683 ms 425.410 ms 423.830 ms
6 302.at-5-1-0.XR2.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.7.182) 430.268 ms 429.991 ms 425.700 ms
7 0.so-4-2-0.XL2.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.101.46) 424.144 ms 424.126 ms 427.753 ms
8 0.so-4-2-0.XL2.ATL5.ALTER.NET (152.63.81.81) 440.275 ms 441.712 ms 441.177 ms
9 POS7-0.BR4.ATL5.ALTER.NET (152.63.84.153) 436.538 ms 438.760 ms 438.739 ms
10 204.255.174.182 (204.255.174.182) 441.441 ms 452.777 ms 441.162 ms
11 sl-bb26-rly-15-3.sprintlink.net (144.232.19.178) 457.464 ms 454.399 ms 456.024 ms
12 sl-bb24-pen-12-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.20.110) 456.706 ms 461.054 ms 458.241 ms
13 sl-bb25-pen-14-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.16.78) 460.541 ms 463.371 ms 468.502 ms
14 sl-bb21-stk-11-1.sprintlink.net (144.232.20.27) 548.466 ms 564.944 ms 642.476 ms
15 sl-gw26-stk-9-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.4.105) 520.726 ms 510.904 ms 519.622 ms
16 sl-rttcc-1-0.sprintlink.net (160.81.7.70) 537.237 ms 536.901 ms 534.515 ms
17 br0.cr1.rno.redundant.com (12.165.48.206) 525.096 ms 529.794 ms 526.035 ms
18 rn1.php.net (12.165.50.194) 526.724 ms 524.359 ms 525.192 ms

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 11:17 PM | Permalink

Was busy visiting Jim's website and I noticed that he was blogging about the following:

this help item from blogger.com is funny: “what to do if your mom discovers your blog...” i like the idea of going multi-lingual. (the blogger item was inspired by this story at the onion.)

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 2:38 PM | Permalink

You got to love UUnet's management console. I've noticed that various graphs we generate for internal usage (i.e. how many ports we are utilising on UUnet's dial-up infrastructure, which realm is using ports, etc.) is no longer working. Seems like someone was having fun and zapped my login again. I'm not going to complain seeing that I'm not responsible for the accounting side of things.

Clearly shows you that it's not getting data from the UUdial Backend box where the UUdial Management Console runs.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 10:56 AM | Permalink

According to good 'ol Yahooligan, Jeremy Zawodny, he is claiming that "God uses MySQL".

This starts sounding like another one of these flames of FreeBSD vs Linux etc. etc. that have been going on for years.

We have just got to remember that for every job there are the right tools for the job. You just have to find them. ;)

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 12:52 AM | Permalink

My blog has finally finished the data migration process that has taken a few months as I've been busy with 101 bits and pieces. A lot of things have happened over the past few months, and hopefully I'll have time to dedicate a few minutes a day capturing a few entries for this blog.

Anyway I'm going to be configuring apache to redirect all requests for the old blog site (http://www.ataris.co.za/blog/) over to here a little bit later this evening.

It's quite remarkable that coding a simple website software wayback in the late 90's would become popular when all it was doing was allowing various people to post news, as well as let "members" have a short bio about themselves online.

Enuff of my rambling for now. ;)

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 9:33 PM | Permalink

Started testing the TypePad service from Six Apart, Ltd the makers of the Movable Type weblog software that powers my weblog.

My first entry on my "BSDguru" TypePad blog is entitled TypePad and is basically a test of their system.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 7:52 PM | Permalink

Interesting insight into the mess that these trackback URL's cause.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 8:07 PM | Permalink

How does one teach 'an old dog' some 'new tricks'?

One of the problems with having seperate web developers and web designers is that the web designers have no idea to code in PHP and the web developers don't want the designers messing with their PHP code.

A few months back I started converting various PHP driven sites I've developed over the past couple of years to using Smarty Template Engine.

Smarty is extremely easy to use, even for a person such as myself who hates HTML code. I prefer to dabble in my php code and never touch HTML.

One of my problems is that designers are scared of the small learning curve of using {$variable} where values need to be extracted and claim that they need to learn Smarty when it's definately not the case.

Anyways I'm quite happy with flexiblity Smarty offers even for the most complex application I've written in PHP a telesales utility with reporting to see things from how many calls each telesales person has done in a day, feedback, etc.

I'll be adding some nice graphs shortly to see graphical representations for management.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 12:01 PM | Permalink

Busy coding an telesales application which allows telesales staff to be more efficient and allows reporting to actually see what telesales staff are getting upto. All I need now is a good 'ole 3com NBX for telephone call reporting, etc. to find out how long they are on the phone for.

Seeing that most telesales staff cannot do the job properly, I've been building little applications to track how much time a telesales person wastes during the day, to enable them to see that you know exactly what they are getting upto.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 5:53 PM | Permalink