Pagetest web page performance test is a great tool for doing what Firebug does but not in your browser. Pagetest can do repeated tests to iron out any outliers. An alternative is Pingdom tools which has some nifty sorting functions but is generally the same thing.

So I ran the homepage of my website on it and concluded that: Wow! Half the time is spent on DNS lookup!

The server it sits on is located here in London, UK and the Pagetest test was made from a server also here in the UK. Needless to say, I was disappointed. Is there anything I can do about that? I've spent so much time configuring Squid, Varnish and Nginx and yet the biggest chunk is DNS lookup.

In a pseudo-optimistic fashion I'm hoping it's because I've made the site so fast that this is what's left when you've done all you can do. I'm hoping to learn some more about this "dilemma" without having to read any lengthy manuals. Pointers welcomed.

Every week I get an email via this website from someone who wants me to help them hack something. I've written things about the subject "hacking" but that doesn't make me a hacker. I'm not a hacker. Here's this week's nutter email I got:

"Hai, im suraj from India.
Actually i want to b a computer expert.There must b nothin wth the coputer tht i cant do.so i think it can b done only wth a hacker.So can u plz help me wth this.pPleae tel me wht i hav to learn.
Than Q."

Does that make any sense?

Yesterday I got another one of these:

 dear sir,

 yesterday some body stolen my cell cell number 9848133384 
 please search for the  same and freeze my account so that 
 no body can use it 

 thank you 

 yours faithfully

 kgdeekshitulu

It seems that a lot of people in India lose their mobile phones these days and that a lot of people in India think that by emailing me about it that I can do something about it.

I'm just a blogger. I don't have a machine that can cancel mobile SIMs.

I've recently registered now set up a new domain name for this website. It's peterbe.mobi and is there to the be mobile version of the pages.

I've also made some of these slight improvements to the css for mobile and removed the category images on the blog items. There is so much more that I can do but I just haven't had time. For example, there's no search on the mobile version.

The screenshot here to the right is from a Firefox extension I have called "Small Screen Rendering" which is useful if you want to get a guessimate look of how your page might appear in browser with a very small screen. Immediate conclusion: there's a hell of a lot of scrolling :)

I've now finally uploaded all my photos from the trip to China.

From 1,000 huge jpegs (at 1.6Gb) down to 300 resized ones (at 43Mb) it took quite a long time to rotate, chose, colour modify and title. To do it I had to use digikam which is the best photo album organiser program available on Linux. Even though it's the best I've found so far it still sucks. It's frustrating when you have lots to do but it's free and works better than nothing and I haven't donated any money to it.

As you might have noticed I have had to reduce the image quality quite a bit especially of the thumbnails. Sorry about this but I see thumbnails as navigation, not the real content. If you want higher resolution images I might be able to get you the original JPG if you ask kindly for it.

At the time of writing, if you do any of these searches on google:

charles dunston carphone warehouse

supersize me,the moveie

7 wounders of the world

...you'll notice two patterns:

1. My site is no. 1 on all three
2. They're all badly spelled

I've now set up alias to www.peterbe.com such that ww.peterbe.com and wwww.peterbe.com both redirect to www.peterbe.com.

We'll see what effect this might have and if it's worth. I guess 99% of all visitors on this site get it right but this tightens the "fool-proofness" even more. Google have one such alias set up on ww.google.com but not wwww.google.com

At the moment I'm not running Squid for this site but if experimentation time permits I'll have it running again soon. One thing I feel uneasy about is how to "manually" purge cached pages that needs to be updated. For example, if you read this page (and it's cached for one hour) and post a comment, then I'd like to re-cache this page with a purge. Setting a HTTP header could be something but that I would only be able to do on the page where you have this in the URL:

which, because of the presence of a querystring, is not necessarily cached anyway. The effect is that as soon as the "?msg=Comment+added" is removed from the URL, the viewer will see the page as it was before she posted her comment. squidclient might be the solution. ...sort of.

Finally I got my domain name back. What happened was that it expired without me being notified. The reason I wasn't notified was that the email address that Network Solutions use is ancient and I don't check it anymore. What I had to do was to send a signed fax with a photocopy of me driving license to Network Solutions in the states to tell them to change my email address. Once I've changed my email address I was able to log in and renew the service for three years.

What confused the whole thing was that apparently I thought I could transfer the domain name over to mydomain.com who I use to administer the domain name. The reason it didn't work was that the domain could not be transfered when it was pending deletion.

Long story short: I'm back. To all those of you who have emailed me on mail @peterbe.com you and have got a delivery-error-message, do you want to resend that important piece of email now?

I'm back! My dear little website is back up and running. This time on a different computer on a different network.

What happened was that the poor little old laptop that my computer was running on completely screwed itself up after a hard restart. Everything on its memory became totally random. When it managed to boot up I had several gigantic folders, some with equal name that couldn't be opened. My friend Jan Kokoska helped me eventually run a few disk-checking programs and eventually we could see my non-backedup files again. With a Linux LiveCD we managed to copy the data across to another computer and eventually it got up here on this server.

Now I've done something relatively useful with my PageRank algorithm written in Python that I'm actually quite proud of. It's not rocket science but at least I've managed to understand the Google PageRank algorithm and applied it to my own setup. This application is very simple and not so useful as one could hope but at least I prove to myself that it can be done.

I call it PlogRank. As you might have noticed, most blog items here on this site have on the left hand side, beneath the menu, a list of "Related blogs". These are from now on sorted by PlogRank! Cool, ha?

The "Related blogs" work by specific word matching. Every blog item has a list keywords that I define manually through the management interface. The selection of keywords is helped by another little database that filters out all typical words. E.g. "PageRank" is a particular word and "page" is not; so selecting these keywords is very easy for me.

Anyway. What I do now, once every week, is that I load a huge matrix of all connections between pages. If this blog item has a link to PageRank in Python then that page increases in PlogRank. It does not effect this page. I then feed this into the PageRanker program I've written which calculates the corresponding PageRank for each blog item. Easy! The whole calculation takes only a couple of seconds with 30 iterations. The calculation is actually only a small part of that time because reading from and writing to the database is the real bottleneck.

So, the end result is that every blog item that has related links will show these links in PlogRank-sorted order. Isn't that neat?

Did a quick analysis on all the referers to my web site. Referers being when web users click a link to my site from another site instead of manually typing in the URL. The result is not surprising but quite sad. About 5% of all referer visits to my web site is from other normal web pages. All the remaining is from search engine results such as Yahoo, Google etc or other obscure web services.

The sad truth is that very few people make a link to my site :(
The good thing is that my site must be very findable.

The most important conclusion is probably that people don't surf the web anymore. Instead they search it. I for one trust Google so much that I sometimes search instead of digging up the URL written down somewhere. This proves the importance of being findable on the web. You have to make your pages findable otherwise you don't get any hits. So, redesign your sites so that Google can index them accurately and avoid silly things like frames or images with text in them.

I have been experimenting recently with HTML optimization but haven't applied it yet. But I have applied this now to my stylsheets. The size gain is 33%! (1577 bytes to 1027 bytes) However, the speed gain involves also the time to perform the optimization so the speed gain will obviously be less than 33%. But the optimization takes, on this slow computer, 0.004 seconds so in approximate terms the speed gain is also 33%. This is on a stylesheet file with some but short and few comments.

The optimization script removes almost all unnecessary whitespace (newline characters included) and all comments. The code for python friends looks like this:

The Wayback Machine has archived my websites since April 2001.

The last archive entry is of how this website looked like with the new design first. I.e. 7 months ago. I didn't know about this project but it looks promising yet limited. It's like a permanent cache.

Another fun one was my profile page from our intranet when I was working for Net4Any. (have patience and wait for the animated mug shot)

I've changed my RSS feed to be RSS 1.0 compliant. My feed has been invalid for couple of days so I thought I needed to upgrade.

RSS 1.0 also allows for a Subject meta data so my items will look better on Webforce.at

In my blog about Wikipedia I mentioned that one thing I didn't like about Wikipedia is that there are too many links that distract you when you're reading. I prefer to read the text when the inline links aren't underlined like they do it on susning.nu or metafilter.com.

Slashdot disagrees with me. Look at this example on Slashdot. So many links that you don't know whether to read it or to click everything.

Supposing I want to send someone a URL to one of the pages of my site. Then if the URL is too long it gets complicated. In emails there's the risk that the long URL gets broken up on many lines. And on SMS there's too much typing. So I've introduced Quick URLs.

For example: http://www.peterbe.com/photos/misc/balloon-flying/ballong_skog_eld.jpg/view becomes http://www.peterbe.com/q-004 Much easier to type in when sending a text, isn't it.

I have to manually select every URL that I want to do this too, but this might change with time. When you enter a Quick URL like the one above you get redirected to the real URL.

Now there are two icons on all pages of this site in the bottom right-hand corner. One is for a printer friendly version and the other is an experimental PDF version.

The PDF trick idea I got from this How-To by Maik Jablonski.

The trick to enable multiple versions of the header & footer was actually inspired by myself. I wrote about this on ZopeLabs.com a long time ago.

This is my first attempt on trying to describe some of the technical mechanisms of this site. I will try to keep it updated as I change the website.

Hopefully I will also write a little something about me, myself and I when time allows.

This can get interesting. ESI, as I've understood it, makes it possible to display on a website "Welcome back Mr. Bengtsson" but have other parts of the page cached through something like Squid. So far I've only used Squid to cache the whole page. From the <html> to the </html> tag.

There is now some development to combine ESI and Squid, what I gather from this blog entry on plope.com I hope to be able to experiment with this here on my site.

Got the server running again. Long story. Now I'm about to upgrade the web server software to use Zope 2.7.0 and the latest Python.

I'm experimenting with analysing the referer logs I get from Google. I.e. what search terms makes people find my site from Google.

The first attempt at summarising this.

This site now has a RSS feed (version 0.91).

The URL is http://www.peterbe.com/rss.xml

An RSS feed is a XMLish summary of what is being updated on a website. It's standardised so it should be possible to view it from any program or web application.

My recommendation for an RSS feed viewer is Feedreader which is free and works really well. Download it, install it and enter http://www.peterbe.com/rss.xml as a new feed.

Disclaimer: These tests are not very scientific so values as they stand are irrelevant.

What is interesting is the difference between the two tests.

Basically what I did was that I sucked the whole www.peterbe.com site (22 files, 111KB) down and served it via Apache on the same machine as the Zope server.

Then I did a benchmark test using using ab with 10 users at 10 concurrent requests. The result is that Apache served the files about 30% faster than Zope.

Complete results

BUT! Bare in mind that the files that Apache served up are static whereas the files Zope served up are dynamic. The content of the Zope request depends on extracting data from a database, sorting, filtering and other various conditional statements. Apache can do none of that unless you use some sort of scripting like PHP, mod_python or mod_perl.

Pages served from Zope are also checked through a comprehensive security mechanism that Apache did not in this case. Every single item (22 of them), when extracted, were with security precautions on the Zope test.

The conclusion from this is: Zope is surprisingly fast considering all the work it needs to do compared to static Apache.

My company, Fry-IT sells a system called MOHO which is a wireless ordering system. Basically, in a restaurant, waiters walk around with a PDA instead of a notepad to take the orders. Then the orders are wirelessly beemed over to the kitchen or the till.

The restaurant show at Olympia was surprisingly big. Lots of people selling similar systems but mostly it was retailers of kitchen equipment and other restaurant equipment. Our stand was somewhat outlandish but we talked to lots of people and got many sales leads out of it. Ned Wells, our sales guy, was very happy with the outcome.

This is the first time I've ever done sales like this so to me it was a great experience.

You might have noticed that this site now has a search feature. It uses Zope's excellent ZCatalog.

I've tried to make it as googleish as possible with the statistics of how long the search took and spelling corrections. Please do try for example Search on ballon. I am working on getting more spelling correction alternatives but haven't yet figured out a good algorithm.

If you're having any idea behaviour with the search please let me know by posting a comment here.