I have a really fast internet connection. On paper and according to the tests at dslreports.com and speedtest.net. But it just felt slow. Pages would take a while to get going. Images on blogs wouldn’t load very quickly – especially if they linked to from another site. The perceptive performance of my much slower DSL was better. That’s. Just. Wrong.

After some head scratching, testing, experimenting, and dog beatingpetting, I think I figured it out (and the lice shampoo took care of the itchy scalp). All Comcast’s DNS servers are running on a single Mac IIe. Over a 300-baud Applecat modem. So those pauses I’m seeing when surfing the webola are from the DNS server catching on fire, falling over, and sinking into the swamp (Comcast does, literally, have huge tracts of land).

So I changed my DNS servers to the OpenDNS server addresses. I changed these on my computer (an Apple Mac Pro), not on my router, so that my computer has a single path to retrieving the lookups. Previously I had tried OpenDNS but had set the router to use them, and set my computer to use the router’s settings. This does seem to make a difference, which is a bit surprising since my network at home is all Gigabit ethernet. Go figure.

My perception is that everything is snappier and more responsive. I don’t really have any way to measure this, so this is a definite seat of the bermuda shorts measurement. So your milage may vary.

Give it a try and let me know if it improved your surfing.

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Should this connection feel slow? Hell to the no!

We had to turn on all wildcard matching in IIS on the server to get this working. But now it does, and it’s sweet!

So the url for the picture below is http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/content/binary/jacky.jpg but the picture is actually on my new site at http://blog.mikefullerton.com/wp-content/oldcontent/jacky.jpg. I think this is exceeding cool. So now if you go to google images and search for mikefullerton.com, all the pictures still load! NICE.

One of the challenges of moving a website is preserving the permalinks – links to your stuff from elsewhere on the web. This is important if you wish to retain any page rankings in the search engines as well as just keeping stuff people have linked to you working. This is a big challenge when moving something as complex as a blog site like mine from one web technology to another, e.g. from dasBlog to wordpress. You really need to do a permanent redirect, so the search engines know that the resource in question has actually moved.

What I’ve done is write a custom ASP.net website that does permanent redirects for every single one of my 650 blog posts, as well as date and category views. So links like the folllowing work:

Example of a random post:
http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/2007/11/13/TinySuperheroDogsFlyVeryLow.aspx

Example of a month view:
http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/default,month,2005-09.aspx

Example of a category view:
http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/categoryview,category,cars.aspx

I also implemented redirect support for images that are linked to my site, so that images with URLs like this:

http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/content/binary/jacky.jpg should be permanently redirected to http://blog.mikefullerton.com/wp-content/oldcontent/jacky.jpg. This is the only part I don’t have working yet. It works fine on my development machine at home, but barfs on the actual server. I’m not sure why yet. Binaries in wordpress are normally loaded into the mySql database, but for my old content I decided just to have a folder for the old posts.

This was a fun little project I did in one day. If you’re interested in using this redirector website, let me know. Right now it’s hand tuned to redirect dasBlog to wordpress, but that could be abstracted a bit more for another blogging engine.

More on this later. I want to post about how I actually moved the site, which was infinitely more difficult and frustrating.

Please let me know if you have any problems.

Just upgraded to a business account with Comcast for my home internet (around $90 per month). I went with a business account because the upload speeds are faster and I get static IPs with it. They also have a promotion going now so the install was free and the monthly cost is reduced. I did have to sign a two year contract, but that’s okay.

With DSL, I was getting about 4800kb/s down and 600kb/s up. This was as fast as DSL would go with AT&T unless I switched to U-Verse. But I didn’t want U-Verse. The TV channels and DVR don’t meet my needs (missing HD channels and only 1 HD channel at a time) and the DSL is only marginally faster. Plus I haven’t heard great things about it.

With my freshly installed Comcast cable I’m getting, wait for it, 17500kb/s down and 2700kb/s up! Holy cow poo! They promise 16000kb down and 2000kb up and to my surprise it actually seems to be faster. I haven’t hooked it up to my network yet, but that’s what the installers speed report said on his laptop. I’ll let you know how fast it is according to www.dslreports.com when I hook up the LAN to it.

I can’t believe how fast this is. And because I’ve switched to Vonage for my home phone, Comcast + Vonage is much cheaper than ATT DSL + Phone. And the speeds are a bit mind boggling.

Here is my DSL speed report:

Now, some stuff annoys me. I’m annoyable. Maybe easily so. Ask anyone. But there’s a scale. For example, getting a bowie knife thrown at me, Alanis Morissette singing about ironic incidents that are about as ironic as a plucked nosehair, or getting pooped on by a bird as I was leaving to photograph a wedding – these are annoying. Teeth grindable. Kitten throwable, perhaps. But the picture below, however, represents an annoyance so epically annoying that I personally called Condoleezza Rice and asked her to have an f-15 fire a sidewinder into a Smucker’s grape jam factory storage vat’s ass. Boom! Splat! (Martha, ya’ll git me a spoon!)

This annoyance comes from the Microsoft Office 2008 for Macintosh My Day application. It’s part of Entourage, an application close to my heart, since I worked on it for so long entire species of insects evolved into sentience and then killed themselves with Carbon Dioxide emissions and political correctness pamphlets. Now, you may be asking. Um, why is that annoying, you grumpy nut-job? I mean, besides the Barney inspired, nauseous inducing color scheme? (Hello! The grape cool-aid called. She wants her color back! (Yes, the cool-aid is a she. Move on.))

Ok, here’s a clue. I didn’t run My Day. Ever. Never wanted it. (Ok, maybe I opened it once, screamed, ran out side and blew up my neighborhood’s power transformer with Coke and Pop-Rocks to cut power to my computer). But today I simply installed a update from Apple on my Mac Pro that required a restart. This annoyance foists itself on me every time I restart. Yes. Foists. Look it up, you curmudgeon. The picture was captured from my desktop about twenty seconds after the restart. The first thing I did was open the preferences.

Get it yet?

My fix for this? Compress the MyDay.app in the Microsoft Office 2008 folder with ZIP. Delete original. Go to my happy place. Breath, Mike breath.

One last thing. My happy place does not have purple anything. Even the lollipops, jawbreakers, and bubblegum are confused by the word purple there. Because they’ve never heard the word before. Purple! Huh! Whu? What is the word you are speaking sir, is it Mikelish? (My happy place, my language). Clearly, they don’t have to run Entourage. Which I do. Entourage, Damn your purple Barney hide!

I just reviewed the Amazon Kindle over on my Fiction Blog.

Check it out, here!

Microsoft is (attempting to) buy Yahoo in a hostile takeover!? Holy Crap. $44.6 Billion? Am I the only one who finds this to be mind boggling? I’m brain boggled. Perhaps this is why MSFT is current down a few dollars to $30.44. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Looks to me like HD-DVD just lost the war. So maybe it’s time to buy a Blu-Ray player. Maybe the Panasonic DMP-BD10AK. Seems to be getting good reviews on Amazon.com. Some people are buying Sony PS3s and using them. However, I hate Sony. Can’t give them my money.

Any suggestions?

I’ve been waiting for this. Apple announced their new MacPros. Yay. I priced one out. Are you sitting down? $6500 with a 30″ cinema display (which I really want). $4600 without the display. Ouch. Ow. Ouchy. Retch. Whimper.

I need a new computer. My home built PC is getting very long in the molars. My MacBook Pro is awesome, but is a bit slow for doing lots of photo stuff, especially with the files from my new 12.3 megapixel Nikon d300.

I’ll have to really think this over.

If you need an external drive enclosure that supports data mirroring, the Drobo looks like a very nice unit. Though for about a hundred more, you can get an HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server with a 500 gig drive (which is an unbelievable deal, imo).

The Drobo seems very expensive for an external drive enclosure, especially for something that doesn’t have ethernet. It definitely is a very sweet design though. I like the form factor and the red/yellow/red lights to let you know it’s failing.

I’m looking for something I can copy all of my data to and leave somewhere offsite. This is a bit expensive considering I’d have to fill it with big hard drives as well. Probably if we’re $300 I’d just buy it. I’ve bought random other external enclosures that are half the price and they’ve all sucked.

For example, I bought a Venus DS3R a while ago. This is actually a very nice enclosure except for one problem. This enclosure promises hardware RAID support. You choose how you want this configured with a small dip switch (which you can’t reach with your fingers) so I was using a small screw driver to toggle it and it broke within about fifteen minutes of opening the box (and I was very gentle). I never did get hardware RAID to work. I ended up using the Mac OS X software RAID which worked fine (though it was very slow) until it completely failed and I couldn’t even load up the individual partitions (also called slices) to recover my data. Luckily it was all backed up on my server, but now that enclosure is sitting on a shelf with 2 perfectly good 500 gig drives in it. I’m probably going to buy the Media Smart server above and throw them in there.

Anyway, the moral of the story is a) you get what you pay for b) don’t use the Mac OS software RAID.

I’m still not happy with my backup story. Still working on it. I’m terrified that my house is going to burn down or that I’ll get burgled and loose all my pictures. With only a couple exceptions, my pictures are almost the only irreplaceable items I have. I’m determined to get this solved so I just don’t have to worry about it.