Category

Internet

This category is for anything network / internet related. I use it mostly to describe website updates though.

Monday, December 29, 2008

Website Tinkering

I made a few changes around the site.  If I spent half the time making actual posts that I spend instead worrying about tiny little issues, I would have several epic novels already.  Well it’s easier to play with the site now than when I start working again soon.  My little change involves the archives.  My old site didn’t put much work into the archives, or “history” as it was called.  It pretty much generated a huge list of post titles that you could click to take you to the entry.  That’s great if I have a good descriptive title, which is maybe 20% of the time.  Your other option was to simply keep clicking “Older Entries” at the bottom of each page and read through my life backwards.  It’s a little confusing to read everything in reverse, but reverse chronological order is the best and standard way of promoting new content so that’s how it is.  You’ll see my new History section on the right of all my pages by year.  It takes you to January of each year and reads in chronological order, different than before.  Reads a little better this way.  Yearly seems to work for now, but I may change it to chapters like: “whiny freshman in college”, “internship”, “flight instructor”, “eagle first officer” if I want.  Who knows…

The other change is pretty big and affects, you guessed it, the friends page.  Yes, I still mess around with it a lot even though I haven’t made any major changes for a long while.  The page was working great, looked great, and I even installed a filter to stop Jo’s Tweets for Today (which he stopped after I mentioned it), but one problem still remained: Without the cache, it took a long time to load.  Sometimes over 60 seconds just for the server to generate the page.  It had to connect to each friends’ site and download the feed.  That’s what takes the longest.  It does apply logic and runs through algorithms to generate the final page but that’s milliseconds.  My solution involved emailing the folks at site5.com, my service hosts, and getting permission to use wget on the server.  I can now run a cron job that downloads my friends page once an hour and stores that page for the user.  So now when you click friends you’re grabbing a cached html file instead of running the php script and it loads significantly faster.  So even if it still takes 30 seconds for the php script to run its deal, who cares because it’s not the page you’re downloading anymore.

The old php script is the same url as always, http://www.darkmercury.net/site/friends/
and the new faster stored cache page is http://www.darkmercury.net/friends/

I don’t know if anyone else actually uses the page, but I think it’s a good way to keep up with everyone’s websites.  I like reading them and commenting, even if no one else does.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Almost ready to go back to work

Eclipse: you know after 3 months even the internet gets boring
krhainos: does the internet include youtube?
Eclipse: yes
krhainos: you mean ... you've ... you've watched all of youtube?
Eclipse: yes
Eclipse: ive finished the internet
Eclipse: its long
krhainos: don't spoil the ending
krhainos: i haven't gotten there yet
Eclipse: i wont
Eclipse: but it is epic
krhainos: does gaeta make out with hoshi?
Eclipse: like i said, i wont ruin it
Eclipse: but thats the start of the last chapter
krhainos: OH NO I'M NEAR THE END OF THE INTERNET?
krhainos: but it's so good, i don't want it to end
Eclipse: they leave it open for a sequel
krhainos: what's after the internet?
Eclipse: internet2

Friday, November 28, 2008

Dark Mercury 4.0

Welcome to the 4th edition of my website.  This version is based on my twitter page and powered by Expression Engine.  EE is the successor to PMachine, which powered my old site.  I know I just did an update to my site in August so you’re probably thinking, why another major update so soon?  Well, the short answer is that I have plenty of time these days.  I’ve been running the same old pmachine website for over 5 years and had the color scheme for a year before that.  So sometimes you just feel like a refresh is in order.  While the August update was an evolution, this update is a revolution.  It is hopefully the answer to many problems I have come across in the last 5 years with the old site.  Rick was talking about drupal limitations when I offered up Expression Engine as an alternative CMS to both Drupal and Wordpress.  I think at one point EE cost money for all but a demo, but these days you can download the core version of the site for free as long as you don’t use it for commercial use.  I had a default installation on my site but hadn’t touched it in months.  Well about a week ago I went back and reinstalled with the latest version and set out to see what the successor to pmachine could do for me.

Importing my posts from Pmachine was the most important and also the easiest thing to do.  While I’m sure tools exist to import wordpress, moveable type, ets blogs, the pmachine convert utility was built right in and easy.  From there I had to modify a template for a good design and usability. Thanks go out to Jo, Rick, and Alison for design feedback, ideas, and tips. 

A severe limitation of my pmachine site was that each post could only be put in one category.  EE allows me to put posts in multiple categories and is one of the biggest reasons I stuck with the upgrade.  EE seems a lot more flexible than pmachine too.  On the old site the menu on the left kept getting shorter and shorter.  I liked the collapsible sections on the side, but to keep them across all the other pages I had to use a function that prevented me from showing posts by months and other tasty features, so the new install gives me that capability. 

Another huge improvement is the URLs.  While some people may not care, I like the new readable URLs way more than the old way.  An old link to a post I made might show up as:
http://www.darkmercury.net/comments.php?id=23_0_1_0_C 

WTF is that link about?  Now The same post is represented by:
http://www.darkmercury.net/site/Six_Flags_Worlds_of_Pain/. 

Likewise http://www.darkmercury.net/index.php?id=C0_5_1
can be shown as
http://www.darkmercury.net/site/category/rants/. 

I’m pleased with how well my friends and news pages integrated with the new site as well.  I stopped using colors for consistency.  Each entry on the friends page looks very similar to a post if I made it, except it will have your RSS image in place of my categories, the title is clickable, and a link to your site is at the bottom.  Once again if you don’t set your RSS icon, it will default to one I pick for you.  If you want help changing it ask me, its quite easy.  Last time I’m talking about that. 

My pages that load in an iframe, such as my calendar and gallery are a little quirky but usable.  There was some sort of permission error with my old gallery so I reinstalled from scratch.  Pics will go up as I have time.

If you want, the old site is available at http://www.darkmercury.net/3.0/
I’m looking at getting even older backups of my site archived with the help of Jo sometime.  Guess that’s all for now

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

D-Link DSL-2320B How I loathe you.

The subject of today's rant is my old D-Link DSL-2320B modem/router. It's hard to hate something that you bought for only $10 off craigslist, but this thing drove me crazy for months. It wasn't broken equipment, DLink just made sure to cripple it for who knows why. Oh sure, on the outside it looks like a very standard piece of equipment. It's got a port for the phone line, an ethernet port, usb, reset switch etc... But to be honest this piece of junk would have worked better if it was an empty box.

I run a very standard internet setup in my apartment. There is no cable internet service, so we have DSL through Grande Communications in Texas. Despite charging us for premium service and only providing basic internet bandwith since January (now resolved), I've been pretty satisfied with their service. So I need a DSL modem which plugs into my apple airport extreme router (I know, apple what a surprise, right? Well it has a USB port I can plug our printer into so I dont need a print server). My desktop plugs into the router via cat5, all other computers/ps3 are wireless N. Giggity. What I look for in a DSL modem is simplicity. Like UNIX, do one thing and do it well. Seems like DLink's strategy is to attempt to do many things, but utterly fail at everything. Come on D-Link! It's not a complex mission I bought you for:
1:) Connect router to Grande network
2:) ???
3:) Profit!

Because I'm a hacker like yash, I decompiled the source code to the modem which is ironically written in basic:
10 Assign 192.168.1.1 to self
20 Connect to grande
30 Assign WAN IP to everything
40 COMPLETELY FUCK UP DHCP
50 Disconnect from Grande
60 Goto 10

This modem refuses to play nice with the most standard router setups. My old modem before it broke had a DHCP server - that's fine with me, I put the router in bridge mode and the dsl modem gives my computers IP addresses and interwebs. Not my preferred way, but it works. It croaked, hence me getting DLINK SPAWN OF SATAN off craigslist. DLINK also assigns itself 192.168.1.1 but won't give connected computers internal LAN IPs. It tries to give every computer connected the WAN IP and it fucks up. The only way I got it to work was basically double NAT, the router assigning DHCP fighting with DLINK on another subnet. Ugh squared.

But that's not even the worst part! The absolutely useless web interface gave me no info other than WAN IP and the fact that itself was 1.1. After installing the modem for the first time Alison and I found we couldn't reach certain websites like yahoo and my work website. A little google digging revealed that the MTU, or Max Transmission Unit was to blame. Basically when you transfer info over the internet the info is broken into little pieces called packets and the MTU is the largest size in bytes each packet can be. For ethernet/cable internet the MTU is 1500 bytes, which computers use standard. For DSL connections, depending on your provider, it is 1492 bytes. Normally your DSL modem will tell your computer you're connected with an MTU of 1492, but not DLINK, no way... That's way too helpful. You would think a DSL Modem would connect at a DSL MTU. There's no setting, nowhere on the unit where you can connect at an MTU of 1492. DLINK thinks it's easier and more obvious to dig through the registry to change it on your computer itself. Windows is nicer about it, and stores the registry key, but on OSX (3 out of 4 computers in my apt.) you have to change the MTU manually, via the console, every single time you reboot. Good riddance...goodbye DLINK I won't miss you.

Jo gave me his old Motorola Netopia 2210 DSL modem when I was last in OH and yesterday I replaced Satanlink with it. It's more of a dumb modem where I can have the router store the connection info and just use the box to dial out over PPPoE. Exactly what I was looking for. Easy, fast, stable. Do one thing and do it well. Thank you Jo.

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Website updates for november

I've got enough website news to warrant its own post I think. I'll talk about this stuff first so the post will sink to the bottom.

Well the big news is aphelionsites.net, my former webdomain expired, as planned. Not too big of a deal since I don't use it much. What this means is some hotlinked images might not show up. I tried to look through my history and correct these errors, but some may still exist. The DGS site was the only website still using the domain, so that's been moved to http://www.darkmercury.net/dgs. If you can't or don't want to remember that you can find the link in my featured section. While I was messing with that I also embedded the quakecon video into the related DGS and DarkMercury pages, so it can be watched without downloading the whole thing.

Next up is the "Categories" selection at the top left of the site. You can click there or on the category image to a page showing all my website categories. From there, click on any you want to read about.. say Flying posts.. and voila! You're now seeing only Flying related website entries. That's pretty neat. A simple feature but long missing.

And the Friends page update...Every time I post I say it's the last time I'm gonna change it. It's kind of ended up full circle. The old versions showed only one post, but you got to see what was going on in all my friend's lives at a glance. If someone posted multiple times quickly, I wouldn't see any but the latest post. I was overjoyed to prove the concept of creating a Livejournal emulation from just RSS links, but that led to a lot of posts from one or two people at the top and everyone else lost at the bottom. I changed it to unlimited posts for 24 hours (so I wont miss any) and after that it just shows your latest entry. All sorted by date of post and I think I like it this way. It's kinda come back to where it was before. I also chopped the time off the post, leaving just the date. It looks cleaner. Anyways I'll see how I like it this way. I still have my LJ style proof of concept at http://www.darkmercury.net/friendsunlimited.php.

News Page opens links in a new window by default now...I removed the comment word bubbles that I was experimenting with this morning. I think that's it.