Monthly Archive for June, 2005

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Internet activity in the EU

Published on June 16, 2005 in Belgium and internet. Closed

The sport of data consolidation: I got my hands on the number of domainnames for all EU countries (June 2005) and combined those with the # pages in Google for each TLD (Top Level Domain, like .be or .fr) and the population statistics for the EU countries. Some Excel activity later, this is what I got:

Registration activity

This is the number of registered domains per 1000 inhabitants. It might give an indication of how ‘normal’ it is to have your own website.
This is the Top 5:

ext country domains persons dom/1000
.dk Denmark 166.414 5.410.000 30,76
.nl Netherlands 405.721 16.300.000 24,89
.de Germany 1.194.366 82.720.000 14,44
.ee Estonia 18.088 1.340.000 13,50
.at Austria 93.689 8.160.000 11,48

Remarks: Estonia seems a surprising entry here, but actually Poland and the Czech Republic aren’t doing that bad either. Better than Belgium, actually.

Authoring activity

This is the average # web pages per person for each country. I estimated the #pages per TLD as a Google query on “xx site:.xx”. (so for belgium, a search on “be site:.be”). If the number of pages is a rough estimator of how much information is available, then this is an indicator of how productive the information producers of the country are.
This is the Top 5:

ext country Google pages persons pages/pers
.lu Luxembourg 1.670.000 455.000 3,67
.uk United Kingdom 174.000.000 59.900.000 2,90
.fi Finland 14.400.000 5.250.000 2,74
.se Sweden 17.800.000 9.040.000 1,97
.ee Estonia 2.280.000 1.340.000 1,70

Remarks: Luxembourg, the country where everyone wants to work and pay taxes but no one wants to live. And again Estonia, up there with the Scandinavian connection and the English!

Site size

This is the average # web pages per domain for each country. This might be an indicator of web site size – the work a webmaster puts in his creation – or just verbosity (hey, the French are first, and then the Spanish, and they DO talk a lot).
This is the Top 5:

ext country Google pages domains pages/dom
.fr France 43.900.000 72.338 607
.es Spain 12.400.000 25.988 477
.fi Finland 14.400.000 30.182 477
.lu Luxembourg 1.670.000 4.458 375
.uk United Kingdom 174.000.000 495.041 351

Remarks: the best place to be a webmaster is France. The web sites are large, you have no competition from the US or South-America (no one speaks English or Spanish) and there’s lots of domain names still available.

All data:

TLD Description DOMAINS SHARE GOOGLE POPULATION PAGE/
PERSON 		DOM/
1000 		PAG/
DOM
at Austria� 93.689 2,8% 10.300.000 8.160.000 1,26 11,48 110
be Belgium� 72.949 2,1% 10.600.000 10.440.000 1,02 6,99 145
cz Czech Republic� 79.612 2,3% 8.350.000 10.230.000 0,82 7,78 105
dk Denmark� 166.414 4,9% 8.250.000 5.410.000 1,52 30,76 50
ee Estonia� 18.088 0,5% 2.280.000 1.340.000 1,70 13,50 126
fi Finland� 30.182 0,9% 14.400.000 5.250.000 2,74 5,75 477
fr France� 72.338 2,1% 43.900.000 60.290.000 0,73 1,20 607
de Germany� 1.194.366 35,2% 62.800.000 82.720.000 0,76 14,44 53
gr Greece� 21.851 0,6% 5.040.000 11.210.000 0,45 1,95 231
hu Hungary� 63.846 1,9% 5.600.000 10.080.000 0,56 6,33 88
ie Ireland� 13.441 0,4% 640.000 4.030.000 0,16 3,34 48
it Italy� 211.700 6,2% 25.500.000 58.600.000 0,44 3,61 120
lv Latvia� 8.061 0,2% 2.020.000 2.300.000 0,88 3,50 251
lt Lithuania� 8.924 0,3% 1.890.000 3.430.000 0,55 2,60 212
lu Luxembourg� 4.458 0,1% 1.670.000 455.000 3,67 9,80 375
nl Netherlands� 405.721 12,0% 20.700.000 16.300.000 1,27 24,89 51
pl Poland� 294.651 8,7% 7.780.000 36.130.000 0,22 8,16 26
pt Portugal� 16.056 0,5% 3.690.000 10.460.000 0,35 1,53 230
sk Slovak Republic� 23.719 0,7% 2.600.000 5.380.000 0,48 4,41 110
si Slovenia� 11.021 0,3% 2.060.000 1.960.000 1,05 5,62 187
es Spain� 25.988 0,8% 12.400.000 43.430.000 0,29 0,60 477
se Sweden� 61.499 1,8% 17.800.000 9.040.000 1,97 6,80 289
uk United Kingdom� 495.041 14,6% 174.000.000 59.900.000 2,90 8,26 351

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In mirror, with camera

Published on June 15, 2005 in photography. Closed

Amusing idea from Paul: upload your own picture of you, photographing yourself in the mirror. The ideal chance to show off that 12 megapixel €2500 camera beast your girlfriend almost didn’t let you buy.

Contribute to the fun! Shoot your picture in the mirror and upload it here! (how long can it take? 3 minutes?)


Dude in kimono, Japan
Two nerds, Belgium

http://www.pixagogo.com/7249135829

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Convert Bind DNS zone into PTR records

Published on June 15, 2005 in Linux. 1 Comment

The following script I made in order to convert the forward DNS records in a /var/named/db.[domain] file into the correct format for a reverse DNS db.[subnet prefix] file.

#!/bin/sh
(...)
DNSROOT=/var/named
PREFIX=$1
DOMAIN=$2
shift 2
DNSPRE=$DNSROOT/db.$PREFIX
DNSDOM=$DNSROOT/db.$DOMAIN
echo "; save this in $DNSPRE"
(
if [ -f $DNSDOM ] ; then
cat $DNSDOM
| grep $PREFIX
| grep -w "A"
| sed "s/$PREFIX.*//g"
| gawk "BEGIN {OFS = "t" ;} {print $4,"IN","PTR",$1 ".$DOMAIN.",";; FROM `basename $DNSDOM`" }"
fi

if [ -f $DNSPRE ] ; then
cat $DNSPRE
| grep -w "PTR"
| gawk "BEGIN {OFS = "t" ;} {print $1,$2,$3,$4,";; FROM `basename $DNSPRE` "; }"
fi )
| sort -n
| uniq --check-chars=3

You would call it as follows:
revdns.sh 192.168.110 internal.example.com > new.db.192.168.110 and then replace the records of the original db.192.168.110 with the records of the new file. The script still requires manual intervention (you cannot pipe the result straight into a live Bind config file) but saves a lot of typing!

Example of the output:

201 IN PTR james.internal.example.be. ;; FROM db.internal.example.com
202 IN PTR wilbur.internal.example.be. ;; FROM db.internal.example.com
216 IN PTR appprd1.internal.example.com. ;; FROM db.192.168.110
217 IN PTR appprd2.internal.example.com. ;; FROM db.192.168.110
218 IN PTR appprd3.internal.example.com. ;; FROM db.192.168.110
219 IN PTR appprd4.internal.example.com. ;; FROM db.192.168.110
220 IN PTR appprd5.internal.example.com. ;; FROM db.192.168.110
221 IN PTR appprd6.internal.example.com. ;; FROM db.192.168.110

Using movies on a web page

Published on June 9, 2005 in media and webdev. 4 Comments


So you recorded those first steps of your youngest, your first public milonga performance, uncle Tom falling backwards into that cake, or auntie Janet dressed like a man. Now you want to show into to the world. You save the movie into a .WMV (Windows Media – Video), .RM (Real Media), .MOV (Quicktime), .MPG or .MP4 (MPEG-2 or MPEG-4) , .SWF (Shockwave/Flash) or .AVI (Microsoft Video for Windows) file, sprinkled some Sorenson or DivX magic on it (if you’re not familiar with these terms, don’t worry. It’s another topic alltogether), upload it to your web server, and then what? What is the best way to present it to your visitors?

ANCHOR tag – a plain link

Works: everywhere
Description: Provide just a link to the movie file, and count on the user’s browser to figure out which application it should give the URL to. WMV files will generally open in Windows Media Player, MOV files in Quicktime, but there is no way to be sure what AVI and MPG files will open in. This depends on the client’s configuration. An additional disadvantage is that a lot of browsers will first download the whole file and only then play it, so you lose the quasi-immediate start of a streaming experience.

EMBED tag

Works: everywhere
Description: even if it is not part of the HTML specification, it should work everywhere. It can be as minimal as <embed src="http://www.example.com/movie.avi">, but also allows the specifying of size, mime-type and player controls. It does not allow you to specify what program (and what version) should be used to play it. It’s again the user’s (browser) configuration that decides.

OBJECT tag

Works: everywhere
Description: this is the official way to do it (according to the HTML specs). You create an <OBJECT> ... </OBJECT> pair with a bunch of PARAM in between. Here is the way to do it with Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, QuickTime and Shockwave/Flash. A very common practice is to combine the EMBED with OBJECT, like in the example below.

IMG with dynsrc

Works: only in Internet Explorer (Windows)
Description: very easy to use, but poorly supported. Allows for combining the classic SRC with the DYNSRC property, so that even if the browser does not show the movie, it can still show an image.

MEDIAPLAYER page

Works: everywhere (if it’s done right)
Description: if you’re a bit handy, you can create a wrapper page for your streaming media. I use my Cinema Tool to show movies. I just input the URL, the format and the size, and the rest is automatic. On podcasts like Traxsource, I use a special audio-only player page (not yet generally available) that shows the playlist (a web page) within the media player (SMIL for Real & QuickTime/ASX for WMV).

IFRAME with MEDIAPLAYER

Works: everywhere (but watch out for Javascript scripts like Adsense/counter pages – they can give errors in frames)
Description: If you don’t want to send your visitors to a new or a popup page, consider inserting a IFRAME into your page. You can then even trigger new movies by just adding a link with the right TARGET. Remark: if you add a link like described in the ANCHOR example above, even with the right TARGET specified, the file will probably open outside of the browser, and not in the IFRAME where you want it. Webmastering shouldn’t be THAT easy!

Also see: fluffbucket.com – Comparison of media players

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