Archive for the 'internet' Category

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More globalisation, please

Published on September 12, 2006 in internet. 2 Comments

A while back I bought the whole suite of Edward Tufte books: “The visual display of quantitative data“, “Envisioning Information” and “Visual Explanations“.

Today my copy of “Beautiful evidence” arrived in the mail. Actually a Belgian Post employee came to drop it off, because I had to pay 10 euro douane/customs. For a book of $52, that is an unpleasant extra 25%.

Beautiful Evidence: by Edward Tufte

The legislation that was printed on the back of the receipt states that any item from outside the EU, with a value higher than 22 euro, or not conform to ’small letter mail of non-commercial kind’ (up to 45 euro), or containing goods from outside the EU should be presented to customs. Standard fee: 10 euro. I have just ordered a t-shirt from SomaFM ($50), I wonder what customs will think of that.

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Please make this pay

Published on June 13, 2006 in Society and internet. 13 Comments

One of the memes going round for the moment is a guy whose girlfriend will let him live his dream (a threesome) if his website pleasemakethiswork.com receives 5.000.000 hits by the end of this year. It’s a bit like the million-dollar-page but with a (sexy) twist. I first read it through Littl’ Q (where she gets her info from, that’s a mystery) and when I saw it hitting the Belgian mainstream Standaard Blog, I took a look at the page.

Looks authentic

First impressions

As one would say in French: “plutot sympa”. You see the couple: Richard Green, an ex-cricket player and Rachel Greenwood both smiling in the camera while they draw up the paperwork. They look like ‘regular people’. The site is very simple (1 page, 1 image of the contract, and a small home video of the two confirming the deal) and the layout looks like it might have been done by a non-webdesigner. To be honest, real beginners tend to be overenthusiastic with fonts and colors but this site is not like that.
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Bouncing email

Published on May 14, 2006 in internet. 1 Comment

You've got mail
If you have sent me an email in the last two days, you will likely have gotten a bounce like “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender“. Please resend your message because your mail server is indeed right: my email addresses @forret.com were unavailable this Friday and Saturday.

The reason: I was too late for the renewal of my domain smoothouse.org so it expired, my Coditel broadband connection was down so I didn’t notice that my mails stopped coming in until Saturday. I did some emergency DNS adjustments, changed those, and then still did some other stuff, and so this is the situation 24 hours later:

  • my email addresses @forret.com are now served by Dreamhost and they should work. (when all DNS updates have propagated through this universe)
  • my DNS management for forret.com is now also at Dreamhost, which makes life a lot easier for me now (e.g. creating barcamp.forret.com was a piece of cake – with an external DNS that’s always a bit more tricky)
  • my web tools are now at web.forret.com/tools instead of at www.forret.com. In short: the domain www.forret.com can not be hosted by someone else than Dreamhost, but my web tools have to run on Windows (ASP), which my Dreamhost account does not have. Hence: web.forret.com, which is my Windows hosting account. However, since www.forret.com now runs on Apache, I can do automatic redirects with mod-rewrite, so that *should* be transparent to users.
  • I’ve lost my domain smoothouse.org – must check with Hostbasket if I can get it back during the DNS holding period.
  • my Smoothouse content can now be found on xampled.com/smoothouse (e.g. my collection of house podcasts)
  • my Smoothpod Mashup podcast has moved to www.xampled.com/smoothpod.
    UPDATE : and it has now moved to mashup.xampled.com
  • The Webjay wizard has moved to my web tools, where it belonged anyway.
  • my HTTP header analyzer has also moved to the web tools, together with it’s companion the Squid Cache policy checker. (I bet you don’t have one of those, right?)
  • I have at last been able to give my sister and father back their @forret.com address (long story). And I gave my mom a new one, for Mother’s Day!

So: please resend your messages, certainly if they were about Barcamp Brussels.

Bluehost vs Dreamhost

Published on April 14, 2006 in bandwidth and internet. 34 Comments

As you might have read in my Migrating to Wordpress article, I am now the proud owner of both a Bluehost and Dreamhost account. These two shared hosting providers have similar strong offerings for a similar low price, but they’re nevertheless different. Let’s compare both:

The raw numbers

BLUEHOST.COM
Bluehost		 DREAMHOST.COM
Dreamhost
PRICE
$6.95/mon (2 years prepaid) $7.95/mon (2 years prepaid)
FEATURES
  • 10 GB storage
  • 250GB/mon bandwidth
  • 20 GB storage
  • 1000GB/mon bandwidth
  • 6 domains, 20 subdomains
  • 50 MySQL, 50 Postgres DB
  • 2500 email addresses
  • PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails
  • unlimited domains
  • unlimited MySQL DBs
  • unlimited email addresses
  • PHP, Ruby on Rails
ONE-CLICK Install
CPanel/Fantastico: Wordpress, pMachine, Nucleus, Drupal, Joomla, PhpNuke, Typo3, phpBB2, OS Commerce, Coppermine, Gallery, PHPList, Advanced Poll, PHProject, SohoLaunch, PhpWiki, PhpAdsNew, WebCalendar, Moodle, … Home-made: Wordpress, phpBB, Advanced Poll, osCommerce, MediaWiki, Joomla, Gallery, WebCalendar

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IVI: Internet voor Iedereen

Published on April 12, 2006 in Belgium, Society, bandwidth, internet and windows. 1 Comment

Internet voor iedereenIf your (Belgian) parents or grand-parents want to buy a cheap PC to get started on the Web, tell them to hold back for a couple more days. The Federal Government – through FEDICT – has set up a program to sponsor a complete package of PC + software + broadband + training for a sharp price. The title of the project: IVI or “Internet voor Iedereen” – the launch is planned for next week, April 18th.
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Barcamp Brussels: May 2006

Published on March 19, 2006 in Belgium, Web2.0, advertising, internet and webdev. 7 Comments Tags: , .

Barcamp Brussel
Last year we organised a fairly successfull blogger’s dinner in Brussels, and now we’re gonna try something different:
next May we will have a Barcamp Brussels event.

WHAT IS A BARCAMP?

Barcamp NY
(photo by miss_rogue)

Barcamp was first organised in LA by Chris Messina and some buddies.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

It is not your regular conference:

  • No spectators, only participants: Attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one. All presentions are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall.
  • No fixed agenda: talks, demos and topics are proposed by the attendees when they arrive on a central whiteboard.

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Saving the Net (Doc Searls)

Published on March 7, 2006 in internet. 0 Comments


In November last year, Doc Searls published a lengthy article in LinuxJournal: “Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes“. It is an essential piece of reading.

This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future.

The topic of the essay is this: the big (telco/media) corporations are dying to take over the Net, manage it the corporate style and charge for any use of the Internet. At the same time they want to get rid of the wild, pioneering spirit that brought us avalanches of innovation and the occasional disruptive force like Amazon, Ebay, MP3 and BitTorrent.
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Broadband in Brussels

Published on February 17, 2006 in Belgium, Brussel, bandwidth and internet. 2 Comments

(post seems to have disappeared when I migrated to Wordpress
I have what is proving to be an expensive habit: I’m subscribed to over 30 podcasts (including e.g. Diggnation at 300MB/week), I regularly download software to try out, I use BitTorrent on a regular basis, I buy stuff on iTunes. All that adds up to more than my allowance my ISP subscription gives me (20GB per month). Most of the months I pay an extra €8 per 10GB.

I’m a Coditel customer (cable provider in the part of Brussels where I live). I started out on ADSL until I got loads of technical problems and Belgacom/Skynet could not solve them. My current bandwidth is not bad (although not as fast as Telenet):

http://www.adslbox.be speed test results:
- Download speed : 4415 kbit/s or 552 kbyte/s
(in theory it should be 10.000 kbit/s)
- Upload speed : 233 kbit/s or 29 kbyte/s
Wed Feb 15 2006 at 20:59:42 UTC+0100

But now I want to know: do I have the best formula? So I collected some data. On vergelijking.be all the provider formulas are listed, but the list is not up-to-date. I collected all the latest numbers from the ISPs’ homepages. I got some real throughput statistics from adslbox.be and ispmonitor.be.

BROADBAND PRICES

Broadband in Belgium: sorted by price
The cheapest broadband one can get is Coditel LightClick: 22,90 € for 1 Mbps. The best price/speed you can get is Telenet ExpressnetTurbo (60€ for a theorethical 20Mbps and an actual throughput of about 11 Mbps). The one to avoid is Belgacom ADSL Light: 30 € for a meager 0,5 Mbps.

COST OF 50GB/MON

Now let’s see what happens if I would go to 50GB data transfer per month. Only 6 providers allow for this, either because their GB/mon allowance is big enough or because the price per extra GB is acceptable:
Broadband in Belgium: cost of 50GB/mon
Where I live, I cannot get BruTele or Chello, so the only options are Coditel (cable) and Dommel, RealDSL or Mobistar (ADSL).

GB/MON ALLOWANCE

Broandband in Belgium: GB/mon allowance
There are a 6 broadband subscriptions that allow unlimited download allowances: Dommel Netconnect Pro, BruTele @Home and @Turbo, RealDSL Basic and GeekDSL and Chello Extreme. The only options for me in Brussels are the 2 ADSL ones, of which the Dommel one is excessively expensive (€150/month).

CONCLUSION

For Brussels, Coditel is still a very good option (now if they could update that empty FAQ page that doesn’t seem to have been updated since the nineties). There is no point in switching from SpeedClick to MegaClick for the GB/mon only, but if the speed is really the double (in theory 20Mbps instead of 10Mbps) it might be a nice upgrade. I don’t need something like 200GB/month yet, but if I would, then RealDSL would be the best option.

If you live in Flanders and your main concern is speed, go Telenet ExpressNet Turbo. If you need loads of GB/month, go Chello Extreme (where possible) or RealDSL.

UPDATE
RealDSL does NOT accept any new subscriptions since October 2005, since there seem to be a capacity problem with its bandwidth provider Telenet. Luc and Cindy blogged about this earlier, so I have no excuse for my sloppy research. The only DSL provider with a unlimited bandwidth offer seems to be Dommel, but at an extreme high price. Their €33/50GB is however a good offer. Thanks for the update, Smetty!