Wow! We just got back from a tricky problem with the server… Gentoo (of which I’m *still* somewhat of a fan) decided to do some, er, *interesting* changes to config in the last emerge.
Thanks to Pete at Bytemark for some great help to get back online.
The BBC have released some info on their website usage stats on the 7th of July at the time of the terrorist bomb attacks in London. It makes some interesting reading, too! “At peak times during the day there were 40,000 page requests per second from News; Total maximum bandwidth from bbc.co.uk reached: 11.1Gb/s”. That’s not bad going.
Here’s an interesting site, in which you shouldn’t click (and they almost laugh at you if you do!)
I just watched the BBC’s video highlights (see main page) of George Galloway on Capitol Hill. I know, as most sane people know, that much of what constitutes American politics (don’t even mention “justice”) isn’t built on intelligent reasoning, but if that is the best Senator-lawyer combination they can come up with, it’s quite a scary situation.
In any case, nice one George – I hope they make the mistake of continuing to persue it!
While snooping that slightly mad Phobile Handset over at Firebox the other day, I noticed their VoIP Cyberphone, which seems to answer my previous question on what’s out there in the Skype phone world. Anybody tried this out?
Pocket Lint has a review of the quite cool (IMHO) Phobile Handset from Firebox. I have to say I don’t think it’s as ironic and throw-away as both the review and Firebox themselves say. Like most people I know I never use a landline, so at home it’d be pretty useful to have a “large-format” handset. Of course, this is all academic when you use Skype for all your calls, but for the incoming it’s quite nice.
I’m not given to going into Hard Rock Café, but I can’t disagree with this.
pasta and vinegar reports (via RIM – Ami Ben-Bassat’s Blog) how Dr. Yossi Vardi, with Ami Ben-Bassat, a science writer, and Guy Vardi, “the CPO (chief pigeon/technical officer)” ran a test of Pigeon-Empowered Wireless Internet to “try and improve Wi-Fly – pigeon-empowered wireless internet and to confront this technology against ADSL”.
Looks like it worked. Nice one. Not sure if the design of the pigeon graphic was *meant* to look like a peace dove, but it’d be nice, wouldn’t it?
“Oh dear.”
That’s how the BBC News website put it, when trying to be polite about Madrid’s Olympic website. I feel kind of bad for them, even though I’ve not exactly been forgiving myself, when commenting on the state of Web Española.
Unfortunately, there’s no arguing with the BBC’s point of view (“Right from the start, the technology breaks down.”) The fact that this is highly representative is frankly depressing. I still haven’t worked even *once* for a local internet client who had the right perspective: *cheap* is king here, thinking small the norm. Currently I’m working for a Spanish company but not one member of the staff, founders included, is from anywhere near Spain (I’m from the closest location, come to think of it – it’s only a thousand miles to Manchester!)
And that’s the way it is. When I came to Barcelona in 1999 I was mildly surprised at the state of affairs, but then again that’s why our Barcelona-based client had chosen a London agency to take it into new web territory. I kept telling myself and others “oh, it’ll catch up, things’ll even out.” I still find myself stuck with that mantra, although I don’t bother to trot it out anymore. I don’t think things *will* catch up or even out. When the opportunity to make some strides came, in the shape of the high take-up of mobile here, I had believed this might be it. But no, it’s been the same old story: no imagination.
[Update 2005-05-25: looks like they actually took the time to listen to some opinions as the site has been slightly spiced and they seem to have got rid of the “Why Madrid?” slogan… doesn’t *anybody* involved with their campaign speak English?]
Just a few days ago, I moved over to using Subversion for version control instead of good ‘ol CVS. Although it’s basically CVS evolved, it somehow *feels* different. Anyway, so far so good. I’ll report back here if there’s anything interesting to report.
