Ajax + high speed broadband + thin client consoles == web 2.1

…or, the reasoning behind the Nintendo Revolution…?

I don’t know, a little too tired to think tonight. Something along these lines struck me as clever on the way home tonight, and has since faded into an imprecise formulation. So let’s pretend I said that first bit confidently and followed it with…

Discuss.

Apologies for continuing messups with my linklog – the service that powers it – del.icio.us is experiencing some hiccups, ostensibly due to a power outage. Hopefully normally service will resume shortly.

My conspiracy theory? The Yahoo is in the process of rebranding their recent acquisition.

Some b*****d has started spoofing email spam from one of my domain names; the net result of which is that I’m now getting 40-60 rejected, bounced or “out-of-office” email replies each day! Although I use a secondary account for that domain, its still a massive pain — does anyone know a way to deal with this? Will complaining to my domain name provider help?

My NAS drive (of which I have recently blogged) stopped working last night, much to my chagrin. With much need of the library of music on it (today in particular), I was quite concerned. Reinstalling drivers, fiddling with Windows hard drive utilities, all did nothing.

Then I ran “chkdsk”, (or, more precisefly “chkdsk /f”) Microsoft’s old disk utility. Fixed it a charm.

Sometimes its good to be a geek.

Bizarre; my net connection kept dropping out last night and I was worried it might be my service provider – but it wasn’t – MSN Messenger’s troubleshooter managed to track down the true source of my problem (and I only activated it by mistake, meaning to press “close” when that window popped up). Something to do with my DNS server not being able to allocate IP addresses, presumably due to some configuration glitch on my machine.

How strange! It would have to be Halloween when MS gets stuff like this right!

Chris asked me about my NAS solution following his blog post about them.

I have a neat little Freecom box – after over a year working for Cisco and talking about their storage solutions, I guess I wanted more than was otherwise available over my network, and, more critically, I’ve recently swapped rooms and my would-be-fileserver is no longer physically connected to my switch/router directly, but via a WLAN.

The problem, therefore, was remotely accessing files off my PC, via two wireless links (from wireless laptop –> switch –> PC and back). It was a latency-filled nightmare and I just couldn’t get the data throughput I needed, even with a 54MBps WLAN. So… the need for a NAS drive.

Of course, the choice of drive was based purely on price and user reviews; I have a pure Windows network so I wasn’t worried about compatibility issues, simply that it worked in the way I needed it to, and the user reviews on Ebuyer and elsewhere were promising.

And it worked well out of the box: following plugging in the 250GB behemoth and sticking some fairly cumbersome drivers on each client machine I wanted to access the drive, it appeared “as local” on each machine, with far less latency than I had had to deal with previously. Of course, transferring the 40GB of music onto it was just too slow over the WLAN — and so I used the USB2.0 socket it had available to get it over more rapidly. The device can only be registered on one protocol at a time, so it disconnected from other machine for the brief periods I was overriding the NDAS functionality and treating it as a USB2.0 external drive.

The net result? I’m pleased with it. My MP3s and video files reside on it and are easily accessible. I have had problems with lag when dealing with different media players, but I believe this is as much a feature of the fact that my music collection is 40GB big and the database functions of these media players are lacking, as much as with inherent delay over my network. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that, latency wise, its only marginally worse than dealing with local files.

So; all good? No. The drivers are a beast – the LPX (“lean packet exchange”) protocol required by Windows is cumbersome and has caused instability in my desktop (although my laptop has had no issue). And wireless seems incapable of dealing with sustained data throughput in the same way that ethernet can, so there is occasional ‘clicking’ and lag, as well as brief periods of the drive disconnecting itself — although the software is good enough to deal with this reasonably seamlessly. And — a minor gripe — the box is quite big and slightly noisy. That said, with the switch in a separate room, I don’t really care, and my net storage situation is improved. I’d definitely recommend it…

…I do.

In the UK, my service provider, Bulldog, gives me amazingly quick eight meg broadband and I’ve been completely spoiled by it. Here, in Malaysia at my folks place, am stuck with a paltry one meg with Streamyx (which, bizarrely, costs only marginally less than Bulldog despite the fact that the Malaysian dollar is grossly devalued against the pound), and am getting frustrated with Flickr, that oh-so-good-but-apparently-bandwidth-intensive photo sharing service. Anyone have any idea how intensive on el bandwidth it really is?

Of course, it could be that Flickr’s servers are just far away, but I’m happier blaming Streamyx, who have been known to be rubbish in the past…

With all that in mind, photos of the wedding might have to wait till I’m back in 8 meg land on Monday…

Have just gone “PRO” on Flickr. Good business model; create a great product that doesn’t seem limited… and then have people discover the limitations just after it becomes valuable to them as a service.

Fortunately the US$ is still rubbish so it didn’t cost too much… a small birthday present to myself.