Ben Roberts » Technical

Can this really be true?

ben.l.roberts — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 11:36:07 +0000

Buried deep in this news article about Intel’s struggle with AMD is the following revelation:

Interestingly, Google (Research) is probably the most important of the white box makers today. According to some industry experts, Google is now assembling so many of its own servers that it may be the third or fourth-largest server maker in the world.

Can this really be true? I wonder how ‘some industry experts’ have worked this out.

Podbop

ben.l.roberts — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 11:40:07 +0000

Podbop is an interesting idea. I guess you could call it a variation on ‘geopodcasting’ — they podcast bands that are playing in your town in the next few months. Unfortunately it’s US-only at the moment. It also relies on bands having MP3s available on their websites. However, I would imagine that is usually the case with with smaller bands. If it’s bigger acts you want to go and see you probably don’t need to hear a podcast to find out what they sound like …

Bogons

ben.l.roberts — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 17:31:15 +0000

Had my first encounter with Bogons while setting up WordPress.

Installing WordPress was fairly easy but I couldn’t work out why the server could only be seen from certain parts of the network. Luckily David managed to put me straight. It turned out that lots of UK ADSL networks were getting blocked by some over-zealous bogon checking on the firewall. Bogons are basically ‘bogus’ network addresses, addresses that are not supposed to be valid. The problem with blocking bogons is that new internet addresses are constantly being allocated, so addresses that are bogus at one point become valid later.