I did it again. This time, the bundle was a games bundle (The Humble Bundle for Android 4), which is Humble's normal fare. Also this time, I was able to collect data from the very beginning. There was a period of 7 hours where my server got turned off and no data was collected, but that time slot was in the middle of the data collection with no major events occurring near it. I patched it up with a little bit of linear interpolation. It shows up on the Marginal Average Price as a plateau, but is otherwise unremarkable.
One thing about this graph that I was not able to capture last time is that the average price was actually highest at the beginning, before sinking to a low, and then slowly rising. The "event" in the middle is when games from the previous Android bundle were added as an additional bonus. Interestingly, I was able to purchase at the point of lowest average price though I did beat it by making my purchase price a nice round number, thereby contributing to the bounce-back of the average price from its initial fall.
The initial fall is probably due to a bunch of people paying $0, or $1 immediately just to get the basic games and/or Steam keys.
The ramp-up of initial purchases is quite high, as you can see.
In this case at least, the initial "bump" was much more significant than the subsequent "blip" produced by adding more bonus content. A lot of people already have the previous bundle games, so this is somewhat expected.
Here again is the raw data, for those who might be interested:
Because some people simply can't handle the true scope of my geekiness.
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Thursday, November 01, 2012
Humble Bundle Data - Results
In my previous post, I said I was going to finish collecting data for the rest of the Humble eBook Bundle at humblebundle.com and post the results here.
The results are in. This was probably the most successful Humble Bundle to date, based on the ending average price. Let's look at the data for the Average Price over Time.
You may notice that bump in the middle of the graph. That is the point in time when several PDF comic books were added to the Humble eBook Bundle. This had the effect of pushing a lot of fence-sitters over the edge to purchase the bundle, as well as increase the margin by which purchasers were willing to "beat" the average price.
You may notice that the Total Purchases graph has some missing data at the beginning. This is because initially I only collected the Average Price (and I was over an hour late in starting that collection). The bundle started at 10:00 AM PDT; I started recording the average price at 11:30 AM, and I started collecting the total number of purchases at 5:30 PM.
With those two numbers, I was able to calculate the total revenue collected. Later, I added direct collection of this figure.
As you can see from the graph. At no point did the average price go down much at all (there were a few times it went down a penny or two). This answers the question I was initially asking, at least for this bundle: should I wait for a lower price? The answer is of course emphatically no. If I was going to beat the average price, the time to do it was as early as possible.
I do seem to recall bundle average prices going down in past bundles, but this may have been due to abuse by people pumping the system for free and/or very cheap Steam keys. That practice seems to have been cracked down upon with CAPTCHAs (remember: only use your scripting powers for good), and the momentum of the price and interest in the bundle seems to have been maintained by the addition of the bonus content. I would expect similar measures in the future.
As it turned out, I when the extra bonus content was added, it was also added to the account of everyone who had previously purchased the bundle, whether they beat the average or not, so I ended up with all but the initial two bonus books.
These marginal rates were all calculated from the previous values. It would be interesting to have better data at the beginning of the data set. I'm curious to know how the profile of the initial wave compares to the second bump. You can't really tell with the first seven hours missing, unfortunately. My suspicion is that the secondary bump was sharper than the initial wave, mostly because I believe that the secondary wave was largely fence-sitters who had not bought because they thought the price was too high for the content offered. When more content was offered (and considering the content), they immediately jumped on it.
It should be noted that the website data is far from perfect. The totals sometimes went down from one reading to the next, and after the bundle had ended, the numbers were still in flux for several hours, but at the scale of these graphs, the fluctuations are insignificant.
If you would like to look at my raw data, I will provide it for download in its unprocessed CSV format generated by my script, as well as the Excel spreadsheet that I used to calculate the missing values and create these fancy graphs.
Here is the data:
Here is the final form of the script I used to create this data:
Enjoy!
The results are in. This was probably the most successful Humble Bundle to date, based on the ending average price. Let's look at the data for the Average Price over Time.
![]() |
| Average Price over Time |
![]() |
| Total Purchases over Time |
![]() |
| Total Revenue over Time |
As you can see from the graph. At no point did the average price go down much at all (there were a few times it went down a penny or two). This answers the question I was initially asking, at least for this bundle: should I wait for a lower price? The answer is of course emphatically no. If I was going to beat the average price, the time to do it was as early as possible.
I do seem to recall bundle average prices going down in past bundles, but this may have been due to abuse by people pumping the system for free and/or very cheap Steam keys. That practice seems to have been cracked down upon with CAPTCHAs (remember: only use your scripting powers for good), and the momentum of the price and interest in the bundle seems to have been maintained by the addition of the bonus content. I would expect similar measures in the future.
As it turned out, I when the extra bonus content was added, it was also added to the account of everyone who had previously purchased the bundle, whether they beat the average or not, so I ended up with all but the initial two bonus books.
These marginal rates were all calculated from the previous values. It would be interesting to have better data at the beginning of the data set. I'm curious to know how the profile of the initial wave compares to the second bump. You can't really tell with the first seven hours missing, unfortunately. My suspicion is that the secondary bump was sharper than the initial wave, mostly because I believe that the secondary wave was largely fence-sitters who had not bought because they thought the price was too high for the content offered. When more content was offered (and considering the content), they immediately jumped on it.
![]() |
| Marginal Purchases (every 15 minutes) |
![]() |
| Marginal Revenue (every 15 minutes) |
![]() |
| Marginal Average Price (every 15 minutes) |
If you would like to look at my raw data, I will provide it for download in its unprocessed CSV format generated by my script, as well as the Excel spreadsheet that I used to calculate the missing values and create these fancy graphs.
Here is the data:
Here is the final form of the script I used to create this data:
Enjoy!
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Humble Bundle Data - Collection
Today was the launch of the Humble eBook Bundle. The way that Humble Bundles work is that the site lists a collection of downloadable items (traditionally games, but lately they have branched out into music, and now books). You can pay any price (including free, if you choose) for the bundle, and it's yours. You can even tweak how much of your purchase price goes (directly) to the content creators, the Humble Bundle site, and a few charities.
Well, not all of the bundle is yours at any price. There are bonus items, which are typically the best of the bunch. To get these items, you are required to beat the average price of the bundle so far.
Well, I like bundles, and I like e-books, so I decided to get the bundle. But I wasn't prepared to pay the price at the time to get the two bonus books. They looked good, but the average price was then just over $9, and I thought that if I was going to spend that much money on an e-book, did I really want the ones offered? I would be willing to bite--but only if the price went down. Humble Bundles typically hover around the $5-7 range for unlocking the bonus content, which for my money is a better impulse purchase for content I didn't get to pick out myself.
Funny thing about having to beat the average price: a lot of people do it, and that will have a tendency to create a constant upward trend in the price to unlock the bonus content. It got me wondering, though. I fully expected the price to trend up for the first couple of days, but then does it dip down again? My gut told me that there would be an initial spike, a dip, and then a spike at the end of the two-week window when the bundle was offered.
But I couldn't find any data on the subject. There are several websites where data on the various Humble Bundles can be found, but a graph of average price over time was nowhere to be found. "Well," I thought, "I'll make one then."
So I did. Or rather, am.
I whipped up a quick script on my Linux box that uses links -dump to grab a text-only version of the web page. It then successively greps this page for the data I'm after, and appends a line of data to a CSV file. Initially, I only collected the timestamp and average price, but I decided that the total quantity sold at that time would also be a valuable and relevant piece of data.
I added a line in my crontab file to run the script every 15 mninutes (which is plenty of granularity over two weeks, and also very reasonable to the remote server), and viola: data!
It will be interesting to see how this little experiment turns out. It may be that the price will almost always trend upward. I know that with certain past gaming bundles, games from previous bundles were added to the current bundle as bonus items in order to motivate people to pay the higher price and keep the average up. I suspect that these items were added at times when the average price was dipping in order to bring it back up. I don't know that there are any books in reserve for this bundle, so that may not be an option.
If it does happen, that will be interesting to watch in the data.
Side note:
I will post an update to this blog when the bundle is over with the full results of the data I collect.
Well, not all of the bundle is yours at any price. There are bonus items, which are typically the best of the bunch. To get these items, you are required to beat the average price of the bundle so far.
Well, I like bundles, and I like e-books, so I decided to get the bundle. But I wasn't prepared to pay the price at the time to get the two bonus books. They looked good, but the average price was then just over $9, and I thought that if I was going to spend that much money on an e-book, did I really want the ones offered? I would be willing to bite--but only if the price went down. Humble Bundles typically hover around the $5-7 range for unlocking the bonus content, which for my money is a better impulse purchase for content I didn't get to pick out myself.
Funny thing about having to beat the average price: a lot of people do it, and that will have a tendency to create a constant upward trend in the price to unlock the bonus content. It got me wondering, though. I fully expected the price to trend up for the first couple of days, but then does it dip down again? My gut told me that there would be an initial spike, a dip, and then a spike at the end of the two-week window when the bundle was offered.
But I couldn't find any data on the subject. There are several websites where data on the various Humble Bundles can be found, but a graph of average price over time was nowhere to be found. "Well," I thought, "I'll make one then."
So I did. Or rather, am.
![]() |
| My data collected at the end of day 1, showing average price and total purchases over time. |
I added a line in my crontab file to run the script every 15 mninutes (which is plenty of granularity over two weeks, and also very reasonable to the remote server), and viola: data!
It will be interesting to see how this little experiment turns out. It may be that the price will almost always trend upward. I know that with certain past gaming bundles, games from previous bundles were added to the current bundle as bonus items in order to motivate people to pay the higher price and keep the average up. I suspect that these items were added at times when the average price was dipping in order to bring it back up. I don't know that there are any books in reserve for this bundle, so that may not be an option.
If it does happen, that will be interesting to watch in the data.
Side note:
- Another bundle site of note that just got started specifically for e-books is StoryBundle. StoryBundle is slightly different, in that they set a minimum price ($1), and the bonus books can be unlocked at a constant price ($7).
I will post an update to this blog when the bundle is over with the full results of the data I collect.
Update: Here are the results.
Enjoy!
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Dropbox: File Synchronization
Ever since we got our second computer (back in 1998, I believe), I have been dealing with the problem of how to keep my files in sync between multiple computers. Initially, I simply didn't, or I used floppy disks to move files back and forth. Then I bought an Ethernet hub, and used windows shares to pass the data back and forth. When I bought a CD burner, I would periodically create snapshots of the family's files.
Over the years, I have had many hard drives crash, and many more clean installs. Solving the file sync problem is often best accomplished in conjunction with backing up those files.
Until recently, I still basically used the LAN solution: Keep two copies of my files on different computers, and periodically (or sporadically) copy one set of files over the other. Of course, if you do it this way, you can never change your directory structure, or you have duplicates, and when you try to clean up the duplicates, you lose files.
I also back up important files weekly to an external drive, and I keep four weekly backups, plus six monthly backups. This process is automated thanks to a customized version of a backup script and some cron jobs on my Linux box. This part hasn't changed.
Recently, however, I discovered a handy little service called Dropbox. Dropbox will back up your files, keep them in sync on all of your computers (2 GB for free, pay for more), and enable you to share them with other users if you choose. I've tried Windows Live Mesh, and I still might use that for remote login, but Dropbox gives you more free storage space, and it is able to sync files from one computer to another over a local LAN (which saves ISP bandwidth). Also, Dropbox supports Linux, which is a must for me.
[Note: if you want to sign up, use my Dropbox referral link an we'll both get an extra 250MB of free space.]
Dropbox enables some pretty cool syncing tricks if you're willing to roll up your sleeves at the command line. Here are a few things I'm doing:
Over the years, I have had many hard drives crash, and many more clean installs. Solving the file sync problem is often best accomplished in conjunction with backing up those files.
Until recently, I still basically used the LAN solution: Keep two copies of my files on different computers, and periodically (or sporadically) copy one set of files over the other. Of course, if you do it this way, you can never change your directory structure, or you have duplicates, and when you try to clean up the duplicates, you lose files.
I also back up important files weekly to an external drive, and I keep four weekly backups, plus six monthly backups. This process is automated thanks to a customized version of a backup script and some cron jobs on my Linux box. This part hasn't changed.
Recently, however, I discovered a handy little service called Dropbox. Dropbox will back up your files, keep them in sync on all of your computers (2 GB for free, pay for more), and enable you to share them with other users if you choose. I've tried Windows Live Mesh, and I still might use that for remote login, but Dropbox gives you more free storage space, and it is able to sync files from one computer to another over a local LAN (which saves ISP bandwidth). Also, Dropbox supports Linux, which is a must for me.
[Note: if you want to sign up, use my Dropbox referral link an we'll both get an extra 250MB of free space.]
Dropbox enables some pretty cool syncing tricks if you're willing to roll up your sleeves at the command line. Here are a few things I'm doing:
- The Linux client for Dropbox treats symlinks to folders as if they were just folders. Initially, I didn't like this, because it meant I couldn't just plop my existing file structure in place (because it contained symlinks to large data sets in other locations). Also, I didn't want certain directories synced. My solution was to simply link to the things I want to sync from my Dropbox folder. That way, I can structure my directories any way I want, and cherry-pick the things I want to sync from that structure.
- I use the Pidgin client for all my Instant Messaging accounts on Windows and Linux. Pidgin logs all of my conversations, and saves them to a local folder. Whenever someone IMs me or I open a chat window to IM someone else, the chat window is automatically populated with the latest conversation with that person from the chat log history. In order to synchronize these logs between computers I created a symlink in the Dropbox folder to the logs folder on my Linux box. In order to get my Windows pidgin accounts to use this folder, I created a folder "Junction" within the Pidgin AppData folder (.purple) using the command: "mklink /J".
- I use DVRMSToolbox along with ShowAnalyzer to automatically find and skip commercials in Windows Media Center. ShowAnalyzer is run on our living room media PC, and that is where the files are stored that tell the DTBAddin component where the commercials are within a given recorded TV file. (If you're interested in setting this up yourself, see this guide.) Normally, I would have to periodically copy new files in the CommercialsXml folder from C:\Public\Users\DvrmsToolbox on the media PC to my laptop in order for my laptop to know when to skip a commercial. Now, the files are synced automatically, and I don't have to think about them. I just open my laptop, fire up Media Center, and select the show I want to watch. It's a pretty sweet setup.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Google Wave
Google Wave looks amazing! (For those with 10-minute attention spans, here's the abridged version. The longer version is worth the watch if you have the time.)
It's a new Internet communication protocol/framework being developed by Google. It's not a walled garden: anyone can make their own implementation (or even base it on Google's code), and it will be interoperable with everyone else, just like e-mail.
But this isn't your grandfather's e-mail. Wave is basically a conversation/collaboration tree, with full version control, history, and really cool tools for mashups, transformations, translations, and anything else anyone on earth can think of and write a plugin for.
This is really that revolutionary. Imagine if every e-mail, chat, wiki, invitation, blog post, tweet, photo album, forum, and whatever else on the Internet was as simple to interact with as an item on Facebook or a wiki, only with way more powerful tools, and it wasn't confined to anyone's walled garden.
Tomorrow's kids will laugh at us for using Facebook for the same reason that today's kids laugh at their elders for using Juno.
I don't expect all of those other technologies to disappear, but to some extent they will be eclipsed, and they will have to keep up or be left behind.
Friday, June 05, 2009
Qwest Woes
I just got off the phone with Qwest tech support. Apparently, the "modem" that I bought isn't just a modem, it's also a router, NAT, and firewall, so none of my port forwarding I had configured in my router was working. First, I had to configure the Qwest modem/router/thing (an Actiontech M1000) to "bridge mode", so that it would turn off its NAT and firewall and just give me a connection to the Qwest network, and then I had to enter my Qwest account PPPoE credentials into my Linksys router (with, to complicate things, Tomato firmware). But now it works as it should, so my HTTP server should be up and running on the 'Net.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Chicken Coop Webcast: The Details
Today I set up a webcam in the chicken coop in order to do a ustream broadcast. If you want to watch it, you can click here.
The challenges were numerous, the first among them is that chickens poop on things, and I didn't want my computer equipment pooped on. Luckily, I have a small Dell computer that just so happens to fit wedged into the wall where the chickens aren't able to roost.
The chicks and ducklings are located in a fenced-off area below the nests. There was already an extension cord to the coop so that the chicks and ducklings can have a heat lamp, so all I had to do for power was add a power strip, and I was good to go.
The webcam is located in the corner of the fenced-off area, optimally positioned so that it can see the chicks and ducklings when they are most active, which is during the day. During the night, they tend to cluster beneath the heat lamp, which puts them on the edge or slightly out of view, but I think the viewing angle is the best overall.
Update: I have since pointed the webcam at the spot under the heat lamp, as it turns out most of the time there are birds there.I brought the monitor in for configuration only. I didn't want to leave in in there and get pooped on, plus it would be in the way. I have a hand-held trackball instead of a mouse, since the surfaces in the coop are... less than ideal for mouse use. The mouse is also a configuration-only item.
The trickiest part of this whole thing is getting an Internet connection in the coop. Actually, it wasn't that hard, once I figured out which equipment was best to use. The Dell is running Windows 2000 Pro, since that's the license sticker that came on the case when I picked it up at the surplus store. Windows 2000 doesn't natively support wireless networking. It will work, but it treats it like regular Ethernet, with a separate configuration app. Anyway my router is in WPA mode, and neither of the two wireless PCI cards I had supported it in Win2k (at least not with the drivers I had), so I went with my other option (besides running a cable to the coop--which would be doable, but require a purchase): a wireless networking bridge.
A few years back I picked up this pair of little black boxes on Woot, and they've come in pretty handy. They're supposed to have a range of 300 feet, and I have no reason do doubt it. Currently, I'm using them at about 75 feet, and they're doing just fine.
The stream is live, of course, so if the chicklings are being boring, or you're reading this later on, after they're grown and the stream is gone or of something else, you won't get to see the result on the live stream.
Therefore, I will post the following video, which I recorded as I was doing some final tweaks to the webcam setup, and saved it for posterity:
The voice you hear at the beginning is mine. I'm on my cell phone with my wife, who is in the house letting me know that the sound is working.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Blogger.com and the Broken Comment Form: Third Party Cookies
A while ago, I noticed that, for some reason, when I was on a Blogger blog on the blogspot.com domain (such as this one), I was no longer seen as "logged in", even though when I went to the Blogger home page, or clicked the "Sign in" link on the upper right hand corner (or the "B" icon on the upper left), I was automatically signed in with my Google account.
This was only a minor annoyance to me (it prevented the "edit" icons from showing up for me on the widgets my own blogs) until I started using the in-line comment form for my blogs. This feature puts the comment form right below the post on its page, in stead of opening a separate window or navigating away to a special comments page. I like it because it allows for immediate comment gratification, and a smooth user experience.
The problem was that now my comment forms seemed to be broken if I was signed in with my Google account. (Google owns Blogger, and they transitioned away from the old Blogger IDs to Google accounts a while ago.)
After doing some research on this problem, I came to the conclusion that the source of the problem was Firefox: specifically that Firefox (since version 3.0) has the default setting of blocking all third-party cookies. (However, if you upgraded your profile from a previous version, you may still have the old default setting left over.) A cookie is a bit of text that a web site can store (in order to read back later) to track information about a visitor to that website.
A third-party cookie is a cookie that is loaded by a script that is not hosted on the same domain as the site that you are visiting. Most third party cookies come from advertisers, whose ads are loaded and, in the background, like to keep track of which ads a user has seen and at which sites they have visited. There are a few companies that like to collect as much information as possible, and the fact that they have their advertising tendrils on so many sites gives them a disturbingly extensive ability to track users' browsing habits.
This is why the makers of Firefox decided to block third party cookies, except for those sites that the user has specifically granted permission to allow access from other sites. I agree with their assessment, and don't want to re-enable all third-party cookies, but I also want to allow certain sites that I trust to know who I am.
Blogger is not nefarious in its desire to "track" me on blogs: it simply wants to let me log in, manage my blogs, and post comments. So, how do I let Firefox know that blogger.com should be allowed to track me on non-blogger.com sites?
Here is the answer:
Go to the settings menu. This can be found under Tools -> Options on Windows and Edit -> Preferences on Linux. I'm not sure where it is on Mac OS X, but I'm sure it's not hard to find.
Once you're there, select the Privacy panel, and under "Cookies", click on the "Exceptions..." button:
Type "blogger.com" into the text field and click "Allow":
You're done. Click Close and exit the settings menu.
The next time you log in to Blogger, external blogger sites (such as those on blogspot.com, as well as custom domains) will know who you are.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Google Reader vs. FriendFeed
It seems that I've been introducing some of my friends to the features of various online tools a lot lately. Not that I've been going out of my way, but it seems that I'm "that guy" who is both "in the know" about tech stuff and willing to answer questions. A friend of mine recently asked me about Gmail. Her frustration was with the fact that the inbox was perpetually cluttered, and there was no way to clear out the old e-mails she had already dealt with without deleting them. So she thought, that is, until I told her what that "Archive" button does. Without it, there is no difference between the Inbox and "All Mail". Labels (aka "Tags") are also an indespensible feature of Gmail when used properly, but that's not my topic. Recently, I started using FriendFeed, and I thought I would explain what how I got there, what it is, and how its niche differs from that of Google Reader.
Recently, I started using Twitter. It began with just subscribing to a friend's Twitter feed in Google Reader (my feed (i.e., RSS, Atom) reader of choice), but it would only refresh the Twitter content about once every couple of days, so I would get nothing for a while, and then about ten posts all at once. When things come in little bits, they're time-sensitive, and so I decided to get a Twitter account of my own in order to keep track of my friends' feeds in a timely manner, and be able to reply if desired.
Thus, I became a Twitter lurker. However, it didn't take me long to figure out how to hook up Twitter to my Facebook status, making my "tweets" (another 'word' I dislike) a replacement for updating my Facebook status, and transforming me into a 'real' Twitter user.
That wasn't enough, however. Apparently, my pallet for up-to-the-minute online content would not be satisfied until I found FriendFeed. When I first encountered FriendFeed, it looked redundant to Twitter's funcitonality, with the added detriment that none of my friends (and only one of my acquaintances) actually used it (at the time). This turned out not to be the case upon further inspection.
FriendFeed is to Twitter what Google Reader is to Blogs. Yes, it will keep you informed of your friends' latest updates to Twitter, but it will also keep you informed of their activities on Digg, Reddit, Flickr, Picasa Web, their shared articles (on any number of services), and absolutely anything else that can be accessed through a feed. The problem was, since none of my friends were using FriendFeed, that none of their content and activity was available there.
Enter the "imaginary friend" feature. Say I have a friend who uses Blogger, Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, and Digg, but this Friend does not use FriendFeed. I can create an "imaginary friend", complete with nickname and profile picture, that aggregates this friend's content from all the various sites and makes it visible in myfeed exactly as if that friend had signed up and entered all those services as their own. All I need to provide, depending on the service, is their account's display name or feed URL.
But why, you might ask, would I need yet another feed aggregator, when I am already using Google Reader? The difference in the way that these two services are used is that while Google Reader provides a hub for consuming content, FriendFeed provides a hub for observing events. Google Reader is all about pulling in the meaty content: reading the whole article. Google Reader, therefore, displays all of the text and multimedia that it can, and keeps track for you of what you have and haven't read. FriendFeed, on the other hand, is a stream of things that "happened": so-and-so posted on their blog, this person updated their status, that person posted a photo or video. The substance of the content is not displayed on FriendFeed: only that it happened and a title, short snippet, or small thumbnail. When an event occurs, it appears as quicly as possible at the top of the page. Once something drops off the page, it's irrelevant.
There are items that appear both in Google Reader and FriendFeed, but there are also items that only appear on one or the other. FriendFeed is all about, well, friends, therefore news sites, webcomics, and blogs by people I don't know are much better suited exclusively to Google Reader, where nothing is skipped, and information is handled exhaustively. By contrast, items with very little content, or of a transient nature, are better suited to FriendFeed, where they can be noticed and optionally interacted with should the occasion arise to do so.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Baidu MP3
Lately, it seems that Baidu MP3 has indexed my server, and is pointing Chinese searchers to various Bible talks and sermons which I have hosted there. I recently (well, it was probably late last year) relaxed restrictions on my robots.txt file to allow most of the content (not the pictures) to be indexed by search engines. Since then, I've been hit from all over the world, but this is pretty recent. What's different is the volume and frequency of the hits. Of course, they're welcome to the content (as long as my server isn't getting hammered). I'm a bit curious as to what's being done with them: do people listen to them in order to learn English? Are they really trying to find music and stumbled on my files by mistake? Are they interested in biblical teaching? Maybe someday I'll find out.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
More DNS Woes
So what happens when your DNS changes more often than your IP address? The whole point of DNS is so that your IP address can change, and you don't have to update your links (also, there's something about being human-friendly, but who needs that?). Sadly in my case, athena has had a string of DNS subdomains that haven't lasted quite so long as I had hoped. My problem is that I link to pages from my blog (mostly containing pictures, audio, and PDF documents) that I would like to be accessible on a permanent basis. Recently, I lost athena.sexypenguins.com, and so I've moved to athena.goddns.net. At some point, I'm just going to have to purchase my own domain. Thus far I've resisted out of (mostly) momentum, but now that I've registered my first domain and found that it's not so bad to be parked, I'm more inclined to plunk down the money. The question is, what should I choose? In the meantime, I've decided to create an "athena-link" label on my blogs, that will at least keep track of which posts have links to athena, so that I can update them whenever I have to change the DNS, which it appears will happen at least one more time. For now (and for the first time in a while), all of my links are up-to-date. Another problem with my current setup is that FreeDNS's policies dictate that I need to have Google's ability to access my server manually enabled every time that I switch to a new domain. This wouldn't be that big of a deal, except that I've started hosting feeds on my site, and Google Reader uses Google's DNS. Also, Google just bought out FeedBurner, and one of my feeds uses that as a proxy.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
OpenID
OpenID is very Good IdeaTM. At the very least, it will allow me to identify myself when commenting on Deborah's blog (from now on). I hope it picks up steam and the big sites start using it.
A few useful OpenID resources:
What I did is set up tags on my blog which delegate OpenID to MyOpenID.com, so I can use my blog URL with MyOpenID.com's service.
Here's what it looks like (inside the <head>):
Adblock
<link href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" rel="openid.server"/> <link href="http://burndive.myopenid.com/" rel="openid.delegate"/> <meta content="http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?username=burndive.myopenid.com" equiv="X-XRDS-Location"/>
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Web Feeds and Aggregators: Thoughts
I just "discovered" Google Reader.
Oh, no, I knew it was there all along. It's even one of Firefox's default feed subscription options. I had simply been ignoring its existence this whole time, content to use Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature for all my RSS/Atom needs.
For the uninitiated, a "web feed" is a way to "subscribe" to the content of a website, such as a blog, news outlet, podcast, or just about anything these days. After subscribing to a web feed, a visitor is automatically notified of new content on that website by their feed reader of choice. There are quite a few out there, including Firefox's Web Feeds feature, Google Reader, the Opera Browser, and Thunderbird.
Basically, in stead of having to go to every website to see if there is new content available, the reader can subscribe to the websites' feeds, and will be automatically notified of any new content on each site.
The problem is that with some feed aggregators, they simply pull all of your content off the site, and allow the readers to get the content without visiting the site. This becomes problematic for ad-supported websites, which typically either draw the readers to the site by providing unique participatory content, such as a discussion forum or comments, by only providing a summary of the actual content in the feed, or by injecting ads into the feed.
I am not an ad-supported website, but I do like my readers to interact with me and each other through comments. If none of the users are drawn to my actual website, then none of them will see each other's comments.
The other thing I like to do is keep track of roughly how many people are reading my blog, and blogger doesn't provide tools to track users on the site itself, much less the feed. They do provide a mechanism to insert something into the feed at the bottom, which could be used to tally readers.
What I have been doing is having the feed only contain the first paragraph or so of the post, and then the readers are directed to the post's actual page. This may prove inconvenient for some readers, although I was trying out Thunderbird, and what it did with my blog was to simply load the post's page directly into the reading frame, which is actually ideal from my perspective.
Other readers, particularly aggregators such as Google Reader only display the text and image content, and use their own formatting.
I have been considering switching the feed to contain the entire post, but I'm not yet sure. What do you think? Is anyone actually reading this? Do you use web feeds? What reader(s) do you use? Do you prefer to have blogger format the post, or do you prefer your reader's formatting?
I have decided that for the time being I will try out Google Reader for all of my friends' blogs, and for newsletters that I read every time, but for news sites where I tend to cherry-pick the articles, I'm sticking with Firefox's live bookmarks: it gives you a menu of the latest posts, with the ones you've read already grayed out. I wouldn't want my feed list to get clogged with every article on Ars Technica, Slashdot, Technocrat, and certainly not Digg.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Downtime
Athena was down all day while I was at work. Everything was working fine last night. The upgrade had gone as planned. Just to be sure there wouldn't be any surprises along the road, and to make sure I was using the latest compiles of everything, I decided to reboot before I went to work. I logged in, su'd, typed "shutdown -r now" and then went off and brushed my teeth and got dressed. When I came back, the login screen had come up. I switched over to tty1 to see if any of the services had screamed at me: none had, so I switched back, logged in, opened up firefox, and typed "http://localhost/" into the address bar. My (boring) directory listing page came up, indicating that Apache was running a-okay, and so I turned off the projector and headed to work. When I got there and tried to log in, however, I got no response from athena.
I tried accessing it through a web browser: nothing. Both ssh and apache weren't responding, so I figured either the whole box had gone down (i.e., kernel panic) or there was some sort of connection issue: perhaps the router wasn't port forwarding, but there was no way I could tell until after work, so I logged on to blogger and saved the post I'd put up directing people to download some files off of athena as a draft (so it would disappear), and went on with my work. When I got home, athena was running just fine, but when I tried to pull up external web sites, I got nothing: so it was a connection issue.
It wasn't the router: my laptop was doing fine, and the port forwarding was still set up. I looked at my init scripts and their accompanying config files: nothing seemed amiss. I restarted the ethernet interfaces and, viola, my network connections were restored: everything worked perfectly. That still didn't satisfy me: I didn't want athena to always start up without a net connection, so I rebooted her again, and the same thing happened. Then I remembered something I had read somewhere (probably the weekly newsletter) about the init scripts changing with the 2006.1 profiles. There was probably a dependency issue somewhere that was messing me up because my ethernet connections were loading too soon, but I had to have parallel startup because of my local DNS cache software.
I decided to look deeper into the issue, and so I pulled up the wiki page for dnscache, and searched the text for "parallel." Nothing. That was odd. I'm absolutely positive that this was the page that told me that I needed to set RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP="yes" in /etc/conf.d/rc. Could it be that the requirements (and the page) had changed? "Parallel" was one of my search terms to find the wiki page, so I went back to my Google tab and opened the cached version of the page: lo and behold, there it was, so someone had very recently changed the page to delete that instruction. I fired up vi, and changed the value to "no" and rebooted. Worked like a charm, only charms don't actually work, whereas this did. So, it wasn't gcc, and it wasn't my config files getting overwritten, it was some change they had incorporated into the new 2006.1 profile.
From the newsletter:
I tried accessing it through a web browser: nothing. Both ssh and apache weren't responding, so I figured either the whole box had gone down (i.e., kernel panic) or there was some sort of connection issue: perhaps the router wasn't port forwarding, but there was no way I could tell until after work, so I logged on to blogger and saved the post I'd put up directing people to download some files off of athena as a draft (so it would disappear), and went on with my work. When I got home, athena was running just fine, but when I tried to pull up external web sites, I got nothing: so it was a connection issue.
It wasn't the router: my laptop was doing fine, and the port forwarding was still set up. I looked at my init scripts and their accompanying config files: nothing seemed amiss. I restarted the ethernet interfaces and, viola, my network connections were restored: everything worked perfectly. That still didn't satisfy me: I didn't want athena to always start up without a net connection, so I rebooted her again, and the same thing happened. Then I remembered something I had read somewhere (probably the weekly newsletter) about the init scripts changing with the 2006.1 profiles. There was probably a dependency issue somewhere that was messing me up because my ethernet connections were loading too soon, but I had to have parallel startup because of my local DNS cache software.
I decided to look deeper into the issue, and so I pulled up the wiki page for dnscache, and searched the text for "parallel." Nothing. That was odd. I'm absolutely positive that this was the page that told me that I needed to set RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP="yes" in /etc/conf.d/rc. Could it be that the requirements (and the page) had changed? "Parallel" was one of my search terms to find the wiki page, so I went back to my Google tab and opened the cached version of the page: lo and behold, there it was, so someone had very recently changed the page to delete that instruction. I fired up vi, and changed the value to "no" and rebooted. Worked like a charm, only charms don't actually work, whereas this did. So, it wasn't gcc, and it wasn't my config files getting overwritten, it was some change they had incorporated into the new 2006.1 profile.
From the newsletter:
Some highlights from the release include the AMD64, HPPA, x86, PowerPC, and 64-bit PowerPC with a 32-bit userland releases being built with version 4.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). AMD64, PowerPC, and x86 also feature version 2.4 of the GNU C library (glibc), while all architectures use baselayout 1.12.1, which features many improved startup scripts.Improved. Indeed. Well, at least they warned me.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Athena: emerge -eav world
First I updated gcc to 4.1.1 (from 3.4.6), then I rebuilt the system software (emerge -eav system), and now I'm rebuilding all of the software on the box using the new compiler and rebuilt tools. I started the big emerge last night, and currently, Athena is chugging away at 429 of 1223 total packages.
I don't expect that this will cause down-time to any of the services running. In fact, I'm counting on Apache (the webserver software) to be up and running without interruption throughout the whole process, and afterward. I finished typing up the notes to a talk I gave, and I'm planning on hosting the PDF, as well as linking to an mp3 of a related talk that my dad gave earlier that I'm already hosting.
Also, this weekend I'm going to a Bible conference (Hicks Lake) and I suspect that I'll have some photos to put up on the web when I get back. I don't imagine I'll have too much trouble, because all of my software was up to date before I started, so I'm not getting any new versions of anything that might cause compatibility or upgrade configuration issues.
I don't expect that this will cause down-time to any of the services running. In fact, I'm counting on Apache (the webserver software) to be up and running without interruption throughout the whole process, and afterward. I finished typing up the notes to a talk I gave, and I'm planning on hosting the PDF, as well as linking to an mp3 of a related talk that my dad gave earlier that I'm already hosting.
Also, this weekend I'm going to a Bible conference (Hicks Lake) and I suspect that I'll have some photos to put up on the web when I get back. I don't imagine I'll have too much trouble, because all of my software was up to date before I started, so I'm not getting any new versions of anything that might cause compatibility or upgrade configuration issues.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Athena's New Last Name
Okay, well it looks like gentoo-linux.be is no longer an option with freedns.afraid.org, so I've had to pick a new domain for my Gentoo box to be under. So, without further ado, the new DNS entry will be: athena.gentoo.org.il
I've had a long and sordid history with DNS on athena. First, it was athena.homelinux.net, then athena.gentoofreaks.org, then athena.gentoolinux.be, then athena.gentoo-server.be, and now this. Each time the domain owner has let their domain expire or withdrawn it from the available pool. You get what you pay for. Let's hope Israel is a better TLD than Belgium.
I've had a long and sordid history with DNS on athena. First, it was athena.homelinux.net, then athena.gentoofreaks.org, then athena.gentoolinux.be, then athena.gentoo-server.be, and now this. Each time the domain owner has let their domain expire or withdrawn it from the available pool. You get what you pay for. Let's hope Israel is a better TLD than Belgium.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Free DNS
It's worth every penny.
Until today, I was using the subdomain athena.gentoolinux.be through freedns.agraid.org for athena's DNS. I have a neat little script that keeps track of what my IP address is, and then if it changes, it automatically updates the DNS listing for my box, and the world can keep on accessing all the wonderful pictures and such that I host there. This is all fine and dandy, but it so happens that the owner of gentoolinux.be is a bit temperamental, and so this morning athena was nowhere to be found. Oh, the IP address hadn't changed, ports 22 and 80 are still forwarded there from the router, and apache and sshd were chugging along just fine, but the DNS listing had disappeared.
I had no idea what was wrong. And I was counting on tar-ing up and transferring a Harry Potter sound track MP3 folder today. Bummer. My first thought was to interrogate RFH: he was doing something with athena after 12:30 last night, but it turns out all he did was watch an episode of "Jack and Bobby," so that was a dead end.
I didn't think to try just using the IP address until I got home and discovered everything was working just fine.
So anyway, I switched the domain from gentoolinux.be to gentoo-server.be, so now athena can be accessed via athena.gentoo-server.be. This domain is "public" at freedns.afraid.org, so hopefully there won't be another similar incident. I sent off a message to the owner of gentoolinux.be to ask him to restore my ability to use it. There are a grand total of 3 domains available for use with "gentoo" in them. It's not essential to have that in the name, but I like it there.
I updated the links on my blog template (actually, I changed it so that it only needs to be updated in one place at the top in a JavaScript variable that gets referenced several times throughout the page).
I didn't go through and update all the links in my blog entries, although I did do the Rattlesnake Ledge photos one. I discovered that you can't put JavaScript inside the blog entries themselves. If I get athena.gentoolinux.be back, then I'll leave things as they are, but if I don't then I'll have to go back through and update each link.
If someone wants to look at photos that have a dead link, all they need to do is click on the "athena" link on the top or bottom of the page and browse to ~tim/photos/.
Until today, I was using the subdomain athena.gentoolinux.be through freedns.agraid.org for athena's DNS. I have a neat little script that keeps track of what my IP address is, and then if it changes, it automatically updates the DNS listing for my box, and the world can keep on accessing all the wonderful pictures and such that I host there. This is all fine and dandy, but it so happens that the owner of gentoolinux.be is a bit temperamental, and so this morning athena was nowhere to be found. Oh, the IP address hadn't changed, ports 22 and 80 are still forwarded there from the router, and apache and sshd were chugging along just fine, but the DNS listing had disappeared.
I had no idea what was wrong. And I was counting on tar-ing up and transferring a Harry Potter sound track MP3 folder today. Bummer. My first thought was to interrogate RFH: he was doing something with athena after 12:30 last night, but it turns out all he did was watch an episode of "Jack and Bobby," so that was a dead end.
I didn't think to try just using the IP address until I got home and discovered everything was working just fine.
So anyway, I switched the domain from gentoolinux.be to gentoo-server.be, so now athena can be accessed via athena.gentoo-server.be. This domain is "public" at freedns.afraid.org, so hopefully there won't be another similar incident. I sent off a message to the owner of gentoolinux.be to ask him to restore my ability to use it. There are a grand total of 3 domains available for use with "gentoo" in them. It's not essential to have that in the name, but I like it there.
I updated the links on my blog template (actually, I changed it so that it only needs to be updated in one place at the top in a JavaScript variable that gets referenced several times throughout the page).
I didn't go through and update all the links in my blog entries, although I did do the Rattlesnake Ledge photos one. I discovered that you can't put JavaScript inside the blog entries themselves. If I get athena.gentoolinux.be back, then I'll leave things as they are, but if I don't then I'll have to go back through and update each link.
If someone wants to look at photos that have a dead link, all they need to do is click on the "athena" link on the top or bottom of the page and browse to ~tim/photos/.
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Dang Script Kiddies
Seriously, who does this kind of thing? I guess it's what I get for publishing a DNS handle to my IP address and forwarding port 22.
Well, no matter. Bring it on, I say. I'll have to start banning IP's. At least then they'll have to write a real script.
Well, no matter. Bring it on, I say. I'll have to start banning IP's. At least then they'll have to write a real script.
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