Martin Geisler Online

I had no connectivity to http://google.com/ today — strange experience…

First I noticed that this site would load very slowly — the big blue header would load at normal speed, but then things would stop for a while, after which the rest of the page would load. The pauses were caused by the Google Adsense advertisements I use — with no connections to the Adsense server, the browser would “hang” for a while until a timeout was reached.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it were only my site that’s broken because of this, but since Adsense is to popular many, many sites around the Internet would suddenly load at crawling speed. (A moment later…) The pages now load at quite normal speed, but without the Adsense advertisements.

While testing I tried to access google.com through a SSH tunnel into [DAIMI][]. That worked fine, so I guess the problem might lie at my end? Trying directly I have no connection to either http://google.com/ or http://google.dk/. But http://google.ch/ works! Quite strange I think… Have any of you experienced this?

I just saw today that everybodys favorite [OpenSource repository][sourceforge] has been updated with a new layout. I think I like it, especially the new design, but the advertisements at the bottom of the page (”Find a Tech Job” etc.) are too near the content for my taste. The old layout had a better separation of content and advertisements.

But I’m glad to see that SourceForge are improving. I’ve entered [PEL][] into the beta program for the upcoming [Subversion][SVN] feature, but I haven’t heard anything from them yet. I’m really looking forward to quitting [CVS][] — SVN is so much better.

While making a post on the rsync list about having it output sizes in human readable units (just like du -h) I couldn’t resist the temptation of writing “mebibytes” and “kibibytes”… :-)

I think this is the first time that I’ve written the units out in full, and I must admit that they sound kind of strange. But the strangeness will wear off after a while, and I still believe that we should adopt them whenever we can since it will clear up some confusion in the long run. Consider it a gift to your children, or maybe even your grandchildren :-)

If this discussion is all new to you, then go here or here for some background information. The discussion in late 2001 on the Linux Kernel mailinglist is also interesting, you’ll find a summary here.

Then try The Love Search made by my friend Svend. It’s an interactive sorting-interface to something called A Foreign Affair, which is a site which specialized in mail-order brides from Eastern Europe and Asia.

I must say that I find the concept of ordering a bride per mail somewhat disturbing, but maybe that’s just because I’m lucky enough to live in one of the worlds most richest states — you can interpret “live in” as both Switzerland and Denmark, it doesn’t really change things… :-)

Maybe I wouldn’t find it so strange if it weren’t for all the girls there who literally sell themselves to find a future husband from the West. I mean, is it really necessary to pose in a swimsuit to attract your future husband?! Or to show a cleavage all the way down to your belly botton? Apparently it is — those 16 years that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall have not stopped people from wanting to come to the West.

To me it looks very cheap, fake and made-up, and that’s definitely not the kind of qualities I would be looking for in a future bride. Not that I’m looking… I have already found the most wonderful girl in Stéphanie — who is both beautiful, honest, and smart!

What is interesting about Svend’s site (from a technical point of view) is the interactive sorting — you basically conduct a merge sort on the photos of the women. It works pretty well, and should be useful for other things as well. Maybe someone could write a plugin for Gallery2 to allow visitors to sort the images like that…

Following up on my last post about “poetic spam” (or rather “nonsense spam”) I want to show you how the current wave of spam from Asia looks like (I don’t really know if the text is Chinese or Japanese):

This is just plain text and not HTML — but notice how they know how to use all sorts of cute characters like stars and box drawing characters. Much more impressive than most other spam mails I get :-)