I haven’t been on MySpace for a long time. In my opinion, it has become a useless website; social networking has moved on. Even when it was “in”, it was ugly and difficult to use. Since becoming dormant, I had no use for my account and decided to close it…

And then MySpace gave me yet another reason for dis-liking the site. They asked me why I wanted to leave. The options were:

• “I’m bored with MySpace”
• “I’m getting too much spam or too many friend requests”
• “I’m concerned about Privacy”
• “I’m getting too much email from MySpace”
• “There is too much drama”
• “Some other reason”

MySpace's 'Cancel Account' page

Crazily enough, these are radio options: It’s impossible to select them all. In fact, they are not interested in improving their service; they are interested in stopping you from leaving. Click any option, and you’ll be told you are wrong — apparently, there’s no valid reason for leaving MySpace. In fact, click “Some other reason” and you’ll be told it’s because you have no or few friends (same as option 1). What does “Too much drama” mean, anyway? Something to do with privacy, apparently:

MySpace's "Too much drama" resolution

So, Myspace: I am leaving, and you can’t stop me!

Rant over

Get My Goo (http://goo.gl/9wd5) has just lanched, making it easy to create goo.gl short links without using the Google Toolbar or Google Reader. Simply enter your URL and a cool goo.gl URL will be instantly created.

The cool bookmarklet allows you to create a short-link for any page you are visiting. Have a look at this screenshot:

Earlier this month, I had been suffering from extremely unstable service from (mt) MediaTemple; this caused quite considerable downtime. In fact, it was so bad that some of my hosted websites became unusable for 2 DAYS! I understand that hosts have problems from time to time, but 2 days!? This is just totally unacceptable, and so I decided to pack my bags and look for a more reliable host.

I had Linode (aff), a Virtual Private Server (VPS) host, in my bookmarks for quite a while; just in case I decided to move host in the future. A ‘Linode 360′ provides 360MB of RAM, 16 GB of storage and 200 GB of data transfer for a mere $19.95 per month. {(mt) MediaTemple offer ‘more’, but you are unlikely to get anywhere near using it without overaging on ‘GPUs’ or database usage; I was eventually forced to buy a MySQL container, and my sites receive very little traffic at all.}

I found the decision of web host a difficult choice to make. I ended up choosing a VPS (it was out of Slicehost and Linode) just to give it a go. And now, I don’t think I’ll ever go back. VPS has its disadvantages (like taking ages to set-up), granted; but the power and flexibility of it is something I couldn’t help but get exited about. With VPS, you don’t get stupid rules like ’5 cron jobs per account’; in fact, you can pretty much do whatever you like.

Take a look at a Pingdom report for Taxomation. Day four was when it moved over to Linode. 2 hours of downtime that day was due to the (mt) MediaTemple hosting, and the downtime on consecutive days due to problems I inflicted on the Linode account. (Maybe I should have got everything working before I migrated, no? .) With (mt) MediaTemple, page loads were typically taking 0.85s. With Linode, that time has been almost halved to 0.46s.

If you are looking for a new web host and know enough about web server software, why not give Linode a go? I’m sure you will not regret it! You can get there using my wonderful affiliate link (Why not?) or with this non-affiliate link.

Bye, bye MediaTemple!

Please share you web hosting experiences…

Taxomation.com have just released ‘404 widget‘ — a useful tool for helping your site’s lost users. The widget looks at the URL a visitor tried to load, and extracts keywords from it. It then runs over to Yahoo! and finds related pages from your site — all just in time to be displayed to the visitor, who can choose a page or keep searching.

It is similar to Google’s widget, except that more than one page is displayed and text from the page is also included. The Taxomation widget can be customised for your site (changing colours, etc) and is simple to set-up: you just need to copy a little code, and everything works instantly. Why not grab yours now, and see what you think…

Here’s a live example for the page ‘http://webinfodb.net/api.html‘ rather than ‘http://webinfodb.net/api.php‘:

(If you are looking for another example, mis-type a URL on this site; it has the widget installed).

You may also be interested in reading the following about creating more useful 404 pages:

• Creating User Friendly 404 Pages (Coding Horror)
• Creating useful 404 pages (Google)
• A More Useful 404 (A List Apart)
• Make your 404 Page Useful (Blog for Profit)
• Usability: Create a 404 page that’s useful and relevant (azngamerboi 2.0)

Today, Google announced the release of Google Public DNS — a complete alternative to the Domain Name System (DNS) offered by your ISP, OpenDNS and similar services. Google claims that their DNS service is fast, secure, and — unlike many ISPs and OpenDNS — they promise never to filter, block or redirect DNS responses.

From previous experience, it can be expected that Google Public DNS will only get better — but I believe that its openness and performance are reason enough for it to be adopted now. I have already switched, and you can do the same in a few seconds.

If you know what you are doing, you can straight-away configure your connection to use Google’s DNS servers: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4.

Obviously, there is some anxiety amongst users about Google collecting more and more data all of the time. However, Google have addressed this with a stringent privacy policy, summed up as: ‘Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information.’

Google Chormium OS has been released! If you want to take the new operating system for a test run, you can download the source code or get an image for VMware player (the later is the easy option). For now, engadget.com has some screenshots, but I hope to try Chrome for myself soon. Stay tuned.

Download Now »

(By the looks of it, it is a WebOS more than anything).

Here’s something you expected: Virgin Media have taken even more control away from you and will hijack a domain when a DNS entry doesn’t exist. Try to go to a domain that doesn’t exist, and rather than get Firefox’s error message or equivalent, Virgin Media will pretend it does exist and give some search results.

And, likely, some of them search results are paid for. I say ‘likely’ because they seem to remind themselves, just in case they forget:

So, really, this is a monetisation strategy rather than being anything useful. Let’s hope it doesn’t get more ‘I’m feeling lucky’ in the future, where we would be redirected without notice. I suppose we’re lucky, in a way

Click ‘What is this page?‘ and opt out.

Are there any ‘good’ ISP’s left? Actually, are there any Internet Service Providers left? I want an Internet provider who doesn’t even care what the WWW actually is, let alone interfere with it. Just pass the information along! It’s none of your business!

Oh, and Virgin Media, about that excessive usage complaint: It wasn’t malware, it was me.

• Domain Name Wire: Virgin Media Joins Typosquatting Club
• The Register: Virgin hijacks empty pages

When I first heard about Google Chrome OS, I initially thought it would be a basic operating system which supported just an Internet browser — where the Internet browser is within the OS. From what I have heard, however, it seems that “the” operating system could just aswell run within the browser.

Of course, there will be an OS to run the Internet browser; but, will there be another “OS” within that?

It is entirely feasible to create an operating system within an Internet browser, using basic HTML, CSS and Javascript. In fact, I had a go myself, last year. “22OS” was my attempt at creating a so-called “WebOS”. Although never completed, it appeared to be entirely possible to build a feature-rich “operating system” that is platform independent. Google already has a project to run x86 machine code in the browser called nativeclient — maybe this is indicative?

Digging up some old code, I managed to get a few screenshots of my old WebOS:

22OS loading in Google Chrome

Google Chrome is extremely fast in loading 22OS, due to its unique Javascript technology.

The 22OS Command Line Interface

22OS default desktop, with Windows Vista theme (for demonstration)

Multiple windows opened in 22OS

If Google Chrome OS turns out to be a WebOS, it would mean the ultimate in software portability. Any software developed for the OS could be run on any browser supporting Javascript, CSS and HTML (providing Google would allow this).

The vision of Google Chrome OS as an operating system running a web browser could be misleading. It is entirely feasible that everything related to user interaction could be off-loaded onto Google’s servers, and Google would have good reason to do it.

Of course, all this is just speculation, but there is argument that the traditional idea of what an operating system is could be different from this case, especially with Google an’all. We’ll just have to wait and see…

Everyday there are millions of web page requests. Each request should hypothetically (and can) be simple; but, for some reason, pointless, redundant data is sent between machines, wasting bandwidth and time. The idea, which reduces this pointlessness, has the potential to save bandwidth across the Internet. It will reduce the amount of data sent with HTTP requests, which may in turn reduce the number of packets having to be sent.

After making a HTTP request for http://infinity-infinity.com/, this is the response you get back:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:08:46 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.8
X-Pingback: http://infinity-infinity.com/xmlrpc.php
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Following this, you get some data — the “thing” you requested. I am concerned with the above. These headers are not the content; they describe the content. It actually makes sense to ordinary people: even if you have no experience with this, you can deduce some of its meaning — Date: tells us a date, Server: describes the server and Connection: Close literally means “Close the connection”.

So, where is the problem? Well, all of the above text is literally sent to your browser — which has to then decode this “human-language” and act on it. So, why do we machines need to talk in human language?

They don’t. This is where my idea comes in. Rather than talking in human language, why not talk in “machine language”? In reality, it is more efficient to talk using machine language because we don’t need to send as much data. If we don’t need to send as much data, we don’t need to send as many packets, and the Internet becomes (a little) faster.

In fact, every single header in the above response could be shortened to save some space.

The date header, previously (37 bytes):

Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:08:46 GMT

could be reduced to this (5 bytes):

D####

Where #### represents the 4 bytes for a Unix timestamp. Since it always contains 4 bytes, there is no need for a separator between headers (\r\n).

The server header (although pretty useless) was previously (23 bytes):

Server: Apache/2.0.54

Reducing this (16 bytes):

SApache/2.0.54

Because this header is not fixed length, a separator (\r\n) is required. Note that there is no way to reduce the value “Apache/2.0.54″ without losing its meaning. The server could simply choose not to send this header (saving all 23 bytes).

“X-Powered-By” and “X-Pingback” are custom headers, and hence out of HTTP’s scope. They could, however, be significantly reduced.

Vary: Accept-Encoding

(23 bytes)

could become this (2 bytes):

VA

Note, the value has been changed here. This is a common header value and so its value (A) could easily be synonymised with “Accept-Encoding”. A header separator is not required because this constant value never has additional data.

Connection: close

(19 bytes)

could become (2 bytes):

CC

Transfer-Encoding: chunked

(28 bytes)

becomes (2 bytes)

Tc

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

(40 bytes)

becomes (3 bytes):

N12

Where N represents “Content-Type”, 1 the byte constant for “text/html” and 2 the byte constant for “UTF-8″

If this was reality, the new response becomes:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
D####SApache/2.0.54
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.8
X-Pingback: http://infinity-infinity.com/xmlrpc.php
VACCTcN12

This requires just 127 bytes, compared to the 265 bytes in the ordinary (today’s) request. If we got rid of the Server:, X-Powered-By and X-Pingback headers, it would be 33 bytes against 164 bytes — saving almost 80%! And it is possible — so why aren’t we making HTTP and other commonly used protocols highly optimised? Your guess is as good as mine.

If anybody would like to do some statistics to estimate how much bandwidth could be saved, it would be great to know…