tzlee.com/blog

Category: Tech, Code & AI

  • Flash Sites are Passé; The DOs and DON’Ts of Web Design

    I’m surprised to find Renoma Paris’s site (in English) made entirely out of Flash. While it took ages to load, it also played an annoying music that I couldn’t turn off unless I turned down my speakers.

    Once the page loaded, I was presented with a scrolling marquee of images. They were so small that I couldn’t figure out what they were, so I clicked on any random image that passes and it brought me to yet another page that required loading. I sat waiting and stared at the red squares in the middle of the screen as more of them appeared after several seconds.

    Frustrated, I closed my browser tab. I was on the site for barely two minutes.

    This is a classic example of how your site can literally drive people away. Try it yourself – go visit that site.

    Many business owners don’t understand that what they like to have on their own site isn’t necessarily what people want to see.

    Here’s some of my personal DOs and DON’Ts of web design.

    • DON’T use flash for your entire site. It’s not only slow and heavy on a computer’s CPU, it doesn’t scroll well within a browser, it renders fonts differently from browsers making them difficult to read at times, the back and forward buttons don’t work, etc. The list of problems are endless. Oh, and did I mention that those Flash guys charge an arm and two legs? Don’t use flash. Period.
    • DON’T embed audio into your pages. It might give an old lady a heart attack, or simply just piss young people off by distorting whatever Wonder Girls track they’re listening to at the moment.
    • DON’T use a splash page. They only serve to delay a user’s entrance into your site. 9 in 10 splash pages I’ve seen have no real purpose other than the intent to create a “grand entrance” to a site. People visit web sites in search for content and will gladly click on the first sight of an “ENTER” button.
    • DON’T upload full resolution photos and simply use the HTML width and height attributes to resize your images. Resize  images using an image editing program like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP to achieve optimal image quality and file size.
    • DON’T underestimate the power of image compression. Choose wisely between GIF, JPEG and PNG compression and experiment which works best for you. GIF generally works well with text, JPEG works well with photos and PNG works well if transparency is involved. When used incorrectly, your images will not only look bad, it will consume unnecessary storage and bandwidth.
    • DON’T pop shit windows up. It’s not only annoying but confusing. Open the next page in the same window – people know how to use the back button on the browser.
    • DON’T use FORM POSTs excessively. This is what most Java and ASP.NET developers don’t quite understand. FORM POSTs (or POSTBACKs) not only prevent the back button on the browser from working, they also prevent caches from doing their jobs.
    • DO engage a third party to check for grammar, spelling and content accuracy. Badly written content translates to a bad user experience.
    • DO test your web site over a real Internet connection at home to check its loading time. Most sites load in a split second over a LAN but not over the Internet.
    • DO read up on how to make your site cache friendly, especially if your site handles lots of traffic. ISPs spend tonnes of money on web caches to conserve their bandwidth and yet web caching is one of the most misunderstood technology on the Internet. When your site is made cache friendly, ISP caches will greatly improve your users’ experience especially if they are far away.
    • DO add more line spacing. It’s easier on the eyes.

    There’s much more to web design than this short list though. Here’s my golden rule – humans like control. Give it to them.

    On a side note, I provide consultation for web marketing. Feel free to drop me a (private) message.

  • SingTel Misleads Customers with iPhone Tethering

    I’ve been having problems trying to establish PPTP VPNs using my iPhone over my SingTel 3G connection. After quite a bit of troubleshooting, I found out that using the e-ideas APN assigns the iPhone a private IP address. I switched to the internet APN and the VPN worked right away.

    However, when I switched to the internet APN, the tethering option disappeared. So either way, I can’t establish a VPN using my laptop. Effectively, this means I’m having a 3G service that doesn’t work.

    So, I called SingTel’s helpdesk at 1626.

    I asked if I could use the internet APN for tethering. They said I can’t, and gave me some bullshit about the internet APN being billed differently from e-ideas.

    I asked if they could file a complaint for VPN issues over the e-ideas APN and they were so quick to disclaim their responsibility the moment I mentioned VPN; quicker than you can finish saying “boomz!” In fact, the customer service dude told me to call Apple when it’s obvious this wasn’t Apple’s problem.

    VPNs are common in enterprises and I believe a lot of people out there need it to work. I cannot believe that SingTel would just disclaim responsibility to support VPN over the iPhone.

    Worse even, some users in the HardwareZone Forum found out that using the e-ideas APN caps your transfer rates. This is something that’s not made known publicly, so if you are going to buy an iPhone with the SingTel iFlexi plans, please be aware.

    This is not the first time SingTel has played punk with its’ customers. Last year, SingTel added Value Added Services (VAS) to customers’ accounts. The unaware customer gets the service free for a short period of time, and then they are later changed.

    No, this is not the typical free service you get when you sign up for a new contract. SingTel actually added the services to existing customers!

    Such a business practice known as negative option billing is not only unethical, but also against IDA’s policies.

    When my wife called to cancel the service and asked for a refund, they rebutted and asked rudely if she had read her contract!

    I have already written a formal complaint to IDA, but have yet to receive a response from them.

    Think I whine a lot? Why not type SingTel Sucks into Google and read for yourself.

  • DRAM Error Rates are Actually Hundred and Thousands of Times Higher Than We Thought

    DRAM, or commonly called RAM, is something we have on all computers and most mini electronic devices such as our mobile phones and portable players. Without them, computers won’t work. They hold vital data while they are in use, such as when you are editing your Excel spreadsheet, or when browsing a web page. Computer’s don’t work on data directly on the disk; once data is read off a disk, they are stored and worked on in memory. Yet Google did an extensive research and found that the error rates are much higher than we thought.

    A two-and-a-half year study of DRAM on 10s of thousands Google servers found DIMM error rates are hundreds to thousands of times higher than thought — a mean of 3,751 correctable errors per DIMM per year.

    This is the world’s first large-scale study of RAM errors in the field. It looked at multiple vendors, DRAM densities and DRAM types including DDR1, DDR2 and FB-DIMM.

    Every system architect and motherboard designer should read it carefully.

    Read the original article here.

    Time to buy ECC RAM as default for all systems. Chipkill should be in servers soon.

    Or maybe RAID5 for RAM, anyone? Buy 3 x 2GB, gives you 4GB with redundancy. Hot swappable… if possible.

  • Sun Netra T1 AC200 is Alive!

    It’s alive!

    I’ve finally decommissioned a server that has served me well for over 5 years. WhyMobile, IABPI and Naturext were the last sites hosted on the server.

    The old hefty 2U server is now sitting in my mum’s office waiting to be upgraded with a new motherboard, power supply and hard drives. It should serve well as a disk storage if configured right.

    I have just racked an old Sun Netra T1 AC200 in the empty 2U space. It’s 7 years old and had a dead motherboard. I’ve just gotten a motherboard replacement off eBay to get it working again. Now with a refurbished board, 2 x 146GB SCSI LVD drives (was originally 2 x 9.1GB SCSI LVDs – pathetic storage) running Solaris 10 and ZFS, it’s ready to go again. Unleash the power of an ancient 500MHz UltraSparc III with ZFS!

    Servers in Rack
    Servers in Rack

    The Sun Netra T1 AC200 is at the bottom of the rack. The first two silver/grey servers are production Sun X2100s running VMware. The third server in white is an OEM Asus server for development and testing. It was donated courtesy of Kelvin, and also runs VMware. The cardboard boxes contain spare disks and some other stuff… for disaster recovery.

    Network and Power Cables
    Network and Power Cables

    You can see an old 24-port Cisco 2950 switch here. It’s a workhorse. I’m thinking if I should get a spare. It’s not just a plain old switch, the servers are running tagged (or what Cisco calls “trunk”) VLANs.

    Every server has dual NICs. All the servers that run VMware are configured to run the dual ports on active-standby mode for port-level HA. I haven’t figured out how to do NIC bonding in Solaris, so that’s on my to-do list, albeit low priority at the moment.

  • Why FTTH Will Suck and 1 Mbps Symmetric Broadband is Enough for Everybody

    Watch this video. Although this video was made for entertainment, it does goes to show what people think 100 Mbps can give them.

    I think I need to start my rant. People have the wrong impression of subscribed broadband speeds. If everybody had 100 Mbps to their homes, we’ll be in for big trouble.

    As of 2007, Singapore’s broadband subscriber count is 796,500 – approximately 22% of our population. The population has grown from 3.7 million in 2007 to almost 5 million in 2009. If the percentage of subscribers remain, we’ll have approximately 1 million broadband subscribers to date.

    Multiply 1 million subscribers by 100 Mbps each, we need a whooping 100,000,000 Mbps total bandwidth to run broadband in Singapore. That’s 100 Tbit/s. Does such a bandwidth exist? No. The APCN 2 cable system has only 2.56 Tbit/s of capacity shared by the entire Asia Pacific.

    Think of the Internet as a highway. Data travels across the Internet like a car on a highway. Each car is loaded with goodies in the boot – YouTube, Windows Update, Facebook, BitTorrent. What happens if everybody drives a Boeing 747 on the highway? Sure, you can put more YouTube, Facebook and BitTorrent in a plane, but that plane’s not going anywhere because there’s simply not enough space on the highway for so many planes!

    Here’s another problem. Think of an auntie at NTUC with a years’ worth of groceries queuing up at the express cashier. Servers have limited capacity. Most network devices run either 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps. There’s some adoption of 10 Gbps in ISPs, but it’s expensive and not commonplace in enterprises. If one person hogs the server with their all-so-awesome 100 Mbps broadband, you’ll just have to wait for your turn.

    1 Mbps (megabit per second) translates to approximately 125 KB/s (kilobyte per second). 1 byte contains 8 bits. I have a 8 Mbps StarHub broadband at home. Do I see 1000 KB/s downloads often? Nope. More like 60 KB/s; that’s barely 512 Kbps. So what makes people think 100 Mbps will make a difference?

    I’ve heard people ask complain why we aren’t enjoying 100 Mbps like Japan and Korea. They say Singapore’s broadband providers suck. Well, look guys. Japan and Korea rely highly on local content due to their language.

    On the other hand, Facebook and YouTube are the top two visited sites in Singapore. These sites aren’t local. In fact, blame it on the content providers here. They are the ones that suck.

    Korea has 14 million broadband subscribers as of December 2006. Do the math. They’ll be in a massive traffic jam if they had relied on international content.

    Humans are born selfish. Everybody wants a piece of the Internet. We need to start giving (uploading) instead of taking (downloading). Broadband has to be symmetric. Up-selling 100 Mbps asymmetric broadband will only make things worse. Just like Globalization, we are consuming more than we can produce. Mark my words.

    Further reading:

  • StarHub and SingNet Practices Traffic Management

    Slow Internet access tonight? ISPs say, blame it on the P2P.

    In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about how the Internet really works and why there’s really no such thing as dedicated Internet bandwidth. To tackle the increasing bandwidth usage, ISPs are now installing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices to reduce bandwidth contention.

    StarHub has publicly announced its use of Sandvine Incorporated‘s Policy Traffic Switch to shape individual user’s traffic to allow fair use of network protocols for better user experience.

    StarHub has been working with our technology partners to mitigate the heavy burden caused by the volume of P2P traffic on the network. To ensure latency-sensitive applications (such as web-surfing and video-streaming) are not severely affected, especially during peak periods, we have implemented traffic shaping to optimize the overall efficiency of the network.

    SingNet also has a clause in fine prings, urm… prints, hidden deep beneath their website just like any other SingTel legal agreements:

    SingNet employs a fair use policy that ensures no single traffic protocol monopolizes all available bandwidth at the expense of other traffic protocols. Network management activities are carried out only for the P2P traffic protocol by ensuring that P2P traffic does not consume more than 10% to 25% of the total available bandwidth during peak and off peak hours respectively.

    So, what really is fair? Is it fair that I get less P2P bandwidth than my neighbor next door watching YouTube? Afterall, everybody uses the Internet differently.

    Quoted from Macbeth: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”