Category: Technology

Vivit interview at HP Discover, Frankfurt

On Thursday 6th December at HP Discover in Frankfurt, Jason Kennedy, Martijn Stuiver and I were asked to discuss how Vivit is changing from a primarily US-centric, practitioner-focused user community to one which helps support our members as the IT world changes around them.

The interview covers the changing demographics of the Vivit user community, how we plan to alter our content to suit our membership, our development of new social media channels, the growth of our membership as well as the development of new special interest groups such as “Cloud Builders” and “Security” alongside our existing special interest groups.

Vivit interview at HP Discover, Frankfurt
Vivit interview at HP Discover, Frankfurt

For more information and to join the Vivit community (it’s free by the way), go to
http://www.vivit-worldwide.org

Tate website fails under Kraftwerk ticket demand

Kraftwerk

 

Who’d have thought it?
I didn’t realise that Kraftwerk was so popular.

This morning, Twitter and Google Plus are full of people ranting about poor website performance.

Today’s vitriol is reserved for the Tate Modern in London which is selling tickets for the Kraftwerk 2013 shows.

 

 

Here are a few snippets of customer feedback from social media this morning.

Twitter comments - Tate

Disgruntled customers are never a “good news” story. The IT people will have their necks on the blocks, the PR team will be working overtime and I really feel sorry for the people who have to man the phones and take calls from customers who’ve been waiting to get through for hours.

A brief look at the site shows a few things that they could do to relieve their problems, but I suspect that they simply haven’t seen demand like this before. This, of course, makes it hard to plan; but some simple performance testing prior to launch could have identified these problems and prevented such a PR disaster.

What could they have done?

Used a CDN
They appear to host their own images
A CDN could help to take load away from their webservers at peak time

Served scaled images and use lossless image compression
They send large images, but resize them in HTML.
Many images could be compressed without reducing quality.
Large images consume bandwidth and reduce the number of simultaneous users that a site can support.

Use a more scalable application architecture
They seem to be hosted by verio.com who offer various hosting options including cloud as well as conventional hosting plans. Despite an on-demand architecture, if the application isn’t designed and built to scale up to meet demand it can still fail.

DMA2200 Media Center problem – resolved

DMA2200For the last few weeks, I’ve been having problems with my Linksys Media Extender. This has been causing me a great deal of grief because this is the only method currently of watching TV in bed (I have a Windows 7 Media Center PC in the front room and serve recorded TV as well as the satellite feeds up to the extender in the bedroom).

I’ve noticed that occasionally the Media Center Extender freezes up and becomes unresponsive to the remote control. I replaced the batteries in the remote (twice) but the problem remained. The Extender would happily continue displaying the channel that I had started watching but wouldn’t allow me to change. Occasionally I’d come back to the Extender to find that the screen was blank and the extender was unresponsive.

Restarting the Extender has always temporarily resolved this issue, but in the last few days, the problem has become more acute and the extender has generally only remained stable for a few minutes before crashing again. Since nobody is manufacturing extenders any more (until Ceton releases their new media center later this year) , this could have meant that I needed to drop an aerial into the bedroom and lose the ability to watch recorded TV.

Trawling the Internet for clues to the problem I came across this article, which although it was 2 years old and written in the US, gave me a nugget of information which fixed my problem.
http://experts.windows.com/frms/windows_entertainment_and_connected_home/f/116/p/95097/496301.aspx (Sadly not there anymore….)

It appears that the extender tries to connect to a Cisco or Linksys server to obtain an update. Since support for this product has now been withdrawn it is likely that the server is now offline. My theory is that the problem hit US users a few years ago and perhaps only recently has the same problem surfaced in my region when the UK/European regional servers were decommissioned.

My connection was wired, but I presume that the same steps could be used to fix a problem with a wired DMA2200 (or DMA2100) extender.

Steps taken:

  • Set a static IP address for the media center extender.
  • Enter 0.0.0.0 for both primary and secondary DNS servers.DMA2200

This prevents the extender from accessing the internet and then crashing when it fails to find the relevant update servers.