jailbreaking !== jail

Jailbreaking is not a crime, but we shouldn’t take that for granted, because as Bunnie (XBox hacker) writes;

Three years ago, the [U.S.] Copyright Office agreed to create an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act so that folks could jailbreak their smartphones. But that exemption is about to expire.

Given the fact that the U.S. jailbreaking-scene is an important contributor, I signed the EFF petition which asks the Copyright Office for continued support for jailbreakers;

Being an avid Android-user, jailbreaking permits me to replace heavily customized (and in some ways crippled, think CarrierIQ) vendor-specific versions of Android with clean, crisp, fast and secure after-market “mods” such as CyanogenMod.

You should really sign this as well!

Act up against ACTA

The European Parliament will soon vote on ACTA, an international trade agreement that might have a huge impact on the internet as we know it. The YouTube video below explains some of the ramifications (in a propaganda-esque kind of way, but still) and this Wikipedia-article provides some more objective information and contains links to -a lot- more detailed reviews and criticisms.
The bottom-line: if you’re European and you were supporting the great anti-SOPA-protests in the U.S., this is the time to act yourself! Spread the word and sign one or more of these petitions against ACTA:

The video:

Say NO to ACTA

Toolbox: BrowserMob

A month ago I added BrowserMob to my toolbox. I’m sure I’m the last web-guy in the world to discover BrowserMob (or “Neustar Web Performance”, as of yesterday), but just in case you don’t know them either, it is an online service that provides availability- and performance-monitoring for websites and -applications.
Great stuff, really; create a simple script by providing a URL, choose what datacenters you want the test to run from, set the interval and there you go. After a couple of minutes you can start gazing at charts & reports or check your mailbox for alerts. You can create more complex tests using a JavaScript-based syntax or you can import Selenium-scripts (hello Selenium IDE for FireFox). The free account I started out with offers a substantial amount of pageviews/ month (40.000) that tests can generate.

AddToAny now includes Lockerz tracking

Update 02-2015: things change, blogposts get out of date and indeed A2A is not owned by Lockerz any more.
AddToAny, one of the most popular sharing-widgets around, has had 3rd party tracking by Media6degrees for quite some time already. I wasn’t too happy about that, but it did have the no_3p option to disable this “functionality”. Half a year ago however AddToAny was acquired by Lockerz.com and it now includes tracking by Lockerz.com which cannot be turned off and does not check for navigator.doNotTrack either.
I’ve contacted the developer (Pat’s a swell guy, really) and he answered he would look into honoring the DoNotTrack header, which he wrote he’d love to include in Q1 somewhere. In the mean time, if you have AddToAny on your site, you can already hide the Lockerz “Earn” tab. And if you’re on WordPress, you could install (or upgrade) WP DoNotTrack, which I’ve updated to stop the Lockerz tracking (make sure lockerz.com is your blacklist).
If there’s a Drupalista out there that uses AddToAny and would like to stop Lockerz tracking; I’d be happy to co-author a Drupal DoNotTrack module, do get in touch!

Choosing a CDN in a whim

I had to look into CDN’s some time ago, to find a suitable temporary solution for a problem at work. There are a lot of players in this field, Akamai and Amazon (Cloudfront) being market leaders of some sort, but there’s also Microsoft with their Azure CDN (which we already had some experience with), other big guns such as Rackspace and Level3 and specialized shops such as CacheFly, CDNetworks and NetDNA as well. So how to choose?

Results only relevant for Belgium (and even then …)avg. speed (ms) for 64kBspeed delta % from fastest
softlayer121.3100%
gogrid123.0101%
microsoft azure132.0109%
level3132.0109%
amazon cloudfront133.3110%
maxcdn136.7113%
cotendo138.7114%
cachefly147.3121%
rackspace156.3129%
highwinds226.3187%
voxcast227.7188%
flexiscale317.3262%
amazon s3 eu417.3344%
cloudflare
invalid result
575.0 NA474% NA
google appspot668.0551%
voxel nl814.0671%
amazon s3 us932.0768%
voxel ny942.0776%

Well, if you’re in a hurry, you could compare price and features via cdnplanet.com. The info might not always be complete, but it does give you a good first idea and you can always visit the CDN’s proper site for more details, can’t you?
After comparing features & pricing, you really should get an idea of the speed of these CDN’s, of their performance relative to your customers. I found this CDN Speed Test on cloudclimate.com very useful; it performs a live test of approximately 20 CDN providers, requesting a 64 kilobyte file 10 times for each CDN from within your browser. So if you can get a sample of your customers to perform that test and provide you with the results, you’ll have some very useful information about performance. Together with your overview of features and price, you should be able to make at least a vaguely educated decision, no?
To have an idea about performance for our market (Belgium), I asked some Facebook-friends to provide me with the results of the CDN Speed Test. Most data I received was for Telenet or Skynet/Belgacom, not coincidentally the biggest ISP’s here. You can see the aggregated results in that ugly table on the left (or a couple of paragraphs up, if you’re subscribed to the RSS-feed).
My conclusion: as I was looking for a pay-as-you-go (no obligations, no monthly fee) CDN for static files, with support for Origin-Pull, HTTPS and some administration features (for example to purge the cache and watch nice graphs), MaxCDN fit the picture pretty well. With a great introductory price ($40 for the first Terabyte and even less if you find the coupon code) and performance that is at 113% of the fastest competitor, they seem to have found somewhat of a sweet spot for my specific context.
The only problem; I’ve got to wait for a “GO” from some people higher up the food chain. Maybe I should already implement it on my blog, just for the fun of it?

Some 2011 numbers and 2012 goals

  1. This blog:
  • WP YouTube Lyte, my WordPress plugin to do “lazy load YouTube embedding”, really took off:
    • 8 minor and 3 major releases (from 0.6.5 to 0.9.4), introducing support for features such as audio-only YouTube, embedding playlists, changing player size on the fly and translations in 6 languages (thanks to those six great contributors).
    • 48260 downloads
    • Main goal for 2012: stabilize and reach the magic 1.0.0 (which will probably include an optimized initialization-mechanism)
  • My WP DoNotTrack plugin is somewhat … younger:
    • 2 releases
    • 336 downloads
    • Goals for 2012:
      • stop more types of tracking (a.o. by including black- or whitelist filtering of the HTML using the output buffer)
      • improve filtering
      • integrate (and possibly automate) tracking-detection using the webpagetest.org API
      • promote the idea of “DoNotTrack” in general and for WordPress and WP plugins & themes in particular (the plugin is just a means, not an end in itself)

    But enough with all the navel-gazing, thanks for b(e)aring with me & have a great 2012 guys & girls!