Today I had a chance to practice my patience. I failed 🙂

It all started when we realized that we have lost the User Guide / Owner’s Manual for our LG Jet Cool Air Conditioner. Model LS-Q076.
While we still don’t know how to program the AC to shut off at certain time.

We need this functionality to ensure that the kids will still have an enjoyable night sleep – but without suffering from dry air due to a continuous, all-night, AC operation.

So, easy, right? Nowadays, just Google, and you should find it, right. Right ? 🙂

Finding LG’s website was easy enough. However, I immediately realized that the WHOLE website’s interface was coded in Javascript.

This is a nightmare for visitors like me for various reasons :

(1) Broken “back” button
(2) Slower website performance
(3) In case of problems – it’s back to start for us.

The International LG website has 4000+ documents listed for their AC product alone. So I looked for its Indonesian website. Found it in no time. And the horror begin.

The website is slow. Horribly slow. This is on a 3G broadband connection, with regular 160 Kbps download speed.

It’s the dynamic parts – the static parts of the website renders quickly. However, its dynamic ones, such as lists, will show up MUCH later.

Basing the website heavily on Javascript doesn’t help either in this particular case. Now you have 2 dynamic parts – on server and client. Both horribly unoptimized.

By default, a dynamic website WILL perform slower than a similar, static one. There are tricks to make it faster, but you need to be really knowledgeable in this topic to pull it off.
LG’s website not only deploy dynamic website on both of its server & client side; it also does so blindly.

Actually, I still have patience for this kind of websites. Since they’re so widespread anyway, sometimes you just have to grind your teeth and get on with it.

But broken navigation ? That’s the last straw.

Basically, I was browsing on the braindead UI design of LG’s website, when it threw an error on me.
I call it braindead because you are looking for a single document from a THOUSAND available choice – but you can only see 20 choices at a time; and you can NOT skip to the page where you think your document is.

Then after skippng about 40 pages, you found the document – and it threw an error.

I had to start again from the Front page 🙁

No, the BACK button does NOT work. Genius, I know.

So, after hours of browsing, retries, and barely enough patience to held back my rage; I finally got my document. Yeah!
Now we know how to set the AC off after certain time.

Then I rushes to my blog, and wrote this. 🙂

Anyway, hope you enjoyed reading it, more than I have suffered it. These kind of websites should be named & shamed as widely as possible.
Hopefully then we’ll be seeing less of them. And the Internets then will become a MUCH better place to browse around.

To Hell with stupid web design practices ! 😀

These past few days I’ve been stumbling on articles about Wolfram Alpha. How that it’d be the next search engine. How it’d be the Google killer. And so on.
Unfortunately, it’s not the first time I’ve heard about such claims.

I can’t remember exactly when I was first online on the Internet. Probably 1995. Back at that time, there was only a handful of websites. There was a book claiming to be the Yellow Page of Internet. It was enough to get me around.

Then the internet grew. Very quickly. So I started to utilize Yahoo to find websites of interest. At that time, Yahoo looks like DMOZ.org. Yes, seriously.
Anyway, it was enough for my needs.

But the Internet doesn’t stop growing. Then I realized that I’ll need a different kind of assistance, to enable me to continue utilize it as best as possible.

So I found AltaVista. Lycos. And others. A.k.a “search engines”

It was truly amazing. You can find what you’re looking for from several millions of pages on the Internet within several seconds. Totally unheard of. I became adept at utilizing it. People thought I’m an IT wizard. While actually I was just rather good at asking the right questions to Altavista.

One thing about the Internet is that it’s a free place. Everyone can do anything at anytime. Altavista was not left alone for long — soon others are gunning for its position.

Long story cut short – Yahoo made Google as its search engine, Google became successful, Yahoo cut the deal; but it was too late. Google already became the King of Search Engines.

So now others are gunning Google.
And they’re not always doing it exactly the same way as Google. Which is good.

We’ve heard about Mahalo. About Cuil. Metacrawler, Ask.com, etc.
However, after years, still none managed to unseat Google from its top position. Despite the fact that some are answering questions even better than Google.

For example, do you know that there are search engines that can process questions in natural language form ? Example : Who is the president of Indonesia ?

Awesome 🙂

START is the first web-based answering system, online since Dec 1993. Yes, what Wolfram Alpha trying to achieve is already done by MIT. 15 years ago.
That made START even more impressive.

Have a look around : Who is Sarah Connor ?

It can be biased too 🙂
What is the best programming language ?

It can even lie !
Are you alive ?

Ahem. Okay, back to the topic – with all these wonderful engines, why it’s Google that’s still on the top ?

It’s because performance alone doesn’t ensure success.

You need also :

(1) Marketing : Google is already a very well-known brand. It’s even included in Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Competing with such well-known brand is a significant challenge.

(2) Scalability : Incoming : Can the engine scale to today’s billions of pages out there on the Internet ?

Google could. Not all the others fare as well.

(3) Scalability : Outgoing : Keeping point 2 above in mind – can you reply to people’s questions within / under 1 second ?

Google could. Some others could too – by sacrificing point 2.

(4) Relevancy : Can you read people’s mind ? Oops, let me rephrase that – can you give relevant answers to the questions ?

This is not easy as it might be because Internet keeps changing. It’s a moving target.

A while ago I was using a search engine called GigaBlast.
It was pretty good, and at the time it was even faster than Google.

However, after a while it started giving me irrelevant results. When I checked, it was because of various SEO techniques being deployed. So it got tricked in certain queries.
But Google kept becoming better. So I went back to Google.

Any contender for Google’s seat must be able to compete in the long run. They must not stay the same, because Google is always becoming better.

Yeah, it might be a while before we saw someone killed Google. Actually, they may be absorbed into Google’s collective instead.

But just as two-person start-up managed to shook the search engine world several years ago by creating Google, we may very well witness that again in the next several years. Because on the Internet, nothing is sacred and forever.

This has been my favorite comic strip for quite awhile now 🙂

The name itself already got me – Chickenstrip. Pure hilarity. Also it’s among my favorite food 🙂
Then the comic itself, it can be both clever & funny at the same time – without trying too hard at it.

Some of the strips are locally/Indonesian-themed, but this is a minority. Most should be enjoyable by anyone who have been in touch with IT in some way.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta do my chicken dance now 😀

Spread the word ! Let’s make more people know about this brilliant comicstrip.

Several days ago I was having problems with my web infrastructure. It seems that it got overloaded. Traffic-wise, it should not; because (1) I got a caching reverse-proxy (squid) installed, and (2) 3 terabytes of traffic is still very well within its current capacity.

Of course, other factors may change this equation, for example, when you have database-intensive pages. In this case, even several requests per minute may already be enough to overload your servers.

Anyway, I notified the parties affected by this and started the troubleshooting process. Following the usual process of benchmarking, profiling, and optimization (BPO); soon I got all fingers pointing to squid. So tried several others, varnish, nginx, ncache; all failed – but this is for another post. This post is about hype and how even IT experts fell for it.

When doing the BPO process, I got in chat with several friends which are quite well-known as IT experts. Help is always welcome, so I followed through the discussions. The suggestions were rather strange though, but all was still well. Until one suggested me to move my infrastructure to a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

I almost snorted coffee through my nose 😀
(I really should have it by IV drips to prevent this from happening again in the future, but anyway…)

A bit about CDN – it’s basically a network of servers all over the world, which hosts the same set of data. Then when a visitor requested the file, it will be served from the server closest to its location. So the visitor will be able to fetch the data with maximum speed.

That’s basically how a CDN works. There are variations, but this is the basic of it.

The problem with using CDN :

(1) CDN is for static contents : Facebook users probably have seen their browser’s status page showing lines such as “Loading static.ak.fbcdn.net”. That’s Facebook’s own CDN. Notice the first word at the beginning of the domain name? Yup, static.

There’s a reason why CDNs are for static contents. Static contents are easier to synchronize and deliver through the whole network. You can, indeed, synch and deliver dynamic contents through a CDN — but the level of complexity jumped by several magnitude at the instant. And so is the cost. Which brings us to the second reason,

(2) Cost : standard CDN will cost you at least 5x of your normal bandwidth costs.
SoftLayer.com brought a breakthrough in this case, where their CDN costs “only” twice the normal bandwidth.

However, it’s still 200% more expensive, and my web infrastructure hosts dynamic contents, which may change by the minute — so it’s absolutely out of the question.

If that friend is willing to foot the cost, then I’m willing to play with the CDN. It makes things more fun with none of the pain 🙂

Anyway, I’m still amazed at how even IT experts fell for hypes. I know CDN sounds cool & hip & sophisticated and so on, still, personally I prefer hard proof. Especially by proving any claim by myself.

But each to its own I guess. Just try not to misled others by spreading the hype too, okay?
Repeat after me – CDN is NOT a silver bullet. And as we all knew already, applying the wrong solution to a problem will just cause even more problems.

Regarding my problem, I solved it by moving squid’s cache to a different disk. Looks like the previous disk was defective. Including some further tweaks, the performance now almost doubled compared to before the trouble begun. Some of the websites fully loads in as little as 2 seconds. Not bad.

Performance-wise, it’s now alright. But my work still continue to further expand the capacity of my web infrastructure. For now, the customers are happy.

That’s what matters.