Tag Archives: pigeon

The day this blog made the front page of Slashdot – fame at last.

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In the techie world, making the front of Slashdot is a big thing or for some, a really bad thing.  The bad thing is that it can bring your server to its knees with the amount of traffic it can send your way .. luckily in my case that did not happen. The big thing is that you are on the radar for a while and if you lucky (which I was), also get a few Google ad clicks.

As mentioned before, I got slashdotted and here is a screenshot to commemorate that occurance. 

This screen capture is from my Google Reader RSS feed of Slashdot.  The highlighted piece above is the text that was link to my blog post. 

While I am typing this, the pageviews of that post and other posts on my blog are still climbing.  It will be interesting how long the traffic will last and to what levels it will return? Interesting times for a little blog like mine.  Would it not be nice to have this kind of traffic each and every day?  Think 6000 visitors per day can generate a fair amount of advertising income.  Should I re-consider my day job? 🙂 .. think not.

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Pigeon – 1; Telkom – 0

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As mentioned in a previous post, a Pigeon raced against Telkom today to transfer 4GB of data over a distance of about 70km.

To no-one’s (well maybe the management of Telkom 🙂 ) surprise, Winston, the pigeon won by a lot of bandwidth to spare.  It took Winston only 2 hours 6 minutes and 57 seconds to transfer the data from Howick to Hillcrest.

Congrats to Winston, hope he got a nice bowl of yummy seeds to munch on.  The question now remains – will carrying data between Howick and Hillcrest become Winston’s full-time job. 

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Blog survived due to Pigeon Race – got Slashdotted :)

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Looking at my blog stats this morning, I almost fell off my chair.  To give you some idea, the traffic on this blog is less than 50 pageviews (around 40 visitors) a day and yesterday and overnight it skyrocketed due to a Pigeon I wrote about.

The Pigeon article alone has almost 4000 views at the moment and here is some graphs that show my blog traffic over the past couple of days:

Blue: Pageviews – Yellow: Visitors
From:  Google Analystics


This is from WordPress Statistics.

So where did the traffic come from:

Yes, as can be seen, I got Slashdotted and my blog survived.  Here is the story on Slashdot: http://idle.slashdot.org/story/09/09/08/1414248/SAs-Largest-Telecomms-Provider-vs-a-Pigeon?from=rss. It was even on the front page of Slashdot for a while.

What I am really glad about is that I moved this blog not so long ago to a new host.  If this was the old host, it surely would not have survived.  My new host, Dreamhost, handle this kind of traffic without any problems.

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Pigeon beats ADSL handsdown .. classic.

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I found this via Watkykjy and it is classic.  I am quoting the whole letter verbatim:

Hi Guys/Gals

We are having a bit of fun at the expense of our favourite telecoms provider Helkom. Let me explain. We have satellite call centres which are connected via business ADSL’s to our main data centre. As usual these connections where very unstable and extremely slow. This caused a huge amount of frustration for us as we need to move voice logs(100’s of megabytes) a day up to our main databases for QA and legal purposes. Our company runs on sales and without voice logs we have no binding contract between us and the customer. So they are pretty essential.

Anyway I read a Aprils fools white paper about Avian carrier networks a couple of years ago. Basically it is a protocol that uses racing pigeons as a network layer. This got me thinking about how fast we can transfer the data by racing pigeon. I discussed this idea with my CIO one night having a couple of drinks. When we did the math we found out that we can transfer the data faster by pigeon for certain sites. So we made a project of it. Next week Wednesday is Pigeon VS ADSL day here at the unlimited world. We have the media involved so check the Sunday times for a article on this event.

Basically we will be flying a pigeon with a 4GB micro SD card from Howick to our central site in Hillcrest. We did a dry run yesterday. Here is the stats: Pigeon took 48 minutes to deliver the data. ADSL is still downloading. Telkom got hold of this via the media and is currently in a flat spin. We got a call from Telkom asking us for our circuit numbers so they can make sure we have good service.

Here is the best part. We spend +/- R 45000 a month just on rental for these lines. If we moved to the Avian Carrier Network we will be saving a whopping R 35 000 a month.

Check out the facebook group, do a search for Winston the pigeon on facebook. Also watch the local press for some tongue in cheek articles about our great Helkom.

Regards
Neil

PS: The Original White Paper is located here: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html

Also check this link for more info: http://pigeonrace2009.co.za

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