When Internet traffic travels from point A to point B — say from your computer to Yahoo! — it travels first to your local Internet company, then over their network to an Internet backbone (something like the 401 in motor vehicle terms), then to the Internet company of your destination. Along the way your traffic passes through a variety of technical gizmos calls bridges and hubs and routers, all roughly analagous to switching stations on the railway.

When you ping a computer, you’re essentially sending out a signal over the Internet, and waiting for it to bounce back. You time how long this takes, and in doing so get some idea of how smooth or congested the route between you and your destination is. This is roughly the same as going into a canyon and yelling “Ping!” at the top of your lungs, and timing how long it takes you to hear the echo.

A traceroute is essentially a roadmap showing the hops, skips and jumps your Internet traffic takes between you and your destination. For example, when I post this message to the website, it will travel over my Island Tel DSL connection to the Aliant network, then to BellNexxia in Montréal, New York and Toronto, over to AT&T Canada’s network in Toronto, to ISN here in Charlottetown, then to the Reinvented server 4 blocks across town. In general the fewer number of hops Internet traffic has to take between you and your destination, the smoother things will go for you.

Here are the results of my pings and traceroutes to Eastlink’s gateway (see previous message for details).

The Government of PEI webserver is 18 hops from c5.eastlink.ca with an average ping return time of 82ms measured over the last five minutes. By contrast, my Island Tel DSL puts me 2 hops away with an average ping return time of 10ms.

The Yankee webserver in Dublin, NH is 15 hops from c5.eastlink.ca with an average ping return time of 62ms. By contrast, my existing DSL puts me 16 hops away, with an average ping return of 50ms.

The Yankee webserver in Boston, MA is 11 hops from c5.eastlink.ca with an average ping return time of 40ms. By contrast, my existing DSL puts me 15 hops away, with an average ping return of 52ms.

Sad note: Mike Muuss, the author of ping was killed last year in an auto accident.

So I got “the call” today from Eastlink telling me that they can now offer Internet, telephone and digital cable services to the Reinvented World HQ here on Prince St.

One of my concerns about switching from my existing Internet service is a question about how “far”, in Internet terms, I would be from servers I maintain for PEI and for Yankee.

So I went to the Eastlink website, clicked on the technical support link, got the phone number (1-800-345-1111) and dialed it up.

I travelled through a well-laid-out phone tree, and after pressing “1 for Internet Technical Support” the phone rang. Once. Yes, just once. I didn’t have to listen to an electronic version of James Taylor’s Fire and Rain. At all.

The friendly guy who answered the call said “Eastlink Internet. How can I help you?” He didn’t say “What’s your user id?” I like this.

I told him my situation. He didn’t respond by saying “what’s an IP address?” He responded by saying “why don’t you just do some pinging and tracerouting to our gateway at c5.eastlink.ca”. Just like that.

The call lasted about 2 minutes from start to finish. I am very impressed.

Andrea Ledwell mentions the lack of Guardian headlines and the old News section of this site. The news is back and so are the headlines, in a friendlier format. It’s funny you should mention this, as earlier this week I sent the following email to Gary MacDougall at The Guardian:

Back in late 1999, I was an early experimenter with a new technology called RDF, which, in essence, allows website content to be syndicated. The idea is that headlines from many different websites can be amalgamated onto one customizable page, with links to the original source provided. While this is quite common these days (see my.yahoo.com, www.moreover.com, my.netscape.com and others), at that time it was all new and experimental.

In the spirit of this experimentation, on November 3, 1999, shortly after you folks went online with your website, I wrote a little program that would visit your website at 3:00 p.m. each Monday through Saturday and sift through the stories on the various pages, pull out the headlines from each page (this is easy to do, in part because you’re so consistent in your formatting — you always enter headlines the same way), and make these available for syndication. I published a couple of notes about this to my own website, and experimented with adding Guardian headlines to various customizable third-party websites.

And then I forgot about all of this and went on to other projects, leaving the daily headline update in place on my server for all takers.

Unbeknownst to me, a lot of people watched those original experiments, or found links to the Guardian headlines files on my server, and started to use them to provide customizable Guardian headlines, with pointers to your website, on their websites. I only noticed this recently, when I started to analyze the traffic to www.reinvented.net.

Look at this website as an example of this; halfway down the middle column of the page you’ll see a section called “Charlottetown Guardian: Top Stories”. I don’t have any relationship with these folks, in fact I didn’t know they existed until I searched just now — they simply connect each day to 5 little files of headlines on my server which, in turn, point to stories on your server.

These headlines are now showing up in many different places in the Internet. If you go to www.google.com, for example, and search for “Charlottetown Guardian deaths”, you’ll see the first search result takes you to a page at this site, which displays today’s Guardian-listed deaths, with links back to your site for details.

Traffic-wise, in the last 100 days there have been 1,367,606 requests for these headlines files from my server, roughly 14,000 per day. This traffic is now accounting for 90% of the traffic to my server.

In the end this is all a Good Thing for the Guardian because, at least in theory, it should be driving traffic to your website.

When I first started this little experiment, I sent an email to Don Brander letting him know what I was doing; I didn’t hear back from him at the time. This email is simply to let you know that this is all happening, and to seek your comments on whether this is a service I should leave in place or not.

At 11:25 a.m. this morning the Island Tel network went off the air. No high speed Internet. No access from the Internet to webservers on the network. And so on. Took the usual frustrating trip through customer service [sic] hell. Finally hung up in frustration after the tech guy asked me to disable my firewall. Sigh. Network came back up after 35 minutes.

Spring is way, way better than winter.

I remember when I was in high school and university, the prospect of writing 1,000 words on something, to say nothing of 2,000 or 3,000 words, was always very daunting.

I have strong memories of combing through a 950 word essay looking for ways to stretch out the length — substitute “the research conducted in the scientific community” for “research” and so on. This can’t have been a good lesson.

And so I was amazed tonight when I sat down after supper to put together my talk for tomorrow that, when I was done 5 hours later, 3,281 words had just flowed right out of me.

I’m not sure how this bodes for my talk tomorrow, but it does put earlier frustrations in a new light.

My wise friend Ann the Communicator writes, in part:

I think you should have a subsection of your site for endless technology discussions which are Not of General Interest…

That said, using Ann as a canarie, I will direct my gaze elsewhere for a spell, if only to preserve my own sanity.

Beware, though, that at any minute, some horrible techo-debacle could strike, and I would have no choice but to write about it. In case this happens, I suggest you of the techo-averse class on this ship re-route to this website for a respite from the inanity.

Just don’t come looking for me when Island Tel comes for your cats¹.

1. Any suggestion that Island Telecom Inc., or its parent or associated companies have anything against cats is purely a fictional construction used for dramatic effect only. As far as we know, they love cats. And I’m sure if you asked really hard, they would install a phone for a cat. But not High Speed Internet. For that you have to be at least a dog.

My friend the Oliver the Science Journalist was talking to North America’s leading ufologist today, and I was dismayed to have Oliver report back to me that this man’s opinion was that aliens from outer space would not care about the font or other presentation details of websites. Really.

My talk pEi-Commerce: Handcrafting Simple, Nimble, Cheap, Distributed Internet Applications for the Atlantic Provinces Library Association Conference is scheduled for Friday, June 1 at 3:30 p.m.

I encourage you to register for the conference, and attend the many interesting sessions scheduled, especially the Banquet with guest speaker Roch Carrier, who graced the Confederation Centre with a wonderful appearance mid-winter and who is a compelling speaker.

7:00 a.m. - Clock radio goes off to the sound of Karen Mair reading the news on CBC. Wake up. Shower and shave. Realize I have enough time to wake Oliver up, feed him, and take him with me.

7:20 a.m. - Call CGH to ensure that we’re on track. We are.

7:21 a.m. - Oliver awake. Change. Downstairs to kitchen. Boil water, mix cereal, dig mushed carrots out of fridge. Oliver eats. Likes cereal (with apples added), but spits out (cold) carrots. No time to warm carrots. Make do with cereal.

7:35 a.m. - Out the door. Realize it’s cold and going to rain. Back inside to put Oliver in a coat.

7:40 a.m. - Arrive CGH’s house. She’s not there. Meet next door neighbour Jill and we talk about the care of cats. Wait in car with Oliver. Sing songs and play pantomime games with Indigo the black puppet dog.

7:50 a.m. - CGH arrives home from early morning trip. Into house. See great pile of luggage. Talk to dog. CGH makes tea and toast. Crazy frenetic air in the house. Dog knows something is up, but doesn’t realize that quality time should be spent with cats before they part.

8:02 a.m. - CGH, now a net addict, must check email and website before we leave for airport. Shows me piece she wrote last night.

8:15 a.m. - Load Oliver into car. Load luggage into car. Load CGH into car with dog.

8:17 a.m. - Off to Queen Street Meat Market to pick up lobster. CGH insists we take Prince St. We take Prince St. Overshoot and double back via Allen St.

8:25 a.m. - Arrive meat market. CGH goes inside and Oliver and I wait in the car. Notice there’s a sticker in the window saying Shoplifting is a Crime. Wonder if casual meat theft is a big problem. Also notice more TIAPEI membership stickers on the window than ever seen before; wonder if longstanding TIAPEI membership has paid off for the meat market.

8:28 a.m. - CGH emerges from meat market with giant, ancient black suitcase, wrapped in packing tape, filled with lobster. Find that suitcase was CGH’s mothers, previously used to ferry lobsters west, presumably in 1940s. Find that suitcase is to be sacrificed ritually upon arrival in Ottawa.

8:29 a.m. - Set off for Ash Drive to drop dog with Joan and Leith. Instructions from CGH to proceed up Allen St. to Mt. Edward Road. Proceed up Allen St. to Mt. Edward Road. Arrive Ash Drive.

8:35 a.m. - Dog transferred, along with copious instructions on care, feeding, etc. Joan looks nervous; awesome weight on shoulders. Leith looks relaxes. Note that Joan and Leith were out mowing lawn and trimming brush at 8:35 a.m.; realize am seldom up this early and this is what people must do at this hour.

8:42 a.m. - Arrive airport (no instructions on best route; turns out CGH’s knowledge of suburban hinterlands is not vast). Park in departure area. Get cart. CGH runs in to start checkin process. Load cart with bags and giant black lobster suitcase. Get Oliver. Try to push cart while carrying Oliver. Difficulty. Giant lobster suitcasse falls off. Retrieved and rearranged. Thankful for automatic doors at airport. Oliver looks puzzled and wonders if we are flying somwhere.

8:47 a.m. - Find CGH in line. Maneouver cart into placed. Say quick goodbye. While walking back to car hear friendly woman, also in line, ask CGH where she’s going. “I’m off to visit my sisters…” she says. Not complete story, but true nonetheless.