Article

Is Reddit on the path to decline?

For a long time I’ve been a member of reddit.com, which is a fairly popular blog of sorts, but recently I’ve started to wonder if it hasn’t jumped the shark and entered its natural period of decline.

I’m not usually a big fan of the whole “is this what this site has become” whines, and this isn’t going to be a note about how the content used to be so much better than it is now (although one may say that such naysayers have a point, what with imgur.com now practically being the most prominent source of links). The site has grown tremendously and recruited users from outside its traditional scientist/engineer base to become more of a general content site, although it does have its overall tendencies, viz. atheism and political liberalism.

That being said, over the past few months it seems that the site is succumbing to its own success. Site performance is generally marginal, and during busy times you’re disturbingly likely to get a 502 error page instead of the comments page you wanted. The search functionality, which was never one of the site’s strengths, is now basically unusable; when doing a search you’re most likely to get the message that reddit is “under heavy load”. Likewise when you attempt to check your unread messages, you often end up with the picture of the reddit alien sweating while carrying a big object on his back (get it? “under heavy load”? harharhar). And of course there has recently been a bit of outright downtime.

The problem is that this just isn’t supposed to happen, not for a site which prides itself on its tech-heavy roots, and especially not for a site which has been acquired by a large corporation. Availability issues are understandable for sites such as this one, which do not have a server farm available to accommodate an excess of requests; but in reddit’s case it’s owned by Condé-Nast, a company with a lot of resources at its disposal. The site has had a few upgrade-related outages in the not-too-distant past. It would appear that the upgrades did not really resolve the underlying issues. It would seem that reddit doesn’t scale as well as its owners think it does.

At the same time it’s not like demand for sites such as reddit is showing signs of abating. The site’s pageviews have grown 1200% since January 2009 (acc. to Alexa) and over 10% in the past three months. So reddit’s capacity problems, it seems, are only going to get worse with time, especially given that they can’t really cope now. Which is really odd for a site whose membership could once be relied on to say that they knew 20 programming languages and “only” used 5 or 6 on a regular basis…

Documentaries to watch in 2009

I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries on YouTube recently, so I figured it might be a good idea to recommend a few. I think all of them are well worth seeing, if you haven’t viewed them already.

Continue reading Documentaries to watch in 2009

The Paulson Trillion-Dollar Bonanza: What’s Not to Like, Part III

I’ve been giving some thought as to the actual value of continuing with this series, because a)over the weekends the bailout proposal has changed considerably, and as of the time of my writing this this newer agreement has already been turned down by the House of Representatives. Continue reading The Paulson Trillion-Dollar Bonanza: What’s Not to Like, Part III

The Paulson Trillion-Dollar Bonanza: What’s Not to Like, Part II

Yesterday I wrote at some length about how the US economy has gotten to the point where Paulson and Bernanke decided it would be worth spending 5 hours promising Congress gloom & doom unless they got a record-busting bailout measure passed. So, why not like this (theoretically) $700B plan to “save the markets”? There are a number of reasons, which I shall put forward here. For reference, here is the draft proposal for the bailout so you can follow along.

Continue reading The Paulson Trillion-Dollar Bonanza: What’s Not to Like, Part II

The Paulson Trillion-Dollar Bonanza: What’s Not to Like, Part I — How We Got There

In case you’ve been asleep in a cave with your hands over your eyes and cotton in your ears for the past few weeks, the American economy has been in a world of hurt recently. US Treasury Henry Paulson has put forward a far-reaching plan to deal with this crisis. As it turns out there are indeed a lot of things not to like about it, but in order to see what’s wrong with it we need to take a look at how the American economy got itself into this mess in the first place. This will tell us what’s wrong with the economy and whether the bailout plan will address that.

Continue reading The Paulson Trillion-Dollar Bonanza: What’s Not to Like, Part I — How We Got There

Extending the Recording Capabilities of your Videotron Illico DVR

Videotron Illico PVRs are neat, but they’re somewhat limited. Even the recently-released HD PVR will run out of disk space pretty quickly. If you like recording high-def shows, you will fill that disk in a rather meager 30 hours. This is not an issue on a day-to-day basis, but go on vacation for two to three weeks and you may well get to that limit. Even worse, the PVR I have is a first-generation HD PVR, which can only take 16 hours of HD programming. Sometimes you just need more. Continue reading Extending the Recording Capabilities of your Videotron Illico DVR

Linksys WRT-350N – thumbs down.

Like any good geek I like to keep my networking equipment current and speedy. So recently I went out and bought a Linksys WRT-350N router. It has great specs — wireless-N support, a gigabit-ethernet wired switch for your desktops, USB storage support — but frankly, you’re better off not giving this one a second thought. It’s like when I try to cook: the ingredients are there, but the end product sucks.

Continue reading Linksys WRT-350N – thumbs down.

Tough times for bond insurers.

This is definitely not a good time to be in the bond insurance business. With large-scale insurers Ambac and MBIA — and with smaller players faring no better — one could well think that in the end the lending crisis has brought to light considerable flaws at the very basis of the American — and indeed global — financial sector. (all links above except the first lead to 6-month stock charts).

Continue reading Tough times for bond insurers.

MB makes a value proposition.

This article drove down the street to http://ambitiousbutrubbish.com/2008/01/mb-makes-a-value-proposition-with-the-all-new-c230/… update any bookmarks you may have.

“Don’t make me use it! Now you’ve done it! You… forced me to use it!!!” -Ren Hoek

Today I used a crack to start a computer game I like to play. Now, don’t get me wrong. I own the game, a few months ago I went down to the shop and bought it fair and square. I haven’t lost the DVD, or even just thrown out the guide with the DVD access key by mistake. No sir. The reason I’m using a crack is because I have to. And I’m here to tell you that neither I nor anyone else should have to do that.

Continue reading “Don’t make me use it! Now you’ve done it! You… forced me to use it!!!” -Ren Hoek