Teknovis

Last Tuesday the Irish Minister for Finance publicly announced the details of the 2009 budget for Ireland. The format of this announcement is that the Minister reads a long speech, containing all of the budget details, in the lower house of the parliament. It was a widly anticipated event this year, due to the current economic downturn.

The speech was broadcast live by the state broadcaster RTE on television, radio, and online. RTE peer at INEX, which is the main Internet Exchange in Ireland. The INEX traffic statistics are available online, and they clearly show a massive peak in traffic corresponding to the speech on Tuesday afternoon, in week 42. The maximum throughput during this time was approximately 5.3Gbits/s. I believe that this is a record for INEX!

It is not a surprise that the speech caused a new throughput record, because a new record was also set during the speech last year. (Last year this occurred in early December).

In general, the throughput appears to be influenced most by RTE broadcasting major sporting events online. For example, the peaks in June 2008 and August 2008 coincide with the European Football Championships and the Olympics respectively. It is also possible to see the distinction between the first and second halves of Champions League football matches on the daily graph.

Tags: INEX, Peering, RTE

I think that it is appropriate that my very first post in this blog should explain some of the reasoning and choices that were made in getting to this point.

The first decision that I had to make when I decided to start this blog was where I would host it. There are many guides online giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options, but for me this was a fairly simple decision. I decided to host it with my current hosting service provider Blacknight, because I like having complete control over it.

The second choice was to decide which bloging software to use. Blacknight offers three possibilities:

• WordPress
• Movable Type
• Drupal

I did not have any previous direct experience with any of these, but I understood Drupal to be more of a CMS, so I immediately eliminated it. Initially I was leaning towards Movable Type because it seems to be favoured by Blacknight. Apparently it is significantly less resource intensive than WordPress due to its use of page caching.

I then started reading some of the many articles online that compare Movable Type and WordPress, and in the end I decided to go with WordPress. The main advantages of WordPress to me are:

• WordPress is open source, whereas only some versions of Movable Type are open source. Therefore, I expect that there will be more plugins and themes available for WordPress.
• WordPress seems to be more popular.
• WordPress appeared to be easier, and more intuitive, to use. This is important to me, because I wanted to start blogging fairly quickly!
• The WordPress implementation seems to be cleaner, since it uses only one programming language (PHP). Movable Type apparently uses a mix of Perl and PHP. I am not a fan of applications written using several similar programming languages!

There are also many advantages of Movable Type, but since these are not relevant to me I have not covered them here.

So now we are here! I will keep this blog updated with my opinions and experiences of WordPress. I also will cover plugins and accessibility in future posts. Now I think that this is enough for my first post!

Tags: Blacknight, CMS, Drupal, Movable Type, Perl, PHP, WordPress