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Time to clean things up.

Time to clean things up.

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It was largely unexpected, but yesterday’s post had an enormous success. Okay, nothing compared to The Blonde Salad‘s posts, but I wasn’t expecting at all to get 500 visits in a couple of hours on a blog that I was considering as dead & forgotten.

This means it’s time to focus on improving your experience on this website. The weather in Ireland, where I currently am, is really helping me focus on my blog:

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What I’ve done so far, in detail:

  • HTTPS: I finally completed the SSL integration. All static links have been modified to use HTTPS, and any HTTP URL is now redirecting to its SSL version.
  • Categories & Tags: I wasn’t using categories and relied on tags to categorize my posts. After a few years the tag cloud had become a real mess, so I spent a few hours in cleaning it up and reducing the number of tags per article. From now on, every post won’t have more than 5 tags and will belong to 2 categories: the real category, and a second one (English, Italian) based on its language.
  • Caching: WordPress wasn’t performing at its best, so I tuned W3 Total Cache and switched to Memcache as its backend. It’s much better now.
  • Permalinks: Sounds like my permalinks are not so permanent. I’ve modified some titles and URLs, so you should expect to incur in 404 errors for the next few days if you’re getting here via Google or old links.
  • MySQL: Yes, believe it or not, I was still using MySQL 5.5. Switched to MariaDB 10.1, and I’m in the process of tuning it: you should expect some brief downtimes in the next few hours, while I restart services.

That’s it, for now at least.

Stay tuned!

Giorgio is back!

Giorgio is back!

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Yes, I’m back: this blog has been abandoned for like three years now, and I feel it’s time to bring it back to life. There is no particular reason behind this choice: I just need a virtual place where I can express my ideas and aggregate content I’ve always been disseminating over the internet for free (comments, forum posts, and so on).

New life means new theme (still in its basic version) and new language: some of my old posts are being read trough Google Translator, and as in the last few years my main language (mainly due to my job(s) and relationships) has been english, I have no reason at all to keep posting in italian. It’s just going to restrict my audience.

This time I won’t do what I did in all the previous “renovations”: I won’t destroy the old posts. The first one dates back to 2009 and I think they are a pretty important piece of history for them to disappear from the internet. I’m recovering the backups of the old versions of this blog in order to merge them with this one.

So, what has changed in those three years?

First, and maybe most important choice to date, I decided to put on hold (and then completely abandon) my studies at the University (Politecnico di Milano). This choice has been strongly dictated by the context (I was attending in Italy): although I perfectly understand the importance of learning the basis and developing a method for “doing things”, I felt what I was studying was too far behind reality. Spending years and thousands of euros to end up working as an underpaid intern in some big company was definitely not what I was expecting from my life.

The networking manual we were using (please mind it was 2013 and it was still being printed and was largely adopted) at a certain point stated that Ethernet was being superseded by FastEthernet, and that some big ISPs were deploying experimental long haul GigabitEthernet links. This was way too much (for non technical people reading this post: in 2013 we were already in the Terabit/s era, with multiple 100GigabitEthernet -100 times GbE- being used in long haul transits): reading this sentence, and then seeing that people that was able to get the best marks at the exam while thinking that GbE was the future (and not the past), helped me realize how detached from reality we were.

I decided to stop wasting time and joined CloudAcademy, a company that is trying to explain and show people how to take advantage of cloud services, as the Training Paths Supervisor. Feeling I had to head back to the battlefield, I decided in a few months to move to Enter, an italian ISP/CSP which at the time (late 2013) was working on the launch of a new multi-region OpenStack-based IaaS service, Enter Cloud Suite.

In Enter I have been employed first as a Cloud Architect and then as the Head of Cloud Architecture, with ECS as the main focus: I spent 2 years and a half designing and implementing hosting infrastructures for large scale news and e-commerce websites and designing, implementing and sometimes managing the OpenStack infrastructure behind Enter Cloud Suite. I was focused on the networking stack (both physical and overlay), and this gave me the opportunity to meet some very interesting realities like Cumulus Networks and Mellanox.

Then, in the first months of 2016, Amazon Web Services called: they offered me a position as a Technical Account Manager in London and I decided to accept it and move from Milan: everything happened so quickly I still have to realize what this means.

It’s very hard to explain what does it feel like being part of such a fast growing company, the one that has been the reference for your entire working life. “Work Hard. Have Fun. Make History.” is our slogan, and what it is all about: I’m sitting in the buildings where history is being written, day by day.

That’s it. This is the story of how I ended up writing this post, while laying on the bed in my apartment in Canary Wharf.

This is definitely a new beginning, and not just for this blog.

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As you wait for the next post, please enjoy the view from my bedroom.

Giorgio

Volunia: updates (for the last time…)

Volunia: updates (for the last time…)

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Some readers are asking me on Facebook and via email to post some updates about Volunia, the search engine i’ve already analyzed and blogged about.

So, let’s try to write something. But, before starting, I have to say this: the point is that… there are no updates. It’s so simple.

As you know, I’ve been monitoring the growth of the search index for a while, but i’ve stopped checking because it simply was not growing. This is the graph:

The only maybe-interesting news is that they have launched a new feedback system (basically, a Q&A CMS), probably due to the need of a more efficient system to manage users feedbacks (with the old “closed” system, i’d bet, they were receiving tons of duplicated feedbacks without any way to rank and clean them).

I’ve tried to speak about good and new features of Volunia, but right now, 2 months after its pre-launch, it looks more as a failure than a revolution: the online rumors about this search engine are now silent and the media interest in it has finished.

Being the interest in it is almost dead, I don’t think I will blog again about Volunia. Do you think this “revolutionary” search engine is still alive?

From my point of view, i’d just consider it as “dead” and focus on other emerging engines.

Giorgio

Is Volunia crawling the web?

Is Volunia crawling the web?

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Are Volunia bots crawling the web? The answer should obviously be… “yes”. But, actually, they don’t seem to be doing their work. Have a look:

This graph is showing the number of search results returned for some common keywords in the last 2 days. I’ve set my Search Language to “Italian and English” and the SafeSearch Filter to “Medium”. This is the data table:

The number of results returned for those keywords has slightly changed. How is this possible?

If you look more carefully at that table, you’ll notice that the number of results isn’t actually changing at all. It seems that my searches are run against 2 different versions of the indexes (look at the number of results for “snow”: it’s 1618056 on 10th February, then it becomes 1583862 in the 11th February morning and then back to 1618056 in the afternoon).

A search for “vada a bordo cazzo”, well-known De Falco‘s exclamation, will result in… no results if you use the double quotes, and some porn sites if you don’t use them. Wow! A little outdated index, isn’t it?

Is VoluniaBot taking a break?

UPDATE 20:45 13/02/2012: Yes, Voluniabot did woke up (in the last 10 hours). Look at this graph:

Volunia: a quick update

Volunia: a quick update

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This i just a (very) quick update about my tests on Volunia: yesterday I focused on network activity and front end configuration, so that i’ve tried to focus today’s tests on search results and common gui errors.

The first thing i’ve noticed: searches are quickly improving. There are many more results, and Volunia’s team has reported that web indexing has been made quicker. In order to “measure” the index growth, i’ve decided to create a table and a graph where i’ll periodically report the number of results shown for some test words. I’ll speak about this in the next days. Well, don’t expect Google-level results in 2 days, but… It’s improving.

I’m a bit concerned about slowness. Searching for “I’m just trying to stress you” takes more that 8 seconds (and the sistem is not yet under heavy loads). But that’s not the worst point. Searching for those words, will lead to this results page:

Can you see that HTML encoding error?

Something similar happens if you search ” “Giorgio Bonfiglio” ” (yes, this time with the double quotes): Volunia will show only one result.

Now, let’s try to click on that “repeat the search with…” link. This is the result:

That’s terrible. It’s not just about an HTML encoding error: Volunia is showing results matching on… that error! Moreover, look at the third result: is Volunia really showing as third result a page where the only matching item is a first name?