Just after I wrote and saved a long article yesterday, the computer with this website crashed.

I couldn't reach it at all, so that meant that either my parents' internet connection went down, or the computer itself crashed.

My father went to check on the server, and found out that the CPU fan was broken. The main board had detected that, and shut down the computer to prevent damage to the CPU. Jaap immediately installed a new fan so when I woke up it was up and running again.

Thanks a lot paps!

Today at around 16:00 o'clock Dutch time the server for this website went down.

My father was home, and he quickly fixed the problem. He took a nice picture of the screen, to allow me to see the error message.

It's a strange idea, that the server is so far away and I'm happy that I have good backups in place. The error message "kernel: page fault trap" is not a very healthy sign.

Yesterday evening we moved the server to a new location. First we had a cosy dinner together, and then we went to Middenmeer and took the server with us. My parents have ADSL, so there is a permanent internet connection here.

The server is now located in the attic of my parent's house. Yesterday evening at midnight I changed the DNS entries for Guus Bosman.nl, so most users should see the website again now instead of a 'temporary offline' page.

Yesterday I installed new software on the website's server. Guus Bosman.nl is running under OpenBSD, a secure unix-like operating system.

I felt it was time to install version 3.5, because version 3.3 is no longer supported. On November 1st a new version will be released again, but I wanted to update the server now as I don't think I'll have a lot of time in November.

From 20:00 o'clock to 0:30 I was installing the new OS. About an hour of that I spent trying to fix the server's diskdrive. Then I realized that the floppy disks just didn't enter the diskdrive completely, because of a mechanical issue. A screw driver helped out and after that things went smoothly. The installation program of OpenBSD is really good.

For a long time there has been an issue with displaying this website correctly in Internet Explorer.

The problem is that sometimes text on the frontpage disappears. This happens when there is an article with a picture; the picture would be visible but the corresponding text not. Reloading the page sometimes fixes the problem, also selecting the invisible text with the mouse would make the text readable.

I never knew how to fix this, but today I found a detailed description of the problem, and a number of possible solutions.

I have applied one the easier solutions, and on my Internet Explorer the problem disappeared! I hope this doesn't cause problems on other browsers though, so please let me know if the website doesn't look correctly in your browser anymore.

For the CSS insiders: I've added a line-height: 1.2em; to the div that contains the article content.

In the screenshot below you can see Guus Bosman.nl in Internet Explorer 6 before applying the fix.

A week ago I placed an article about a game with a penguin. It was a great success: many visitors had a lot of fun trying to hit the poor bird as hard as possible.

The article is truly a record for this website. It has been read more than 1700 times already, and attracted a huge number of visitors (through Google and Altavista). And so many comments! Today I've decided to "close" comments for that article for anonymous users.

If you would like to see some information about the visitors that were attracted by this game you can see a NedStat counter I've put online for a few days.

We are now officially P3P compliant:

> Thank you for making your site P3P-compatible.
> I added your site to the list.

For my work I came across a new Internet standard: the Platform for Privacy Preferences, or P3P. This allows a website to inform its customers of its privacy policy: how does the website deal with the personal data of its users.

An important aspect of the standard is that the format is both human- and machine-readable. Internet Explorer 6.0 knows how to read this information for example (see the screenshot below). You can tell Internet Explorer what your preferences are, for example that you never want to give your e-mail address to sites that sell e-mail addresses to third parties. Your browser will then warn you if you enter such a website.

I've created a policy for Guus Bosman.nl, to see how it works. My privacy policy is pretty simple: I don't sell, share or give away information on my visitors to other people. However, the website uses "cookies", to keep track of logged in users and to remember your username. <

All this you can read in my Privacy Statement.

Yesterday at the end of the afternoon Mark and I did an experiment with my website.

We were looking at a program that can be used to measure the performance of a website: how many visitors per minute can it reasonably handle? We need such tools for our work, and we did a quick experiment with a new program that Mark found.

I don't know exactly how many visitors my website usually has. I should really find that out once! A very rough estimate (for last Tuesday) indicates that every two minutes a page of our combined websites gets visited.

Background
The website you are reading is running on a new PC, and that computer doesn't do a lot more than handling the website. That means that in theory it could deal with quite a lot of visitors at the same time.

However, the connection of my computer to the internet is a major bottleneck. It's an ADSL connection with a maximum upstream of about 380 Kbit/s. If there are a few people on my website this is definitely fast enough. More than, say, ten visitors per minute would be a problem: the website would become very slow.

The experiment
The program we used yesterday is called JMeter. It behaves exactly as a user visiting a website: the website doesn't see the difference between a real visitor and JMeter. Because it's automatic, you can configure it to behave as a group of visitors too; which is of course the powerful aspect of such programs. We configured the tool such that 40 people would visit my site every minute. Half of them would see the whole website (including pictures); the other half without pictures. We then run the test for 15 minutes.

The result
The main result: when 40 people per minute are visiting the site, it will take around half a minute for a new visitor before he sees the frontpage of the site, and another minute before all the images and pictures will have been downloaded. That's pretty good! Of course for a professional website that would be quite slow, but for my self-made and self-managed hosting solution it's quite reasonable.

We also re-run the tests with an even bigger amount of visitors. If 400 visitors per minute visit the site, many of them will be blocked: the computer simply refuses to serve them. This type of test is called stress tests: seeing if the server would crash under heavy pressure. With 100 visitors per minute the site gets very slow of course: an average of more than one minute per page without images, and much longer if images are included. But the important result is that the computer didn't crash, and kept functioning.

A nice news message from my internet provider:

"The speed of the XS4ALL subscriptions Lite, Basic en Fast ADSL will be increased once again, starting January 15 2004. " - XS4ALL.

My current connection speed is 1024/320 Kbit/s, but from January the downstream will be doubled to 2048 Kbit/s. Wow... I remember the time that I was happy with a new modem that had a speed of 14.4Kbit/s.