inside aebrahim’s head

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Coral NYU Distribution Network, here is a short introduction:

Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem.

Publishing through Coral is as simple as appending a short string to the hostname of objects’ URLs; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to participating caching proxies, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the source web server. These volunteer sites that run Coral automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it, improving its availability. Using modern peer-to-peer indexing techniques, Coral will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once.

Since I’m currently located in Beijing, I find the Coral Network very useful for accessing sites that have been censored by the Chinese Government. By simply adding .nyud.net:8090 onto the end of a hostname, it will fetch any page and deliver it to you via its cache. There are many other uses for it, such as accessing Slashdotted sites, but I use it primarily for accessing banned sites (for example, anything on Blogspot, TypePad or LiveJournal, amongst a lot of others).

In order to make things easy for us Firefox/Mozilla users, they’ve written a search engine plugin using which you can easily ‘Coralize’ any page, an extension with which you can ‘Coralize’ any links on the current page, and a ‘Coralize’ bookmarklet that Coralizes the currently viewed page.

I’m sure someone out there will find Coral as useful as I do.

It’s been around 50 days since I’ve posted anything to my blog. Certainly my longest hiatus yet. I’m very much out of touch with most things that have happened on the web since 7th January, and certainly am out of touch with happenings in the Mozilla world.

What have I been up to? I did some travelling over my Chinese New Year break, and then as soon as I got back and was ready to pick up again, my laptop’s hard drive died, so I lost another few days before Dell replaced it.

Where have I been? I finished my final exams in Beijing on 7th January in the morning, and then the trek began:

07th January:  Beijing, China to Hong Kong (by air)
08th January:  Hong Kong to Singapore (by air)
17th January:  Singapore to Mumbai, India (by air)
22nd January:  Mumbai, India to Kolkata, India (by air)
30th January:  Kolkata, India to Mumbai, India (by air)
01st February: Mumbai, India to Singapore (by air)
03rd February: Singapore to Hong Kong (by air)
12th February: Hong Kong to Mumbai, India (by air)
13th February: Mumbai, India to Surat, India (by train)
19th February: Surat, India to Mumbai, India (by train)
20th February: Mumbai, India to Hong Kong (by air)
21st February: Hong Kong to Beijing, China (by air)

I just got back online from my laptop last night, because on the 20th, my hard drive failed, so I had to bring my broken laptop to China and get it fixed here. Dell was actually very good about it, they replaced my old 60GB/2MB cache drive with a new 80GB/8MB cache drive. They also replaced my motherboard because I told them my fan was making wheezing noises. Apparently the easiest way to remedy this was to replace the mobo, since the fan is attached to it. In any case, I’m not complaining.

I hope to get back in touch with Firefox happenings, so I can start triaging bugs again as soon as possible.