Dream with Our Eyes Open

So you can see (either right here, or by clicking on the DW crosspost link, depending on where you are) that I have been changing up my DW journal layout. I've been wanting to do a Saiyuki-themed layout for ages, but despite many years' experience with HTML, the layered CSS used by LJ/DW for sophisticated changes in layouts still gives me the sort of brain lock I associate with learning new mathematical concepts.

DW recently added a "Bannering" layout, so I thought I'd give it a try. After an hour or so of tinkering, I'm cross with a number of things. The main one is that the journal title uses the journal text font color. Who the hell thought that was a good idea? Of course people might want to have the title of the whole shootin' match in a different color than the body text. Also, IMHO, the title ought to be in its own container with a limited width so that it forces a longer title to wrap instead of extending across the entire banner. But this is what I get for not buckling down and figuring out how the actual code works. Oh well.

For the past week, it's been crawling for me.

So LJ sent me a response that actually makes a certain amount of sense to me, on the basis of some issues we've had at work with external database services:

At the time your request was opened, some new IP addresses Dreamwidth began using to crosspost to LiveJournal had been blocked by automated processes. These have since been removed, and Dreamwidth's IP addresses are whitelisted within our system. If you are still having issues with this, LiveJournal does not offer support for Dreamwidth's crossposter; you will need to contact Dreamwidth's support department for assistance with any problems remaining with this feature.

Of course, they're being somewhat shirty about DW, but that sort of IP issue is something I've encountered previously where two services are supposed to be working together online. But I was having the problem again this afternoon ... I guess I will send this info to DW's sys admin folks, although I imagine they know already.

"[I]t seems to be an issue with alter.net, which is run by Verizon."

And if I try searching for recent messages online about Alter.net and communications problems, I find, for example, this: "The host google-gw.customer.alter.net (alter.net is part of Verizon network) is experiencing horrific packet loss, sometime upwards of 50%." That means that along this route, communications on the Web, which is broken up into a stream of chunks called "packets," is being compromised not only by the loss of the packets themselves, but by the fact that if the sending server (the host) knows that a packet has gone missing, it will re-transit the packet, and so traffic bulks up again.

It seems that playing Youtube videos is where the major slowdown is seen most often. There were several recent postings at various message boards about this issue.

I tried doing a "traceroute" myself, and yes, I can see where the communication runs through Alter.net.

On the other hand, response this morning is pretty sprightly. Either things have improved, or there are just fewer people online (and downloading chunky stuff like videos) at 8:00 a.m. U.S. ET!

So yeah, if your connection to DW runs through Alter.net, you may be seeing (or have seen - let's be optimistic) this issue, and if not, you likely won't.