Month: December 2004

Two kids.

One dog.

A treeful of presents.

45 minutes.

Now to deal with madness that resulted.

From our house to yours, Merry Giftmas.

Just discovered a new player in the Web performance field: SciVisum.

Anyone know anything about them?

As a sidelight to my Web performance job, I spent a lot of time investigating Web compression techniques, tools and devices a while back (I have a library of items I have collected

My studies were purely technical, i.e. what was the bandwidth saving in implementing this technology v. remaining uncompressed. Now I want to work with some companies who have implemented a compression solution recently and get a sense of what the bottom-line impact was.

Some questions I am trying to answer.

• Does compression really save companies money?
• Is the hardware/software implementation cost have an acceptable ROI?
• Have you implemented a compression solution, then retired it? Why?

Not earth-shattering questions, but they will help me better understand the end-to-end business implications of deploying and integrating a compression solution.

If you woul dlike to partcipate, please drop me a line here.

Lexthink! sounds like the kind of event I would want to attend if I worked in a real Professional Services firm.

And to make it "by invitation only"…well, that makes it super sexy!

Thanks to Scoble for the link.

Just spent the last hour assembling a gift for the boys. Samantha was kind enough to stand back and simply read the instructions to me — and they were EXCELLENT directions. There were a few "big daddy hands in in a tight small space to tighten a nut" moments, but beyond that, all the parts were there and clearly marked and in the right quantity.

End-product: one ride on tractor for the boys! Thanks to Grandma and Grandpa (Samantha’s parents) and Great Grandma Isa (my grandmother) for contributing.

In a previous post, I discussed that I was reading some management books to get an insight into the other side of the company. I have finished Hope is Not a Strategy finally. Interesting, but no new revelations. The war stories are the most interesting part of the whole book. The approach to sales in common-sensical, but much too hard for most folks in this day of instant gratification.

The reason why the Long Tail concept seemed so familiar to me is that I work with the statistical cousin to the marketing term, the Heavy Tail.

The term Heavy Tail is used to describe a dataset that is not “normally” (in the statistical sense; think Bell Curve) distributed. Internet performance data is notoriously heavy-tailed, with a large concentration of datapoints to the left-hand side of the population and a very slow and long/heavy tail trailing out into the nether reaches of “where things go very wrong”.

When I gave training classes, I described this (being a Canadian, of course), as the Beaver Effect. If you are as puzzled as some of my seminar participants were, I am not suprised. However, go look at a picture of beaver — none posted here; you know how to use Google.

Huge Body; large tail. The Beaver Effect.

Guess it doesn’t resonate like the Long Tail.

I have a monthly conference call with one of our consulting clients to go over their data, discuss improvements, and hear about initiatives that they they may be undertaking which will have an effect on the data for next month’s call.

I woke up from my month-long slumber to prepare for this call. I saw some unusual trends, noted them, threw everything in a PowerPoint and thought to myself, "Well, they probably already knew this…but it’s what I saw".

When I got on the call, it seems that my information had set off a fire-drill. They look at the data daily, but hadn’t had anyone turn it into information for them. Now it looks like they will have to go in and debug an ancient piece of Java code that no one has looked at in years, cause it just worked. (See Tim Bray for more on this topic)

How does your company turn data into information? Chat away!

I miss it.

Seems like an odd thing to say, but I miss talking to groups of people who may be interested in what I have to say (in my offbeat and unique way) about concepts in Web performance. I used to do it a lot at my previous job, but I have not been presented the opportunity to go somewhere and talk for too long.

Anyone know of any good conferences where I could give a presentation or talk on Web performance? I can’t seem to find any…but I guess I haven’t been looking in the right places.