Month: January 2005

My work laptop is now a fine machine, running Apache, PHP, Zend Optimizer and MySQL. A true development environment for a geek like me!

And just in time: storm’s a-comin’!

A while back I asked if anyone had a REGEXP to deal with IIS log files. Well, It was more complex than that. It seems that the logfiles are mangled by the MSFT log parser tool into a very weird format.

And here is the REGEXP I had to use.

/^(S+) (d+) (d+-d+-d+) (d+:d+:d+) (S+) (-) (S+) (S+) (S+) (d+) (S+) (.+?) (.+?) (S+) (S+) (-) (S+) (S+) (S+) (S+) (S+) (S+) (.+?) (.*)$/

Nice, isn’t it?

Jakob Neilsen has a great article on Web Design Standards. You often hear me discuss things along these lines at the application and HTML layer — HTTP and (X)HTML/CSS standards. I agree with what Jakob is saying: designers must consider how people will use their site, not just how they want them to use their site.

The Takeaway:

Why Websites Should Comply With Design Standards

One simple reason:

• Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience: users spend most of their time on other websites.

Ok, figured out the problem with the "/" [root document] query using FULLTEXT indices. It’s actually two problems,

1. It is less than the minimum character count, which is four by default; I reduced that to three.
2. It isn’t an alphanumeric character.

So, my corner-case hack would have been necessary anyway.

Esther Derby has some great advice for managers…heck, for all of us.

1. Notice that what you are doing isnt working.
2. Notice what you are
feeling about that.
3. Center yourself.
4. Generate options.
5. Ask for
help if you need it.
6. Acknowledge your mistake.
7. Apologize if
necessary.

The non-billable hour has this great post on the idea of recovering costs for items such as printers, faxes, phones, etc.

Oh this is nice. What a great way to get your customers to come back to you. Lets bill them for everything we touch. Can’t wait for the cost-recovery implant that gets stuck into professional’s brains by their firms in order to capture the exact amount of brain-power a project took.

Ok, as Tim Bray does, I am here to expose the stupid with the great in all the code I write.

Mine was even more brain-damaged. I generate a series of aggregate Web Log stats,after filtering out bots/crawlers/images/css/robots.txt/etc., to generate meaningful information on the visitors to my sites.

However, the aggregate stats were not meshing with the drilldowns I was generating to examine data views, such as who hit what pages, who hit during what hour, etc.

Well, it helps if you look at the same data. The drilldowns used the following SQL filter:

ap.bytes != 0

Ummm…if I built the TEMP table for aggregate data view page using the same filter, the information would be aligned.

A Homer Moment…DOH!

Well, don’t have to worry about cooling my systems lately! Went downstairs last night and it was about 29F in the basement.

I figure since my main systems have two PIII processors, there should be no problem with them getting too cold!

I changed the info at Feedburner to reflect the new name of this blog. Please update your subscriptions.

Peter Lin has a Web performance paper here. Focuses on Java and Tomcat. Comments here.

Too bad he misses the point of external monitoring, because some of the other points he makes are very good. Too much focus on the data, not enough on how this improves performance.

Appears that he lives in the area. Peter, if you read this, say hi!