I finally tired of running my own blog server, and since most folks use the feeds, I figure I will abuse Matt Mullenweg’s bandwidth rather than my own.
Welcome back?
Month: September 2006
Creative Hiatus — Sketching
As a part of my creative hiatus, I have strated sketching. A lot. Still lifes mainly (people are still way off in the future), and mostly objects found on my desk and around the house.
Nothing worth showing yet, but it is relaxing to dissect an object line by line and then put it back together.
The Size of Storage
Today, I took an inventory of the portable storage solutions I have with me at all times.
On the bottom, a Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition at 100GB. In the middle, an 8GB Zen Microphoto. On to, a mostly useless iPod Shuffle that I use as a thumbdrive.
The top two are provided for context. I also purchased a 300GB Maxtor OneTouch III that I use for my media files.
Based on it’s size, the Maxtor Mini must use a standard 100GB laptop drive in a sleek aluminum housing. So far, It’s a dream. Slides into my bag, acts as a backup, and stores larger media files for when I’m on the road.
But the whole idea that I can slip nearly 110GB of storage into my pack is insane. And next year, this will be old school.
Suburban Wildlife
Over the last 12 hours, we have had some pretty remarkable “wildlife” scenes in our yard.
Last night, as I took Wiggles out for her walk, she found a cat…a striped, stinky cat.
Skunk 1, Wiggles 0.
We suspect that it had been hiding under our back porch. We are taking steps to encourage it to find new digs. But Wiggles did enjoy her bath at 10:30 last night.
This morning, two squirrels decided to try on their best wrasslin’ moves in the ancient birch tree outside our house. The were tumbling around like crazed…well, squirrels. They rolled down the tree in a ball once, and then fell separately from about 20 feet, bouncing off tree branches on their way to the ground.
When they broke it up, one of the combatants sat in a tree branch for about 20 minutes, recuperating and literally licking its wounds.
Who says that we live in a world devoid of natural elements?
Visual Beauty
As I re-align my processing, I have discovered that the beauty of photographs really holds me. Many of my Bloglines subscriptions are now streams from Flickr. One photographer in particular that I have found captures images of power is Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir. There is something very powerful in her images, and she lives in one of the countries I really want to visit: Iceland.
There is something primeval and cultured that emanates from that island nation, the cultural centre of the Vikings.
Pictures make my mind snap, change my mood in an instant, draw power from inside me.
Wandering Flickr is always a wonderful way to relax.
On a creative hiatus
Over the last 3 weeks, I have been unusually quiet, even for me. I am taking a creative hiatus and doing a lot of reading, by real writers, not just technical books.
I am also in the office a lot more than I have been for the last two months. Getting back into that takes a little time as well.
As always, comments are open, and spam will be deleted.
Be good to each other.
Brad Feld: Used Mercedes Dealer
So, with all the prognosticating about what Brad Feld is going to do next, I think I know what his next gig is.
Used Mercedes Dealer, specializing in cars with slight electrical issues.
Here’s one of the models he has in his Kevlar and Nomex lined showroom.
Ignore the flames.
Web Performance, Part VII: Reliability and Consistency
In this series, the focus has been on the basic Web performance concepts, the ones that have dominated the performance management field for the last decade. It’s now time to step beyond these measures, and examine two equally important concepts, ones that allow a company to analyze their Web performance outside the constraints of performance and availability.
Reliability is often confused with availability when it is used in a Web performance context. Reliability, as a measurement and analysis concept goes far beyond the binary 0 or 1 that the term availability limits us to, and places it in the context of how availability affects the whole business.
Typical measures used in reliability include:
- Minutes of outage
- Number of failed measurements
- Core business hours
Reliability is, by its very nature, a more complex way to examine the successful delivery of content to customers. It forces the business side of a company to define what times of day and days of the week affect the bottom-line more, and forces the technology side of the business to be able to account not simply for server uptime, but also for exact measures of when and why customers could not reach the site.
This approach almost always leads to the creation of a whole new metric, one that is uniquely tied to the expectations and demands of the business it was developed in. It may also force organizations to focus on key components of their online business, if a trend of repeated outages appears with only a few components of the Web site.
Consistency is uniquely paired with Reliability, in that it extends the concept of performance to beyond simple aggregates, and considers what the performance experience is like for the customer on each visit. Can a customer say that the site always responds the same way, or do you hear that sometimes your site is slow and unusable? Why is the performance of your site inconsistent?
A simple way to think of consistency is the old standby of the Standard Deviation. This gives the range in which the population of the measurements is clustered around the Arithmetic Mean. This value can depend on the number of measures in the population, as well as the properties of these unique measures.
Standard Deviation has a number of flaws, but provides a simple way to define consistency: a large standard deviation value indicates a high degree of inconsistency within the measurement population, whereas a low small standard deviation value indicates a higher degree of consistency.
The metric that is produced for consistency differs from the reliability metric in that it will always be measured in seconds or milliseconds. But the same insight may arise from consistency, that certain components of the Web site contribute more to the inconsistency of a Web transaction. Isolating these elements outside the context of the entire business process gives organizations the information they need to eliminate these issues more quickly.
Companies that have found that simple performance and availability metrics constrain their ability to accurately describe the performance of their Web site need to examine ways to integrate a formula for calculating Reliability, and a measure of Consistency into their performance management regime.
My wife thinks I have a problem
This is what I found when I dumped out my pen/pencil case this morning. Does anyone out there find this unusual? I don’t.
