Month: September 2006

Apparently "Canadian" is translated into "Strafe and Kill" in American pilot slang

Canadian soldier killed, others wounded in ‘friendly fire’

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — U.S. warplanes mistakenly strafed Canadian troops fighting Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan, killing one soldier and seriously wounding five on Monday in an operation that NATO claims has also left 200 insurgents dead.

This is not the first “friendly-fire” incident involving US pilots and Canadian Ground troops.

On April 18, 2002, four Canadian soldiers were killed in what became known as the Afghanistan friendly fire incident: Sgt. Marc Léger, Cpl. Ainsworth Dyer, Pte. Richard Green and Pte. Nathan Smith. Eight other soldiers were wounded during a night-time live-fire training exercise near Kandahar and Tarnak Farms. The four were killed when an American F-16 fighter pilot, unaware of the exercise, noticed the ground fire and responded by dropping a bomb without determining who the combatants were. These were the first Canadian soldiers to be killed in combat since the Korean War. The pilot, U.S. Air Force Maj. Harry Schmidt, disobeyed an air controller’s order to “standby” while information was verified. Schmidt was initially charged by the U.S. Air Force with 4 counts of involuntary manslaughter and 8 counts of assault. The charges were dropped in June 2003 and in July 2004 he was found guilty of dereliction of duty. [here]

UPDATE: Seems that the Canadian soldier killed on Monday was a track star at Nebraska.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Mark Graham, a former Nebraska track star, died Monday in Afghanistan while serving with the Canadian military. He was 33. [here]

If I never hear "God Bless America" again…

Summer is officially over. Our neighborhood is now an emptying parking lot as the City of Marlborough begins to recover from the Annual Labour Day Parade.

Gabrieli for Polluter!

All of the usual floats and groups were there — in fact, the order is almost predictable now.

Machine gun fire is echoing from one of the floats. It seems that the parade is less a celebration of the working man, and more a celebration of the military culture of the United States. I know that the average military man is a working man, but does the air of my community have to ring with the constant rage of machine gun staccato to remind me of the glory of the military?

The one memory I will take from this year? The several thousand balloons released by parade spectators bearing the words “Gabrieli for Governor”. I think the Gabrieli campaign should have thought a little harder about this. Now there are flocks of latex animal killers floating through the MetroWest skies.

Yay team.

Discovering Nick Drake

On a recent musical connect the dots tour through Wikipedia, I stumbled across a reference to Nick Drake. I had first heard of Nick Drake through a review of his work on All Things Considered months ago.

The sound is ephemeral. The sound is haunting. The sound is a lost gem of our time.
It has shocked me how much the songs he made are what I have needed over the last few weeks.

If you get a chance, watch A Skin Too Few, the documentary of his life; you will have to look in the usual places online to find it, as it hasn’t been released on DVD yet.
Find him. Listen. You will never go back.

I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you’re here
Brighten my northern sky.

Enemy Alien Status: Uncertain

I just remembered something this morning. Starting October 7, 2006, I will be officially a man without a Visa. My final H1-B renewal expires on October 6, 2006, and although they have applied for an extension, and I am at some indeterminate point supposed to get a Green Card, I will be of no status as of that date.

If you have any conferences or camps or seminars you want me to attend, better get me before October 6!

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Web Performance, Part VI: Benchmarking Your Site

In the last article in this series, the concept of baselining your measurements was discussed. This is vital, in order for you and your organization to be able to identify the particular performance patterns associated with your site.

Now that’s under control, you’re done, right?

Not a chance. Remember that your site is not the only Web site your customers visit. So, how are you doing against all of those other sites?

Let’s take a simple example of the performance for one week for one of the search firms. This is simply an example; I am just too lazy to change the names to protect the innocent.

one_search-7day

Doesn’t look too bad. An easily understood pattern of slower performance during peak business hours appears in the data, presenting a predictable pattern which would serve as a great baseline for any firm. However, this baseline lacks context. If anyone tries to use a graph like this, the next question you should ask is “So what?”.

What makes a graph like this interesting but useless? That’s easy: A baseline graph is only the first step in the information process. A graph of your performance tells you how your site is doing. There is, however, no indication of whether this performance trend is good or bad.

four_search-7day

Examining the performance of the same firm within a competitive and comparative context, the predictable baseline performance still appears predictable, but not as good as it could be. The graph shows that most of the other firms in the same vertical, performing the identical search, over the same period of time, and from the same measurement locations, do not show the same daytime pattern of performance degradation.

The context provided by benchmarking now becomes a critical factor. By putting the site side-by-side with other sites delivering the same service, an organization can now question the traditional belief that the site is doing well because we can predict how it will behave.

A simple benchmark such as the one above forces a company to ask hard questions, and should lead to reflection and re-examination of what the predictable baseline really means. A benchmark result should always lead a company to ask if their performance is good enough, and if they want to get better, what will it take.
Benchmarking relies on the idea of a business process. The old approach to benchmarks only considered firms in the narrowly defined scope of the industry verticals; another approach considers company homepages without any context or reliable comparative structure in place to compensate for the differences between pages and sites.

It is not difficult to define a benchmark that allows for the comparison of a major bank to a major retailer, and a major social networking site, and a major online mail provider. By clearly defining a business process that these sites share (in this case let’s take the user-authentication process) you can compare companies across industry verticals.

This cross-discipline comparison is crucial. Your customers do this with your site every single day. They visit your site, and tens, maybe hundreds, of other sites every week. They don’t limit their comparison to sites in the same industry vertical; they perform cross-vertical business process critiques intuitively, and then share these results with others anecdotally.

In many cases, a cross-vertical performance comparison cannot be performed, as there are too many variables and differences to perform a head-to-head speed analysis. Luckily for the Web performance field, speed is only one metric that can be used for comparison. By stretching Web site performance analysis beyond speed, comparing sites with vastly different business processes and industries can be done in a way that treats all sites equally. The decade-long focus on speed and performance has allowed other metrics to be pushed aside.

Having a fast site is good. But that’s not all there is to Web performance. If you were to compare the state of Web performance benchmarking to the car-buying public, the industry has been stuck in the role of a power-hungry, horsepower-obsessed teenage boy for too long. Just as your automobile needs and requirements evolve (ok, maybe this doesn’t apply to everyone), so do your Web performance requirements.

Amazon Adds New Server Response Header to HTTP Spec

I like it when a major online retailer takes the initiative and extends the existing HTTP specifications.

Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2006 13:58:58 GMT
Server: Server
x-amz-id-1: 1S269NQQQYFX2DF09G7Z
x-amz-id-2: jiSzL7NRwWiEx7pM/90anU1AW9p9Qts3
Set-cookie: session-id-time=1157698800l; path=/; domain=.amazon.com; expires=Fri Sep 08 07:00:00 2006 GMT
Set-cookie: session-id=002-9480265-0783223; path=/; domain=.amazon.com; expires=Fri Sep 08 07:00:00 2006 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
nnCoection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Anyone know what the nnCoection: close header represents?

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