Author: spierzchala

Blog Browser Stats – March 14 2009

Here are the browser stats for Newest Industry as of March 14 2009. Not a large amount of traffic, but it is indicative of what most folks with technical content on their blogs likely see.

Picture 1

What did surprise me was the number of people who are still using MSIE 6.0. I am not sure what is continuing to perpetuate the presence of this percentage of people on this antiquated browser, other than large corporations running this by mandate of the IT department.

I think that with the release of all the new browsers this year, support for MSIE 6.0 should simply cease. I will gladly install a javascript library that will kill pages for MSIE 6.0 visitors, announcing that the Internet is no longer available to them.

GrabPERF Instability this week

Over the last seven days, GrabPERF has been running in a very unstable state. This appears to be directly related to the use of InnoDB as the DB engine on a few of the larger tables in the database. [InnoDB changeover discussed here]
Today, the system was offline for several hours before I noticed that the DB had failed to restart properly. Apparently the system simply decided that the InnoDB engine had gone away.
All tables have now been switched back to the good old MyISAM and all the headaches that come with that.

GrabPERF Maintenance – March 5 2009, Part 2

One additional changes was made to GrabPERF today. The homepage with the Top and Bottom Performers, has been changed from a dynamic page to one that is autogenerated every two minutes. This graph should explain why.

grabperf_top20-mar052009

The dynamic page was starting to push 20-25 seconds just for the Top 20 List. When I switched to the static list, times dropped to less than 1 second.
It’s always bad when a Web performance measurement site has poor performance.

GrabPERF Maintenance – March 5 2009

Today we undertook two maintenance and upgrade tasks at GrabPERF that have been neglected for too long.

  1. The Agent code was streamlined and removed the connection error sub-routine. It seems that the latest versions of cURL no longer support the connection error determination (I can only imagine the madness of trying to support this on multiple OSs), so it has been removed as part of the error detection process. This change has been pushed out to four agents for testing and will be distributed to all other active agents after this is complete.
  2. Upgrade of cURL to 7.19.4 on four agents. The same four agents that have the new agent code have also had the underlying HTTP(S) engine (cURL) upgrade to 7.19.4. Although this supports no new features that I am aware of, it is always good to be on top of the latest release with bug-fixes.

We are also trying to determine how to capture the URL that we connect to when we take a measurement. As far as cURL is documented, it still does not appear to support this feature.

GrabPERF now using MySQL 5.1

On the weekend, I upgraded the database engine for GrabPERF to Mysql 5.1 and switched the main data table from MyISAM to InnoDB.
The switch to InnoDB was done because of the locking issues that were occurring during long queries, especially when doing ad-hoc analysis. The row-level (versus table-level) locking of InnoDB has removed most of these issues.
I have been seeing some strange behavior with the new engine. As a result of this, I will be re-starting the database engine twice a day. There should be no degradation, as this is simply a daemon re-start, not a machine re-start.

Does the browser really matter?

Last fall it was Chrome. Now it’s Safari 4 Beta. Soon it will be Firefox 3.1 and IE 8.

Each browser has its harsh critics and fervent supporters. But in the end, does the browser really matter?

The answer to this question depends on who you speak to. Developers will say yes, because browsers make their lives hell, as none of them subscribe to the same set of standards for display, rendering, or code processing. I would bet that if you asked any developer, they would prefer that only one browser existed and was used by everyone.

The people at the end of the browser chain, you and I, don’t really care either. We only care when the browser drops an unexpected rendering surprise on us, or doesn’t work because the JavaScript functions were designed with Browser A and B in mind and we use C and the submit button on our purchase doesn’t work.
The question isn’t Does the browser matter? but Why does the browser still matter?

There is no reason to have five large browsers out there. There is no reason why they should all behave differently, render pages in their own unique way.

And while people will say that having multiple versions of multiple generations of uniquely developed browsers drives innovation and prevent stagnation in Web development, I say enough is enough.

There is no reason to have yet another browser. The browser doesn’t matter.

The content matters.

And when you switch the perspective around to that view, you should easily realize that the browser, any browser, is simply a window into the content being created for and by us. It should not matter to anyone that I use Opera, Safari, Firefox, IE, Camino, Chrome, or Lynx.

What does matter is that the content can be delivered to me the way I want it. Not the way the browser wants it.

What we need to realize is that browsers no longer matter. They are software. They are portals into what we are trying to do and say.

The browser is not the application; the Web is the application.

Geekery: Install an OS on a Fujitsu B-2131 without a CD, Part Deux

Well, it’s done. After a week of trying this and that, I finally got DSL (DamnSmallLinux) rolling on the Fujitsu B2131 last night.
To remind folks what the challenge was (and is for some of the linux dev teams out their who claim to support older platforms): Install a fully-functioning OS on a laptop machine built in 1999/2000 without a CD drive.
DSL has a great boot floppy image that works with their embedded version of the OS installed on a Flash drive – ok, the flash drive made the challenge less problematic than originally described.
However, I lay the challenge out to all of the Linux distros: Create an across the INTERNET (not that crazy PXE boot stuff) install that can be started with boot floppies.
The B2131 has a large enough hard drive and enough power to run Xubuntu, but installing it easily (i.e. my 10 year-old son could do it) makes modern linux distros completely unreachable for people trying to easily make old machines go.
So, linux geeks, think you can do this?

Geekery: Install an OS on a Fujitsu B-2131 without a CD

A co-worker gave me an ancient Fujitsu Lifebook B-2131. I want to turn it into an ultra-portable netbook thingie.
The catch? No cd-rom.
Apparently the world has forgotten the world of the boot floppy and internet installs.
Well, almost everyone.
Turns out that if you have a floppy drive, and 5 spare 1.44MB disks, there is a way to install Ubuntu over the Internet! [SEE HERE]
We ran out of time and floppy disks today, but this looks like a cool father-son project for this week.
Further updates as they are warranted.

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