Author: spierzchala

GrabPERF: FiOS and BitTorrent – Don't Play Nice

2008-11-13 / / 0 Comments

I fired up the Boston FIoS measurement location today after a couple of days off, and found that suddenly FIoS doesn’t like the BitTorrent.

The line of purple dots all indicate measurements that reported an error code. All of those measurements come from Boston FiOS. See the real-time graph here.
Accident? Design? That I cannot comment on. I simply report on what I see.

GrabPERF: Three New Measurement Locations

2008-11-12 / / 0 Comments

In the last 24 hours, thanks to the help of some willing volunteers, GrabPERF has seen the addition of three new measurement locations:

  • Dallas, TX (USA)
  • Virginia (USA)
  • London, UK

All of these location have been graciously provided by the team at e-planning.
Thanks to all of you who volunteer your machines and bandwidth for this project.
As always, we are looking for as more measurement locations. It would be great if we could get some data from the Asia-Pacific region.

Two Weeks with the MacBook

2008-11-03 / / 0 Comments

My new MacBook arrived two weeks ago, and I felt that I had spent enough time with it to actually make some useful comments on the good, the bad, and the headbangingly frustrating.

The Finder

Dear Apple: Shoot the Finder development team. Thanks.

I have switched to Path Finder as a Finder replacement. Truly the finder is one of the most debilitating pieces of software I have ever used. Nautilus on Gnome is a far superior file management system.

Software, in general

On the whole, I have found replacements for most of the Windows tools I use on a regular basis. But, as I am not made of money, I am using GIMP for Mac, and that is just clunky in the X11 environment.

Living in the browser makes my life much more tolerable than those who require the Windows environment. I haven’t got the money to buy Parallels or VMWare Fusion right now, so I am using RDC to connect to my Windows box. Slap Windows in Space #3 Fullscreen, and no one would know the difference.

Haven’t found a good Mind Map tool. And BBEdit is also muchos dineros. So Smultron is the text editor.

Usability

I rate this very high. Other than adjusting to the lack of certain keys (DEL, Pg up/dn, etc), the transition has been seamless. The trackpad is a dream and I miss being able to throw stuff around on my Dell laptops’ trackpads like I can using the one on the MacBook. I do find I leave apps hanging, as I am still adjusting to CMD-q closing the app.

Dashboard. What can I say? It’s what I need – high-level data at a glance, including the Prem Tables!

Overall

After four years waiting for a MacBook, I can say that it has been worth the wait. Solid, dependable, and slowly becoming my primary computer.
The only concern that I have is the aluminum case. I have an aluminum sensitivity, and if my hands start to peel and otherwise be in bad shape, I will have to determine a solution to that issue.

Moving from Windows – My First Week With Ubuntu (Hardy Heron)

2008-10-19 / / 0 Comments

For the last week, I have been using Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on my personal laptop. I can say that the experience has been mostly transparent for me, even with the need for a complete re-build last night after an attempt to install a complex theme replacement.

I can say that it has been transparent because I have been using Linux desktops in one form or another on an intermittent basis since 1999. When business was slow in the Fall and Winter of 2001/2002, I was the Guinea Pig in my organization to see if Linux could be a corporate replacement for Windows for all desktops and laptops.

So, when I say that the process has been transparent, you will have to realize that I have been a technical user of these desktop interfaces for a number of years. But I can say that since my first positive experiences with the Red Hat Fedora and the Ximian Gnome replacement interface, things have come a very long way.

Ubuntu 8.04 is the first real interface that seems to work predictably, efficiently, and effectively with external devices and programs that are business friendly. This is especially the case if most of the tools are Web-based, as Firefox and Opera work seamlessly. OpenOffice 2.4 can open DOCX files, and media players support most of the files I want to watch/listen to.

It prints to the home network printer.

It accesses the home file server.

I can share and synchronize files among my computers using DropBox.
Some caveats to my positive experience.

  • I work mainly on the Web
  • I do not play games
  • I have been using Linux in various forms and editions since 1999.

If you have technically savvy friend, or really want to push and expand your knowledge of computers and highly configurable operating systems, I would definitely suggest giving Ubuntu a try on the extra computer you have lying around. My laptop is at least 3.5 years old, and not anywhere near as fast as my work laptop running XP. However, with Linux, the two are comparable in speed and performance.

Go on. Try it. I know you want to.

Web Performance: Nice Display. Now Show Me the Data.

2008-10-16 / / 0 Comments

Today’s Web interfaces are all about the Flash (literally). Smooth charting, cool effects, callouts to references — ways to try and simplify complex data collections.
Problem-solving and diagnosis requires a far deeper dive than the flashiest interface could ever provide, because it comes down to the numbers. The actual measurements that make up the flashy chart. If you look at the data used by a professional trader and a someone at home looking at stock charts, there is a substantial difference.

When you get down to that level of analysis, the interface becomes irrelevant. Any analyst worth her or his salary (or salt – same thing) can tell you more from a spreadsheet full of relevant numbers than they can from any pretty graphic. This is true in any field.

When do traders or Web performance analysts use pretty charts? When they have to explain complex issues to non-technical or non-specialist audiences. When these analysts work on solving the sticky problems faced in the everyday world, they always fall back on the numbers.

Web performance data consists of the same few components, regardless of which company is providing the data. In effect, beyond a few key pieces of information about how the measurement data is captured, all Web performance data is the same.

Just because the components that make up the data are the same does not guarantee that the data from two different providers is of the same quality. In an imaginary system, Web performance data from all the major providers could flow into a centralized repository and be transformed using an XSLT or some other mangler so that it would be indistinguishable in most cases to tell which firm was the source.

But a skilled analyst would quickly learn to recognize the data that can be trusted. That would be the data that quickly and accurately represented the issues he was trying to diagnose. The data that flowed with the known patterns of the Web site.

The data that helped him do his job more effectively.

In the end, a pretty interface can go a long way to hide the quality of the data that is being represented. A shiny gloss on poor data does not make it better data. It is critical that the data that underlies that pretty chart is able to live up to the quality demands of the people who use it every day.

Selling the interface is selling the brand. Trust in the data builds the reputation.
Which one sold you when you chose your Web performance measurement provider?

Web Performance: The Strength of Corporate Silos

2008-10-16 / / 1 Comment

When I meet with clients, I am always astounded by the strength of the silos that exist inside companies. Business, Marketing, IT, Server ops, Development, Network ops, Finance. In the same house, sniping and plotting to ensure that their team has the most power.

Or so it seems to the outsider.

Organizations are all fighting over the same limited pool of resources. Also, the organization of the modern corporation is devised to create this division, with an emphasis on departments and divisions over teams with shared goals. But even the Utopian world of the cross-functional team is a false dream, as the teams begin to fight amongst themselves for the same meager resources at a project, rather than a department level.

I have no solution for this rather amusing situation. Why is it amusing? As an outsider (at my clients and in my own company) I look upon these running battles as a sign of an organization that has lost its way. Where the need to be managed and controlled has overcome the need to create and accept responsibility.

Start-ups are the villages of the corporate world. Cooperation is high, justice is swift, and creative local solutions abound. Large companies are the Rio de Janeiro’s of the economy. Communication is so broken that companies have to run private phone exchanges to other offices. Interesting things have to be accomplished in the back-channel.

This has a severe effect on Web performance initiatives. Each group is constant battling to maintain control over its piece of the system, and ensure that their need for resources is fulfilled. That means one group wants to test K while another wants to measure Q and yet a third needs to capture data on E.

This leads to a substantial amount of duplication and waste when it comes to solving problems and moving the Web site forward. There is no easy answer for this. I have discussed the need for business and IT to find some level of understanding in previous posts, and have yet to find a company that is able break down the silos without reducing the control that the organization imposes.

Performance Alerting: Is Louis Gray the Canary in Your Coal Mine?

2008-10-10 / / 4 Comments

Yesterday in the Fast Company Live Fail Whale session [mention on Scoble’s blog here], Paul Bucheit of FriendFeed jokingly said that his company’s external alerting mechanism was Louis Gray.
I cringed when I read that, as the last people who should be letting you know you have an issue are your visitors or customers. I know that FriendFeed is new and may not have the ops team that Dorion Carroll and Technorati have developed over the years, but it is still critical.
You have done a lot as a company to build a brand. Don’t let your internal and external performance sully your reputation. There are a number of low-cost and free ways to watch your performance and alert you before things break.
Louis Gray is a great guy. But he is not an objective and reliable way to alert you when something is wrong with your site.

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