Performance Zen

Author: spierzchala

  • Email? What is this Email you speak of?

    Russell Beattie has 400 pending Email messages. [here]
    I have heard other bloggers complain of this as well. [here and here and here]
    I can’t remember a time when I have received more than 5 Emails in a single day. Most of those are automated server messages telling me when backups are complete, etc.
    I’m not complaining. I remember when I worked in Tech Support (before the Ticketing System was installed) that my inbox was always full. But I learned quickly how to delegate, reply succinctly, and be verbose when the situation demanded it.
    I know I don’t get 100,000+ visits a day, and have adoring fans and vitriolic enemies, but to have an Email backlog like that is truly astounding.

  • Stupid attacking domain — andrewsaluk.com

    Looks like some bozo has managed to take over a large number of machines and launch some sort of zombie attack against blogs. If you see andrewsaluk.com filling up your referrer log, block the hosts. They are likely zombies.

    Just checked the domain (IP address 211.180.238.254) — it originates in South Korea. Definitely points to either a script-kiddie or a zombie on a high-speed connection.

  • Opera sings a tragic aria about Microsoft and “Interoperability”

    Hakon Lie, CEO of Opera, nails Bill Gates to the wall using his own claim to support interoperability. [here]
    This is a brilliant rant on Microsoft and they’re lack of support (or half-baked attempt to support) Web Standards initiatives. MSIE is a six-year old engine, groaning under the weight of it’s own bloated code. Lightweight “skin” browsers using the MSIE engine can’t, and shouldn’t, save it.
    I can’t wait to see MSIE 7, because no one is going to wait for Longhorn. By Longhorn MSIE’s market-share will have dropped below 50%.
    Collaborate or die.

    Hakon Lie Apparently said the same thing directly to Scoble. [here]
    A more complete commentary here.

  • Asbestos is big money…in AdSense!

    Guess that someone has figured out that AdSense will pay big dollars for Asbestos click-throughs. [here]
    Guess everyone is getting rich except Halliburton and WR Grace.

  • Bay Area: Here I Come!

    I have a bunch of client visits in the Bay Area on March 2-3. Looking forward to being back on my old stomping grounds…Pancho Villa Tacqueria!

  • Cool features of the Slurp! Bot

    Yahoo Search Blog has a great posting on how the Slurp Bot tries to conserve bandwidth by making use of compression and cache-control headers. [here]
    As a Web performance fanatic, it is heartening to see that these folks have taken such care, and put such thought into their indexing crawler. They want it to be accurate, but they don’t want to slam your site.
    A while back, I had to write a robots.txt file for WebPerformance to keep the MSNBot from stomping the site on a daily basis. This site uses frames and query variables to produce the various performance graphs. Well, the MSNBot was indexing every page and every variation almost daily. Finally, I said go away, just to that crawler. All the others are fine. Maybe MSN Search should take a page from the Yahoo! (Inktomi) Bot development team.

  • How big companies manage their Brand Image

    Jennifer Rice points us to the Honeywell site where the company explains how they manage their brand image.

    It is actually something that I am familiar with, as our company went through a similar process last year, so that everything that the company put out had a unified look and feel, and that everyone was able to understand what the core vision was.

    There has been some drifting, but even in a small company like mine, managing the brand and presenting a unified vision of the company makes you loom much larger.
    There are a number of companies I have come across that don’t understand the need to present a clear, concise and focused brand image. When I see presentations or documents from these organizations, it does not matter how successful they are, or how cool their technology is. I have reached a level in my life that I want a level of maturity in the material that I am presented with.

    Acting and speaking and writing with a unified voice indicates that the company is organized and focused on their own success. That will win me over every time.

  • Comments on the kuro5hin Blogging HOWTO

    BL Ochman has her comments here. Her comments on the blogging pundits/evangelists/wild-eyed fanatics at the end of the article. Sort of the same way I feel about PodCasting.
    The Head Lemur also makes a brief, yet sarcastic note of this…
    Maybe I should read the original now…

  • Cool software…for the Powerbook I don’t have

    Dave Winer posted this about a cool app called Feeder.
    Got all excited. Went to the site.
    App runs on Macs only.
    Crushed.
    Once again, foiled by not having a cool computer.

  • Chuck is getting married…

    Prince Charles, heir the British throne, will be marrying his companion, Camilla Park er Bowles in early April. [here]
    Why do I care? Well, I am a citizen of the Commonwealth, so I still great affection for the British monarchy. But as well, Charles and I have this odd tie — we were born on the same day, twenty years apart.
    So every day, on my birthday, I raise my glass and drink a toast to the Prince of Wales.
    And I will do the same on April 8.