Author: spierzchala

Brian Marick has a great article on testers.

I am one of those who is a tester. And frankly, I agree with everything he says.

Why Johnny Cash?

How high’s the water snow, momma?
2 feet high and risin’….

Took the Damnation out…ok, I dragged her behind me. The snow is shoulder deep on her, knee deep on me. And it is still falling. And it is still blowing.

I am not even going to try and dig out until the snowfall stops.

ADDENDUM: Dave Winer has a great movie of guys digging out in Cambridge. Shot from his hotel room.

Since I think that I have stabilized the GrabPERF System into a happy near-production environment, I am considering an expansion of the system. This expansion would include adding more measurement locations.

Much like Ian Holsman’s WebPerf.Org, I want to know if there are any volunteers who would like to participate in a BETA of this system when I have it ready to go.

Requirements for BETA participants would be the following:

— crontab
— Perl DBI
— Perl dbd-mysql
— Perl CURL-Easy
— A stable IP address
— Ability to talk to my server on port 3306

I would establish some very basic Agent verification (hence the stable IP address). This would include allowing the IP address to talk to my database server through IPTABLES, and then verifying that the Agent ID and it’s IP address match, in the database.

Drop me an e-mail if you are interested.

Halley Suitt is at Robert Scoble’s 40th b-day in Seattle…near Victoria. Seems that people from the East Coast are getting snowed in and missing the party [here].

At least 8 inches here at The Embassy…with a stiff wind…and now sign of stopping.

I hate you all…in the nicest possible way! 😉

In the Business 2.0 Blog, the author posits on the possibility that eBay may be reaching the theoretical limits of its network growth potential. In this case, I do not mean the technical TCP/IP network; I mean the business to client network that has been created around this community.

eBay has been trying to move into new markets and diversify — classifieds and rentals being two new opportunities. And the recent price increase has infuriated some of their long-term community members.

From personal experience, the treatment that the ZenWife received from the PayPal division has been enough for both of us to walk away from using it.

So, eBay, what are you going to do to make your user-community ecstatic to use you again? How are you going to make yourself a place where people want to do business, not a place where they grudgingly do business because you are a near-monopoly?

How will you make your community love you again?

The team at Port80 has a great article on why the VARY server respose header is important for caching and compression in HTTP/1.1 [here]. It succintly sums up this method for determining what should be cached and which cached content should be delivered to requesting clients.

My work laptop is now a fine machine, running Apache, PHP, Zend Optimizer and MySQL. A true development environment for a geek like me!

And just in time: storm’s a-comin’!

A while back I asked if anyone had a REGEXP to deal with IIS log files. Well, It was more complex than that. It seems that the logfiles are mangled by the MSFT log parser tool into a very weird format.

And here is the REGEXP I had to use.

/^(S+) (d+) (d+-d+-d+) (d+:d+:d+) (S+) (-) (S+) (S+) (S+) (d+) (S+) (.+?) (.+?) (S+) (S+) (-) (S+) (S+) (S+) (S+) (S+) (S+) (.+?) (.*)$/

Nice, isn’t it?

Jakob Neilsen has a great article on Web Design Standards. You often hear me discuss things along these lines at the application and HTML layer — HTTP and (X)HTML/CSS standards. I agree with what Jakob is saying: designers must consider how people will use their site, not just how they want them to use their site.

The Takeaway:

Why Websites Should Comply With Design Standards

One simple reason:

• Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience: users spend most of their time on other websites.

Ok, figured out the problem with the "/" [root document] query using FULLTEXT indices. It’s actually two problems,

1. It is less than the minimum character count, which is four by default; I reduced that to three.
2. It isn’t an alphanumeric character.

So, my corner-case hack would have been necessary anyway.