Performance Zen

Author: spierzchala

  • Rants on Rubbermaid

    The Head Lemur has an excellent rant on his favourite Rubbermaid Laundry Basket, and the state of the company itself (Laundry Baskets).

    I agree with his design changes, and I also wholeheartedly agree with his rants on the state of the Rubbermaid site. I used to be a Rubbermaid evangalist myself. When I was a grad student in the early 1990s, I stored the contents of my nomadic life in RoughNeck containers, which doubled as firniture. However, since then, the quality and diversity of their product line has sunk and they have been marginalized.

    After watching the Frontline on Is Wal-Mart Good for America, I blame Wal-Mart and poor management for the slide of one of my favourite brands. Wal-Mart squeezed an American plastics company right to the edge, exposing magaement issues, and forcing them into a merger with Newell.

    So, although I like the design that the Head Lemur has suggested, it is unlikely that a company which was once so creative and cutting edge will even care that someone has a cool idea to improve one of their products.

    I hope I am proven wrong as well.

  • Glad to be home

    A very long red-eye. We were diverted to DEN on the SJC-ATL leg due to a medical emergency. This added 4 hours to the trip. I am still wiped out, but the gentleman definitely needed medical attention.

    I got some very uncomfortable sleep, but don’t expect anything brilliant until at least Monday.

  • Amazon.com Experiences Sporadic Outage

    Link: Amazon.com Experiences Sporadic Outage.

    Ah. My former company quoted.

    Again, they fail to be able answer the why. The new player from AlertSite makes a stab at it.

    Another “so what” press release.

  • Web Performance Evangelism Run Amok

    I wanted to point you to an evangelist of the good kind that Scoble found — “Obi-Wan”, the Prowler Knight. They come in all shapes and sizes.

    One of the directors in our company keeps saying how impressed he was by a certain product evangelist he saw at a conference a few years ago. He sings high praises about my potential to do the same. I know I can — spent the last five years delving into the how-tos of Web performance, and have a bit of an opinionated streak to help me along.

    Today, I am going to evangelize on Web performance.

    The issue is that everyone has specific questions and nobody wants to think about the actual big picture. The biggest question an online has to ask is: “How do we make it fast, reliable, scalable, efficient and economic?”

    Easy, right? Well, no actually. Big players in the online commerce world still have problems with this. Why? Why can’t they get it right?

    Over the last few days, I have posted a couple of screenshots showing that Amazon, the online retailing poster child, has had 3 distinct and length outages. This is unheard of from them. However, they should be in seasonal lockdown at the moment. So I looked at some data I have access to last night. I know when the problem started, but don’t know the root cause. It is frightening that in the span of a single day, the internet leader is in the uncomfortable position of scrambling to decipher and resolve their problem during the busiest time of the year.

    This doesn’t surprise me anymore. I just shrug my shoulders and say, loudly, for the umpteenth time that if someone had asked the right questions, followed the correct process, and accurately analyzed the data none of this would be happening.

    I have said it before: I have tried. Look at a retailer like Amazon, and you must also look at Target — Target is completely wedded to the Amazon Infrastructure. Was Target part of the analysis of the data so that they could approve the system state freeze? The answer is likely no, and you know what? Target is likely going to collect a ton of paybacks from SLA infringements as a result of the Amazon outages.

    At the beginning, I asked what does it take to achieve Web performance excellence. The answer is time and dedication. Online businesses have to either dedicate themselves to this, or sign on to partners who can.

    Some big firms think that the traditional IT consulting firms can do it. What is their expertise in Web performance? How do they plan to validate and verify that the improvement plan they have outlined is actually meeting your business objectives? How will they help you manage your content, customer-tracking and ad providers?

    Big IT consulting firms: Can you validate and verify that the performance improvements that you have implemented are economical? Are they efficiently resolving the issue? Who resolves problems?

    How many consultant, engineers, developers and business managers does it take to fix a bad Web page?

    Answer: I don’t know. Do you?

    In the end, Web performance is no longer about response times and success rates. It is no longer about usability. It is no longer about hit tracking, processor utilization, SANs, and distributed content. We performance boils down to a single question:

    “How do we make it fast, reliable, scalable, efficient and economic?”

  • More Radio Spectrum Available Soon — Dying US Commercial Radio

    Steve Rubel: Hate to break this to you — All US Commercial Radio is worthless crap. iPods are a symptom, not the cause (iPods Blamed for Denver Radio Stations’ Decline). The Mega-Media corporation has killed local and unique radio. In San Mateo, the ZenWife used to listen to KFOG; in Boston, it’s WBOS. You can’t tell them apart. So I don’t; they aren’t worth the time or effort.

    The only station that I listen to is BBC Radio 6 — Public Radio with tunes from the 1960s to NOW! Wonder if that’s on XM or Sirius.

  • Alan Herrell on the Sony v. Kottke experience

    I am with Alan on this one.

    Boycottsony

    His open letter to the Sony Corporation on the Kottke/Jeopardy is a very clear expression of what happens when a major corporation attempts to paralyze free speech.

    Sony, please take me off your mailing list. Until you re-align yourself with your reality, I will not buy your products, see your movies, or buy your artists cds.

    The blogosphere is very tribal. You attack one of the members, we all retaliate.

  • When Wal-Mart ain’t happy…

    Looks like the slow Holiday shopping season is affecting everyone, even Wal-Mart.

    Seems that even the Chinese can’t help them now (Frontline: Is Wal-Mart Good For America?).

  • George Tenet on Limiting Net Access

    Joi Ito has some interesting comments on George Tenet’s madcap Bush Cabal lunacy on limiting net access.

    Hey now, this is the kind of thinking we don’t need.

  • Saturday…I think

    Spent all day in bed.

    Now before you go off the deep-end and start saying how decadent, you have to realize that I spent most of the time unconscious, sweating, and having very unusual vivid dreams. It was actually kind of nice to have vivid dream again; I don’t have them very often, as a result of the Paxil/Seroxat I take.

    On the whole, it was a truly unpleasant day. Managed to crawl out of bed long enough to help put the boys to bed, and I am functioning mainly with the help of Advil (Curse of the CNS AGAIN!).

    ZenWife has hit her Holiday Season stride, and is slapping up “Canadian Pine” garlands, lights, bows, and pine cone highlights around the Embassy. I am settled in the command chair, knowing full well I better be healthy by Monday, or the whole trip to West Coast will be in question.

    Ugh. Nice disease.

    On a happy note, I sent my first 419/Nigerian Scam mail to spam@uce.gov. Seems that someone wants to hear about these things.

  • Commentaries on MSIE and CSS/Standards Support

    Tristan Nitot and Eric Meyer comment (Tristan : Eric) on the seeming resistance by Microsoft to move MSIE towards a greater degree of W3C Standards support.
    As a hack and slash Web developer, the presence of standards is a necessity for me. I can read the W3C description of the <div> tag and it’s child attributes and be able to implement it on my site.
    The interesting that is not mentioned in the this is that MSIE lacks support for a number of HTTP-level standards as well. I know that most designers only worry about the screen results, but us Web performance wanks have to worry about the performance repercussions of a new browser release.
    The most stunning example of this is continued resistance in some camps to the use of compression, and the utter lack of support for HTTP pipelining in MSIE.
    Resistance to compression is a result of broken compression algorithms in older versions of MSIE. If you are actually still using one of these browsers, or an OS that does not support a new version of MSIE, the Web is mostly broken for you anyway, so compression is just another headache.
    HTTP Pipelining is supported in all of the browsers…except MSIE. HTTP Pipelining is the ability to request multiple objects simultaneously across the same TCP connection. As most Web objects are small, the immediate impact to Web performance is astounding.
    MSIE 6 is a vast improvement over the previous generations that have come out of Redmond. However, it would be interesting to have Microsoft on the side of Web performance as a major provider of server and client software.
    Now, if we could only get the Mozilla.org folks to “liberate” the Netscape Enterprise/SunONE Web server code and bring that dinosaur into the modern age, we would all be a happier lot.