Over the last 3 weeks, I have been unusually quiet, even for me. I am taking a creative hiatus and doing a lot of reading, by real writers, not just technical books.
I am also in the office a lot more than I have been for the last two months. Getting back into that takes a little time as well.
As always, comments are open, and spam will be deleted.
Be good to each other.
So, with all the prognosticating about what Brad Feld is going to do next, I think I know what his next gig is.
Used Mercedes Dealer, specializing in cars with slight electrical issues.
Here’s one of the models he has in his Kevlar and Nomex lined showroom.
Ignore the flames.
In this series, the focus has been on the basic Web performance concepts, the ones that have dominated the performance management field for the last decade. It’s now time to step beyond these measures, and examine two equally important concepts, ones that allow a company to analyze their Web performance outside the constraints of performance and availability.
Reliability is often confused with availability when it is used in a Web performance context. Reliability, as a measurement and analysis concept goes far beyond the binary 0 or 1 that the term availability limits us to, and places it in the context of how availability affects the whole business.
Typical measures used in reliability include:
Reliability is, by its very nature, a more complex way to examine the successful delivery of content to customers. It forces the business side of a company to define what times of day and days of the week affect the bottom-line more, and forces the technology side of the business to be able to account not simply for server uptime, but also for exact measures of when and why customers could not reach the site.
This approach almost always leads to the creation of a whole new metric, one that is uniquely tied to the expectations and demands of the business it was developed in. It may also force organizations to focus on key components of their online business, if a trend of repeated outages appears with only a few components of the Web site.
Consistency is uniquely paired with Reliability, in that it extends the concept of performance to beyond simple aggregates, and considers what the performance experience is like for the customer on each visit. Can a customer say that the site always responds the same way, or do you hear that sometimes your site is slow and unusable? Why is the performance of your site inconsistent?
A simple way to think of consistency is the old standby of the Standard Deviation. This gives the range in which the population of the measurements is clustered around the Arithmetic Mean. This value can depend on the number of measures in the population, as well as the properties of these unique measures.
Standard Deviation has a number of flaws, but provides a simple way to define consistency: a large standard deviation value indicates a high degree of inconsistency within the measurement population, whereas a low small standard deviation value indicates a higher degree of consistency.
The metric that is produced for consistency differs from the reliability metric in that it will always be measured in seconds or milliseconds. But the same insight may arise from consistency, that certain components of the Web site contribute more to the inconsistency of a Web transaction. Isolating these elements outside the context of the entire business process gives organizations the information they need to eliminate these issues more quickly.
Companies that have found that simple performance and availability metrics constrain their ability to accurately describe the performance of their Web site need to examine ways to integrate a formula for calculating Reliability, and a measure of Consistency into their performance management regime.
This is what I found when I dumped out my pen/pencil case this morning. Does anyone out there find this unusual? I don’t.
Canadian soldier killed, others wounded in ‘friendly fire’
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — U.S. warplanes mistakenly strafed Canadian troops fighting Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan, killing one soldier and seriously wounding five on Monday in an operation that NATO claims has also left 200 insurgents dead.
This is not the first “friendly-fire” incident involving US pilots and Canadian Ground troops.
On April 18, 2002, four Canadian soldiers were killed in what became known as the Afghanistan friendly fire incident: Sgt. Marc Léger, Cpl. Ainsworth Dyer, Pte. Richard Green and Pte. Nathan Smith. Eight other soldiers were wounded during a night-time live-fire training exercise near Kandahar and Tarnak Farms. The four were killed when an American F-16 fighter pilot, unaware of the exercise, noticed the ground fire and responded by dropping a bomb without determining who the combatants were. These were the first Canadian soldiers to be killed in combat since the Korean War. The pilot, U.S. Air Force Maj. Harry Schmidt, disobeyed an air controller’s order to “standby” while information was verified. Schmidt was initially charged by the U.S. Air Force with 4 counts of involuntary manslaughter and 8 counts of assault. The charges were dropped in June 2003 and in July 2004 he was found guilty of dereliction of duty. [here]
UPDATE: Seems that the Canadian soldier killed on Monday was a track star at Nebraska.
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Mark Graham, a former Nebraska track star, died Monday in Afghanistan while serving with the Canadian military. He was 33. [here]
Yesterday we had no bricks.
It’s amazing what one trip to a former chimney in Watertown can do.
Garden edging, here we come.
Summer is officially over. Our neighborhood is now an emptying parking lot as the City of Marlborough begins to recover from the Annual Labour Day Parade.
All of the usual floats and groups were there — in fact, the order is almost predictable now.
Machine gun fire is echoing from one of the floats. It seems that the parade is less a celebration of the working man, and more a celebration of the military culture of the United States. I know that the average military man is a working man, but does the air of my community have to ring with the constant rage of machine gun staccato to remind me of the glory of the military?
The one memory I will take from this year? The several thousand balloons released by parade spectators bearing the words “Gabrieli for Governor”. I think the Gabrieli campaign should have thought a little harder about this. Now there are flocks of latex animal killers floating through the MetroWest skies.
Yay team.
On a recent musical connect the dots tour through Wikipedia, I stumbled across a reference to Nick Drake. I had first heard of Nick Drake through a review of his work on All Things Considered months ago.
The sound is ephemeral. The sound is haunting. The sound is a lost gem of our time.
It has shocked me how much the songs he made are what I have needed over the last few weeks.
If you get a chance, watch A Skin Too Few, the documentary of his life; you will have to look in the usual places online to find it, as it hasn’t been released on DVD yet.
Find him. Listen. You will never go back.
I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you’re here
Brighten my northern sky.
I just remembered something this morning. Starting October 7, 2006, I will be officially a man without a Visa. My final H1-B renewal expires on October 6, 2006, and although they have applied for an extension, and I am at some indeterminate point supposed to get a Green Card, I will be of no status as of that date.
If you have any conferences or camps or seminars you want me to attend, better get me before October 6!
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