Category: Uncategorized

1. The Packers deserved to go down in flames. They played awful football.
2. I am saddened that both the Chargers and the Seahawks got the boot. The Seahawks because they are the closest NFL team to my point of origination (Victoria, BC); the Chargers because I have a soft spot for Doug Flutie, having seen his best years in the CFL.
3. The Colts look unstoppable.
4. Go Pats!

The Great Confusicator (Obsfucator?) has spent a lot of time stumping for Tort Reform this week. His primary example has been firms hit by Asbestos lawsuits.

I wonder if this is because Halliburton subsidiary KBR ended up going into Chapter 11 fighting an Asbestos lawsuit? (More here and here)

Wonder why no one is talking about this…or does the Washington press corps have a short memory?

I stand corrected — CBS MarketWatch does mention Halliburton in an Asbestos story. Right at the very bottom.

The ZenWife and I hail from Victoria, BC, on Vancouver Island, the largest island off the Pacific Coast of North America. It is blessed with a mild Mediterranean climate, year-round.

Except now.

Apparently they are having a winter storm that has dumped more snow on the area than we have seen in Massachusetts this year.

Have fun!

Dan Gillmor mulls over the thought of whether the NY Times will charge for its online service.

My answer is: NO.

I am increasingly angered by newspapers that make their sites more and more irrelevant to me by hiding behind subscriptions and registrations. Do they need my marketing information?

If they will only make their online content available to subscribers, why have a dead-tree edition? Or vice-versa?

Online news is how the majority of my generation and younger get their information. Lead, follow, or get offline.

Jeremy has one final swing at the termination of his employment.

My take is that the response of HSC is very typical of any large firm who has been caught in a very public and almost untenable situation. And that they chose to discuss a personnel issue at all makes me see them in a very bad light. HR should know about the confidentiality rules in Canada.

The response of former employees also is typical of the response of full-time, politically-tenured employees to contractors in all organizations. I have seen this in almost all work cultures — "How dare he smear our company’s name; and he was just a contractor anyway".

Glad Jeremy has moved on; I will now drop the topic.

Added two new features to the GrabPERF system this morning.

1. Display the Arithmetic and Geometric Mean by aggregated hour. This uses the datapoints in the ‘data’ table, which reaches back 10 days.
2. Display the Success Rate by aggregated hour. Uses the same data as above.

These are attached to each individual test screen.

Have fun!

In this interview, Chris Anderson (of the Long Tail fame) speaks to Jeff Bezos of Amazon about that very topic.

I found a great example of a Heavy-Tailed Frequency distribution in my performance data today.

This clearly shows how data in the wild can be distributed in a non-normal fashion. In this case, there is a very heavy weight on the end of the tail, not simply a few straggling outliers.
It has become very unusual to find sites that exihibit this degree of heavy-tailed behaviour  over the last year. When I started in this industry, this was more the norm than the exception.

A good read on evolving excellence through simplicity.

The concepts that apply in the manufacturing process also apply in Web performance. Simplicity makes Web performance excellence easier to achieve.

What does your Web performance process look like?

Jeremy Wright was fired for blogging. This is likely the trend of 2005.

I like Jeremy and as a fellow Canadian, this doesn’t surprise me. But I will hold my tongue on this topic.

More here and here.