Performance Zen

Category: Uncategorized

  • Southeast Asia Tsunami Aid — Who’s Giving?

    The CBC has a great list of which countries are giving and how much.

    Given the size and scope of the crisis, the response from the world community seems particularly small. Individual contributions will likely grow this number, but give what you can.

    Especially in the US. I would like to see private donations in the US vastly exceed government contributions to send a message to the Bush Cabal — the United States has not forgotten the rest of the world.


    UPDATE

    It seems that the US has decided to kick in another $20M. I gave my $100 to the Canadian Red Cross this afternoon.

  • Netcraft Anti-Phishing Tolbar

    The folks at Netcraft have released an anti-phishing toolbar. So far it is only for MSIE; hopefully they will release a Firefox extension soon.

  • Free Tools from Port80 Software

    Got an e-mail from the team at Port80 Software in San Diego. They have a compression and caching solution for IIS, which although not my development platform of choice, is heavily used in the Fortune 1000, mainly due to the requirement from these firms to contract with a vendor with enterprise support programs.

    The link below takes you to their variety of tools that check the cacheability and compressibility (this a word?) of your pages.

    Port80 Tools Page

    They also have a blog — [200 OK]. Drop by and check them out — there is a very interesting discussion on TIME_WAIT states going on, an oft-forgotten little tweak that is available for high-performance Web servers.

  • Snow

    Once it’s shovelled, it is quite beautiful out there.

    About 6 inches — ok maybe 4 inches with larger wind-accumulation in our weird yard. Kids had a blast in the snow and the Damnation Hound goes “crackerdog” in snow.

    We are all wiped and ZenWife is baking for the New Year’s Day house party we are having. We will have food for millions by the end!

  • Another Blogger Refugee

    Allan Jenkins is moving Desirable Roasted Coffee to Typepad.

    Another Blogger user fleeing to another service.

    Hmmmmm….

  • Wasted Life — Part Deux

    As I previously asked, ever get the feeling you have wasted your life?

    This feeling was renewed when I actually sat down and read Joi Ito’s bio. I am obviously slated to be one of the proles.

  • Madness is over

    Two kids.

    One dog.

    A treeful of presents.

    45 minutes.

    Now to deal with madness that resulted.

    From our house to yours, Merry Giftmas.

    House_christmas2004

  • New player?

    Just discovered a new player in the Web performance field: SciVisum.

    Anyone know anything about them?

  • Web compression benefit survey — looking for volunteers

    As a sidelight to my Web performance job, I spent a lot of time investigating Web compression techniques, tools and devices a while back (I have a library of items I have collected

    My studies were purely technical, i.e. what was the bandwidth saving in implementing this technology v. remaining uncompressed. Now I want to work with some companies who have implemented a compression solution recently and get a sense of what the bottom-line impact was.

    Some questions I am trying to answer.

    • Does compression really save companies money?
    • Is the hardware/software implementation cost have an acceptable ROI?
    • Have you implemented a compression solution, then retired it? Why?

    Not earth-shattering questions, but they will help me better understand the end-to-end business implications of deploying and integrating a compression solution.

    If you woul dlike to partcipate, please drop me a line here.

  • By Invitation only

    Lexthink! sounds like the kind of event I would want to attend if I worked in a real Professional Services firm.

    And to make it "by invitation only"…well, that makes it super sexy!

    Thanks to Scoble for the link.