Category: Uncategorized

In a previous post, I discussed that I was reading some management books to get an insight into the other side of the company. I have finished Hope is Not a Strategy finally. Interesting, but no new revelations. The war stories are the most interesting part of the whole book. The approach to sales in common-sensical, but much too hard for most folks in this day of instant gratification.

The reason why the Long Tail concept seemed so familiar to me is that I work with the statistical cousin to the marketing term, the Heavy Tail.

The term Heavy Tail is used to describe a dataset that is not “normally” (in the statistical sense; think Bell Curve) distributed. Internet performance data is notoriously heavy-tailed, with a large concentration of datapoints to the left-hand side of the population and a very slow and long/heavy tail trailing out into the nether reaches of “where things go very wrong”.

When I gave training classes, I described this (being a Canadian, of course), as the Beaver Effect. If you are as puzzled as some of my seminar participants were, I am not suprised. However, go look at a picture of beaver — none posted here; you know how to use Google.

Huge Body; large tail. The Beaver Effect.

Guess it doesn’t resonate like the Long Tail.

I have a monthly conference call with one of our consulting clients to go over their data, discuss improvements, and hear about initiatives that they they may be undertaking which will have an effect on the data for next month’s call.

I woke up from my month-long slumber to prepare for this call. I saw some unusual trends, noted them, threw everything in a PowerPoint and thought to myself, "Well, they probably already knew this…but it’s what I saw".

When I got on the call, it seems that my information had set off a fire-drill. They look at the data daily, but hadn’t had anyone turn it into information for them. Now it looks like they will have to go in and debug an ancient piece of Java code that no one has looked at in years, cause it just worked. (See Tim Bray for more on this topic)

How does your company turn data into information? Chat away!

I miss it.

Seems like an odd thing to say, but I miss talking to groups of people who may be interested in what I have to say (in my offbeat and unique way) about concepts in Web performance. I used to do it a lot at my previous job, but I have not been presented the opportunity to go somewhere and talk for too long.

Anyone know of any good conferences where I could give a presentation or talk on Web performance? I can’t seem to find any…but I guess I haven’t been looking in the right places.

Ok, the GrabPERF and Pierzchala.com servers are back on the Net, with new IPs. You may not be able to get to them for a while, due to DNS propagation.

Whatever Comcast did better be worth it.

Looks like the link to my home network is down. Ugh.

Guess I will have to do some work now.

Samantha reports that the tv is out and there are multiple Comcast trucks patrolling the neighbourhood. Looks like a severe knockdown.

The Blog Herald has a great discussion on blogging to a world-wide English-speaking audience (Choosing your English: the choice for new bloggers).

As a Canadian living in the US, my spellings have slid more towards the English(US) side of the spectrum in the last five years. This has been a matter of survival when dealing with annoying spell-checkers and US businesses (some of which claim to have a world view).

After reading the article, I think that I will make more of an effort to use my native spellings, and preserve what I learned growing up.

Ok, I am with Eric on this one. I do not give one iota about designing to a specific browser. I know what I use, and my pages look good in that browser. I also know that the browser I use is very standards compliant. And it’s too bad if other browsers cannot play that game.

Standards, in HTTP and web-rendering languages, exist for a reason. I shake my head that we have to bow to something that not only is partially standards compliant, but based on technology that is creaky at best.

Design to the standards, and eventually everyone will have to bow to the accepted standard.

Ok, as far as Internet hotspots, I have never tagged Kamloops as one of the biggies.

But, as Darren Barefoot passed along, they are the first city in Canada to get city-wide wifi.

Nice place…but, not for me.

Ok, in a weird little way, the subtext of the browser wars has started to re-surface in the blogosphere. Everyone is getting into the browser distribution mix.

Including me.

Check out the Browser Percentage Stats for this blog and for the GrabPERF Server.

Thanks to Tim Bray for re-starting this mess.