Category: Uncategorized

Occasionally, when I am travelling, I will find an airport with a decent bookstore. And I will indulge my habit of buying management books to try and get a competitive advantage when dealing with all sales people, even those that work in the same company that I do.

You see, when you understand how sales people think, and how they will try and position the types of services that I am capable of providing, then I am able to defend myself when they dream up some cockamamie scheme that will help them cover their butt for just one more quarter.

This time, it is Hope is not a Strategy and Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. Started Hope, and will likely get to Execution later this week. Then I am going to go back and read Solution Selling. Then, after I indulge in all of this competitive detective work, I hope that someone buys me a copy of High Performance MySQL, if only because I love what Jeremy has to say on his blogs (here and here).

So, if you see some non-Web performance related rantings this week, it’s most likely cause of what I am reading offline.

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.

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.

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 Samantha 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.

I am with Alan on this one.

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.

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?).

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.

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!).

Samantha 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.

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.

A couple of comments on the new MSN Spaces site.

1. Your web server headers for the main page are basically not helpful, especially the Caching ones:

   Cache-Control: no-cache
   Pragma: no-cache
   Expires: -1

   "-1" is not a valid Expires entry — jest set it to the current date. "Pragma" is a client-side header ONLY.

2. No compression? CSS, JS, and HTML file compression could save you some bandwidth and speed up the site.

The one site I looked at from an MSN staff member was an incredibly busy wild mess. But usability and site design are only things that I comment on.

Be interesting to see this try and evolve. Steve Rubel has a link to some of Steve Ballmer’s comments. He also links to a previous article that discusses the "Pearl Harbor" email in 1995 when BGates discovered the Web.

I think that this is a bit far-fetched on Mr. Rubel’s part. Unlike 1995, Microsoft does not carry the goodwill and universal support that followed it’s release of MSIE. Even if they get it right in version 3.0, Google, TypePad and other players will not allow them to dominate. They may be able to release a blogging product that integrates into IIS (oh wait! what database will it use…you need a license for SQL server too!), but that will only allow other companies to open in competition to the Spaces offering.

Yes, the MSN move may move blogging to a more mainstream audience, but the other players in the field will just move-in.

My thought is that 2005 will be the year of corporate consolidation in the blogosphere. Yahoo will acquire one of the major services (TypePad and Radio Userland come to mind), and Blogger will become more tightly integrated with the other Google offerings. It will be like the portal wars all over again.

Will be fun.