Category: Uncategorized

I love the shirt.

It’s the four chins and obviously thinning hair I could do without.

Who is that guy????

Around the blogs, there are a number of folks talking about Skype making people pay for SkypeOut calls.

Guess what? Everywhere else in the world, you have always had to do this. So I don’t understand what the problem is.

I know that the QoS will improve on SkypeOut once the feeloaders are gone. Free is good, but you get what you pay for.

Those people who think free is a sustainable business model are either selling ads to pay the bills, or falling into the 1999 trap all over again.

Ok Skype hounds, this is is. Skype, in a move to get us North Americans (sorry Mexico) to use more Skype, is offering us unlimited calling to Canadian and American numbers (landlines and mobile) for all of 2007 for the ridiculously low price of $14.95 (offer valid until January 31, 2007).

Get it! Like you need a reason to resist Skype?

Oh, and of course all Skype-to-Skype calls are still free.

So, the question begs to be asked: why? Well, it seems that us dense folks on the non-European side of the Atlantic and the non-Asian side of the Pacific haven’t been adopting Skype fast enough.

A variety of theories abound about this. The one I have is that the US phone companies have priced long-distance so low that there is no motivator driving people away from their POTS connections.

The competition between the Telcos and the Cablecos over your phone service has been another factor in keeping long-distance costs so low.

It will be interesting to see which of the long-distance companies responds with a North American unlimited plan for a ridiculously low rate.

Technorati Tags: Skype, SkypeOut, unlimited+calling, voip, Telcos, Cablecos, long+distance, competition

My Google Alerts today picked up a post from a former colleague of mine, commenting on another post from the Yahoo! Interface blog.
I had some problems following the stream in the Performance Matters post, so I thought I would this post to clear up my thoughts.
A technical note up front: Using a waterfall chart that only shows non-persistent connections gives a very skewed view on how a modern Web page page performs. Persistent connections and modern TCP/IP stacks with fast-retransmit algorithms and window-scaling have seend a trend away from network-related performance issues in the recent past.
After the dot-bomb crash, the overabundance of bandwidth (in the form of over-built fiber-optic networks) made backbone and end-to-end connectivity issues for business and most home broadband users almost completely disappear.
The wealth of bandwidth (ok, North America consumers arethe poor cousins compared to their European and Asian counterparts) removed the veil of “it’s the network” which had been the crutch of performance engineers for many years, and exposed the effects of poor design and badly designed infrastructure.
In many cases, poor page design could be overcome. However, issues with core infrastructure and application design were (and are) notoriously difficult to resolve without spending a lot of money and investing a large amount of time and manpower.
So, when these issues were combined with the shrinking budgets and constricted IT staffing in the post-boom era, application performance issues became (and still are) the root-cause of most Web performance issues.
In recent months, as the use of Internet telephony, rich-media streaming, file-sharing, RSS, and SOA products rise nearly exponentially, the bandwidth crunch is starting to re-appear. This is something I first speculated about in October 2005 [here].
In one area, I do agree with the Performance Matters post: the larger the page, the slower download. However, the ongoing debate is one that pits the “more smaller” crown against the “fewer larger” crowd. The “fewer larger” crowd appears to be losing, given the design of most modern Web pages.
The only other comment I can fairly make here is that the majority of the sources cited in the Performance Matters post are 5-6 years old. In that time, I have learned a lot about Web performance, and that the post is more relevant to to the state of the Internet at that time, and not now.

When we lived in California (1999 – 2003), the CrazyCanuck-mobile had the following vanity plate.

Likely only Canadians will get it.

Once again, thanks Hugh.

After a couple of days vacation, the FeedBurner feeds are back.

I bought the domain forwarding option from WordPress.com (http://crazycanuck.org/), and then waited. I reactivated the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/crazycanuck this morning, and you can start using that again.

Rick Klau from FeedBurner left a comment last night, which prompted me to try again.

Hopefully things will remain stable now.

Technorati Tags: FeedBurner, feeds

I do not want to host my own blog.

Even if I wanted to, WordPress.com does not make it easy to export content. This, however, is a separate discussion.

Skype and Web 2.0 (I hate the term, but I am using it) are inextricably linked.

WordPress and Web 2.0 are inextricably linked.

WordPress.com hates Skype. It’s that simple.

According to a WordPress.com forum post:

Actually in this case it’s because skype and callme are being stripped. They’re not XML recognized tags and staff has stated that they won’t be supported.

And

Fraid not. Javascripts are still removed from input for security concerns. If you really need Skype, I would suggest getting a paid host.

See here.

WordPress.com: BUILD A SKYPE WIDGET!

Thank you.

Technorati Tags: WordPress.com, skype, widgets

This is a shot I took at Sweetgrass Farm Winery in November 2005.

One of my favourite places in the world.

PS: Keith Bodine, vintner and distiller at Sweetgrass Farm Winery got the last of his necessary permits and licenses this week. Wine and spirits shall start flowing from Maine soon! Well, as soon as one can expect fine wine and spirits to flow.

Technorati Tags: Sweetgrass Farm Winery, wine, spirits, winery, vintner, Maine

After a few months using the Microsoft Live Writer, I am giving the Performancing Blogging Extension for Firefox another try. Just seems more natural that since I use Firefox as my daily work platform, I should use it for everything.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Live Writer, Performancing