Category: Uncategorized

Over the last 3 weeks, I have been unusually quiet, even for me. I am taking a creative hiatus and doing a lot of reading, by real writers, not just technical books.

I am also in the office a lot more than I have been for the last two months. Getting back into that takes a little time as well.

As always, comments are open, and spam will be deleted.

Be good to each other.

When I was in the UK in early 2003, I saw a great show on Channel 4, Time Team.

Of course I can’t find it in the US.

Does anyone out there have access to the DVDs or copies of the show I could get copies of? Or where do I buy them in the US?

Technorati Tags: Time+Team, Channel+4, DVD, channel4

Yesterday we had no bricks.

It’s amazing what one trip to a former chimney in Watertown can do.

Garden edging, here we come.

I just remembered something this morning. Starting October 7, 2006, I will be officially a man without a Visa. My final H1-B renewal expires on October 6, 2006, and although they have applied for an extension, and I am at some indeterminate point supposed to get a Green Card, I will be of no status as of that date.

If you have any conferences or camps or seminars you want me to attend, better get me before October 6!

Technorati Tags: DHS, Immigration, H1B, H1-B, Canada, Visa, Green+Card, Permanent+resident

I have been running the GrabPERF Compression and Performance study for less than a week, but I thought that I should share some of the initial results with everyone.

As you can see above, the byte transmission savings gained by some sites is pretty astounding. Google News sends a pages with a median weight of near 31,000 bytes when compressed; but when compression is disabled on the client, this jumps to over 139,000 bytes.

What is interesting is that the performance gains don’t look truly significant. However, they compressed pages are faster, and have the added benefit of costing the site less, as bandwidth costs count by the byte (I know it’s more complicated than that, but for now, let’s assume a fantasy world).

I will continue to monitor that results and will close the measurements after 14 days and write up a final report.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, Web+Compression, HTTP+Compression, Performance+tuning, GZIP

Alan at MREater hit the jackpot when he gave a supply sergeant a lift.

As a bonus he got a Fisher Space Pen. And of course…

It’s the perfect companion to the “Rite in the Rain” All-Weather Field Book the soldier also gave to me. Nothing like a friendly supply sergeant. The Field Book has paper “created to shed water and enhance the written image.” Hot damn. That book is a good piece of gear, the kind of thing you wonder how you ever lived without.

Based on his description, he got a tan Tactical Field Book.

I need to find a supply seargeant to give a lift to!

Technorati Tags: Fisher+Space+Pen, RiteintheRain, Rite+in+the+Rain, Fisher+bullet+pen, Supply+Sergeant

The title is a play on an old Royal Canadian Air Farce skit.
I have been having an adverse reaction to a new medication, which the doctor asked me to stop taking today. This reaction involves am itchy rash slowly spreading all over my skin.
Tonight I took 1.5 teaspoons of Benadryl to see if that would help.
Well, that’s 3 hours of my life I won’t get back from the sleep goddess.

Ok, the Blogger blogs all use GZIP compression.

BUT! The Blogger.com homepage does not.

Ummm…attention to detail? Anyone?

Technorati Tags: Blogger, Upgrade, HTTP+Compression, Web+compression, QA, GrabPERF, Web+Performance

I wonder if the AOL/Movie Studio deal will lead to a whole bunch of new genre pics…you know AOL has some pretty compelling information to share with the producers…

Technorati Tags: AOL, Movie+studios, Fox, Sony, Universal, Warner+Bros, Privacy

One of the performance hits that the GrabPERF system has is the dynamic generation of the main page. The nature of the SQL calls and the underlying PHP makes it scale exponentially past a certain number of measurements.

Last night, Kevin Burton made a grand suggestion: generate a static page on a regular schedule.

Duh!

Today, I wrote the script that does this. The performance of the main page has adjusted accordingly.

Yikes!

UPDATE: Ian Holsman reminded that if I use cURL, I can use the exiting PHP to build the pages without a PERL script.

I. AM. AN. IDIOT.

Now, bedtime.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, PHP, MySQL, Dynamic+pages, Static+pages, HTML