Category: Uncategorized

I was considering the amazing popularity of WordPress (the hosted service as well ad the application), now the agreed upon champ in the blogging world. I was considering this in light of the fact that when I started blogging in the dark ages of 2004, MoveableType and TypePad were the undisputed champs.

When did the shift occur? What was the watershed moment?

It hit me. it was the day Scoble announced his blog would be a WordPress.com blog. [here]

Now, Scoble may not be as large a force in the blogging world anymore, but that day in October 2005 when he made that announcement sealed the fate of SixApart. The buzz momentum swung to WordPress and all of the yummy goodness therein.

The SixApart/MoveableType/TypePad fiends out there are likely to flame me, but the latest release of MoveableType received the response usually reserved for yet another Who farewell tour. It is bloated, complex and difficult to manage.

On the other hand, I can install and/or update WordPress in less than 5 minutes and no one would notice a thing.

I wonder what the next seminal blogging tool will be?

Technorati Tags: Scoble, MoveableType, Moveable+Type, SixApart, Six+Apart, TypePad, WordPress, photomatt, Matt+Mullenweg

Apparent using HTTP compression alongside HTTP/1.1 will cause certain versions of MSIE 6.0 to implode. [here]

I personally think this was because the NSA power shortage was making it too hard for the spooks to snoop on compressed Web traffic. [here]

Via: Port80 Software

PS: No, I won’t turn off compression because Microsoft did something really stupid.

Technorati Tags: Internet+Explorer, Internet+Explorer+6.0, MSIE, Port80+Software, HTTP+Compression, Web+Performance, Microsoft, NSA

This post has two underlying reasons for existing: 1) to test out the new MSFT Live Writer Beta; and 2) to talk about a great story that GigaOm pointed us to today.

Om Malik pointed out a story in the Seattle Times today that talked about “Broadband in the Boonies”. Having grown up in the boonies of British Columbia, this immediately got my attention. The story discusses the explosive growth of Internet businesses in the now heavily wired interior of Washington State; the story focuses on the are around Twisp, Winthrop and the Methow Valley.

Until you have been in this area, and I have, you don’t get the possibility of winter isolation. The story talks about how these places are four hours from Seattle; what they neglect to mention is that this is 4 hours in the period between April 15 and October 15, depending on snow.

The direct westerly route to Seattle from these locations passes through the Cascades. Through the extremely high and snowy Cascades.

ZenWife and I took a spur of the moment detour through this little part of heaven, pausing a night in a campground in Twisp. Right on the river. When we woke up the next morning, I remembered how much I missed those early morning moments in the mountains.

Twisp is far more isolated than Golden, BC, or any of the other towns that we passed through on our trip this summer. But it is a reminder to us all that place is important. Not because we have to be there, but because it is where we are at home.

I have lived in the Valley. I have lived in Massachusetts. But neither has been home.

And to me, home is worth more than anything.

Technorati Tags: GigaOm, Seattle+Times, Twisp, Winthrop, Methow+Valley, Washington+State, Home, Broadband, Freedom, Om+Malik

The new GrabPERF Agent code, with support for plain text or regular expression content matching, is now in production on all active measurement agents.
I added one more feature before I rolled out the new code: when a content match error occurs, the server headers and HTML content for 14 days.
I have not exposed this feature yet, but will be doing so in the next few days.
Again, thanks to the GrabPERF community for your continued support.
Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, Text+match, Content+match, Agent+upgrade

Michael Arrington’s latest Crunch product, CrunchGear, is getting beat up this morning.

Ouch!
In the past, these would not appear as errors, but the new text match feature in GrabPERF is working like a charm. The new code is up on 3 of the 5 measurement agents, and the remaining 2 should be updated by tomorrow.
Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, CrunchGear, TechCrunch, Michael+Arrington

July 25, 2006 at 19:48:24 GMT.
That’s the last time that the Technorati bot indexed my blog.
I am confused, because of all the sites out there, my blog should be pretty easy for Technorati to index — this server, as well as the GrabPERF servers is hosted in Technorati’s racks. Theoretically, the bot should be able to index my blog without leaving the building.
I posted something this morning, and IceRocket, Google Blogsearch, Ask.com Blog Search all have it.
I am wondering if anyone else is noticing this.
Technorati Tags: Technorati, Tags, Indexing, bots, search, blog+search

Scott Berkun wrote a great post that discusses how he encounters the start-up inflection point in companies. This is the point where the company has to make that brutal transition from the fast-and-loose dynamic of the true start-up to the more established and “normal” business methods.
This week, Niall Kennedy provided an example of someone who gave an established firm a try, but decided that the start-up world is more to his liking.
The object here is not to decide which is best, the start-up or the established firm, but to discuss the transition that occurs when moving between these two phases; and the direction of travel is always one-way, to the established firm. For all their talk of “thinking like a start-up”, established firms are what they are.
I have made this transition twice now. The first time was during the exuberance of the 1999 bubble world with a company that had just gone public. Here the transition was initially hidden by the exponential growth and overly optimistic predictions made by the executives. When reality stepped in early in 2001, the true effect of the transition became clear: this was no longer a start-up, and there were people who were more than willing to make the tough decisions. Whether, in the long-term, these were the correct decisions is a question that I am not willing to answer; I was merely an observer.
I was an observer when a similar change occurred at my current company. A start-up in the sense that it was still a VC-funded private firm, this company had (and still has) an excellent product developed by some top-flight technical talent. The issue now was to take that foundation and build a team that could execute. Again, I can’t say whether the decisions that were made were the correct ones, but the team that was built during that time has lead the company out of the wilderness and in a very solid direction.
These are simply my experiences. In my experience, there are start-up people and established company people; and there are the rare folks who can slide in and out of both worlds. Me, I fall into the start-up category. When a company starts edging toward 200 employees, I begin to feel a bit edgy. In a very quick exchange I had with Niall Kennedy on Tuesday, he said that he set a magic number whan a company became a “189” “187” (a number he also mentioned was police slang for homicide).
Is there a magic number? Or does it depend on the company? What defines a start-up? What defines an established firm?
Technorati Tags: start-up, established+firm, big+company, Niall+Kennedy, Scott+Berkun, Inflection+Point, transition, management

I now have a true live example of how text matching can provide information on issues where a successful page is returned.

In this example, the TEST AGENT returned a Text Match Failed error, while 3 of the agents running the current production code said the page was a success.
How do I know that the TEST AGENT is right? Take a look at the byte count. For the successful pages, the byte count is in the 3,600-3,900 byte range; the page that had the Text Match failure only returned 1076 bytes. And three other measurements around that time reported the same approximate size, but reported successful page downloads.
If this Agent code shows continued success and robust behaviour, then I will push it into production on August 14.
Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Agent+upgrade, Web+performance, text+match, content+match

Ok folks, this is it. I have finally truly woken up from my slumber and I am starting to add features to the system.
Today’s latest: content | text matching.
This is a critical step in the development, as it allows for quality checking against the returned data. Currently, I can only catch errors under 3 defined circumstances:

1. The server returns an HTTP code >= 400
2. The measurement times out when delivering the data (45 seconds)
3. The connection to the server fails (only some agents and kernels)

Now, the ability to confirm that the data being returned under what would be considered by the server admins as a success criteria, i.e. something with an HTTP/200 OK message got sent back to the client, can trigger an error in a defined text string or regular expression does not appear in the HTML.
This is currently up on a test agent, and if it proves stable, I will roll it out to the production agents later this week. If you would like to be a part of this beta, drop me a line or a comment.
Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, Text+matching, Content+matching, quality+check

Since I started using the Performancing Firefox extension, it seems that Technorati takes a while to find me. FInally figured out that I haven’t enabled pings.

So this is a test post to see if the ping function works correctly.

Technorati Tags: Performancing, Firefox, Technorati