Category: Uncategorized

I am still swamped at work, but I have a glimmer of space available to me, so I thought that I would drop by and let everyone know what’s happening.

We are well on our way to being ready for the trip to BC and Alberta that starts Monday (June 26). We have a dining room full of luggage, and have a lot of information concerning travelling with Miss Wiggles. It’s been nearly 3 years since I was “home” to Victoria, so it will be fun to scout out and see what’s changed since the last visit.

As a sidenote, if anyone in the Victoria, BC area wants to do a meetup while I am in town, I would be happy to attend — need some lovely beer from Swan’s or Spinnaker’s.

GrabPERF continues to chug along almost completely unmanaged. One tiny improvement I made to scatter plot is the only code change in months. If things settle down at work (not likely until we get an extra body in here to support me), I will be updating some of the measurement code and back-end systems. Until I have time to go through a formal review process, the system is in maintenance mode.

While I am on vacation, I will likely been able to write some more; lot’s of thoughts on IIS 5.0, Net Neutrality, Firefly, and other things that are deeply buried right now.

Technorati Tags: Victoria, BC, Alberta, Canada, Vancouver Island, GrabPERF

I am doing a brief study on something I have noticed in a couple of sites running Windows 2000 Server and IIS/5.0, most notably with server-based SSL in place. In order to verify my findings, I need a larger subset of sites/servers to gather data from.
If you have such a site, please leave me a comment.
Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2000, IIS 5, IIS/5.0, SSL, Web performance

Made a simple change to the Scatter Plot graphs today. Any measurement greater than 180 seconds (3 minutes) is flagged as an error in this view.
Why?
Thank PodTech. Som of their measurements were coming in at an insane 500 seconds plus this morning, and my graphing package couldn’t handle the scaling of data between 0.5 and 1400 seconds.
Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web performance, Scatter Plot

Dear PodTech:
Say thank you.
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 19:18:11 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.53 (Fedora)
Location: http://www.podtech.net
Content-Length: 283
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache/2.0.53 (Fedora)
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.11
X-Pingback: http://www.podtech.net/xmlrpc.php
Status: 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 9233
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 19:14:21 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Performance got better, didn’t it?

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web performance, PodTech

Dear PodTech:
Use HTTP Compression. It’s built into Apache/2.0.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 15:30:24 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.53 (Fedora)
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.11
X-Pingback: http://www.podtech.net/xmlrpc.php
Status: 200 OK
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Probably save you some bandwidth and improve your performance, which is in the tank right now.
Podtech Live Web Performance
Best of luck.
Technorati Tags: PodTech, GrabPERF, Web Performance

So, I called United today to see if there were any special procedures I had to follow when we arrived at Logan on June 26, as Ms. Wiggles is going to Canada with us.

Turns out that they had completely screwed up our flights. And hadn’t bothered to inform us that they had changed the flights.

So, I forced someone cold and impersonal operator (who I am STILL on the phone with) to re-book our tickets so that we had enough time at O’Hare to actually make our connecting flights.

That’s it. They blew it. United is done.

Sorry United. You will have to do something pretty damn special to get me back as a customer after this.

Technorati Tags: United, UAL, customer service, customer disservice

Reading anything using a feed reader allows prevents us from discriminating against the content.

Start with an inflammatory statement, then back it up, using the wisdom gleaned from Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Why do feeds prevent us from initial discrimination? Because we have no point of reference other than the text in front of us, and the occasional image. There is no way to make a quality judgement based on differences in appearance or layout.

In fact, the feeds we read are often filtered by the influence of others. We react positively to someone’s raving review of a feed, and we incorporate it into our subscriptions.

The decisions we make in those initial seconds may sour over time. Feeds grow old, stale, uninteresting. But the why did we subscribe in the first place? Was it a decision based on the layour of a site? The way the person looks?

No. It is based on the feedback of others, and the content we encounter.

Technorati Tags: Blink, feeds, blogging, Malcolm Gladwell

Life has been insane for the last 2 weeks as I struggle to keep up with a flood of new projects and preparations for our three-week vacation to Canada.

It will be interesting to go home. I have only been in Canada for one overnight trip since September 2004, and that was Toronto, which really doesn’t count.

As well, tomorrow is Kinnear’s 5th birthday. Yes, he was born on June 6. And yes, I know what tomorrow is.

But now I have to jump on another conference call, so I will try and check in with some of my varied adventures more often.

Tags: Life, 6/6/2006, Kinnear, birthday, vacation, Canada

Just got MIDPSSH to work on my Razr. Had to perform a few hacks to get around the T-Mobile Firewall (SSHD now listens on port 110), but there is some perverse pleasure in seeing a linux command prompt on my Razr.
Maybe I need to do some real work now.
Technorati Tags: Razr, SSH, MIDPSSH, T-mobile

On my trip to Europe earlier this month, I picked up a Razr V3 that had been abandoned by one of my colleagues in the UK. Sitting in a drawer, it looked so lonely and abandoned.
It probably wishes it had stayed there.
Since I got it, I have been exploring all of the sites and boards that discuss the various hacks that people have performed on this magnificent piece of technology. Short of some of the advanced procedures (still trying to figure out how to convert the bluetooth into a directed energy weapon), this is not the same phone I received two weeks ago.
I have flashed the firmware (twice), switched on the Autoupdate feature for the Time/Date, and removed all of the Vodafone specific branding that came with the device.
I now understand how you can become heavily involved in phone modding. This device, which is a simple V3 that you see everywhere, is more powerful than my first 386. I can cruise the Web using Opera Mini, check directions using Google Mini-Maps, and use it as a modem if I am ever stuck for a connection somewhere.
I also have the Motorola Phone Tools software installed, so I can control my phone over USB.
A lot of what I have learned and done over the last three days is definitely in a “grey zone” as far as Motorola is concerned. However, given the number of people doing this, Motorola should open up their tools and let people know how to make the mods they want.
In fact, I would love to see Motorola should run a contest to see who can build the coolest Flash pack for the V3 that can be used by anyone. That would build intense customer interest and would make the V3 even more of a geek toy than it is now.
It is the single coolest gadget I have ever owned. It even outranks the Treo and the Zen Micro.
For those of you out there into the risk of turning your slek and sexy phone into a brick, I suggest Motox or MotoModders as places to start.
Long live MotoModding.
Technorati Tags: Razr V3, V3, Moto, MotoModding, Motorola, hacks, flash, modding