Category: Uncategorized

The question is a simple one: why do I have to dial “1” for long distance from my home phone?
This likely doesn’t apply to VoIP users, but I still use POTS at home.
I understand that it is an artifact of the way that the long distance system was originally built. However, my home line is the only phone I use that requires me to dial “1” first.
On both my mobile (T-Mobile) and office phones (MCI VoIP), I dial 10 digits and I am done.
So, why can’t the local phone systems figure this one out?

Technorati: telephone, long, voip, pots, telephony
IceRocket: telephone, long, voip, pots, telephony

The second measurement agent is now up and running on Ubuntu!
And the happy news is that it is reporting CONNECTION ERRORS!
Well, ok, not so good news for those of you who are getting them. On the other hand, a gap in the measurement data should indicate a serious problem now.

In order to avoid doing some work today, I will be upgrading the second GrabPERF Agent from Mandrake 9 (10?) to Ubuntu Breezy 5.10.
Hopefully this will improve the stability of this machine and allow connection error signals from the kernel to be captured correctly by cURL.

Kathy Sierra once again reminds us that only the truly intelligent employers realize that the Work/Life balance is more important than ANYTHING else. [here]
And her reason for this: clients who abuse startups and small companies who then abuse their employees to work miracles.
The takeaway:

And as the tech employment market starts to tick up ever so slightly, it’s becoming less and less of an “employer’s market” again. I don’t care about the Aeron chair, but I do care about having a life beyond work. If you can’t make your business model work without promising your clients a miracle (which we’re expected to pull off), change your business model! And when you DO ask us to go our ass off again, a little worshipping goes a long way ; )

Mena Trott posted a note on her blog that details all of the performance enhancements and upgrades they have been through recently. [here]
And it has improved.

CLICK IMAGE

I know it’s easier to malign an organization than to give it credit where it is due; and I am giving the SixApart team a huge amount of credit for bringing this back from the edge.

I lost the second measurement agent at 2005-11-05 15:34:35 yesterday. And as it’s remote and threw some kind of fatal error, I have no way to re-start it until tomorrow.
Sorry.
Volunteers to host another measurement location?

FEMA sends a bill for $3.7 billion to the state of Louisiana
Hmm…I would refuse to pay on the grounds that no usable services were provided by FEMA. In fact, I think that Louisiana should send FEMA a bill.
Via: CCUCEO

One thing that I have been frustrated with in cURL is the lack of OS level network error reporting.
Guess what? I should read the docs. It’s been in the code for a few revisions now.
The problem: It appears to behave erratically. I have it working successfully on one measurement machine (local network agent), but when I blindly rolled it out to the remote Gomez Agent, all the measurements melted down and started throwing this mysterious Error Code 43.
The difference is that the local machine is running linux 2.4.20-31.9 (most likely Redhat 9) and the Gomez Agent is running 2.4.22-26mdk (Mandrake 9? 10?).
I tried to test the code on one of my linux 2.6 (Fedora Core 3) servers running cURL 7.12.3, which should have this code in place, but it returns nothing when the connection fails due to a reset or timeout.
I now understand the need for network homgeneity. ARRRGH!
I just don’t get why the cURL RPMs for Fedora on the cURL site throw module dependency errors; and I am not getting involved in an RPM upgrade “falling dominoes” party at 01:00 EST.
I hope the Connection Timeout errors help some of you folks out who where just getting gaps when weird network errors were occurring.

A while back, I posted a note that the Tag search app at Technorati was behaving in a manner that did not match the performance of the rest of their products. [here]
The Technorati team followed up with me today and asked if I had seen any improvement.

CLICK IMAGE

Ummm…yeah. Just a little.
Again…wow.

UPDATE: And Technorati just told me that they started using HTTP Compression.

CLICK IMAGE

Technorati: Technorati, Tags
IceRocket: Technorati, Tags

I will be in DC/Baltimore on Thursday and Friday on business. No time for a meetup, but if anything weird happens with GrabPERF or the server, I will get to it as soon as I can.