Category: Uncategorized

Later today, I will be discussing an offer of support for the GrabPERF System which came in last night.
I know that I have made my need for hardware and financial support for GrabPERF fairly clear over the last couple of days. However, I was impressed and surprised by this offer of sponsorship/support, especially given who the person making the gesture is.
I won’t say reveal any details yet (yes, I am stealing a Buzz Marketing trick from Scoble and Wright), but this is a very exciting development for the GrabPERF System.
Perhaps corporate sponsorship is the model I need to look at for this.
GrabPERF: The PBS/NPR of Web Performance Monitoring.

Yesterday, a JetBlue plane suffered a failure of the front nose-wheel system shortly after take-off.
After 2 hours and an spectacular light show, the Airbus A320 slowed to a perfect stop on a runway at LAX. [here]
The winners? JetBlue. A perfect landing, flight attendants who were calm in-flight, and the ability to watch the whole thing from your seat on the plane via DirectTV.
Buzz Marketing at its most unique — what does this experience say about the quality of JetBlue to you?
UPDATE: Shel Israel watched the whole thing. [here]

The Slacker Manager had a great post about Fast Tracking yourself. [here]
When I read the article, I realized two things:

1. I was coming up on my two-year anniversary with my current employer with no change in responsibilities or roles
2. I was going to break one of the SM’s cardinal rules

Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed. Now it is time to change the personal marketing campaign.

Google Wifi
I guess “Own All Data” does not fall under “Do No Evil”.
Via: Geek News Central

Bob Wyman of PubSub suggested that I should add in the Google Blogsearch ATOM results to see if it any faster than the HTML results.
The answer: they might be. But they aren’t.
Why not?
Some bright bulb at Google’s Blogsearch team hasn’t enabled HTTP Compression on the XML results.
Boys, go back and check your config file and make sure that the text/xml (maybe even text/*) MIME-type is enabled for compression.
Then we will have a race on our hands.

You know it’s going to be a good day when the DBA comes up to you and says:
“You know those really huge and stupid queries that we always yell at you about? Well, we have some database hardware in place and we thought of you as someone who could stress the system.”
Fast hardware. Fast Drives. And a query headed quickly towards the 2-3 million row count and 10 minutes of running time.
I love abusing hardware.

At my real job, we monitor and report on the performance of a number of different e-commerce verticals.
[I will now try and stop using marketing-speak.]
In the retail index, the Gap has been down for nearly 3 weeks. Well, they have come part way up, but it is flaky, and they don’t have a search function.
No search function? Oh yeah, let’s go shop somewhere else.
Anyway, Erick Schonfeld at Business 2.0 just linked to a story at adfreak about this little re-design outage.
20 days. And counting.
This is unheard of in the Internet economy. Well, not unheard of, but the only other site I know that had a similar re-design outage was Wal-Mart back in 2000.
The Gap is a savvy online retailer. Why couldn’t this been done in a more intelligent way? What has made this re-design so problematic?

The weekly GrabPERF Search Index Results are in.
This Week’s Notes

1. ERTW.com Agent location taken offline
2. Addition of Google Blogsearch to the Index
3. Numerous performance improvements to the GrabPERF interface

Week of September 12-18, 2005

TEST                           RESULT  SUCCESS  ATTEMPTS
--------------------------  ---------  -------  --------
PubSub - Search             0.2688096    99.82      6532
Google - Search             0.4013164    99.97      6532
Google Blogsearch - Search  0.5818507    98.60      4214
MSN - Search                0.6981630    99.83      6532
Yahoo - Search              0.7159974    99.95      6527
eBay - Search               0.8345692   100.00      6528
BlogLines - Search          1.0204595    99.95      6531
BestBuy.com - Search        1.1687228    99.97      6530
Feedster - Search           1.3112797    99.82      6531
Technorati - Search         1.3240335    99.95      6528
Amazon - Search             1.5195445    99.72      2481
Newsgator - Search          1.5823492    99.72      6529
Blogdigger - Search         1.7142475    99.97      6506
BENCHMARK RESULTS           2.0313721    99.50     76849
IceRocket - Search          4.2792600    98.79      6515
Blogpulse - Search          6.5226776    99.29      6522

These results are based on data gathered from two remote measurement locations in North America. Each location takes a measurement approximately once every five minutes.
The measurements are for the base HTML document only. No images or referenced files are included.

Technorati: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO
IceRocket: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO

I upgraded b2evolution yesterday to 0.9.1, which the developers claim had substantial performance improvements.
I believe them.

Kudos to the b2evolution team!

Now it’s your turn to suffer with this.

CEMETARY POLKA
Tom Waits
Uncle Vernon, Uncle Vernon
Independent as a hog on ice
He’s a big-shot down there at the slaughterhouse
Plays accordion for Mister Weiss
Uncle Biltmore and Uncle William
Made a million during World War II
But they’re tightwads and they’re cheapskates
And they’ll never give a dime to you
Auntie Mame has gone insane
She lives in the doorway of an old hotel
And the radio is playing opera
All she ever says is go to Hell
Uncle Violet flew as pilot
And there ain’t no pretty girls in France
Now he runs a tiny little bookie joint
They say he never keeps it in his pants
Uncle Bill will never leave a will
And the tumour is as big as an egg
Has a mistress, she’s Puerto Rican
And I heard she has a wooden leg
Uncle Phil can’t live without his pills
He has emphysema and he’s almost blind
And we must find out where the money is
Get it now before he loses his mind
Uncle Vernon, Uncle Vernon
Independent as a hog on ice
He’s a big-shot down there at the slaughterhouse
He plays accordion for Mr. Weiss

Buy Rain Dogs. End my suffering.