- High Performance Networking in Google Chrome — far more than you ever wanted to know about how Chrome is so damn fast.
- Tactical Chat — how the military uses IRC to wage war.
- http-console — a REPL loop for HTTP.
- Inductive Charger for Magic Mouse — my biggest bugbear with Bluetooth devices is the incessant appetite for batteries. Huzzah!
"performance" entries
Four short links: 6 March 2013
Chrome's Speed Tricks, Military's IRC, HTTP's REPL, and Inductive Mice
Four short links: 18 December 2012
Tweet Cred, C64 History, Performance Articles, Return of Manufacturing
- Credibility Ranking of Tweets During High Impact Events (PDF) — interesting research. Situational awareness information is information that leads to gain in the knowledge or update about details of the event, like the location, people affected, causes, etc. We found that on average, 30% content about an event, provides situational awareness information about the event, while 14% was spam. (via BoingBoing)
- The Commodore 64 — interesting that Chuck Peddle (who designed the 6502) and Bob Yannes (who designed the SID chip) are still alive. This article safely qualifies as Far More Than You Ever Thought You Wanted To Know About The C64 but it is fascinating. The BASIC housed in its ROM (“BASIC 2.0″) was painfully antiquated. It was actually the same BASIC that Tramiel had bought from Microsoft for the original PET back in 1977. Bill Gates, in a rare display of naivete, sold him the software outright for a flat fee of $10,000, figuring Commodore would have to come back soon for another, better version. He obviously didn’t know Jack Tramiel very well. Ironically, Commodore did have on hand a better BASIC 4.0 they had used in some of the later PET models, but Tramiel nixed using it in the Commodore 64 because it would require a more expensive 16 K rather than 8 K of ROM chips to house.
- The Performance Calendar — an article each day about speed. (via Steve Souders)
- Mr China Comes to America (The Atlantic) — long piece on the return of manufacturing to America, featuring Foo camper Liam Casey.
Four short links: 11 October 2012
A/B with Google Analytics, Lego Rubiks Solver, TV Torrents, and Performance Tools
- ABalytics — dead simple A/B testing with Google Analytics. (via Dan Mazzini)
- Fastest Rubik Cube Solver is Made of Lego — it takes less than six seconds to solve the cube. Watch the video, it’s … wow. Also cool is watching it fail. (via Hacker News)
- Fairfax Watches BitTorrent (TorrentFreak) — At a government broadband conference in Sydney, Fairfax’s head of video Ricky Sutton admitted that in a country with one of the highest percentage of BitTorrent users worldwide, his company determines what shows to buy based on the popularity of pirated videos online.
- Web Performance Tools (Steve Souders) — compilation of popular web performance tools. Reminds me of nmap’s list of top security tools.
Six themes from Velocity Europe
Cultural shifts and handling large-scale growth among the emerging trends in the WPO and DevOps communities
By Steve Souders and John Allspaw
More than 700 performance and operations engineers were in London last week for Velocity Europe 2012. Below, Velocity co-chairs Steve Souders and John Allspaw note high-level themes from across the various tracks (especially the hallway track) that are emerging for the WPO and DevOps communities.
Performance themes from Steve Souders
I was in awe of the speaker and exhibitor lineup going into Velocity Europe. It was filled with knowledgeable gurus and industry leaders. As Velocity Europe unfolded a few themes kept recurring, and I wanted to share those with you.
Performance matters more — The places and ways that web performance matters keeps growing. The talks at Velocity covered desktop, mobile (native, web, and hybrid), tablet, TV, DSL, cable, FiOS, 3G, 4G, LTE, and WiMAX across social, financial, ecommerce, media, games, sports, video, search, analytics, advertising, and enterprise. Although all of the speakers were technical, they talked about how the focus on performance extends to other departments in their companies as well as the impact performance has on their users. Web performance has permeated all aspects of the web and has become a primary focus for web companies. Read more…
Four short links: 3 August 2012
CV Camouflage, Best Practices, Failure Conference, and Fiber Lessons
- Urban Camouflage Workshop — Most of the day was spent crafting urban camouflage intended to hide the wearer from the Kinect computer vision system. By the end of the workshop we understood how to dress to avoid detection for the three different Kinect formats. (via Beta Knowledge)
- Starting a Django Project The Right Way (Jeff Knupp) — I wish more people did this: it’s not enough to learn syntax these days. Projects live in a web of best practices for source code management, deployment, testing, and migrations.
- FailCon — a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers and designers to study their own and others’ failures and prepare for success. Figure out how to learn from failures—they’re far more common than successes. (via Krissy Mo)
- Google Fiber in the Real World (Giga Om) — These tests show one of the limitations of Google’s Fiber network: other services. Since Google Fiber is providing virtually unheard of speeds for their subscribers, companies like Apple and I suspect Hulu, Netflix and Amazon will need to keep up. Are you serving DSL speeds to fiber customers? (via Jonathan Brewer)
Velocity Profile: Schlomo Schapiro
Web ops and performance questions with Schlomo Schapiro.
A profile of web operations and performance expert Schlomo Schapiro, systems architect and open source evangelist at ImmobilienScout24.
Four short links: 8 June 2012
Speedy Proxy, SPDY Reviewed, MySQL Automation, and LinkedIn Checker
- HAproxy — high availability proxy, cf Varnish.
- Opera Reviews SPDY — thoughts on the high-performance HTTP++ from a team with experience implementing their own protocols. Section 2 makes a good intro to the features of SPDY if you’ve not been keeping up.
- Jetpants — Tumblr’s automation toolkit for handling monstrously large MySQL database topologies. (via Hacker News)
- LeakedIn — check if your LinkedIn password was leaked. Chris Shiflett had this site up before LinkedIn had publicly admitted the leak.
A crazy awesome gaming infrastructure
Sarah Novotny on building high-performance gaming platforms.
How do you bridge the gap between IT and business while building a gaming infrastructure that scales? Sarah Novotny addresses that question in this Velocity podcast.
Velocity Profile: Kate Matsudaira
Web ops and performance questions with Kate Matsudaira.
A profile of web operations and performance expert Kate Matsudaira, vice president of engineering at Decide.com.
Which is easier to tune, humans or machines?
Kate Matsudaira on the human side of performance and operations.
In this Velocity podcast, Kate Matsudaira discusses the human side of performance and operations, including how to teach people to address time, cost, quality and scope.