- Story Written in Reddit — historical scifi based on the question “Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU?” Movie rights were just acquired by Warners. (via BoingBoing)
- Auditing Google — the comically complex games played to move profits to jurisdictions beyond taxation is under scrutiny, at last. While you dodge taxes like this, you have no high moral ground for “do no evil”.
- Frontend SPOF Survey (Steve Souders) — a “frontend SPOF” is any crap whose mere presence can delay the display of your web page. We’ve been bitten by this on Radar: “ooh, let’s try this widget—wait, now it takes 12s to load a page, wtf?”
- Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets — an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It’;s translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.
"performance" entries
Four short links: 17 October 2011
From Reddit to Movie, Google Audited, Web Delays, and Sugared CSS
Velocity is coming to Europe
Velocity Europe will be held Nov. 8-9, 2011 in Berlin.
The Velocity Conference has already turned once exotic topics like database scaling and mobile performance into common knowledge. Now, Velocity is bringing its mix of web ops and performance evangelism to Europe.
Four short links: 9 August 2011
Android Peripherals, Security Asymmetry, Teaching on G+, and HTTP Load Testing
- DSLR Controller — Android app that lets you remote-control your DSLR. Much being made of the fact that iOS devices aren’t as easy to interface with. For more, see the Wired article. (via BoingBoing)
- Asymmetric Security Warfare — I found this nugget buried in this photo shoot talking about the differences between Black Hat and DEFCON conferences: [Mudge, Peiter] Zatko found that it takes about 125 lines of code to create the typical piece of malware and it takes about 10 million lines of code to create sophisticated technologies to protect against it.
- Teaching Cooking in Google+ Hangouts (KQED) — I love the many uses of hangouts. To my mind, they remain the unique value-add for G+.
- HTTP Benchmarking Rules — Mark Nottingham lays down some guidelines for meaningful and effective benchmarking of HTTP services. Full of subtleties and wile: [P]retty much every server loses some capacity once you throw more work at it than it can handle. A better way to get an idea of capacity is to test your server at progressively higher loads, until it reaches capacity and then backs off; you should be able to graph it as a curve that peaks and then backs off. How much it backs off will indicate how well your server deals with overload.
Velocity 2011 retrospective
Resilience engineering and data's role in performance are key trends in web ops.
A number of emerging themes are defining the web operations world, including: resilience engineering, new approaches to failure, and the role data plays in boosting performance.
Four short links: 17 June 2011
Gamification Critique, BitCoin Trojan, App Store Abandonment, and SSD Rant
- Don’t Play Games With Me — slides from an excellent talk about games and gamification. (via Andy Baio)
- All Your Bitcoins Are Ours (Symantec) — a trojan in the wild that targets the wallet.dat file and transfers your bitcoins out. If you use Bitcoins, you have the option to encrypt your wallet and we recommend that you choose a strong password for this in the event that an attacker is attempting to brute-force your wallet open. (via Hacker News)
- FT Escapes the App Trap (Simon Phipps) — Financial Times dropping their iOS app and moving to HTML5, to escape the App Store commissions. As Simon points out, they’re also losing the sales channel benefits of the App Store. Facebook are doing similar. (via Tim O’Reilly)
- Artur Bergman on SSDs (video) — a short sweary rant he gave at Velocity, laying out the numbers for why you’re an idiot not to use SSDs.
Velocity grows with more tracks, more topics and … bath products?
The state of the Velocity Conference.
Over its three-year history, the Velocity Conference has expanded to include mobile performance, "Velocity Culture," and a new line of bath products (that last one might not be the best fit).
Four short links: 6 May 2010
Ethics, Regulation, TCP/IP, and Time Travel
- Ethics and Economics — This paper looks at the evidence that suggests that ethical behaviour is good for the economy.
- FCC to Regulate Broadband — Two FCC officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will announce Thursday that the commission considers broadband service a hybrid between an information service and a utility and that it has sufficient power to regulate Internet traffic under existing law.
- TCP/IP and IMS Sequence Diagrams — watch SYN, ACK, payload, etc. packets to and fro to understand what really happens each time you fetch mail or surf the web. This is what Velocity-type devops performance folks care about.
- How to Build a Time Machine (Daily Mail) — extremely readable article by Stephen Hawking about the possibilities of time travel.
Four short links: 4 January 2010
Code for Speed, Wooden Locks, Font Design, and a Java Distributed Data Store
- Why Git Is So Fast — interesting mailing list post about the problems that the JGit folks had when they tried to make their Java version of Git go faster. Higher level languages hide enough of the machine that we can’t make all of these optimizations. A reminder that you must know and control the systems you’re running on if you want to get great performance. (via Hacker News)
- Wooden Combination Lock — you’ll easily understand how combination locks work with this find piece of crafty construction work.
- From Moleskine to Market — how a leading font designer designs fonts. Fascinating, and beautiful, and it makes me covet his skills.
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Terrastore — open source distributed document store, HTTP accessible, data and queries are distributed, built on Terracotta
which is built on ehcache(updated: Terracotta has an ehcache plugin, but isn’t built on ehcache). A NoSQL database built on Java tools that serious Java developers respect, thefirstsuch one that I’ve noticed (update: I brain-farted: neo4j was definitely on my radar). Notice that all the interesting work going on in the NoSQL arena is happening in open source projects.
Four short links: 22 December 2009
Trading Systems, Streaming iTunes, Scheduling App, Crowdsourcing Lessons
- Trading Shares in Milliseconds (Technology Review) — With the rise of automation, the bulk of U.S. stock trading has moved from the once-crowded floor of Manhattan’s New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to silent server farms run by exchanges and broker-dealers across the country: the proportion of all trades that the NYSE handles has shrunk from 80 percent in 2005 to 40 percent today. Trading is now essentially a virtual art, and its practitioners put such a premium on speed that NASDAQ has considered issuing equal 100-foot lengths of cable to the brokers who send orders to its exchange servers. (via Hacker News)
- Stream iTunes Over SSH — short script that lets you tunnel itunes from one machine to another over ssh (by default iTunes only shares on the local network).
- Doodle — simple way to schedule a common meeting time. (via joshua on Delicious)
- Crowdsourcing — Simon Willison’s thoughtful “lessons learned” from his crowdsourcing projects at the Guardian. Crowdsourcing is not as simple as “give them a wiki and they will fill it” (this is related to the failed “everyone in the world wants to work on my broken payroll system” theory of open source), and Simon explains some of the subtleties. The reviewing experience the first time round was actually quite lonely. We deliberately avoided showing people how others had marked each page because we didn’t want to bias the results. Unfortunately this meant the site felt like a bit of a ghost town, even when hundreds of other people were actively reviewing things at the same time. For the new version, we tried to provide a much better feeling of activity around the site. We added “top reviewer” tables to every assignment, MP and political party as well as a “most active reviewers in the past 48 hours” table on the homepage (this feature was added to the first project several days too late). User profile pages got a lot more attention, with more of a feel that users were collecting their favourite pages in to tag buckets within their profile.
Steve Souders: Making Web Sites Faster in the Web 2.0 Age
How huge JavaScript libraries, rich content, and lame ad servers are slowing the web down
As much as anything else, a user’s impression of a web site has to do with how fast the site loads. But modern Web 2.0 websites aren’t your father’s Oldsmobile. Chocked full of rich Flash content and massive JavaScript libraries, they present a new set of challenges to engineers trying to maximized the performance of their sites. You need to design your sites to be Fast by Default. That’s the theme of the upcoming Velocity Online Conference, co-chaired by Google performance guru Steve Souders. Souders is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, and spent some time discussing the new world of web site performance with me.