- Welcome to the Malware-Industrial Complex (MIT) — brilliant phrase, sound analysis.
- Stupid Stupid xBox — The hardcore/soft-tv transition and any lead they feel they have is simply not defensible by licensing other industries’ generic video or music content because those industries will gladly sell and license the same content to all other players. A single custom studio of 150 employees also can not generate enough content to defensibly satisfy 76M+ customers. Only with quality primary software content from thousands of independent developers can you defend the brand and the product. Only by making the user experience simple, quick, and seamless can you defend the brand and the product. Never seen a better put statement of why an ecosystem of indies is essential.
- Data Feedback Loops for TV (Salon) — Netflix’s data indicated that the same subscribers who loved the original BBC production also gobbled down movies starring Kevin Spacey or directed by David Fincher. Therefore, concluded Netflix executives, a remake of the BBC drama with Spacey and Fincher attached was a no-brainer, to the point that the company committed $100 million for two 13-episode seasons.
- wrk — a modern HTTP benchmarking tool capable of generating significant load when run on a single multi-core CPU. It combines a multithreaded design with scalable event notification systems such as epoll and kqueue.
ENTRIES TAGGED "Velocity"
Four short links: 14 February 2013
Malware Industrial Complex, Indies Needed, TV Analytics, and HTTP Benchmarking
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 aff ected, 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.
Four short links: 26 June 2012
Post-Capture Zoom, Load Gen, Inventive Malware, and Manufactured Normalcy
- SnapItHD — camera captures full 360-degree panorama and users select and zoom regions afterward. (via Idealog)
- Iago (GitHub) — Twitter’s load-generation tool.
- AutoCAD Worm Stealing Blueprints — lovely, malware that targets inventions. The worm, known as ACAD/Medre.A, is spreading through infected AutoCAD templates and is sending tens of thousands of stolen documents to email addresses in China. This one has soured, but give the field time … anything that can be stolen digitally, will be. (via Slashdot)
- Designing For and Against the Manufactured Normalcy Field (Greg Borenstein) — Tim said this was one of his favourite sessions at this year’s Foo Camp: breaking the artificial normality than we try to cast over new experiences so as to make them safe and comfortable.
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.
What is DevOps?
What we mean by "operations," and how it's changed over the years.
NoOps, DevOps — no matter what you call it, operations won’t go away. Ops experts and development teams will jointly evolve to meet the challenges of delivering reliable software to customers.
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.
Four short links: 24 May 2012
Maker Tribe, Concept Mapping, Magic Wand, and Site Performance Matters
- Last Saturday My Son Found His People at the Maker Faire — aww to the power of INFINITY.
- Dictionaries Linking Words to Concepts (Google Research) — Wikipedia entries for concepts, text strings from searches and the oppressed workers down the Text Mines, and a count indicating how often the two were related.
- Magic Wand (Kickstarter) — I don’t want the game, I want a Bluetooth magic wand. I don’t want to click the OK button, I want to wave a wand and make it so! (via Pete Warden)
- E-Commerce Performance (Luke Wroblewski) — If a page load takes more than two seconds, 40% are likely to abandon that site. This is why you should follow Steve Souders like a hawk: if your site is slower than it could be, you’re leaving money on the table.
John Allspaw on DevOps
How good DevOps keeps you shipping your product.
John Allspaw discusses DevOps in high-volume web companies and the importance of cooperation between development and operations.
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