Robert Scoble has launched a thread over on FriendFeed [here] discussing the NBC Olympics broadcast schedule and how the reality of the Internet and Social Media is changing how things are broadcast.

People are recommending the CBC feed. I would likely say the people in the UK would recommend the BBC feed. But I can tell you one thing: Samantha and I have boycotted this year’s Olympics.

If there is an interesting event, or final, I will search out the video. But the idea of watching the jingoistic, materialist, flag-waving, US-centric view of the Olympics makes me ill. I don’t like the Chinese regime for a variety of reasons; but the idea of having the US Olympic team shoved down my throat by NBC while McDonalds and Coke sell me a new world is enough to make anyone give up tv forever.

Rant Off.

UPDATE: Seems Henry Blodget has a similar opinion, with less rant. [here]

The Network World article on telecommuting appears to be getting a lot of play this morning on the RSS feeds.

I agree with Daemon at the Web Worker Daily: Yeah, and your point?

I learned a long time ago that I would NEVER be happy as a do-nothing management hack (whoops! did I say that out loud?). Career advancement to me is an out-dated way of life, and those that are desperately hanging on to this ideal are this generation’s answer to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit or The Organization Man.

What does career advancement mean in a world that is mobile, engagement-based, driven by accomplishment, not by success? Career advancement is a growth in the respect in which you and your skills are held. Titles become meaningless; generating buzz and delivering on it are what define your success.

Time to raise the controversy element: The people who see telecommuting as a career negative are those that can only survive in a herd. Those who cannot generate their own motivation. Those who need to be away from themselves, to not hear the voices in their heads.

[Cartoon: Hugh MacLeod]

Some of the people I hold in highest regard have no title, and would be seen by corporate types as “drop-outs”.

Guess that makes me a drop-out. Bully for me.

Yesterday, I read Anne Zelenka’s post on ROWE at Best Buy. I was heartened to see that this idea was getting mentioned again, and that it was getting front-page interest from Big Media.

On a lark, I forwarded the post to my director and VP. Their responses frightened me. They were written in management-ese, and indicated that timesheets are soon to be added to my daily routine.

Hugh Mcleod — Sheep/Wolf

I can help cure the first, starting with Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, and George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language.

The second plague, timesheets, I see as more odious. It goes along with the new measurement-focused management culture in our company. Sometimes, I wonder what’s more important to the managers and executives: measurements or results.

As a person who is difficult enough to manage due to my bipolar, and my deep-rooted desire to do things that have meaning, timesheets are a problem for me. I don’t work to timesheets; I work to goals.

Structured environments have always been a serious problem for me. They trigger a deep resentment, some deep rooted need in my soul not to conform. I know that they serve a purpose, and that some people take a great deal of comfort in the process of knowing how they spent their day. My comfort comes from delivering meaningful results, not in worshipping the almighty bureaucracy.

I suppose that as the company I work for grows and has more people to manage, timesheets are inevitable. However, it’s about the time that timesheets appear that I feel the need to find more results-oriented, dynamic organizations.

Timesheets are a sign of corporate doublespeak, freeing people from the need to excel.

Technorati Tags: work, management, timesheets, bipolar, sheep/wolf, gapingvoid, Web+Worker+Daily, Anne+Zelenka

This paper is an extension of the work done for another article that highlighted the performance benefits of retrieving uncompressed and compressed objects directly from the origin server. I wanted to add a proxy server into the stream and determine if proxy servers helped improve the performance of object downloads, and by how much.

Using the same series of objects in the original compression article[1], the CURL tests were re-run 3 times:

1. Directly from the origin server
2. Through the proxy server, to load the files into cache
3. Through the proxy server, to avoid retrieving files from the origin.[2]

This series of three tests was repeated twice: once for the uncompressed files, and then for the compressed objects.[3]

As can be seen clearly in the plots below, compression caused web page download times to improve greatly, when the objects were retrieved from the source. However, the performance difference between compressed and uncompressed data all but disappears when retrieving objects from a proxy server on a corporate LAN.

Instead of the linear growth between object size and download time seen in both of the retrieval tests that used the origin server (Source and Proxy Load data), the Proxy Draw data clearly shows the benefits that accrue when a proxy server is added to a network to assist with serving HTTP traffic.

	MEAN DOWNLOAD TIME
Uncompressed Pages
Total Time Uncompressed — No Proxy	0.256
Total Time Uncompressed — Proxy Load	0.254
Total Time Uncompressed — Proxy Draw	0.110
Compressed Pages
Total Time Compressed — No Proxy	0.181
Total Time Compressed — Proxy Load	0.140
Total Time Compressed — Proxy Draw	0.104

The data above shows just how much of an improvement is gained by adding a local proxy server, explicit caching descriptions and compression can add to a Web site. For sites that do force a great of requests to be returned directly to the origin server, compression will be of great help in reducing bandwidth costs and improving performance. However, by allowing pages to be cached in local proxy servers, the difference between compressed and uncompressed pages vanishes.

Conclusion

Compression is a very good start when attempting to optimize performance. The addition of explicit caching messages in server responses which allow proxy servers to serve cached data to clients on remote local LANs can improve performance to even a greater extent than compression can. These two should be used together to improve the overall performance of Web sites.

[1]The test set was made up of the 1952 HTML files located in the top directory of the Linux Documentation Project HTML archive.

[2]All of the pages in these tests announced the following server response header indicating its cacheability:

Cache-Control: max-age=3600

[3]A note on the compressed files: all compression was performed dynamically by mod_gzip for Apache/1.3.27.

Well, I just heard that everyone’s favourite corporate rock and greed group is returning to Boston.

That’s right: The Rolling Stones.

They announced that there are student discounts available. Perhaps they should start adding senior’s discounts as well.

Technorati Tags: Rolling+Stones, Rock, Greed, Boston, AARP, Seniors

Reading anything using a feed reader allows prevents us from discriminating against the content.

Start with an inflammatory statement, then back it up, using the wisdom gleaned from Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Why do feeds prevent us from initial discrimination? Because we have no point of reference other than the text in front of us, and the occasional image. There is no way to make a quality judgement based on differences in appearance or layout.

In fact, the feeds we read are often filtered by the influence of others. We react positively to someone’s raving review of a feed, and we incorporate it into our subscriptions.

The decisions we make in those initial seconds may sour over time. Feeds grow old, stale, uninteresting. But the why did we subscribe in the first place? Was it a decision based on the layour of a site? The way the person looks?

No. It is based on the feedback of others, and the content we encounter.

Technorati Tags: Blink, feeds, blogging, Malcolm Gladwell

If anyone wants to know why I am proud of GrabPERF, this graph should give you a clue.

Every hour, an aggregated value is produced for every test url. Counting up the Geometric Mean aggregations on a daily basis, the growth line is pretty amazing.

Doing a rough calculation, the system has grown from testing 40 urls to testing 104 urls.

But the true scope of this growth can only be seen by looking at the number of data insertions into the raw data table on a daily basis.

Currently, with the four measurement agents (I turned down one of the Technorati agents today to relieve the strain on the database server), the system is handling nearly 300,000 data insertions a day. Not even in the same timezone with most of the major sites I measure, but when I think that this is a system that I designed, I am stunned. For an unfunded, not-for-profit, one-person effort, I am constant astounded by what this system can handle.

Other areas of note over the last year:

• The Technorati-donated servers can now easily hold 60 days of detail data on a robust enterprise grade system, in a real datacenter
• The basement datacenter is now closed
• The new interface was created specifically to allow the system to grow and easily accommodate new features
• People are now approaching me on a daily basis to have sites added, or to have data explained
• GrabPERF went from one measurement agent to five agents in four locations, including a location in Europe (Portugal)
• GrabPERF has been used in various places to serve as an indicator or motivator for performance improvement, including: Bloglines, Ping-O-Matic, Technorati, PubSub (1 and 2), Blogwise, and others.
• A number of corporate and individual sponsors have stepped forward to support our efforts in many different ways: money, servers, measurement locations, commentary and critiques

I know that I have said it many times in person, or online, but thank you all. Those of you who use and support GrabPERF are the ones who continue to motivate me to make this system better on a daily basis.

Keep those cards and letter coming.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, growth, Web Performance, analytics

Time for me to launch the GrabPERF Quarterly Pledge Drive.

This is the part I hate. As I have noted in the past, I can’t charge for GrabPERF in any sort of traditional business sense. But I am also not doing this for a pat on the back.

As always, any donation, no matter how small, is appreciated.

I am also looking to add to my corporate spnsors list, so if you or your company is interested in achieving this much sought after position, drop me a note.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, donations, Pledge Drive

This makes me sad.

A South Caroline businessman is making an attempt to purchase the Hudson’s Bay Company. [here]

The company, lovingly referred to as the Bay, was incorporated in 1670 and once owned more real estate in North America, in fact “all the land in the Hudson Bay watershed – a mass that amounts to about a third of present-day Canada.” [here]

The HBC is the early history of Canada. Without their greed and ingenuity, Canada would never have grown beyond the Valley of the St. Lawrence.

Perhaps this is the revenge for War of 1812.

Technorati: Canada, Hudsons Bay Company

IceRocket: Canada, Hudsons Bay Company

If you or your company would like to donate to GrabPERF, here is what we need!