I just found out today that I one of the ever decreasing number of Canadians who has a free five-year work visa waiting for them in the United Kingdom, courtesy of their grandparents.

It’s called the UK Ancestry Visa, and it opens up a whole new set of options to me. It streamlines the hideous visa process I have encountered in this country (USA), to a form and the birth certificates of my grandparents, my parents, and myself. Oh, and their marriage certificates.

And yes, it appears that I may score 3 out of 4 in the grandparental category, as my Scottish grandparents were all born over there.

And no, Pierzchala is not some strange Highland clan, lost to the dark fog of the ages. I am 25% Polish. I have always wanted to have a custom flag made, with the Imperial Polish Eagle superimposed over the cross of St. Andrew.

So, let’s see: hideous work permit process that takes years and has no guarantee of success; or immediate entry and work with a simple form and some family documents.

Now, admittedly, I have it easy due to my UK ancestry. However, the entry of highly skilled workers into the UK takes days, not years.

And the US wonders why emigrants are loathe to come here anymore.

Tags: app, cro, HTTP, IE, IM, it, LAN, media, Om, One, pr, United Kingdom

I was futzing around with my WRT54G(L) last night and did something wrong. I thought I had bricked the damn thing. Much cursing and swearing ensued as I put a BEFSX41 on the front-end of the network (I have three of these; don’t ask why) and wandered upstairs with the lump of black and blue plastic that used to be the hub of my wireless network.

After much fiddling, I thought I had it working, so I plugged it into the network drop I have at my desk…and the damn thing disappeared!

Not physically, but from the network. I couldn’t connect to it via the network ports, and when I did connect wirelessly, I got an IP address from the wired router..????

Then the lightbulb went on. It appears that when you put a WRT54G(L) on a network behind another router (most likely only happens with other Linksys devices) , it immediately becomes an access point ONLY.

This was the way it was supposed to work.

And people wonder why Linksys/Cisco sells so many of these damn things. With automagic behaviour like this, it makes the world of networking so much easier for morons like me.

Technorati Tags: WRT54G, BEFSX41, WRT54GL, Linksys, Home+Networking, Wireless, 802.11g, Firmware

Tags: app, ARIN, HTTP, IE, IM, IP, ip address, it, media, networking, Om, ssl, Technorati

Today, I took an inventory of the portable storage solutions I have with me at all times.

On the bottom, a Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition at 100GB. In the middle, an 8GB Zen Microphoto. On to, a mostly useless iPod Shuffle that I use as a thumbdrive.

The top two are provided for context. I also purchased a 300GB Maxtor OneTouch III that I use for my media files.

Based on it’s size, the Maxtor Mini must use a standard 100GB laptop drive in a sleek aluminum housing. So far, It’s a dream. Slides into my bag, acts as a backup, and stores larger media files for when I’m on the road.

But the whole idea that I can slip nearly 110GB of storage into my pack is insane. And next year, this will be old school.

Technorati Tags: Maxtor, ipod, apple, creative, Zen+Microphoto, ipod+shuffle, Maxtor+OneTouch+Mini

Tags: app, Apple, ARIN, cro, HTTP, IE, IM, IP, it, LAN, media, Om, One, PHP, pr, Technorati

In the previous article in this series, I talked about the fallacy of ‘average’ performance. Now that this has been dismissed, what do I propose to replace it with. There are three aggregated values that can be used to better represent Web performance data:

• Median
• Geometric Mean
• 85th (or higher) Percentile

The links take you to articles that better explain the math behind each of these statistics. The focus here is why you would choose to use them rather than Arithmetic Mean.

The Median is the central point in any population of data. It is equal to the calculated value of the 50th Percentile, and is the point where half of the population lies above and below. So, in a large population of data, it can provide a good estimation of where center or average performance value is, regardless of the outliers at either end of the scale.

Geometric Mean is, well, a nasty calculation that I prefer to allow programmatic functions to handle for me. The advantage that it has over the Arithmetic Mean is that is influenced less by the outliers, producing a value that is always lower than or equal to the Arithmetic Mean. In the case of Web performance data, with populations of any size, the Geometric Mean is always lower than the Arithmetic Mean.

The 85th Percentile is the level below which 85% of the population of data lies. Now, some people use the 90th or the 95th, but I tend to cut Web sites more slack by granting them a pass on 15% of the measurement population.

So, what do these values look like?

These aggregated performance values are extracted from the same data population. Immediately, some things become clear. The Arithmetic Mean is higher than the Median and the Geometric Mean, by more than 0.1 seconds. The 85th Percentile is 1.19 seconds and indicates that 85% of all measurements in this data set are below this value.

Things that are bad to see:

• An Arithmetic Mean that is substantially higher than the Geometric Mean and the Median
• An 85th Percentile that is more than double the Geometric Mean

In these two cases, it indicates that there is a high number of large values in the measurement population, and that the site is exhibiting consistency issues, a topic for a later article in this series.

In all, these three metric provide a good quick hit, a representative single number that you can present in a meeting to say how the site is performing. But they all suffer from the same flaw — you cannot represent the entire population with an entire number.

The next article will discuss Frequency Distributions, and their value in the Web performance analysis field.

Tags: 85th percentile, Arithmetic mean, geometric mean, media, percentile, Web Performance

I have been running the GrabPERF Compression and Performance study for less than a week, but I thought that I should share some of the initial results with everyone.

As you can see above, the byte transmission savings gained by some sites is pretty astounding. Google News sends a pages with a median weight of near 31,000 bytes when compressed; but when compression is disabled on the client, this jumps to over 139,000 bytes.

What is interesting is that the performance gains don’t look truly significant. However, they compressed pages are faster, and have the added benefit of costing the site less, as bandwidth costs count by the byte (I know it’s more complicated than that, but for now, let’s assume a fantasy world).

I will continue to monitor that results and will close the measurements after 14 days and write up a final report.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, Web+Compression, HTTP+Compression, Performance+tuning, GZIP

Tags: ARIN, bandwidth, client, compress, compression, Google, GrabPERF, gzip, HTTP, IE, IM, IP, it, measurement, media, Om, One, Pages, performance, pr, run, Technorati, web, Web+performance

This post has two underlying reasons for existing: 1) to test out the new MSFT Live Writer Beta; and 2) to talk about a great story that GigaOm pointed us to today.

Om Malik pointed out a story in the Seattle Times today that talked about “Broadband in the Boonies”. Having grown up in the boonies of British Columbia, this immediately got my attention. The story discusses the explosive growth of Internet businesses in the now heavily wired interior of Washington State; the story focuses on the are around Twisp, Winthrop and the Methow Valley.

Until you have been in this area, and I have, you don’t get the possibility of winter isolation. The story talks about how these places are four hours from Seattle; what they neglect to mention is that this is 4 hours in the period between April 15 and October 15, depending on snow.

The direct westerly route to Seattle from these locations passes through the Cascades. Through the extremely high and snowy Cascades.

Samantha and I took a spur of the moment detour through this little part of heaven, pausing a night in a campground in Twisp. Right on the river. When we woke up the next morning, I remembered how much I missed those early morning moments in the mountains.

Twisp is far more isolated than Golden, BC, or any of the other towns that we passed through on our trip this summer. But it is a reminder to us all that place is important. Not because we have to be there, but because it is where we are at home.

I have lived in the Valley. I have lived in Massachusetts. But neither has been home.

And to me, home is worth more than anything.

Technorati Tags: GigaOm, Seattle+Times, Twisp, Winthrop, Methow+Valley, Washington+State, Home, Broadband, Freedom, Om+Malik

Tags: attention, broadband, business, GigaOm, HTTP, IE, IM, Internet, IP, ISP, it, LAN, live, Malik, Massachusetts, media, Om, Om Malik, pr, Technorati, the other

Over the last year, GrabPERF has been something that has caught the fancy of a few in the Blogging/Social Media world. It has given some perspective of how performance can affect business and image in the connected world.

But what of GrabPERF itself? It has been on a development hiatus for the last few months due to pressures from my “real” job and various trips (business and pleasure) that I have been undertaking. Over the last two weeks, I have been trying to clear out the extra measurements and focus the features and attention on the community that appears most interested in the data.

During this process, I heard back from some folks who had been using GrabPERF in stealth mode (even I can’t track all the hits!), and who asked, “Hey! Where did my data go?”. Glad to hear from all of you.

Just to give everyone some idea of the growth, here is a snapshot of aggregated daily performance and number of measurements.

The number of measurements shot up, until I started culling the unused measurements. Over the last 3 weeks, average performance became extremely variable, and that’s when I began considering the culling. As well, the New York PubSub Agent appears to have gone permanently offline, as a part of their winding down process.

The fact that the system was taking 390,000 measurements per day still astounds me.

This was also comparable to the number of distinct sites we were measuring.

After the latest cull, we are down to 84 distinct tests, a level last seen on November 27, 2005.

I am pleased that the system has held together as well as it has.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, statistics

Tags: app, ARIN, attention, blog, Blogging, business, community, data, GrabPERF, hits, HTTP, IE, IM, IP, it, measurement, media, Om, One, performance, pr, social media, statistics, Technorati

Dear Flickr:

I have been wondering for sometime why downloads from your site seemed a little sluggish at times.

At first I blamed your unprecedented growth and success. For a little Vancouver startup (I am a BC boy myself), your entrance onto the stage of social networking applications has been phenomenal. The move from zero to infinity may have played a part in the performance I was seeing.

Nope. There was something else going on; I could see it every time I loaded a Flickr page in my browser. There was something else going on.

So today, I checked something out, and found the problem.

You need to enable persistent TCP connection on the static.flickr.com servers.

Now, that is the simple answer. I know that with large, web-based applications, enabling something as monumental as persistent connections could cause serious issues. If the architecture of the system was not designed to handle persistent connections, turning them on could cause the entire system to collapse.

There are legitimate, if mis-guided, reasons for disabled persistent connections. Some administrators believe that it is actually more efficient to have a client open a connection for every object. Easier to manage state, etc. The only problem is that in order to do that, you have to tune the systems serving data to shorten the amount of time a closed connection spends in a TIME_WAIT state.

When a TCP connection is closed, the socket is not immediately closed by the system in a default configuration. The TIME_WAIT state is the holding pen that these connections are pushed into. While in this state, the socket is locked and this may count against the incoming TCP connection queue, forcing the network stack to delay or reset new incoming connections.

Still, as Flickr is a worldwide company, the delay that the lack of persistent connections injects is astounding for locations in Asia. If you want to grow your business, and support more services, this will likely become a bottleneck very quickly.

Have a great weekend!

smp

Technorati Tags: Flickr, persistent connections, TCP, http, web performance, scalability

Tags: ads, app, application, Asia, browser, business, client, data, design, HTTP, IE, IM, Issues, it, media, networking, Om, performance, persistent, persistent connections, pr, server, startup, TCP, Technorati, web, Web Performance, web-based application

I read about the Jimi Wallet on 43 Folders today.

I immediately ordered 2: one for me and one for Samantha.

We have both pared ourselves down to the bare essentials already, and this is one more step in that direction. I can see it being especially useful when you are travelling, when all you really need is:

1. Bank Card
2. Drivers License
3. Credit Card 1
4. Credit Card 2
5. Medical insurance card.

Now I will likely take the money clip out most of the time to hold my office key card, but put it back in for travelling.

A damn fine idea. Means I can stop carrying this 5 year-old Dell business card holder I have convereted into my Wallet.

The only question: does it hold UK Pounds?

Technorati Tags: Jimi, Jimi Wallet, 43 Folders

Tags: bank, business, Dell, EAD, HTTP, IM, IP, it, media, Om, One, PHP, Technorati

It took 3 calls, 6 people, and 90 minutes to resolve the problem with Samantha’s new Dimension 3100.

And what was the fix? A secret squirrel hotfix for Media Center.

Still wouldn’t buy another Dell.

Technorati Tags: Dell, Dimension 3100, tv tuner, Windows XP Media Center

Tags: Dell, HTTP, IM, it, media, Om, pr, Technorati, tv, window, Windows