2008 September :: Bitcurrent

Archive for September 2008

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Keeping ourselves honest

Jennifer Bell and the folks at Visible Government took the covers off their much-needed I Believe In Open project. If you’re a Canadian, you should go sign up. Simply put: any elected official who isn’t willing to be transparent and accountable to their electorate has something to hide, and we now have the technology to track their record.

Which makes me wonder what Bitcurrent’s record is. Once upon a time, many of the folks behind Bitcurrent were part of Networkshop, a consulting firm that became Coradiant, a web performance company that helped create the end user experience management space.

Back then, Networkshop talked a lot of trash. We blew the whistle on SSL performance issues, and wrote a huge (250+ page) study on load balancing. We also prognosticated a lot.

Using the Internet Way-Back Machine, I decided to go scoop up some issues of Networkshop News and see how they stood up to scrutiny nine years later. Here’s one on how networks change if the PC is no longer the dominant client, from March, 2000.

How do you think it stacks up?

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Categories : Uncategorized

Tags : accountability, Cloudcamp, Internet archive, Networkshop, Security, Uncategorized, Visible government, Web operations

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Conference week in New York

It’s time to head to New York for the start of the fall conference season. This year, Interop and Web2Expo are side-by-side at the Javitz Center, and we’re holding the Interop Unconference event on Thursday night. Then there’s High Performance on Wall Street happening on Monday the 22nd.

At Interop this year, we’re helping to run the Software-as-a-Service track (in conjunction with Jeff Kaplan of Thinkstrategies) and the Cloud Computing track (helped by Peter Laird, who I first met when I saw his excellent Taxonomy of the Cloud, which he’s been hard at work revising for Interop.) I’m also doing a free session on cloud foundations at the show. The lineup of speakers and panelists is remarkable, and will hopefully lead to some great conversations. We also have folks from Google, Amazon, Joyent, 10Gen and Bungee on a Web2Expo panel.

Here’s a recap of the sessions and participants:
Read More→

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Categories : Uncategorized

Tags : High Performance on Wall Street, Interop Unconference, Web2Expo

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Sitting on the frontlines of the Chrome rollout

Within hours of Chrome’s release, many companies were reporting operational issues. This might seem strange: Chrome is supposed to be leaner, faster, and better. But some of those improvements meant headaches for people running websites — and for those monitoring them. We sat down with Gomez CTO Imad Mouline to look at his company’s experience with the Chrome rollout.

Following its launch, Chrome rocketed to roughly 1% market share practically overnight, according to some sources, and although its use is tailing off a bit, this was a significant enough change in traffic to cause problems. “Small differences under the hood of the browser can lead to big issues in application delivery,” said Mouline. “For example, Chrome has a different connection profile with up to 6 connections per host” which increases TCP session concurrency. “The use of millisecond timing for the Javascript setinterval function also causes issues.”

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Categories : Uncategorized

Tags : AJAX, Chrome, Gomez, Posts, RIA, Web, Web operations

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Human 2.0 is the Next Big Thing

We’re about to upgrade the human race. It’s more than a technology shift, it’s a cultural one. And it’s perhaps the first step on the singularity. This is most of what I’ve been thinking about lately. We’re sliding into it day by day, without noticing. I firmly believe it is the most significant change the human race faces, and it’s going to drive a tremendous amount of business and fuel wide-ranging ethical discussions. Most of the other technologies we cover here and elsewhere are simply building blocks for Human 2.0.

This is the first of many posts on the subject, and it sounds a bit muddy. Hopefully we can clarify that in the coming months. But if you’re willing to wade through some still-addled thinking, read on.

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Categories : Uncategorized

Tags : Augmented reality, Augmented Surfing, iPhone, PMOG, Posts, Skype, Technology, VR, Webwars